By the 1920s, Jews were--by all economic, political, and cultural
measures of the day--making it in America. But as these children of
immigrants took their places in American society, many deliberately
identified with groups that remained excluded. Despite their success,
Jews embraced resistance more than acculturation, preferring marginal
status to assimilation.
The stories of Al Jolson, Felix Frankfurter, and Arnold Rothstein are
told together to explore this paradox in the psychology of American
Jewry. All three Jews were born in the 1880s, grew up around American
Jewish ghettos, married gentile women, entered the middle class, and
rose to national fame. All three also became heroes to the American
Jewish community for their association with events that galvanized the
country and defined the Jazz Age. Rothstein allegedly fixed the 1919
World Series--an accusation this book disputes. Frankfurter defended the
Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Jolson brought jazz music to
Hollywood for the first talking film, The Jazz Singer, and regularly
impersonated African Americans in blackface. Each of these men
represented a version of the American outsider, and American Jews
celebrated them for it.
Michael Alexander's gracefully written account profoundly complicates
the history of immigrants in America. It challenges charges that
anti-Semitism exclusively or even mostly explains Jews' feelings of
marginality, while it calls for a general rethinking of positions that
have assumed an immigrant quest for inclusion into the white American
mainstream. Rather, Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status stemmed
from the group identity Jews brought with them to this country in the
form of the theology of exile. Jazz Age Jews shows that most Jews felt
culturally obliged to mark themselves as different--and believed that
doing so made them both better Jews and better Americans.
