Jews and American Popular Culture [Three Volumes]

Subjects:

• Popular Culture » Popular Culture (General)
• Popular Culture » American Studies
• Multicultural Studies » Jewish Studies

Reviews:

• [T]his engaging and learned series of essays traces the achievements of Jews in many American entertainment forms. The complex history offers numerous examples of innovators moving into the center of the American entertainment industry from its margins....Like their subjects, Buhle's essayists deserve a widespread audience for their lively studies of progressive and popular American culture.
  —Science & Society January 2008
• [W]hile not claiming to provide any definitive or comprehensive answer to the inevitable question--Why have Jews had such a central impact on American popular culture?--does move, in many of the pieces included, toward a suggestion: Shut out of more traditional fields, Jews creatively embraced the emerging technologies of film, radio, an television, as well as many new commercial opportunities from the department store to the invention and distribution of novelty games and toys. What resulted was an American culture shaped in large degree by a resilient and talented minority population....[t]his collection is a sturdy beginning to the description and analysis of the unendingly interesting subject of Jews and American popular culture.
  —Congress Monthly March/April 2007
• Given the surprisingly ground-breaking nature of the collection, the quality of its contributors, and the breadth of the ground it has broken, this project is invaluable....[a] fascinating and broad collection of essays.
  —ZEEK August 2007
• Jews have had a central impact on many aspects of American popular culture, and this handsome three-volume reference set presents a scholarly, yet accessible, survey of the history of Jewish involvement in pop culture. Editor Buhle does an admirable job of grouping the essays by areas of interest. The more familiar areas of study, such as Jews in movies and literature, get the most attention. Other topics receive comprehensive treatment, such as jews in television and theater, radio broadcasting, and music. Jews in sports should be a popular section. Most intriguing are areas of popular culture given little coverage in past publications: fashion, toys, department stores, amusement parks, pornography, the Internet, gangsters, and the Jewish nose....The never before published comic strip by Pekar is a nice bonus. Highly reccommended for academic libraries as well as large public libraries.
  —Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter May/June 2007
• In this collection of 51 essays, academics and journalists relate the contributions of Jewish creators and performers to American popular culture, covering the ethnic origins of the American obsession with the movies, moguls and the studio system, the social film and the blacklist, musicals, censorship, animation, talk radio, television drama, comedy writing, Yiddish theater, vaudeville, Broadway, drama, klezmer music, Tin Pan Alley, folk music, jazz, rock, protest, high lit, the pulps, children's literature, advice columns, satire, comics, baseball, boxing, basketball, the Olympics, amusement parks, the Catskills, fashion, toys, food, department stores, gangsters, porn, beauty, plastic surgery, popular front culture and the Internet. Think how much richer life would be if fewer talented people had to overcome anti-Semitism.
  —Reference & Research Book News May 2007
• Editor's Choice This isn't just a quick and dirty survey of American Jews doing mass culture. It's 861 pages, with scores of references to further reading, that explains what Jews were doing what they were doing, when they were doing it, and what impact that had on other Jews and non-Jews alike. If you want to sound smart about Jewish pop culture--and we know a thing about this--there really is no better place to start your library.
  —American Jewish Life Mar/Apr 2007
• Though this set has the heft of a reference series, it works best in a circulating collection. It is not an encyclopedia but rather an insightful and eclectic compilation of essays by noted scholars and writers....There are many unusual but telling meditations on popular culture in this expansive series (e.g., The Jew and the Nose: Plastic Surgery and Popular Culture written by Beth Aviva Preminger, a plastic surgeon). One of the strong points of the series is that each entry has a list for further reading....Libraries with strong American Jewish studies collections should definitely have this set. Academic institutions and large public libraries should consider.
  —Library Journal 4/15/2007
• Buhle has made an important contribution to the understanding of the impact of Jews on popular culture in the US. The encyclopedia is a compendium of 52 essays that cover a diverse range of subjects, from David Wagner's The Social Film and the Hollywood Blacklist to Albert Fried's The Story of America's Jewish Gangsters. Additional topics include Jews and Beauty, Food in Jewish American Culture, and Fashion, all by scholars or writers with expertise in their fields. Buhle's introduction examines contemporary Jewish history within the context of US popular culture, and notes that it has taken five generations of Jewish participation in popular culture to disprove the argument made by anti-semites such as Otto Weininger that Jews had a talent for the superficial arts as compensation for their inability to create real art. Also included in the introduction are illustrations by Harvey Pekar, the famed cartoonist. The three-volume work includes photos, suggested readings that accompany each essay, and notes on the contributors. Given the quality of the essays as a whole, the encyclopedia should become an indispensable resource work for scholars and students engaged in research on the Jewish experience in the US. Essential. All levels/libraries.
  —Choice 7/1/2007

Table of Contents:

