Klezmer is a continually evolving musical tradition that grows out
of Eastern European Jewish culture, and its changes reflect Jews'
interaction with other groups as well as their shifting relations
to their own history. But what happens when, in the klezmer spirit,
the performances that go into the making of Jewishness come into
contact with those that build different forms of cultural identity?
Jonathan Freedman argues that key terms central to the Jewish
experience in America, notions like "the immigrant," the "ethnic,"
and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to
intertwine the Jewish-American with the experiences, histories, and
imaginative productions of other groups: Latinos, Asians, African
Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others.
Freedman traces the twists and turns taken by these various
relationships in a number of imaginative arenas: the white-black
crossover between jazz and klezmer and its unexpected consequences
in Philip Roth's "The Human Stain"; the relationship between
Jewishness and queer identity in Tony Kushner's "Angels in
America"; contemporary fictions about crypto-Jews in Cuba and the
Mexican-American borderland; the connection between Jews and
Christian apocalyptic narratives, especially the best-selling "Left
Behind" series; the centuries-old cross-referencing of Jewish and
Asian American identities; the stories of "new immigrants" spun by
contemporary writers like Bharathi Mukherjee, Gish Jen, Lan
Samantha Chang, and Gary Shteyngart; and the revisionary relation
of these authors to classic Jewish American immigrant narratives by
the likes of Henry Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. By
interrogating the fraught andmultidimensional uses to which Jews,
Judaism, and Jewishness have been put in shaping the nature and
properties of other categories of identity and experience, Freedman
offers a richer understanding of racial, ethnic, and sexual
categories in America and of the ethnoracial complexities facing
the United States in the twenty-first century.
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