Jewish Humor, Commercial Entertainment, and Modern identity in 20th C America and Central…

Catalog description

The seminar explores the relationship between humor, popular culture and Jewish ethnic identity in early 20th-century Europe and America. It argues that self-deprecating humor and satiric performance of Jewish stereotypes were not expressions of self-hatred, but complex cultural gestures that led to in integration within mainstream society. Topics to be considered are: the joke as a social gesture; the Jewish music hall as an urban institution; the politics of blackface in American Vaudeville; the East-European Jews in Hollywood.