June 2005

Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to The Goldbergs

Drawing on scholarship from a range of disciplines, Weber traces the tension between nostalgia for the world left behind and the desire to blend into American culture, by examining early immigrant fiction and cinema--from novels of Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth, to Hollywood's representation of Jews in The Jazz Singer and Gentleman's Agreement, to Saul Bellow, Gertrude Berg and the comedians Milton Berle and Mickey Katz.

Setting an array of figures and works in creative dialogue, Haunted in the New World offers a genealogy of those core emotions -- shame and self-hatred, nostalgic longing and the impulse to forget -- that organized much of 20th-century Jewish American expressive culture and transformed American culture at the same time.