Introduction

This special section of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies has a history. So much of our work in the academic world has been dominated by competition in recent years – from University rankings to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) procedures – that it is about time to relate a story of co-operation. Two years ago, Caspar Battegay, author of Judentum und Popkultur (Bielefeld: Transcript 2012), had the idea to assemble new research papers on Jewish popular culture for a special issue of Jewish Cultural Studies, the yearbook edited by Simon J. Bronner for Littman’s Library of Jewish Civilization. As a member of the editorial board of JCS (and as the editor of yet another journal, Jewish Culture and History), I happily agreed to collaborate with him. Unfortunately, there were not enough papers to justify a complete issue of JCS. I am therefore very happy and grateful to Glenda Abramson that the following articles have now found a home in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.

The articles present quite a wide range of settings: contemporary art, film, music, popular magazines, humour; they introduce quite a collection of “types,” from the tough, hip, jive-talking “biblical brother” who battles anti-Semites on the streets of New York to the “nebbish”; and they offer a fairly unusual vocabulary for the average reader of this journal (including the writer of this introduction), “Jewface,” “sicknik,” and “shazoom.” At the same time, they approach and discuss themes and (spatial as well as temporal) arenas that seem more familiar: post-War (Jewish) America, the archive of life, children of Holocaust survivors, censorship, movies. They form part of what we all contribute to, Jewish Studies, and yet they offer a different perspective.

What is Jewish Popular Culture? (What is “Jewish”? What is “popular”? What is “culture”? Should I open these boxes? Maybe better not.) Most authors who have attempted to define popular culture agree on a number of points:

As the “culture of the people,” popular culture is determined by the interactions between people in their everyday activities: styles of dress, the use of slang, greeting rituals and the foods that people eat are all examples of popular culture. Popular culture is also informed by the mass media. […] Popular culture encompasses the most immediate and contemporary aspects of our lives. These aspects are often subject to rapid change, especially in a highly technological world in which people are brought closer and closer by omnipresent media. Certain standards and commonly held beliefs are reflected in pop culture.¹

Is “pop culture” then synonymous with “popular culture”? And will it be enough to add “Jewish” to the mix, to find what we are looking for? Or is there something more? Do we find it “at the intersection of Judaism and pop culture,”² or should the religious dimension be left out of the equation? Is it indeed a secular phenomenon? Is it American? Sometimes it seems so.

The Israeli liberal newspaper Ha’aretz published a list of “2015’s Top 10 Jewish Pop Culture Moments” and introduced their selection with the words: “From Matisyahu to Larry David, here are some of the moments that made Jews stand out in the increasingly bizarre whirlwind of American pop culture.” The 10 moments were: Cindy’s conversion on “Orange is the New Black” (television); Amy [Shumer] and Chuck team up for gun control (comedy meets politics); JDate sues [JSwipe] over the letter “J” (dating agencies); [Rapper David Burd] Lil Dicky climbs the Billboard charts (rap music); Matisyahu plays at a festival he was disinvited from (music and BDS movement); Lena Dunham’s New Yorker piece about her Jewish boyfriend – or was it her dog? (literature, society, anti-Semitism); Jon Stewart’s montage of his Jewish moments on “The Daily Show” (television again); Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings’ performance on “8 Days of Hanukkah” on The Late Show (music, festivals); the opening of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (film, and the creative minds behind the project are Jewish); Larry David’s Bernie Sanders impersonation on “SNL” (television again, politics, but also stereotypical use of language and gestures).³

Do all our readers know what these 10 moments are about? (I had to look up half of them). Apart from the remarkable fact the Israeli newspaper seems to find such typically “Jewish” moments in the United States rather than in Israel or elsewhere, there is a clear dominance of media and media-related events, television, film, the internet, and much less regard for those topics we find in the works of ethnographers and anthropologists who contribute to Jewish Studies (to name just a few: Haya Bar-Itzhak, Dan Ben-Amos, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Mikel J. Koven, Vanessa Ochs) or, for example, in the Encyclopedia of American Jewish Popular Culture. Here, the list of entries contains mostly names, from Dylan, Bob and Einstein, Albert via Jong, Erica and Koch, Edward to Westheimer, Dr Ruth and Wiesel, Eli, but also diverse topics such as Hollywood Moguls, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Jewish Delicatessens (Fischel 2008).

If we can agree on the most basic definition of “culture,” that it describes what people do, both in their daily lives and on special occasions such as festivals, in work and leisure, and what people create, from agriculture to symphonies and sculptures, and that it encompasses the meanings and rituals they attach to such practices, and that none of this is constant and fixed but always in movement – then “popular culture” might be what many people do, or what people traditionally do, in family and community settings, whereas “pop culture” might be what the younger, the less established and more avant-garde people do, on stage, in a studio, or on screen. We could further argue that “popular culture” is often based on religious practice, whereas “pop culture” is rather secular and irreverent and uses religious elements in a more playful way. At some points these two different approaches meet, for example when it comes to food, to clothing, or to language and gestures (see Chivers 2014, III, 234–258).⁴

The idea of bringing all these topics and approaches together and offering a new perspective in and for Jewish Studies in general has itself been termed a chutzpah (Bronner 2008, 1–28). In the early discussion between Caspar Battegay, Simon J. Bronner and myself, some common points were agreed upon:

• Jewish culture, both in religious and secular terms, is a matter of practice. While, obviously, there is an important tradition relating to thought and text, the study of Jewish culture(s) often starts with the question how individuals and groups connected in one way or another, do (or don’t do) things: eat, pray, study, marry, raise children – or make music. In recent years, new forms of such cultural practice have developed and deserve the attention of scholars in the wide field of Jewish Cultural Studies.

