Take Two on Michael Scott

For today’s class, we read a classic article by Douglas Kellner called “Popular Culture and the Construction of Postmodern Identities”–even if he’s not certain that so-called postmodernism isn’t just an attenuated form of modernism. Still Kellner offers some useful distinctions to help us understand how our experience of personal and cultural identity has shifted in the last 60 years. Since, say, 1950, Americans have generally grown more comfortable balancing multiple identities, even adopting additional identities and affiliations, at the same time those identities have grown less stable and more open to change. Beneath this, however, lies a more fundamental shift. As Kellner summarizes, “While the locus of modern identity revolved around one’s occupation, one’s function in the public sphere (or family), postmodern identity revolved around leisure, centred on looks, images, and consumption.” To put in another way (and to paraphrase my Post-Post-Jew colleague), how a man earns money is now less important than what he does in his free time. “Yes,” he tells someone at a party, “I am an investment banker, but my real passion is film.” Kellner is less clear in discussing the family, thrown lightly into parentheses. If anything, family has traditionally been understood as private, in opposition to the public workplace, but for Kellner it is part of our public identities. Similarly, being Jewish certainly has a private dimension (how we observe, if at all, at home), but it also has aspects of public performance–how someone dresses, what he does or does not eat–that have the potential to mark someone as Jewish both to other Jews and to outsiders. Yet precisely as personal and cultural identities become increasingly multiple and flexible, they grow increasingly privatized and contextual. We grow better at “switching” identities from one context to the next–or at least, we imagine we do. I am not what I “am” but what I say I am, what I seem to be, what I consume–all of which is subject to revision.

What makes Michael Scott a perfect shlemiel for the postmodern age–to build a little on Moishenadir2′s earlier post–is that he, unlike nearly all of his office mates, refuses to play any role but one. His life revolves almost entirely around the office, and his status as boss–it’s not possible to imagine Michael doing anything else. He sees his co-workers as his closest friends, if not his family members, and his only significant romantic relationships have been with co-workers (or this season, the mother of a co-worker.)

To put it another way, Michael is the opposite of a Zelig–he cannot assimilate to a changing context. Heck, Michael can barely keep a secret for more than fifteen minutes. And yet, that inability–or perhaps refusal–to bend, to switch roles, is the source of both Michael’s greatest successes and failures. As much as Michael’s style gets him in trouble, it also works for–as last year when he regained control of the Scranton branch. In an ever-changing world, Michael Scott is that last bastion of stability–for better and for worse.

1st Impression of Michael Scott

Yes, it’s true: “The Office” is increasingly one of the most depressing shows on TV and a large part of that is the pathos invested in its co-lead, Michael Scott. This is truly one of the biggest differences between the American “Office” and its forerunner. Michael Scott had to grow and develop in order for the show to be successful long-term, but the way he’s grown is somewhat unexpected, peculiar. Michael Scott has become a Schlemiel, America’s most prominent since Malamud’s Fidelman or Alexander Portnoy.

The Schlemiel is one of the classic comic types of Jewish culture, defined by his haplessness. The popular explanation goes: a Schlemiel is the one who spills the soup, rather than the one upon whom soup is spilled.  Yet this description of bumblery masks the complex role that the Schlemiel often serves in literature. As Ruth Wisse argued in the classic The Schlemiel as Modern Hero:

The schlemiel’s misfortune is his character. It is not accidental, but essential. Whereas comedy involving the schlimazl tends to be situational, the schlemiel’s comedy is existential, deriving from his very nature in its confrontation with reality.

And:

In this respect, the schlemiel differs from most anti-heroes who are characterized–as the term accurately implies–by means of negative definition. The schlemiel is not a hero manque, but a challenge to the whole accepted notion of heroism…The schlemiel is mighty in that he subdues his urge to be a hero.

The comedy of the Schlemiel is the exposure of the immorality of the world around him. His inaction teaches us more about the nature of the world than directly confronting the circumstances ever could. This increasingly comes to define Michael.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Michael’s relationship with Jan. Michael is willing to do anything for Jan. He takes on a second job, he endures emotional abuse, he has to watch her pine for another, much younger, lover. Yet he is silent. He even goes through multiple vasectomies and reversals as Jan debates whether or not to have children. Shades of “Gimpel the Fool.”

