Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (review)

Reviewed by: Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen Andrea Most (bio) Henry Bial. Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Pp. 195. $20.95 (Pb). Henry Bial’s Acting Jewish addresses the thorny and complicated question of how Jewishness manifests itself in American popular entertainment. Using a performance studies approach that privileges performance history and audience responses to films, plays, and television of the last sixty years, Acting Jewish argues that mainstream American entertainment “is a crucial site for understanding the relationship between Jews and American culture” (5) and that the particular strategy of what Bial calls “double coding” allows for a conversation about identity that is based “neither on questionable essentialisms nor on a politics of victimhood” (6). Double coding describes how the same cultural product can be read differently from two different reading positions: Jewish and gentile. The act of “reading Jewish” is a primary way of “acting Jewish” and even, Bial asserts, one of the most important means by which Jewish identity is established in American culture today. In other words, to “get” the Jewish codes of Seinfeld or Fiddler on the Roof serves to “affir[m] one’s membership in an imagined community of American Jews” (20). Those who do not “read Jewishly” can enjoy the same shows without experiencing this act of identification. Bial takes care to point out that the definitions of Jewish and gentile, as used here, are not essential or racial; rather, to respond “Jewishly” to a work of popular culture, one must simply be literate in the requisite cultural codes. Because of its methodology, Acting Jewish illuminates aspects of canonical works of American Jewish culture that might be overlooked by relying exclusively on textual analysis. For example, Bial makes fresh observations by focusing on questions of casting and acting styles. He argues that Death of a Salesman has been read as Jewish when Willy Loman was played by a Jewish actor because Lee J. Cobb’s or Dustin Hoffman’s Method acting –which draws on personal experience to build a character – uses the actor’s Jewish background and therefore creates a Jewish sensibility in the performance. Similarly, Bial fills important gaps in our understanding of Fiddler on the Roof by exploring the notably different performances of Tevye by Zero Mostel (on the Broadway stage) and Topol (in the mass-market film). Explaining the history that each actor brought to the role, Bial contrasts [End Page 638] Mostel’s shtetl sentimentality to Topol’s more robust, almost macho performance. The use of audience response to make the central argument of Acting Jewish proves to be less convincing, however. Reception studies are notoriously problematic because the evidence for audience response is so difficult to acquire. The “audience” for Bial seems to be almost exclusively reviewers for major publications and scholars of Jewish culture. While their responses do teach us something about the ways in which culture writers respond to Jewish-inflected works, it is not safe to infer conclusions about identity formation among American Jews more generally from these select and self-selecting responses. Furthermore, although Bial aims to identify both “Jewish” and “gentile” responses, a large majority of the responses he cites are “Jewish” ones. In his discussion of the 1950s sitcom The Goldbergs, for example, he notes how certain Jewish aspects of the show resonate with Jewish scholars, but then asks, “Do they resonate in the same way for an audience unfamiliar with these coded indicators of Jewishness?” (48). He implicitly answers this question in the negative but provides no explicit evidence. Similarly, Bial makes sweeping statements about the response of audiences to Annie Hall: The significance that viewers attach to Alvy’s “specific Jewish personality” is conditioned in large part by the cultural knowledge and expectations they bring to the film. Members of the Jewish audience . . . respond to the familiarity of the character. For them, Allen’s appeal lies in his ability to observe the humor in everyday situations. But audiences not familiar with Jewish performance codes see the intercultural encounter from the point of view of Annie. (98) This statement is unsupported by evidence, and...

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