For the past fifty years, Julius Novick has assessed American drama with insight and affection. In 1958, he began a thirty-year tenure as theater critic for the Village Voice, publishing reviews that earned him the Nathan Award for dramatic criticism. He has also discussed drama in dozens of other periodicals, including the Jewish Daily Forward, American Theatre, The Nation, New York Times, Threepenny Review, and Vogue. Novick has served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize drama jury and taught as a drama studies professor at several New York City universities. In 1968, he published his first book, Beyond Broadway: The Quest for Permanent Theatres, a field guide to American resident theaters outside New York and a call for the revitalization of those theaters. As an elegant marker of his fiftieth year critiquing American drama, Novick has published his second book, Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience.
With Beyond Broadway and Beyond the Golden Door, Novick aims beyond his usual medium of journalism. With the latter work, he also aims beyond his usual audience of theatergoers and theater participants. Aside from a few scholarly articles, Novick has not written specifically for an academic audience. While Beyond Broadway suggests a practical argument to both theater professionals and the public, Beyond the Golden Door offers a survey of “significant plays by Jewish American dramatists, written in English and produced for general audiences … plays in which Jews take center stage” (3–4) for an academic readership. This survey spans the period from The Melting Pot (1908) by Israel Zangwill (the book's only non-American playwright), to Neil Simon's Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway (2001), and concentrates on plays written in the decades after World War II, when Jewish Americans felt increasingly comfortable addressing Jewishness and when Jewish-themed plays proved marketable to general audiences (6). The argument of this book, unlike that of Beyond Broadway, is gentle: Novick regards Jewish American drama as an index of Jewish American concerns, and dwells on thirty-four plays to chart the evolution of these concerns. The grand preoccupation he observes is that of balancing Jewish with American identity. Novick writes,
Certain themes keep recurring: the memory of persecution; the fear of the big Gentile world and the yearning to join it; generational conflict; upward social mobility; pride; shame; ambivalence; the counterpoint of outward success and inward disappointment; new American ways of being Jewish; the survival of Jewish identity among those indifferent to Jewish religious belief and religious observance; the diminution of Jewish identity over the generations. All these, like the spokes of a wheel, lead to and from the great subject of this Jewish American drama: the question of how (or whether) to be Jewish and American at the same time. (4)
As this list suggests, social and psychological themes dominate; rarely do the plays address religious conviction and practice. In the book's introduction, Novick lays bare the premises he uses to explore these themes. He explains that he considers a character in a play Jewish if that character is regarded as such by others in the play or by the play's audience (4). He prefers the term Jewish American to American Jewish because he intends a comparison with other Americans, not with other Jews (5). (Associating Jewish Americans with African Americans, Novick repeatedly refers to W. E. B. Du Bois's statement from The Souls of Black Folk, “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”) And he acknowledges that the book is not exhaustive (7). Still, Novick presents rather a sufficient sample of Jewish American plays that is both representative and eclectic: here are Awake and Sing! (1935) and Fiddler on the Roof (1964) alongside Welcome Stranger (1920) and Falsettos (1992); here are Gertrude Berg and Tony Kushner alongside Wendy Wasserstein and Jon Robin Baitz.
The book's first three of ten chapters narrate chronologically from The Melting Pot to Death of a Salesman (1949), after which chronology yields to arrangement by author (Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Alfred Uhry), theme (prosperity, fathers and sons, daughters), and genre (the musical). An epilogue on Angels in America and the apparent decline of secular American Judaism somberly ties off the chapters. A useful series of notes, a play index, a playwright index, and a general index conclude the work.
Novick summarizes each play with detail and clarity, and provides historical and biographical context to show how each play reflects its author's milieu and life. The strongest chapters are those that sustain attention on a particular playwright, such as the chapter tracing Arthur Miller's increasing ease with exploring his Jewishness onstage and the chapter pursuing Alfred Uhry's portrayal of German Jewish American self-hatred. Striking observations, followed by propositions, proliferate. For instance, Novick comments on Samuel Raphaelson's The Jazz Singer (1925): “Again and again in Jewish American plays, Americanization takes the form of rebellion against the family and against the Jewish community, of which the family is in some measure a microcosm. … Could these children be reenacting, in diminished form, the great leaving-home of their immigrant ancestors?” (18). And on Death of a Salesman, Novick writes, “The lack of specific ethnic markers is paralleled by a lack of specific chronological markers. … Does this make the play merely vague, inauthentic, ahistorical, or does it help the audience to believe that the process we are seeing is not the product of one historical moment, but a possibility over many decades, and even now? Whether the generalizing impulse is a fault or a virtue is an open question” (49).
Compelling as these propositions are, they leave the reader wanting more. By posing a rhetorical question instead of a speculative answer, Novick departs from a topic just when it clamors for further analysis. While Death of a Salesman, like all art, can rest happily in ambiguity, academic criticism rests with less comfort. Novick's book leaves a frustrating number of “open question[s],” without advancing contestable claims. His thesis—that Jewish American drama mirrors Jewish American life—invites complication. Is there ever tension between this drama and the life it purportedly represents? That is, do the playwrights ever get it wrong? Why is there so little religious tradition portrayed onstage in these plays? Why do the plays seem to ignore Israel? Why are all these plays in the realist mode? How does Jewish American drama compare to contemporaneous Jewish American fiction, Jewish American art, and non-Jewish American drama? And, most broadly, what is the role of drama besides mirroring the culture out of which it comes?
In addition to calling for further argumentative development, the book would benefit from deeper dialogue with scholarly work on the subject. Louis Harap addresses Zangwill, Raphaelson, Odets, Miller, Elmer Rice, and others whom Novick studies in Dramatic Encounters: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-Century American Drama, Poetry, and Humor and the Black–Jewish Literary Relationship (1987). Given Novick's repeated citation of Du Bois, Harap's book seems particularly apt for engagement. Twice Novick quotes Henry Bial, whose Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005) also invites a rich critical response. Scholarship by Jonathan C. Friedman on Jewishness and homosexuality in the performing arts might have enriched Novick's summary of Angels in America, while work by Sarah Blacher Cohen on drama by Jewish American women might have productively informed Novick's chapter on “Jewish Daughters.”Footnote 1
Novick's writing style reflects his journalistic background. He writes conversationally, with a happy absence of jargon and convolution. We read that the 1922 hit drama Abie's Irish Rose is “supremely trashy” (11) and that Forty-Five Seconds from Broadway is “lame and implausible” (86). Sometimes the fluidity yields wordplay, as when Novick wonders whether Jack Robin in The Jazz Singer will choose between a career as a cantor or as a jazz singer: “What will it be, Kol Nidre or Cole Porter?” (20). Whether this and other wordplays strike as clever or cloying will depend on the reader. Novick's wit could have been more finely showcased by another round of copyediting and proofreading.
For scholars in the field of Jewish American history and literature, the book will lack innovation. But for nonspecialists and nonacademics who seek to learn more about the topic, Beyond the Golden Door will be helpful as an a clear, engaging survey of twentieth-century Jewish American drama.
