Jonathan Freedman

Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Angels, Monsters, and Jews: From Kushner to Klezmer2. Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe,, and the Making of Ethnic Masculinity3. Antisemitism Without Jews: Left Behind in the American Heartland4. The Human Stain of Race: Roth, Sirk, and Shaw in Black, White, and Jewish5. Conversos, Marranos,, and Crypto-Latinos: Jewish-Hispanic Crossings and the Uses of Ethnicity6. Transgressions of a Model Minority7. Asians and Jews in Theory and PracticeConclusion: The Klezmering of AmericaNotesIndex

Coming out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust

In among the many ways I do identify as a woman, the identification as a gay person is a firmly male one, identification “as” a gay man; and in among its tortuous and alienating paths are knit the relations, for me, of telling and of knowing. (Perhaps I should say that it is not to me as a feminist that this intensively loaded male identification is most an embarrassment; no woman becomes less a woman through any amount of “male identification,” to the extent that femaleness is always (though always differently) to be looked for in the tortuousness, in the strangeness of the figure made between the flatly gendered definition from an outside view and the always more or less crooked stiles to be surveyed from an inner. A male-identified woman, even if there could thoroughly be such a thing, would still be a real kind of woman just as (though no doubt more inalterably than) an assimilated Jew is a real kind of Jew: more protected in some ways, more vulnerable in others, than those whose paths of identification have been different, but as fully of the essence of the thing.) —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written”

Henry James and the Idea of Evil

Henry James needed an imagination of Evil; it was a requirement of his artistic vocation as well as his personal identity. He had a huge ambition not only for his own fiction, but for the novel generally, which in his moment was still an adolescent inhabiting the outskirts of cultural respectability, where film (or “the movies”) lived twenty years ago. James worked as a propagandist for the genre, playing a kind of shell game by worrying in his essays or prefaces over various aspects of fictional composition, as though one could simply assume for it the serious stature of lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry. But when in his own work he wanted to connect allusively to these established literary traditions, the problem of Evil became his chief conduit. I want here to examine this process in two of Jamess most famous short works, Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, and one of the great novels, The Portrait of a Lady, to question why Evil so dominates his imagination when the very concept had, by his own estimation, become creaky, suspect, lame.

Henry James and Early Film

Although Henry James was alert to contemporary culture and media in the years when film was invented and institutionalized, he attended few early films and mentioned them infrequently in his work. Jamess work parallels many of the most salient features of this rapidly developing new form. Comparing his works with the films of G.A. Smith, this article argues that the two share a remarkably similar set of techniques and thematic obsessions and helps us to understand both the dynamics of early film and the relentless experimentation of the high cultural Master of the Art of Fiction.

Introduction: The Moment of Henry James

Why, after a hundred years, Henry James? At a critical moment so leery of traditional notions of literary and cultural value, so impatient with gestures of authorial self-aggrandizement, so suspicious of the prerogatives of class privilege, few writers would seem less likely to survive than one thoroughly embedded in the highest of high literary culture, driven by desire for canonical status, fascinated by the intensities of the drawing room and the mores of the country house. And few bodies of work would seem less likely to thrive in our MTV-mediated age of instantaneous apprehension. The thickness, the opacity, the ambiguous range of reference of Jamesian prose demand attention, focus, and, that rarest of contemporary commodities, time. Yet persist he has: indeed, his work has managed to attract devoted readers and inspiring commentaries across and through the major critical shifts of the last fifty years. Each successive wave of theoretical and critical practice - New Criticism, deconstruction, feminism, marxism, New Historicism - staked their claims and exemplified their style of interpretation by offering powerful re-readings of James.

Lessons Out of School: T.S. Eliot's Jewish Problem and the Making of Modernism

Jonathan Freedman is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford University Press, 1990) and The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, AntiSemitism, and the Making of Literary Anglo-America, 1880-1980 (Oxford University Press, 2000). Lessons Out of School: T.S. Eliot’s Jewish Problem and the Making of Modernism

On different differences, or, reopening the canon of worms

When the profession of literary criticism moved in the direction of interrogating racial, classed and gendered difference in the early 1980s, it significantly omitted the category of Jewishness. But to add Jewishness – considered not as an essence but as a problematic – into the critical mix is not only to correct for this omission. It is also to make critical and theoretical interventions thicker. I gave as an example the so-called canon controversy, one which becomes more complex when the construction of the new critical literary canon by figures like Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot becomes enriched by a discussion of their relation to the fascinating, yet abjected, figure of the Jew. And I turn to the examples of Jewish critics like Auerbach and Spitzer not only for a guide to discussions about the nature of the European literary tradition in the past, but also to current efforts to rethink its place in the globalizing literary world of the present and future.

Trilling, James, and the Uses of Cultural Criticism

Meetings like the recent, extraordinary sesquicentennial celebration of the birth of Henry James are examples of the cultural reworking that accompanies, and accomplishes, the afterlife of authors. And the afterlife of Henry James celebrated in New York last June is one that sees James in the guise of cultural criticism. It is this James to whom I attempted to devote some attention a few years ago—a James more canny than uncanny, more intensely conscious of his cultural awareness and social engagement than he had previously been seen. It is this James, too, of whom Ross Posnock has spoken in his recent book, in which Henry rather than brother William is envisaged as a kind of worthy successor to Adorno and Benjamin as critic of identity thinking and facile models of subjectivity. The return of James to the province of cultural criticism is, I think, a significant one, not only for James (who is doubtlessly chuckling somewhere at all the new vestments that are now being placed on him), but also for the enterprise of cultural criticism itself. For that enterprise, too, has worn as many clothes as any of which I am aware. At the moment, it is decked out in the black garb of the postmodern: grappling with its own conditions of possibility, the limitations of its own modes of representation, its entanglement in the exigencies of social power. In so doing, it might be said to have reached a distinctively Jamesian moment: one of intense dissection of its own motives, of acute self-consciousness about its methods of representation, and of a productive sense of the possibilities as well as the liabilities of its own limited perspective. It is from this reflexive—this Jamesian?—perspective that I write here. My focus will not be so much the rhetoric of cultural criticism as its social and cultural uses—of the things that people do with the serious, sustained, critical and self-critical engagement with the forms of representation that a society generates to speak its norms, fears, and hopes. Cultural criticism, I will be assuming, always asks to be read doubly. It speaks of social rearrangements that culture effectuates but at the same time performs a cultural work, enacts a social negotiation, all its own. And one of the most important things it tries to do is to create a position for