"You Know, I Used to Be a Jew": Groucho Marx, Max Reinhardt, and the Transformation of American Studies (original) (raw)

This essay is based on a keynote lecture at a meeting of the Austrian Association for American Studies, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. Set against the backdrop of Trump's election, the essay begins by unpacking of a Jewish joke in relation to my own family's history, including its history at the very site in which the conference took place. Building on certain questions emerging from that exercise, it moves to a sustained examination the project of American Studies as manifested in the founding of the Salzburg Seminar. Noting in particular how the founding generation underplayed the structures of racial domination and obscured the dynamics of settler colonialism, the essay ends with a discussion of how the history of that project might inform the opportunities and challenges facing the field now.