Beyond The Golden Door »

Julius Novick is Emeritus Professor Emeritus of Drama Studies, Purchase College of the State University of New York. He is the author of Beyond Broadway: The Quest for Permanent Theatres. He was the theatre critic at The Village Voice, The New York Observer, and New York Newsday and has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, the Forward, and many other publications. He has been honored with a Fulbright Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others, and has served twice on the Pulitzer Prize Drama Jury.

Clifford Odets. Arthur Miller. Paddy Chayefsky. Neil Simon. Jules Feiffer. Wendy Wasserstein. Tony Kushner. These leading American playwrights do not just happen to be Jewish: they are Jewish playwrights. They and other Jewish playwrights have written out of their own experience, for general American audiences, about what it feels like to be twentieth-century American Jews. Beyond the Golden Door is the first book devoted to showing how Jewish playwrights have dramatized the great struggle to balance Old World heritage with New World opportunity—a struggle with implications for all American ethnicities.

Introduction 1

1 The Golden Land 9

2 Elmer Rice's Multiethnic New York 25

3 The Bronx 35

4 Arthur Miller and the Jews 47

5 Prosperity and Its Discontents 61

6 Neil Simon: Brighton Beach to Broadway 71

7 The Musicals 87

8 German Jews, Southern Jews 97

9 More Fathers and Sons 109

10 Jewish Daughters 129

Epilogue 141

Acknowledgments 145

Notes 147

Bibliography 173

Index of Playwrights 183

Index of Plays 185

General Index 187