This is not the only dimension of Michael’s character. At times, his boorishness makes the comparison impossible (as when he refused to let Phyllis be Santa Claus). And yet, the fact that Michael’s foolishness–as painful as it can be–is often the result of a naive outlook to the world, a misjudgment of the forces allied against him, is one of the major reasons that we ultimately embrace the character.

This American Life?

Last week, This American Life shared their predictions for the year 2010. Along with discussing psychics, economic forecasts, and parents anxiously awaiting the birth of a new children, there was this segment, “Nostra-mom-us,” five minutes of Etgar Keret talking with his mother about the mideast. I’m not quite sure what it is about Keret’s segment that has to do with America; yes, we get a certain glee from hearing Dermot Mulroney mangle Hebrew when reading this Keret story, but “Nostra-mom-us” is just five minutes of Keret talking to his mom about what to expect in Israel–not exactly a look at what it means to be the number 1 party school in America. (Yes, I’m spending too much time in the TAL archives. Blame thelazyscholar.)

Whatever the reason, there’s a long tradition of Americans projecting American tropes and values onto narratives of Israel. Deborah Dash Moore writes in her work on Miami and LA:

This drama of Israel’s creation paralleled the American experience. It combined elements of the American revolution against the British with frontier settlement and the fight against Indians. Reduced to melodrama, this reading of postwar Jewish politics ignored the reality of bitter, fratricidal struggles among Zionist parties….Its themes were liberation and redemption, reenactment in secular terms of a religious message…The consensus adopted by the movies simplified the historical reality, giving it a single trajectory, idealizing its participants, and emphasizing its American resonance.

American popular narratives of Israeli independence came to resemble the American revolutionary war. Even the trailer for Exodus brings up the Minutemen at Concord.

The film is advertised as an American epic. The trailer invokes Gone with the Wind, and not-so-subtly uses the phrase “birth of a nation,” reminding us of the notorious epic. The movie is sold as American experience, and its story structured around resonances to America.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is paradigmatic of this phenomenon. Zohan renounces violence and comes to America where he falls in love with a beautiful Palestinian woman, the [SPOILER ALERT] sister of his arch nemesis. The nemesis tracks him down to the states, but they are able to put their problems aside and team-up to confront the real villain, the American capitalist intent on destroying the ethnic neighborhood.

The movie celebrates American values, American multiculturalism, the melting pot. Only in America can these people put their problems aside and live together–not just side by side. The movie’s fabula and content are in this sense superficially Israeli; everything is refracted through the American point of view.

Big H, little h, and the Land of Israel

The following is a post by a new (occasional? regular?) contributor, Sa’adiah Palin, a PhD candidate in Modern Jewish Studies, focusing on twentieth-century American Jewish intellectual life. I’ll be back with some thoughts of my own later.

What role has the state of Israel played in American Jewish culture?  How conscious were American Jews of the events that came to be known as the Holocaust?  Very rarely are these questions examined in sober, dispassionate tones because they converge with a highly incendiary discourse over the current conflict in the Middle East and raise questions such as “who is a Jew (or perhaps more important here: what are the Jews?)” and more general ones on the use and abuse of power.  My goal in this post will be to simply rehearse some of the issues discussed in the scholarly literature and talk a bit about what is at stake.

One major touchstone in this debate is a book called The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick.  In it, Novick argues on two different levels: as an historian and as someone making normative claims.  I’ll deal with the former component first.  Novick’s argument is that there was a subterranean knowledge of the atrocities of World War II among all Americans and American Jews in particular.  However, these various atrocities, acts of war, and sporadic bits of information were not referred to as the Holocaust (with a capital “H”).  Novick admits that the word holocaust was in circulation but shows how it was used to refer to the general catastrophe, mass suffering and destruction that a modern, technological war that wreaked havoc on more than one continent.  The suffering and routinized killings of Europe’s Jews was understood within the framework of a larger holocaust that consumed Europe.  It was only in the late 1960′s and particularly after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War that the Holocaust, now with capitalized “H”, became a specifically Jewish event, and a unique and discernible entity.

