Tony Michels

On Jews and Taboos in American Communist History

The Russian Revolution may be considered, in the words of historian Michael David-Fox, “one of the most potent and expansive touchstones of twentiethcentury political and intellectual history.” For more than seven decades, from the Bolshevik seizure of power in Fall, 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Americans defined themselves politically, to a greater or lesser extent, in reference to Soviet Communism. For most people, this meant eyeing the U.S. S.R. with suspicion or hostility, except during World War II. However, a significant number of reformers and radicals drew inspiration from the Russian Revolution from its beginning. Educators, feminists, trade-unionists, panAfricanists, liberals, and others viewed the Soviet Union as a vast, daring social experiment that wedded scientific planning with ideals of equality in all areas of human endeavor: economics, the arts, pedagogy, nation-building, gender relations, and so on. The three papers published here stress the emancipatory hopes invested in the Soviet Union and the CPUSA. For politically radical African Americans “Communism existed in the South as an alternative, as an aspirational ideal, and as a threat to the racial and class order,” writes Glenda Gilmore. Left-wing homosexuals looked eastward and imagined, according to Aaron Lecklider, “a new life outside the confines of...self-tortured loathing.” Julia Mickenberg shows how feminists “turned their attention, for varying lengths of time, to Russia and the Soviet Union as they sought models for female empowerment and social justice in the first half of the twentieth century.” By examining the liberating role of the Russian Revolution, all three papers seek to overcome the “Red Taboo” that has discouraged discussion of the subject in the past. To be clear, this taboo has not inhibited the study of American

Anita Norich. Discovering Exile: Yiddish and American Jewish Culture during the Holocaust . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. xiii, 215 pp.

whom Novick studies inDramatic Encounters: The Jewish Presence in TwentiethCentury American Drama, Poetry, and Humor and the Black–Jewish Literary Relationship (1987). Given Novick’s repeated citation of Du Bois, Harap’s book seems particularly apt for engagement. Twice Novick quotes Henry Bial, whose Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) also invites a rich critical response. Scholarship by Jonathan C. Friedman on Jewishness and homosexuality in the performing arts might have enriched Novick’s summary of Angels in America, while work by Sarah Blacher Cohen on drama by Jewish American women might have productively informed Novick’s chapter on “Jewish Daughters.” Novick’s writing style reflects his journalistic background. He writes conversationally, with a happy absence of jargon and convolution. We read that the 1922 hit drama Abie’s Irish Rose is “supremely trashy” (11) and that Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway is “lame and implausible” (86). Sometimes the fluidity yields wordplay, as when Novick wonders whether Jack Robin in The Jazz Singer will choose between a career as a cantor or as a jazz singer: “What will it be, Kol Nidre or Cole Porter?” (20). Whether this and other wordplays strike as clever or cloying will depend on the reader. Novick’s wit could have been more finely showcased by another round of copyediting and proofreading. For scholars in the field of Jewish American history and literature, the book will lack innovation. But for nonspecialists and nonacademics who seek to learn more about the topic, Beyond the Golden Door will be helpful as an a clear, engaging survey of twentieth-century Jewish American drama.