Jazz Age Jews »

"Michael Alexander's Jazz Age Jews is an imaginative interpretation of American Jewish history. Beautifully and forcefully written, this account focuses on how Jews in the United States have perceived of themselves as outsiders. Alexander's arguments will raise eyebrows, infuriate some, and stimulate widespread discussion. Nonetheless, his approach may be a forerunner of a new way to examine American Jewish history."--Leonard Dinnerstein, author of Anti-Semitism in America, America and the Survivors of the Holocaust, and The Leo Frank Case

"Jazz Age Jews is a significant contribution to our understanding of American Jewish culture and society. It reinterprets the meaning of Jewish identification with the outsider in the 1920s and demonstrates the profound impact such Jewish behavior and beliefs had on American culture. Alexander knows how to tell a good story and has chosen wonderful case studies as the means to spin his narratives. With new ideas on almost every page, this is an excellent book."--Deborah Dash Moore, author of At Home in America

Publishers Weekly

Jews and the jazz age: bathtub Manischewitz? Yiddish speakeasies? the Purim massacre? Not exactly. In his deft and provocative book, Alexander sketches how the social position and public perception of American Jews mutated in America during the 1920s. Drawing on a wealth of sources reports in Yiddish newspapers, the history of minstrel shows on Broadway, and papers of Oliver Wendell Holmes this book traces the unique roles played by and the problems faced by descendants of the great waves of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants. Alexander argues that, even when they prospered financially, these Jews possessed an "outsider identification" that propelled them to support social justice causes as well as often valorize extralegal activities such as gambling. He paints a vivid portrait of popular anti-Semitism of the time Fitzgerald's malicious portrait of a Jewish gangster in The Great Gatsby; the attempt by Harvard's president A. Lawrence Lowell to institute quotas for Jews at the university, Henry Ford's white-supremacist writings while structuring his book around three pivotal events that shaped thinking about Jews: the Black Sox Scandal, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer. His arguments in the first two sections are dazzling about Arnold Rothstein's role in the national pastime's scandal and Felix Frankfurter's defense of the Italian anarchists but he is less convincing when critiquing Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot in his analysis of Jewish performers and blackface in his third example. Despite this, Alexander's commentary is elucidating and insightful, an important contribution to both Jewish and culturalstudies. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.