A few historians have tried to dispute Novick’s historical argument, whether implicitly or explicitly; I have in mind here Michael Staub’s Torn at the Roots and the very recent We Remember With Reverence and Love by Hasia Diner, one of the preeminent historians of American Jews.  (Full discretion: I have read Staub’s book but I have not yet read Diner’s so I have to rely on reviews and synopses and conversations with colleagues).  Both of these books have the same fundamental problem: they try to dispute Novick’s argument by pointing to random and sporadic acts of commemoration that took place throughout American Jewry and try to artificially inflate these to the level of full-blown collective consciousness.  Doesn’t it seem that so much evidence from the historical and cultural record can be marshaled to negate Novick and debunk the “Myth of Silence after the Holocaust” (part of the subtitle of Diner’s book)?  What about films such as The Pawn Broker (1964), Exodus (1960) and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)?  Don’t these constitute widely disseminated films that starred huge movie stars and were released by major American studios?  Weren’t these films seen by large swaths of Americans that make explicit reference to the particulars of the Nazi atrocities?  Yes, they do.  Wasn’t the bringing of Adolph Eichmann to justice at the hands of the new Jewish state a crucial piece of current affairs?  Yes it was.  Didn’t William Shirer’s 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich go a long way towards not letting Germany off the hook in the American mind, despite the importance Western Germany played in Washington’s newly emergent Cold War?  Yes, it did.  As the war ended and the historical record became more and more clear the American public learned more and more about what happened in greater and great detail.

But these criticisms still miss the mark because they fail to take seriously Novick’s argument about the Holocaust becoming its own discrete event and how that specific word came to be used. 

Some New Jewess Stereotypes

The blogosphere is still abuzz about Christopher Noxon’s recent Details essay, “The Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl,” or as Noxon more colorfully calls it the “JILF.” It’s the sort of trend story one regularly sees in the pages of the New York Times Styles section, that is to say largely made-up. Here’s the recipe: start with a Jewish porn star with an Orthodox background, name-check a few famous Jewish actresses (Rachel Weisz, Scarlett Johansson), toss off references to two current examples (Mad Men and Glee) plus a biblical one (Queen Esther), and voila, the suddenly sexy Jewish woman.

What Noxon glosses over is that the idea of the exotic Jewess has history much longer, and more ambiguous than Natalie Portman’s career. To find the proto-Jewess, one needs to go back further than the 1990s to 1819, when Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe, with its portrait of the beautiful and wise Rebecca (often assumed to be based on American educator Rebecca Gratz). But philo-Semitism has always been double-edged–just think about the evangelical love of Israel. In fetishizing the Jewish women, Noxon can’t help reiterating some old and tired stereotypes, even as attempts to flip their value, lusting over the very qualities–her dark hair, her nose, her loquaciousness–that others have found repulsive. It’s worth noting here that Noxon himself is not Jewish–though he is married to Jenji Kohen, the Jewish creator of Weeds. Still there’s something a little creepy in hearing him wax archly about the appeal of the “ladies of the tribe,” as though they were all interchangeable.

The problem is less that Noxon attempts to identify a trend but that he skirts over the nuances. Surely, Noxon is onto something as far as Mad Men is concerned. Who could have predicted in season one that Don Draper would fall for the aloof and alluring Rachel Menken? Glee, too, has created something of an anti-heroine in Rachel Berry, a success-driven Streisand-in-the-making (seriously, listen to actress Lea Michelle’s oddly captivating rendition of “Don’t Rain On My Parade“). But the writers of both shows were careful to touch on stereotypes, at the same time puncturing them. There’s no doubt both Rachel’s are recognizably Jewish, but there’s something consistently surprising about them, too. That’s the difference between a caricature and a character–between following the scripts of stereotypes and creating something new.

Hanukkah Dragons and Jewish Christmas

Is Jewish Christmas a Holiday? By that I mean, is it widely practiced, similarly practiced, and/or repeated? Most of us in class last Tuesday found the SNL  “Christmas for the Jews” song utterly recognizable; conforming to stereotype, all the American Jews in class actually spend (or have often spent) Christmas together as a family eating Chinese food and going to the movies. The level of Jewish observance seems not to matter; Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, and Orthodox all get Chinese food—though observance may impact entrees ordered and the quality of your meal. It may have emerged as a counter-holiday, but it seems phenomenologically the same as a regularly holiday: we come together as a family unit by eating food both real and symbolic, seeing ourselves as conforming to a wider, unique nation/family in the process.

