Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture

Judith Ruderman

Description

In Passing Fancies in Jewish American Literature and Culture Judith Ruderman takes on the fraught question of who passes for Jewish in American literature and culture. In today's contemporary political climate, religious and racial identities are being reconceived as responses to culture and environment, rather than essential qualities. Many Jews continue to hold conflicting ideas about their identity—seeking, on the one hand, deep engagement with Jewish history and the experiences of the Jewish people, while holding steadfastly, on the other hand, to the understanding that identity is fluid and multivalent. Looking at a carefully chosen set of texts from American literature, Ruderman elaborates on the strategies Jews have used to "pass" from the late 19th century to the present—nose jobs, renaming, clothing changes, religious and racial reclassification, and even playing baseball. While traversing racial and religious identities has always been a feature of America's nation of immigrants, Ruderman shows how the complexities of identity formation and deformation are critically relevant during this important cultural moment.

Acknowledgments

Chapter One: Jews and Their Complex Identities: "O Brave New World, That has Such People In't!"

Chapter Two: The "Jewish Nose" and the Nose Job in Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases: "The Most Unkindest Cut of All"

Chapter Three: Jewish American Women and the Nose Job: "God Hath Given You One

Face, and You Make Yourself Another"

Chapter Four: Renaming as a Strategy for Passing in Thyra Samter Winslow's "A Cycle of Manhattan": "A Ros[s] by Any Other Name"

Chapter Five: Renaming and Reclaiming: "To Thine Own Self be True"

Chapter Six: Jews and Gentiles Becoming the Other: "Neither a Borrower nor a Lender be"

Chapter Seven: Racial Crossings Between Jews and Blacks: "That You Might See Your Shadow"

Chapter Eight: The Use of Clothing in Passing Narratives: "The Fashion Wears out More Apparel than the Man"

Chapter Nine: In Search of an "Authentic" Jewish American Identity: "Who is it Who Can Tell me Who I am?"

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• Judaïsme
• Assimilation
• Acculturation
• Passing
• Antisemitism
• Analysis
• Christianity and Judaism
• Judaism
• Literary criticism
• Jewish studies
• Secular Jewish culture
• Jewish American literature
• Nathan Englander
• Literature
• Jews

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253036971
• Langue: English

Extrait

PASSING FANCIES IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
JEWISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Alvin H. Rosenfeld, editor
PASSING FANCIES IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Judith Ruderman
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Judith Ruderman
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-03695-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03696-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03699-5 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20 19
For my beloved grandchildren
Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Jews and Their Complex Identities: O Brave New World, That Has Such People In t!