• Traditionally, Jewish popular culture has been researched in the framework of cultural history, ethnography and folklore studies. Rabbi Max (Meir) Grunwald’s Gesellschaft für Jüdische Volkskunde, founded in 1898 in Hamburg, Germany, or An-Ski’s ethnographic excursions in the Pale of Settlement (1912–1914) revealed a neglected dimension of Jewish culture: the cultures of the everyday, of the margins, and their reflection in the arts. Based on this heritage, Jewish Cultural Studies has developed the research area further and integrated topics and methodological approaches from various fields of the Humanities (representations, material culture, gender, family, sexuality, performance).

• New developments in a Jewish involvement in popular music (and popular culture in general) have been highlighted when, in 2012, one of the world’s most famous Hip Hop artists, Aubrey Drake Graham – better known as Drake – made a controversial video in which he re-enacted his Bar Mitzvah. This example can form the starting point of an investigation into the relationship between – the many varied and different forms of – Jewish cultural practice and the world of contemporary popular culture.

• Pop culture develops in dialectic ways: what is scandalizing and marginal today, might become part of the global mainstream tomorrow. The discourse on (and of) pop culture mirrors such dialectics, it follows and produces formations and constructions of identity (Jewish in some ways, and/or a result of the co-construction emerging from Jewish/non-Jewish relations) in different media and on different stages.

• During the past decade, reflections of Jewish cultural practice, as well as representations of Jewish identities in pop culture have undergone a change. “Jewishness” (a term in need of constant debate and reflection) itself has become a matter of style, in some contexts it is apparently hip to be Jewish and maybe also to sound Jewish (in these troubled times I have to add that in other contexts old enmities come creeping up again). For Jews and non-Jews alike, being Jewish is no longer categorically equated with being part of a marginal minority; “Jewishness” has become a universally applicable symbol and, like the African-American identity, is an element in a globalized public culture.

• Cultural stereotypes regarding Jewish cultural practice are still active. Ironically, these strong stereotypes are central to the performance of various Jewish comedians such as Moshe Kasher, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Sarah Silverman. As innovative and original as these topics might seem, older questions – on anti-Semitism, for example – are never far away.

I hope that these questions and thoughts constitute a useful framework for the articles assembled here. I have learned a lot from reading and discussing the articles, and I am very happy to admit that I do not agree with all of them. But they made me think. Rachel Garfield’s discussion of the archive in the works of the three artists whose works she looks at, Doug Fishbone, Deborah Kass, and Suzanne Treister, at first glance seems to be very far away from the work on Jewish archives I have done.⁵ But when I think again and accept the idea of the archive, “not as a museum deposit but as ‘found’ material that may be appropriated by the artist and drawn together to create a self-formed repository of motifs for specific conceptual purposes” (Garfield 2016). I feel that it might make sense to look again at the letters, diaries, and other documents that form the body of my own historical research, from this angle. Yes, there is an – often undiscovered – element of “conceptual purpose” in the archival documents I have used, both in the writing process of those who produced the letters and in the forms of storage that has made them accessible to research.

In a similar way, reading about the “funny Jew” in Jarrod Tanny’s article or the “nebbish” in Jennifer Caplan’s contribution, or about MAD Magazine, and gaining new inroads into seemingly well-known tropes: empowerment, identity, acculturation, gender and – in all three cases – the cultural practice of counteracting, has made me aware of the fact that there is so much more to discover in Jewish Studies. How fruitful a dialogue can emerge between the more traditional forms of popular culture and the more contemporary forms of pop culture (and between the different research methods connected to each area) becomes visible when we read Ela Bauer’s paper on the encounter of the Jewish society in Poland with the “silver screen,” the Yiddish cinema in the 1920s, and Tsafi Sebba-Elran’s deep analysis of the manifold representations and manifestations of the “other” in the most traditional of topics related to Jewish popular culture – the joke. These two papers also widen our geographical horizon, our temporal and spatial maps of Jewish popular culture, they allow us to integrate the Eastern and Central European Jewish experience into current research ideas, and they prevent us from falling into the trap of trendiness by insisting on the importance of historical consciousness.

Notes

1. https://philosophynow.org/issues/64/Pop_Culture_An_Overview (accessed August 28, 2016).

2. http://www.popjewish.com/ (accessed August 28, 2016).

3. Gabe Friedman, Ha‘aretz, 28 December 2015: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/1.693504.

4. For gestures see Chivers (2014, 234–258).

5. See the special issue of Jewish Culture and History 15 (1–2), 2014, on “Jewish Migration and the Archive” and the introduction by James Jordan, Lisa Leff, and Joachim Schlör (1–5).