In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite
America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end
with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory
sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to
denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest,
patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the
anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities
Committee's (HUAC's) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of
Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer
to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls
"comic cosmopolitanism," an intolerably seductive happiness,
centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and
intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic
irreverence of the "uncooperative" witnesses as a crime against an
American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to
"name names." Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to
be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American
culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants,
and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude.
Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series
of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances
by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy
Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an
uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome
Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of
a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the
early twenty-first century.
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