My fair Sadie: Allan Sherman and a paradox of American Jewish culture.

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My fair Sadie: Allan Sherman and a paradox of American Jewish culture.

In a 1993 essay entitled The Paradoxes of American Jewish Culture, Stephen J. Whitfield found no shortage of them, including the following: "[The] American Jewish subculture looks drab in the light of an American culture that Jews have helped to energize, a mass culture that has dazzled the world. " (1)

A good deal of the work done by scholars of Jewish studies has been energized by the desire to settle this paradox. There has been an attempt to rebalance the scales, to reinvigorate the Jewish subculture by claiming ownership of Hollywood, musical theater, comedy, Tin Pan Alley, and other cultural goods the Jews presented to America without asking for a receipt. Toward this end, Jewish cultural studies counters "the devaluation of Jewish difference" in order to "make Jewish literature, culture, and history work better to enhance Jewish possibilities for living richly." (2) For Whitfield, the future health of American Jewry is linked to the success of this cultural reclamation project. His exuberant and fascinating In Search of American Jewish Culture is a lost-and-found of Jewish inventiveness he believes is crucial to a full appreciation of that culture, and essential also for American Jews who must decide "what they and their descendants might want to live for." Whitfield's account of American Jewish culture includes Jews "who did not want to serve a manifestly ethnic or communal purpose." (3) He is content to ignore their wishes.

Whitfield is not alone. Though important critics such as Robert Alter and Harold Bloom are committed to what Whitfield has termed a maximalist approach to Jewish studies, a stance that views as Jewish only works that "bear directly on [the Jews'] beliefs and experiences as a people," the ascendancy of Jewish cultural studies in the 1990s heralded the arrival of a rigorous minimalism. (4) In an attitude that might be summarized as waste not, want not, Jewish cultural studies eagerly mined American mass culture for the hidden contributions of assimilated Jews. Critics have found in Betty Boop cartoons, Milton Berle's television career, female vaudevillians who suppressed their Jewish identities, Mezz Mezzrow (a Jewish jazz musician who decided he was essentially an African-American), and even Barbie dolls, material that broadened and deepened our understanding of American Jewish culture. (5)

Jewish parents who once told their children to clean their plates because people in Europe were starving might well recognize the mood informing Jewish cultural studies. Like those Jewish parents, cultural historians feel that American Jewish culture is starving and that nothing of value should be thrown away. For Whitfield, the crisis is caused by anoth...

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