Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity

Jonathan Freedman

December, 2007
Cloth, 408 pages, 17 illus
ISBN: 978-0-231-14278-6
$34.50 / £20.50

"Jonathan Freedman has scooped us! Klezmer America mobilizes what is indeed a key field of contemporary Jewish creativity and reads it as a key metaphor for the intersections of Jewishness in the politics of American identities. The book is lively, lucid, and inviting. As a lesson in how to talk about Jewish and other collective names, Klezmer America dances deftly above the twin pitfalls of sentimental reification and allegorizing annihilation." — Jonathan Boyarin, Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"By reintroducing Jewishness to the discourse of race and ethnicity in America, Jonathan Freedman challenges rigid categories that have shaped American studies in recent decades. A timely and captivating study, Klezmer America widens and enriches the cultural map of the United States in its exploration of the mutual construction of Jews and 'Other Others.'" — Hana Wirth-Nesher, Samuel L. and Perry Haber Chair on the Study of the Jewish Experience in the United States, and director, Goldreich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, Tel Aviv University

Related Subjects

• American Literature
• Judaism
• Race and Ethnicity

About the Author

Jonathan Freedman is professor of English and American studies at the University of Michigan. He has also taught at Yale, Caltech, and Oxford universities and at the Bread Loaf School of English. He is the author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture and The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Anti-Semitism, and the Making of Literary Anglo-America.

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