"You Know, I Used to Be a Jew": Groucho Marx, Max Reinhardt, and the Transformation of American Studies (original) (raw)
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JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies
Beginning with the unlikely pairing of Max Reinhardt and Groucho Marx, this article unpacks an old, politically troubling Jewish joke as a way of tracing two trajectories that unfolded between Austria and the United States. The first follows the author's family, the second the interdisciplinary field of American studies. The joke's commentary on the dilemmas of assimilation, as played out in the family history, frames a more sustained examination of how national identity was understood by the American studies project consolidated in Salzburg and the US just after World War II. Focusing on how the new field's ways of engaging and occluding problems of race, subordination, exploitation, and land-theft shaped an interpretation of American democracy's history and prospects, the article puts these issues in the context of Donald Trump's election as president and the urgency of understanding not only the ruptures but also the historical continuities his presidency repr...
Such centers spiritually strengthened those younger or weaker Jewish communities that were dependent on them. Yet in the course of time and for a variety of historical reasons, some of these initially peripheral settlements themselves made successful bids for hegemony. Thus, according to Dubnow, Spanish Jewr y gained independence from the Oriental Gaonate in the tenth century,,and live hundred years later the mantle ofleadership fell upon the German-Polish Jews. In ,the twentieth.. century, Dubnow looked.toward a joint hegemony shared by kws in the European-American Diaspora and in the land of Israel.' Whatever the shortcomings of Dubnow's grand scheme, when applied to the entire course of Jewish history the notion of an inchoate Jewry looking to an established, intellectually productive one for inspiration and guidance, then gradually-or li!fully-breaking away to assert its own primacy is suggestive for specific instances. It can, for example, be usefully applied to the relation of the American-Jewish community to its German-Jewish origins durjng Jhe nineteenth century. 2 From the beginning of large-scale Jewish i)nmigration from Germany to the United States in the 1830s until the demographic submergence of German Jewry in America beneath the flood tide of East European immigration at the end of the century, there. was a discc:rnible tension between forces making for preservation of the German-Jewish heritage as represented by Jews still in Germany, and those that pressed, in the direction of greater spiritual independence. While German Jewry could and did serve as a moder of modernization, especially · in matters of religion, acculturl!tion 247 248 Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model in the United States worked mostly in the opposite direction: toward an assertion ofindependence from the German matrix. Although for a period of time German Judaism was venerated almost without qualification, by the last decades of the nineteenth century its hegemony was under severe attack even by those German Jews in America who owed it the most. The purpose of this essay is to trace {his conflict of forces-as it appeared in the realms of culture and religion and to explain the eventual disavowal of German Judaism as a model for American Jewry.
Judaica Petropolitana, 2016
This article examines the Russophone Jewish immigrant experience in the United States of America and the reconceptualization of the borders of RussianJewish identity by analyzing the Russian-language Jewish press. At the turn of the twentieth century, the emigre Russian-speaking Jewish intelligentsia in America significantly contributed to shaping public opinion back in the Russian Empire about their new homeland. The initial failure to integrate into new society amplified immigrants’ sense of “Russian” identity, deepening their understanding of what it meant to be a Russian Jew. A desire to preserve contact with the abandoned motherland, share immigration experiences, and exchange ideas led to the establishment of transnational networks between the New World and the Old. The Russophone Jewish periodicals, organs of the acculturated and partially secularized Jewish intelligentsia, became a vital platform for linking Russian Jews on the two continents. Memoirs, diaries, and letters of expatriates ultimately presented a wide range of images of America — from “the land of murderous capitalism” to “the place where Jews could finally breathe freely,” although the positive depictions prevailed. These cultural representations mediated by the Russophone emigre writers shed light on the immigrant experience in the late imperial period and help reconstruct the transnational cultural production and fashioning of new Russian Jewish identities.
American Research Journal of Humanities Social Science (ARJHSS), 2025
This analysis examines how Dupont's 1923 silent film Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law) reflects Jewish identity and cultural integration in Weimar Germany while paralleling American Jewish experiences of the era. Through the interpretation of the protagonist Baruch's journey from a traditional shtetl to Vienna's theater scene, the study explores how the film addresses the intricate dynamics of Jewish assimilation, cultural preservation, and identity transformation. The study employs comparative analysis to illuminate similarities and differences between German and American Jewish experiences of cultural adaptation in the 1920s, utilizing theoretical frameworks from scholars like Zygmunt Bauman and Herbert Gans. Particular attention is given to the film's cinematographic techniques, including dissolves and parallel editing, which visualize the protagonist's navigation between traditional and modern worlds. This paper concludes that Das alte Gesetz presents a delicate portrayal in the molding of cultural negotiation, contributing to a far-reaching historical context while lending itself as a metaphor for broader challenges confronting minority communities in their balancing of tradition and modernity
The American Jewish Archives Journal, 2022
Reviews volume lxxiv. 2022. numbers 1&2 141 Herzl, with a town named after him and a giant sketch of his head on its water tower. It is to tell a messier story of a complex human beinga human being whose life seems so particular and unusual and yet has lessons for a broader understanding of humans. It is also to suggest that a messier story, including attention to embodiment as a central part of that story, might be a new way to tell the stories of iconic thinkers and writers (221). Like the work of brilliant writer and theorist Saidiya Hartman, whose concept of critical fabulation has revolutionized how African American history is written, Imhoff's work on Jesse Sampter offers a radical methodology for writing an embodied Jewish history that is attendant to the messier story of Jewish lives, iconic or not.
The Holocaust in American Life
The Holocaust in American Life
Writing the History of Representations Between 1939 and 1945, many things happened to vast numbers of diverse and dispersed people. To talk in everyday life about all of them requires capacious words, representations which develop as events recede and gain their meaning only with the passage of time. An American soldier in 1944 might have described himself as storming the beaches of France or fighting in the outskirts of Caen. As a veteran twenty years later, he could say he fought in World War II. Peter Novick understands the centrality of representations in historical inquiry (pp. 220-1; cf. pp. 66, 68, 74). Collecting in one phrase an enormous mass of horrible events, 'the Holocaust' is such a representation. Novick boldly asserts ' "the Holocaust", as we speak of it today, was largely a retrospective construction, something that would not have been recognizable to most people at the time' (p. 20; cf. pp. 59, 116). This is the historical fact that he tackles in The Holocaust in American Life. The tone of this book is generally commensurate with its large ambitions. Bold and occasionally pugnacious debunker, Novick writes like somebody who wants to call a spade a spade. Nevertheless, his text is persistently punctuated by hesitations (pp. 166, 176, 183, 226, 232, 233, 257). He seems wary of hubris. He wants the reader to know that he knows when his way is blocked. Some barriers to historiography are unavoidable: documents are missing, witnesses are dead. Other impediments arise from the way the historian sets to the task. Every inquiry constitutes both an 'object' and its own peculiar impasse. I will argue thet Novick's project is blocked by the way he has chosen to investigate 'the Holocaust in American life'. To orient the discussion, consider that Americans today often use the word 'Holocaust' without clear reference to the