• Volume One: Movies, Radio, and Television
  Acknowledgments
  Introduction, A Cartoon by Harvey Pekar and Barry Blitt
  Chapter 1. The Movies: Notes on the Ethnic Origins of an American Obsession by Dennis B. Klein
  Chapter 2. National and Local Movie Moguls: Two Patterns of Jewish Showmanship in Film Exhibition by Judith Thissen
  Chapter 3. The Studio System by Bernard Dick
  Chapter 4. The Social Film and the Hollywood Blacklist by Dave Wagner
  Chapter 5. Jews in Hollywood Musicals by Bernard Dick
  Chapter 6. Making a Scene: Jews, Stooges, and Censors in Pre-War Hollywood by Dan Bronstein
  Chapter 7. Animation by Tom Sito
  Chapter 8. The Jewish Film Festival by Deborah Kaufman and Janis Plotkin
  Chapter 9. A Brief Introduction to Jewish-American Radio by Henry Sapoznik
  Chapter 10. Jews on the Radio, 1920-1953 by Ari Y Kelman
  Chapter 11. Jewish Talk Radio: Programming in Our Time and Place By Ariana Green
  Chapter 12. Television Drama of the Golden Age by Judith Smith
  Chapter 13. Intellectual Pogrom: How the Blacklist Purged Political and Cultural Discourse in Early Television by Steven W. Bowie
  Chapter 14. Jewish Comedy Writers of the 1950s and 1960s By Kathy M. Newman
  Chapter 15. Bring in the Klowns: Jewish Television Comedy since the 1960s by Vincent Brooks
  Volume Two: Music, Theater, Popular Art, and Literature
  Acknowledgments
  Chapter 1. Yiddish Theater in America by Edna Nahshon
  Chapter 2. Vaudeville by Pamela Brown Lavitt
  Chapter 3. Jews and the Broadway Musical by Andrea Most
  Chapter 4. Jews in American Drama by James Fisher
  Chapter 5. Star-Spangled Bulgar: The Story of Klezmer Music in America by Pete Rushefsky
  Chapter 6. Jews, Tin Pan Alley, and the Rise of American Popular Music by Derek Seidman
  Chapter 7. Folk Music by Ron D. Cohen
  Chapter 8. Jewing Jazz/Jazzing Jews by Josh Kun
  Chapter 9. Jews and Rock n Roll by Danny Goldberg
  Chapter 10. Justice, Justice, You Shall Pursue: Jewish Political Artists by Paul von Blum
  Chapter 11. The (Un)forgotten Singers of Struggle by Hershl Hartman and Miriam Hartman Flacks
  Chapter 12. Entertaining New Americans: Serialized Fiction in the Forverts (1910-1930) by Ellen Kellman
  Chapter 13. Lower East Side Literature by Sanford Sternlicht
  Chapter 14. A Yiddish Odyssey: Jews and the Pulps by Gerard Jones
  Chapter 15. Bohemians and Beats by Jonah Raskin
  Chapter 16. Jews in American Childrens Literature by Julia Mickenberg
  Chapter 17. Advice Columns by Gabrielle Birkner
  Chapter 18. Putting on the Shpritz: Postwar Jewish American Political Satire and Parody by Stephen E. Kercher
  Chapter 19. Comic Strips/Comic Books by Eddie Portnoy and Paul Buhle
  Volume Three: Sports, Leisure, and Lifestyle
  Acknowledgments
  Chapter 1. Jews, Baseball, and American Fictions by Eric Solomon
  Chapter 2. A Sport At Which Jews Excel: The Search for Basketball in American Jewish History by Ari Sclar
  Chapter 3. Boxing by Douglas Century
  Chapter 4. American Jews and the Summer Olympics by Chris Elzey
  Chapter 5. Jewish Sportswomen by Linda Borish
  Chapter 6. Amusement Parks by N. Popper
  Chapter 7. The Jewish Community in the Catskills by Phil Brown
  Chapter 8. Fashion by Elizabeth Greenberg
  Chapter 9. Jews in the Toy and Novelty Industry by Lawrence Bush
  Chapter 10. Food in Jewish American Culture by Jennifer Schiff Berg
  Chapter 11. How to Make a Poet: Jewish Department Store Moguls and the American Dream by Jennifer Segal
  Chapter 12. The Story of Americas Jewish Gangsters by Al Fried
  Chapter 13. Jews and Pornography by Rachel Shtier
  Chapter 14. Jews and Beauty by Alana Newhouse and Rebecca Spence
  Chapter 15. The Jew and the Nose: Plastic Surgery and Popular Culture By Beth Aviva Preminger
  Chapter 16. Popular Front Culture by Paul Buhle
  Chapter 17. Present in the Future: Jews and the Internet by Steve Bergson
  Afterword: Hammerin Hank Greenberg: Folk Hero for the Game He Didnt Play by Aviva Kempner

PDF Catalogs:
Praeger Public Library Spring 2008.pdf	Greenwood Multicultural Spring 2008.pdf
Pop Culture Spring 2008.pdf