2 The Jewish Nose and the Nose Job in Nathan Englander s The Ministry of Special Cases : The Most Unkindest Cut of All

3 Jewish American Women and the Nose Job: God Hath Given You One Face, and You Make Yourself Another

4 Renaming as a Strategy for Passing in Thyra Samter Winslow s A Cycle of Manhattan : A Ros[s] by Any Other Name

5 Renaming and Reclaiming: To Thine Own Self Be True

6 Jews and Gentiles Becoming the Other: Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be

7 Racial Crossings between Jews and Blacks: That You Might See Your Shadow

8 The Use of Clothing in Jewish Passing Narratives: The Fashion Wears Out More Apparel Than the Man

9 In Search of an Authentic Jewish American Identity: Who Is It Who Can Tell Me Who I Am?

Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I THANK THE ARTISTS in words or images who created the texts that inspired my work and the many scholars who produced my secondary sources: the literary critics, Judaic studies experts, researchers on race and passing, sociologists, medical historians, biographers, physicians-the list goes on.
Various friends and family members suggested works relevant to my topic or made other helpful comments: Dorothy Anger, David Birnbaum, Linda Carl, Susan Dyer, Lawrence Etter, John Friedman, Laura Lieber, Eric Meyers, B. J. Purow, Sarah Purow-Ruderman, Marjory Ruderman, and Diane Sasson. They were an important part of this process, personally and professionally, and I am grateful for their interest and input.
Thanks to Dee Mortensen, the humanities editor at Indiana University Press, for being warmly receptive to my initial proposal; Alvin Rosenfeld, the editor of the series of which my book is now a part; and various others at the press, including Paige Rasmussen and Maya Bringe, who responded to my technical questions or cleaned up my errors. My experience from proposal to publication has only reinforced my prior impression of IUP s reputation. I was fortunate that the anonymous readers of my manuscript accepted the task of reviewing it, for they gave my work considerable care and attention and offered invaluable advice as a result. I wish I could thank them in person for their time, energy, knowledge, and intelligence, but here at least I can acknowledge these unnamed scholars for the critical insights that improved this book immeasurably.
At Duke I relied on the IT expertise of Quincy Garbutt, who responded to my computer issues with alacrity and patience. My research and writing were facilitated by the dedicated staff and extensive holdings of the Duke University Library. I so appreciate the assistance of Duke s librarians, especially Jewish Studies specialist Rachel Ariel and literature and theater studies specialist Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, but also those who provided additional needed services, often behind the scenes: Bobbi Earp, Erin Nettifee, Cheryl Thomas, and many more. I am lucky to have access to the breadth and depth of the holdings not only of Duke University but also of the other research libraries in the area and beyond, whose resources I tapped as well. As but one example of the materials available to me, Duke has a complete set of the year s issues of the Smart Set that I was looking for-this in spite of the fact that, as Thomas Connolly said of the magazine, in his study of its co-editor George Jean Nathan, the periodical files . . . have almost completely deteriorated. It is one of the scarcest of magazines.
Finally, I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Duke over many years in addition to my administrative posts, and I particularly thank the students in my Duke University seminars on Jewish American literature and culture. Although I had long been interested in this broad subject, it was in these classes that I was able to develop that interest from a passing fancy into an actual book. Above and beyond the opportunity to test ideas in a classroom of bright undergraduates, my students enthusiasm for the authors and issues we discussed increased my own. I hope they got from those classes half of what they gave to me.
PASSING FANCIES IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
1 Jews and Their Complex Identities

O Brave New World, That Has Such People In t!
N EAR THE START of Jess Row s 2014 novel, Your Face in Mine , the protagonist quotes the above line from Shakespeare s The Tempest to an old high school classmate struggling with the loss of his wife and child. They both remember the line, and the play, from their junior year class called Utopias, Dystopias, and Fantasy Worlds. Welcome to the rest of your life, Martin Wilkinson exuberantly says to Kelly Thorndike, leaving open for the moment the question of whether Thorndike s life will become a utopia, dystopia, or fantasy world. 1 These are the possibilities that Row s novel explores through the surgical alteration of racial identity in which each character engages, one from white and Jewish to black, the other from Caucasian to Chinese. And these are the possibilities that my study of passing in Jewish American literature and culture will entertain as I examine the various strategies employed over the centuries, mainly by Jews, to facilitate becoming another self.
Although Your Face in Mine is science fiction, it is-like much science fiction-not far removed from the reality of current life. Certainly it relates to issues of importance to contemporary readers, such as the fluidity of identity in open societies in modern times, as well as the debated distinction between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, or passing versus trespassing. There are many ways to take on an identity to which one aspires and to which, in the eyes of the dominant culture at least, one is not entitled. Much has been written about these ways, especially about how and when black people have crossed the color line to pass as white in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America (a trajectory that Row reverses in his depiction of racial crossing in the twenty-first). A major focus of my study is how Jews have strived to pass into mainstream society by means of tactics ranging from facial surgery and name changes to clothing choices. Consistent with the historical appellation of Jews as a race, there are similarities in the motivations and stratagems for both blacks and Jews in their quest to transform themselves but also differences in the ways they have been able to overcome the obstacles to living as who they think they are and becoming people society says they are not. I also explore the related topics of Jews passing as Christian or black, along with the opposite but complementary trajectory of Christians and blacks passing as Jews. Thus, I hope to fruitfully extend the customary discourse about crossing the color line to include the lines crossing into and out of Jewishness.
The phrase historical appellation of Jews as a race is bound to raise eyebrows; since the Holocaust, sensitivity to referencing, much less utilizing, a racial designation is deservedly high. Hitler s categorizing of Jews as a separate race may not have been unique to him or his country and time period, nor was his hierarchical approach to race that ranked Jews as inferior beings; however, Hitler s subsequent step, into a position on Jews as among the parasites (including homosexuals, Gypsies, and others) requiring extermination, had the hellish consequences of which the world at large became fully aware only after the fact. Race theory, social Darwinism, and the eugenics movement all fed into Hitler s ultimate solution to the Jewish question. Although scientific conceptions of racial classifications, originally stemming from eighteenth century German zoology, had been discredited by prominent scientists in England and America shortly after World War I, the racialized notions about human beings that filtered long ago into the popular imagination, and occasionally have reappeared even in scientific investigations, have proved difficult to dislodge. 2 For modern-day Jews, the painful memory of the liquidation of such a large percentage of Europe s Jews on racial grounds is an argument one might understandably make for never using the term race again in connection with the Jewish people.
Ethnicity is the term commonly used today with reference to Jews and other groups. But this term is also problematic, as Jonathan Freedman suggests in his parenthetical remark in an essay about negotiating i