Of course the big difference is that there is no textual basis for “Jewish Christmas,” no legal code calling for its existence, nor even hinting at it. It appears to be a fully cultural holiday, likely unique to American Jewry. As such, we don’t readily perceive it as something Jewish. Ivan Marcus distinguishes between assimilation and what he calls “inward acculturation.” Inward acculturation is a borrowing from another culture wherein the item borrowed is perceived as Jewish. Circumcision. Bar Mitzvahs. Wedding bands. All of these things aren’t unique or original to Judaism, but we’ve nonetheless made them Jewish rituals. Is Jewish Christmas perceived as Jewish? It certainly doesn’t describe regular Christmas practice. As the song goes

On Christmas Eve, The Gentiles gather
Around the Christmas Tree
They stay at home, and party with
Their Goyishe family

And yet, without any sort of textual element, we don’t readily conceive of this phenomenon as Jewish. We seem to have entered a sort of neutral space when it comes to religion, though we’ve perhaps created a true ethnic holiday.

This year we have another innovation in Jewish practice: The Hanukkah Dragon.

DAVE: You know, a lot of people think that Jews don’t have anything like Santa Claus.

MARISA: Not true?

DAVE: We have a Hanukkah dragon!

MARISA: Instead of bringing holiday cheer he brings holiday guilt!

DAVE: And fire!

MARISA: (and Nice Jewish Guys calendars)

I’m not sure what to make of the Hanukkah Dragon. Why shouldn’t Jews have a mascot? John Stewart suggested as such back in Naked Pictures of Famous People. And a fire-breathing dragon is so ridiculously non-textual that it might work. After all, it would take a pretty grand misreading of the apocryphal story of Daniel and the dragon to link this back to Judaism.  And even though that would probably be the greatest act of inward acculturation of all-time, I’d prefer to let the Hanukkah dragon be its own creature, a nice piece of Jewish Americana with a bonus shout-out to one of next week’s topics, the Nice Jewish Guys calendar.

The Post-Post-Jew and a Synthetic Flying Machine

The last two days have seen us explore the past. We’ve been working off of the idea of a “usable past,” a concept first developed by Van Wyck Brooks in 1918, later imported by David Roskies into Jewish Studies, but we could just as easily have focused our attention on the “unusable past,” looked instead at the waysides of Jewish history. Yesterday we mentioned that Charleston was once the city with the largest Jewish population in America, a fact rather far from the cultural memory of American Jews. Sure, Charles Reznikoff once wrote a book celebrating Charleston’s history and tried to write a novel about Charleston’s Jews, but the first was tepidly received and the second never did come about–and Reznikoff isn’t exactly Philip Roth when it comes to popular consciousness. Charleston was never fully represented as a Jewish site, and was left out of the Jewish memory map of America. (Though Earl Raab once wrote in Commentary that “To be not only Jew and American, but also Chariestonian, would seem to be thrice chosen.”) How can it be recovered? Should it?

This is a somewhat oblique way of reintroducing a topic The Lazy Scholar mentioned yesterday:

What makes [Everything is Illuminated] still compelling, and more complex than one expects, is that it is at once about the desire to recover the past and the impossibility of ever doing so in a stable way…Trachimbrod only exists in the pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book.

This is unfortunately as true for the real shtetls of Eastern Europe as it is for the fictional shtetls, and life in both is entirely dependent on the strength of the representation. Abraham Sutzkever, the most important Yiddish poet of his era, explored this notion in countless poems. The poet’s ability to bring back the dead, to revivify, is only as strong as his ability to link words and phrases, to construct a poetic artifact. Only artistic strength ensures an audience, and only with an audience can we begin to discuss memory. (See, especially, the great “Green Aquarium”)

Incidentally, another text of ours touched upon revivification: “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” I say incidentally, because we hadn’t explicitly chosen it for that purpose; rather, something related. But here it is, a description of revivification in all its grotesque beauty:

Now how I remember you
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet

The illusion is momentarily put aside. So much of the album is about reincarnation (“Now she’s a little boy in Spain…”), reminding us that the process of reincarnation necessitates transformation–perhaps one of the reasons the dark brother refuses to come back (“says it was good to be alive/but now he rides a comet’s flame/and won’t be coming back again”). The only way to reanimate the body is through physical manipulation, to make the muscles move; an image strikingly beautiful in its honesty.

Shtetllurgy; Or, the Lure of the Old Country

Today’s session centered on nostalgia for place as a central trope in Jewish identity, community, and culture since World War II. We started with the “old neighborhood”–specifically a longing for the Lower East Side, what Irving Howe termed “the world of our fathers.” As Hasia Diner shows in her wonderful study Lower East Side Memories, American Jews of the 1960s and 70s began looking increasingly to the neighborhood around Hester, Orchard, Rivington, and Delancey as the essential and authentic “homeland” of American Jewry. This mnemonic move, of course, overlooked many of the realities of life in the Lower East Side–for one that it was never exclusively Jewish–and privileged certain lives and narratives as both more American and more Jewish than others. (How shocking it is to learn that until 1880, the U.S. city with the largest Jewish population was Charleston!)  But I’m less interested in considering whether we’re “right” to idealize the Lower East Side, than I am in thinking about how Jewish identity and culture changes depending on when and where we start our usable past.

