It may now be a truism to say that Popular Music Studies is at a point where research on music and race is expanding well beyond the African American example. Jon Stratton's recent work is a valuable contribution that builds on the debate about Jewish identity and popular music led by Jeff Melnick's Reference Mellnick1999 book A Right to Sing the Blues. While Melnick focused on various themes in the fraught history of American black–Jewish race relations, Stratton's approach is based on a range of case studies. Jews, Race and Popular Music begins with a detailed description of the complex history of Anglo-Jewish race relations in the USA, Australia and Britain. Statton's thorough approach here sets a general tone for the rest of the volume. His analysis proceeds through a discussion of torch singing in the earlier part of the 20th century to the activities of the Brill Building songwriters of the 1960s and on into the period's blues revival. After a pitstop discussing the Beastie Boys, the author moves his attention to Australia, where he contrasts the careers of Renee Geyer and Marcia Hines. Stratton then shifts to England to look at Helen Shapiro in the 1960s and Amy Winehouse. By referencing American girl groups, Sharipo's and Winehouse's beehives form a point of connection:

The title of Winehouse's album is important here, as Jews in the book explore their external positioning as an ambivalent racial Other to the historical norm of whiteness. As the terrain of race relations has changed in the last century, perceived Jewishness has also moved from its ascribed place as something associated with black identity (as an Other to whiteness) to something that has become ambivalently accepted as part of white society. Here Jewish culture is likened to a constantly swinging pendulum that has reacted to the racist perceptions of the WASP formation. At different times Jews have been cast as almost black, not black but non-white then, like the Irish, white but ethnically distinct. For Stratton, they have responded to such labelling by playing upon their changing cultural mask. His framework allows him to sidestep issues of essentialism and Jewish self-definition to make a book that is arguably part of whiteness studies. Given that context, he provides a partial but interesting history of the ways in which Jewish performers have negotiated their changing racial categorisation to survive a white-dominated, Anglophonic music marketplace.

Stratton's argument, then, turns on a particular notion of cultural translation. As part of a group more easily accepted by whites than their black counterparts, Jewish performers play vital roles as translators and racial go-betweens. As he says of those involved in the 1960s blues revival: ‘These Jews were bringing a musical aspect of African-American culture to a white audience’ (p. 87). However, their intermediary role itself has ebbed and flowed in relation to calls for racial separatism from various parties in each era. It changed, for example, when post-war prosperity brought the promise of assimilation to the new white suburbs of America's cities. Once suburban WASPs showed that they did not want to mix with their new neighbours quite as freely as many had hoped, Stratton argues that Jewish performers turned away from the American dream and rediscovered their own identity, changing the sound of popular music accordingly.

In the middle of the book, the flow is somewhat interrupted by a refreshing portrait of the Beastie Boys as nebbish parodists who perform in a way that uses Jewish stereotypes of inadequate masculinity to undercut the quintessentially American white college frat boy persona. As an exuberant trio of hip-hop fans seemingly emasculated by overbearing mothers, the rappers were, Stratton argues, in effect doing whiteface. His analysis seems a little out of place because it concentrates on performance in a music genre with a very different history of racial politics compared to the rock and ballad traditions which dominate the rest of the volume.

As the book's title implies, Jews, Race and Popular Music locates all the musician's personal endeavours squarely in relation to their race. One of the pleasures of reading it is the extended roll call of Jewish contributors to popular music in the areas examined. This extends from prominent and expected characters, such as Brian Epstein, Bob Dylan and Barbara Streisand, to both less well known figures and others, like Malcolm McLaren, whose Jewish identity was never an obvious part of their image. Stratton frequently pulls in artists of other ethnicities such as Dusty Springfield to act as comparisons. In this way, at every turn he locates the race and nationality of each performer and shows how Jews have actively changed their names or muted markers of physical identity to pass as white or explore a perceived link to black identity. Stratton's mention of the widespread racism registered in social perception surveys reminds us that these individuals lived in a society that was highly concerned with race. Their racial identities inevitably mattered. Nevertheless one wonders how conscious and reflexive some of the individuals under discussion were about the specific role that their own racial identity played in their career, and how it became articulated in their creativity. The book locates some interesting cultural shifts but perhaps simultaneously reduces and overdetermines individual personal motives in their wake.

While Jews, Race and Popular Music is often fascinatingly meticulous, it becomes unnecessarily laboured in places in pursuit of its arguments. One gets the impression that by shining a searchlight on music history, Stratton has seen precisely what he wanted to see. There is little or no discussion of any counter-argument, for example that whites were experimenting with the cultural trappings of blackness even more enthusiastically than Jews. The author also seems prone to extend his interpretations and inferences a little too enthusiastically in support of his arguments. Appropriately, he spends a lot of time exploring the stereotype of the Beautiful Jewess, for instance, which emphasises physical excess and predatory sexuality as alibis for white desire of an exotic female Other. When he finds a reference to Jessica Rabbit from the 1988 film Who Framed Rodger Rabbit used in a story about Amy Winehouse, he correctly explains that the rabbit was a curvaceous and seductive cartoon character, a femme fatale in a movie that mixed cartoon figures with live action. Next he begins to over-egg the pudding by explaining that Jessica is a Jewish name, and that cartoon characters in the movie ‘have the status of a minority group like African Americans or Jews’ (p. 190). This occasional tendency to find more evidence that is necessary is unfortunate given that Stratton's analyses are otherwise elegant in their combinatory approach to race and gender.

Perhaps rightly, Jews, Race and Popular Music steers clear of any detailed discussion of the most famous Jewish folk music genre, klezmer. The book, after all, is about Jewish agency within the cultural terrain of white hegemony. Yet the Jewish performers discussed can only speak about themselves through the stereotypes of others. Stratton's careful construction of smoke and mirrors means that there is no self-defined perspective on Jewish identity that can in turn become a social resource to be celebrated, questioned or parodied. The musicians he discusses can freely comment on white perceptions of blackness and on whiteness, but never on their own identity. When the Beastie Boys perform a kind of nebbish stereotype, for example, they are therefore seen as doing whiteface rather than parodying their own heritage. Perhaps this silence is useful in avoiding essentialism and placing Jewish identity in a role that whiteness has occupied for so long. A lack of focus on the heritage of Jewish self-definition is acceptable in some ways as irrelevant. There is a actually a sense in which the argument is more curtailed by its focus on popular culture; had Stratton included analysis of some of the white bastions of classical music in his discussion, complementary dimensions of the struggle for acceptance might have been highlighted. In the final analysis, though, while Jews, Race and Popular Music ranges across different countries and time periods, its patchy coverage is actually an asset. The book does not claim to be a full history of Jewish identity and popular music; instead it provides a valuable, case-by-case discussion of the complexities of the field.