Most, Andrea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
253 pp., $29.95 (USD). ISBN: 0674011651.
[1] How did Jews become Americanized? How did they navigate
private and public identity in a lively sea of competing and possibly
incommensurable identities? These are the broad, central questions
that Andrea Most poses and answers in a pathbreaking work in Jewish
cultural studies. Her book, Making Americans, traces the
development of the Broadway musical in the second quarter of the
twentieth century, using this development as a lens by which to
consider the transformation and transmission of identity in America’s
multicultural bustle.
[2] Through her study of the Broadway musical (including such
standards as The Jazz Singer, Oklahoma, Annie Get
Your Gun, and South Pacific), Most argues that the Jewish “writers,
composers, and performers” utilized the stage as a communal
and personal working out of the “complexities of assimilation” (1).
Not simply a vehicle of genial amusement or gentle satire, the musical
often shone its bright lights on exigent social issues such as race,
even if under the equivocal guise of levity. The stories told and
sung on stage became “indistinguishable from the story of
America itself” (2), an astonishing achievement for those
under the internal and external duress of proving their American bona
fides while at the same time not discarding their inherited
identities.
[3] In Gershwin’s Girl Crazy, Gieber Goldfarb, played
by comedian Willie Howard, sings “But Not for Me” first
after his own fashion, then mimicking the style of stage greats
such as Maurice Chevalier, Al Jolson, and Eddie Cantor. On the surface,
these masquerades seem little more than imposture, a diminution
of the creative self into a meager ersatz celebrity. Most convincingly
asserts, however, that Howard’s Zelig-like imitations are
in fact not artificial and surely not insincere, but instead the
root and bark of the “American Creed. His impersonations were
a demonstration of the power and possibility of performance for
newcomers to American culture” (1). That is to say, identity
is not fixed. In America, men and women, Jews and non-Jews,
give shape to their own destiny; they are self-creators. This fitful
passage “from exclusion to acceptance” (3) thus often
suggests transgression of stable identity. From Jakie Rabinowitz
in blackface in The Jazz Singer (a complicated, delicate
matter in the history of race relations, to be sure), Henry Williams
as a Native American chief in Whoopee, Gieber Goldfarb as
a woman in Girl Crazy, to Annie Oakley as a dead-eye shooter
in Annie Get Your Gun, Jewish creators of the Broadway musical
demonstrated that to be American meant to be multiple, that the
idea of an inherent and immutable nature was to be shed in the celebration
of variety. Only variety speaks of possibility, of mobility, in
an American social and cultural life where the old beliefs no longer
coerce and the new beliefs are at best unfamiliar and more likely
unformed.
[4] Making Americans also narrates the story of Jewish political
liberalism in the years immediately prior to and following World
War II. The writers and composers of the musicals referred to in
the book were largely moderate New Deal liberals who saw that success,
financial and social, was not in conflict with progressive ideals
of tolerance, racial harmony, and integration. They navigated a
middle course in American politics: between the isolationists and
bigots on the right and the radicals and Communists on the left.
Their dream was the immigrant’s dream: that the American sense
of fair play, general decency, and economic and personal freedom
(perhaps most evident in Annie Get Your Gun) would trump
the suffocating insularities and weary prejudices of the old country.
Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms touches on several of these
foundational themes in American liberalism. These themes, Most writes,
are also a way whereby “Jewish secular identity” (100)
is strengthened. The principal actors in Babes in Arms are
young men and women—all children of “out-of-work vaudevillians
[who] have gone on a tour sponsored by the Works Progress Administration” (66)–who
toil at a dismal work farm during the Depression. Disenchanted by
the tedium and “oppression” (78) of the farm, the kids
arrange a play, a “Follies”-like production in order
to bring in some money for themselves. This scene cuts to the heart
of American Jewish liberalism. Most rightly notes that their
play is a rejection of “the socialized institution of the
work farm” and a triumph of “self-reliance” (84),
while emphasizing “equal opportunity, regardless of race,
religion, or ethnicity” (70) in their “diverse cast” (82).
Independence and unity both are represented as the noblest ideal,
but the musical finds a maneuver to ease their possible tension: “Like
another old performer, Walt Whitman, the babes in arms celebrate
themselves, and in doing so celebrate all Americans” (100).
[5] Making Americans accomplishes its ambitions by sketching
with substance and flair the Jewish contribution to the Broadway
musical, and how the musical itself can be appreciated as a public
performance for the acting out of Jewish communal and personal identity.
The book contributes and appeals to several disciplines. Those who
research Jewish cultural history, inter-ethnic relations, American
intellectual history, the history of musical theatre, and cultural
studies in general, can profit considerably by availing themselves
of Most’s work. Making Americans is a fine addition
to any academic library and may well be of benefit to larger public
libraries in major metropolitan areas in North America.
Matthew LaGrone
University of Toronto
matthew.lagrone@utoronto.ca