At the same time that American Jews began to long for the Lower East Side, after all, they also began looking back to “the old country,” the world that the Nazis destroyed, as a meaning-full homeland. Fiddler on the Roof, first on Broadway in 1966, then on the silver screen in 1971, and now in countless countries (and high schools), stands as the most significant example of shtetl nostalgia. Yet Fiddler is hardly a simple portrait of Jewish tradition, despite the lyrics of opening song. Rather, Fiddler shows us a world already in the throes of change, where old patterns of family and religion must make way for modernity, for better or worse. Our longing for tradition begins precisely at the moment it’s lost.

The lure of the Old Country has only seemed to grow stronger in the 21st century, as the  success of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated seems to attest. What makes the novel still compelling, and more complex than one expects, is that it is at once about the desire to recover the past and the impossibility of ever doing so in a stable way. The novel is divided into two alternating parts–we get a travel narrative, as a young Ukrainian guides an American Jewish writer on a search for the women who saved his grandfather from the Nazis; and we get the writer’s playful rendering of his grandfather’s shtetl, Trachimbrod. In the end though, Trachimbrod only exists in the pages of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book. Anyone can visit the Tenement Museum for a taste of the immigrant East Side, but we never go back to the shtetl except in imagination. Yet perhaps that very absence is what draws us back to Old Country, both freeing and forcing us to find and create a usable past for ourselves, over and over again.

At the Seder with Larry and Woody

Today in American Jewishness: Ivan Marcus, Bar Mitzvah Disco, Kitsch, “Christmas Time for the Jews,” Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Curb Your Enthusiasm Episode 47, “The Seder.” It was your typical look at ritual, focused on questions of religious tradition, cultural negotiation, the status of Judaism as an American religion, and the meanings and values of vicarious experience.

Actually, “The Seder,” as an entire episode of an American television series entirely devoted to celebrating a Jewish holiday, is a particularly fascinating lens on an American Jewish ritual. The episode finds Larry’s decidedly non-Jewish wife Cheryl preparing her first ever Passover Seder for Larry’s family, their friends, long-time neighbors, and a new member of the community, a convicted sex offender. Suffice it to say, hilarity ensues, though, oddly, one accompanied by a peculiar sense of morality.

It’s hardly the first time that the Seder is used as a vehicle for discussions of morality—-even within the limited frame of American popular media. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Martin Landau’s character imagines himself back at his family Seder, using the opportunity to ask for their opinions of his own crime as they struggle with the enormity of the holocaust and some speak favorably of the Soviet Union. This is clearly one in an endless series of arguments, repeated every Passover; their own ritual derived from the Holiday’s message of liberation and Rabbinic ideal of debate.

The Hebrew utterance we hear as Landau enters is actually the prayer said before eating the bitter herbs. Fitting given their subject matter.

There’s a Hebrew prayer during the Seder episode in Curb, but it’s a very different one: the “she-hekhianu,” a blessings said to mark an occasion, either its first occurrence or the renewal, the first in a cycle. Here the prayer is symbolic of Cheryl’s initiation into Jewish ritual, and to take it a step farther, the gentile American audience watching. As Larry explains the afiqomen to the children gathered around the table, he also explains the idea of the afiqomen to the audience. The episode teaches something of Jewish ritual. Not much, but something.

What he does teach, however, brings the moral element into focus. The sex offender spots the father of a child telling his son exactly where the afiqomen is hiding and he reports back to Larry. He feels compelled by an internal code to tell Larry. The whole series revolves around Larry’s particular sense of morality, debating whether it’s appropriate to do things a certain way or not, and the injustice he feels when others cross his lines. In a way, the sex offender is the perfect foil for Larry. For this one episode, their moral codes align. With one major exception.

And yet the episode also implicitly asks questions about rehabilitation in our country. No one wants the sex offender at the Seder, and Larry only gets Cheryl to agree by defining his inclusion in terms of Christianity. Earlier he’d claimed that Jews were obligated to take other Jews in for Passover, ensuring that they’d have a place to eat (true), and Cheryl agrees to take another couple in for the Seder (itself a scheme! You try describing an episode of Curb). But inviting in a sex offender is a line she won’t cross, and the only way Larry can get her to agree is by asking “What would Jesus do?” It’s a joke, but a one with a punch. Cheryl wouldn’t take him in if it only corresponded to Larry’s values. The whole notion of taking this person in for dinner is placed into a religious values context rather than a societal one. Certainly a more comfortable frame of reference for much of the audience.

The episode has the dual effect of teaching America about the Seder while also teaching them that it conforms to the values they already have. Nothing at here is at odds with America. Even Cheryl a can do it.

Consuming Jewishness; Or, Can Man Live On Gefilte Fish Alone?

Our mini-course “American Jewishness” began today with a spirited discussion of two essays: “Packaging Jewishness,” Elliott Weiss’s sharp analysis of kosher food marketing; and Staci Boris’s lively introduction to “The New Authentics,” the daring exhibit of “post-Jewish” art she curated in 2008 (you can read my take here). Read side by side, the essays hint at a tension that underlies many discussions of ethnic identity: what is the value of cultural consumption versus production?

As Weiss points out, innumerable products, from Oreo cookies to Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix, sport the seal of kosher approval, yet some companies choose to amplify the nostalgic or symbolic value of their products to add to their appeal. Take, for example, Mother’s Gefilte Fish, a familiar staple of many Passover tables. Shoppers know from the Orthodox Union symbol on the left that the fish is kosher. The rest of the label—the logo, the name, the tag “Old-Fashioned”—do what the seal itself cannot: it makes this gefilte fish more than a rabbinically-approved food; it makes it a symbol of Jewish tradition itself, of the “old country,” and of the devoted gefilte-fish-making mother we may have never known. To consume nostalgically packaged  products like Mother’s gefilte fish, Weiss writes, “is not merely a physiological act, it is a semiological one as well: the consumption of Jewish signifiers.”

And yet where does this consumption of signifiers get us? What does it actually mean to enjoy Mother’s Gefilte Fish, or, to take one of Weiss’s younger examples, the punnily named He’Brew, “The Chosen Beer.” Virtually everything about the beer’s packaging strives to make it more than your everyday ale. No, to drink He’Brew is a Jewish act, even if its meaning remains unclear. To quote Weiss:

Using quasi-Chagallian pictorial conventions, the image on the front of He’Brew features a “rhino-centric” caricature of a Jewish immigrant (nasally well-endowed and myopic) rising above a fabled skyline, part San Francisco, part old Jerusalem, and part European shtetl… Caricaturing the triumphant arrival of the chosen people to the Promised Land, He’Brew transposes the ironic image of the poor, bearded, and disheveled immigrant upon entry to Ellis Island to modern-day California. Here, the Promised Land is conceptualized as both a place (Northern California) and an idea (mainstream, middle-class America).

The label, in other words, consolidates and blurs a variety of journeys. And still it teeters between irony and earnestness. To drink He’Brew is at once to claim a Jewish affiliation and to laugh about it. It is Jewishness performed as camp, in Susan Sontag’s old sense: Jewishness in quotes.

This campy consumption of Jewish signifiers stands in contrast to the artistic works surveyed in Boris’s “New Authentics.” Most of the artists Boris selected come from the same generations of post-baby-boomers who presumably represent the target market for He’Brew, and yet they do not only consume the culture around them: they produce it. In fact, in a striking departure from the groundbreaking 1997 exhibit “Too Jewish,” The New Authentics artists rarely engage directly or primarily with traditional Jewish customs and signifiers. Still Boris suggests, that very indirectness can itself become a mode of affiliation. “In fact,” Boris writes, “one could even speculate that it is through their art that these artists most profoundly connect with an express their Jewishness.” Here the performance of Jewishness is as much about the process of production as it is about the final work.

But where does that leave those of us who aren’t artists? How can we produce “Jewishness” in an authentic and meaningful way outside the realm of art? And is production ultimately a more meaningful performance of identity than consumption? Is it “more” Jewish to make gefilte fish from scratch rather than spoon it out of a jar?

The performance theorist in me suspects that much depends on repetition, or as Judith Butler put it, the “stylized repetition of acts.” It’s not that either consuming or making gefilte fish is in and of itself an authentic act of Jewish identification. Rather eating or cooking gefilte fish every Passover, year after year, just might make it a significant act for a given person. But I’ll stop there, since that hints at tomorrow’s topic: ritual.