Daniel Hack and Amy Hungerford begin their preface to Jonathan Freedman's The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity by stating, “the book in your hands is a labor of love” (ix). Freedman suffered from a stroke soon after sending the manuscript to editors at University of Chicago Press, and Hack and Hungerford shepherded the work to completion. They express in their preface deep admiration for Freedman's capacity for curiosity and insight and for his mode of communicating about the literature and culture he loved. That sense of labor as a form of love, which motivated Hack and Hungerford's act of scholarly generosity, also animates each of the chapters of Freedman's book. One gets the sense in reading this book (and Freedman's work in general) that thinking about cultural objects, writing about them, placing them in connection constituted for him a way of expressing affection. In his first book, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (1990), he offered a way to take aestheticism seriously, to see its politics and its engagement with the social realm that it pretended to disavow. Those of us who have, since then, been thinking about aestheticism with his work in mind will find reading The Jewish Decadence, with its familiar sharpness, clarity, and sense of fun, something like talking to an old friend. In his introduction, he describes his methodology, stating that he wishes to “cleave to the decadent example by stressing—by dwelling on, even—the rich idiosyncrasies of individual texts” (7) and he does pause over the detail, beauty, and strangeness of the works with which he engages in a manner that is at once loving, decadent, and illuminating.

Freedman's argument, that Jewish novelists, poets, actors, and philosophers reworked the discourse of decadence, which often linked Jewishness to decline, to their own ends in order to generate a Jewish response to the conditions of modernity, is compelling. More importantly, it offers a model of how work on afterlives and transnational circulation can avoid the trap of thinking in terms of unidirectional influence and attend to the agency and creativity of those influenced. Jewish decadence is not in Freedman's eyes an instance of mimicry. It is instead an example of radical renovation that remade an often anti-Semitic discourse about degeneration into a vitalizing resource for Jewish writers and an entry point into bohemian and avant-garde culture for Jewish women, Jewish gallery owners, and Jewish painters.

The individual chapters range widely in terms of approach and methodology, moving deftly between highly disparate modes of thinking and reading. In early chapters, Freedman shows us entire networks of Jewish painters, such as Simeon Solomon; Jewish art dealers and collectors; and Jewish members of Oscar Wilde's circle, such as Reggie Turner, Ada Leverson, and William Rothenstein, whose connections with one another constitute a significant tide of Jewish decadence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This careful yet wide-ranging approach to intellectual and aesthetic history gives way to a chapter, at once more focused and wild, on the role of Salomania in the reconceptualization of the Jewish female body. In this chapter, Freedman begins with a young Fanny Brice performing a parodic version of Salome's dance of the seven veils at an audition and ends with a discussion of Betty Boop as the descendent of the Jewish performer as slender girl tradition, of which Sarah Bernhardt and Alla Nazimova were also a part. In chapters on Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin, Freedman slows down to provide rich proof of deep engagement with decadence on the part of two of the most highly significant Jewish figures linked with modernism and the concept of modernity. Freedman closely reads Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) and Benjamin's The Arcades Project (1927–1940) to find Proust merging decadence, Jewishness, and sexual otherness and Benjamin melding Baudelaire and kabbala. Not every chapter is equally successful. The treatment of Jewish engagement with Arthur Schopenhauer does not feel sufficiently integrated into the rest of the project, and the final chapter on S. An-sky's The Dybbuk (1920) and its afterlives, while making a convincing case that the dybbuk narrative became central to the Jewish imaginary in the twentieth century, does not cohere as successfully as earlier chapters. The conclusion to The Jewish Decadence, however, in which Freedman moves playfully between Serge Gainsbourg, Claude Cahun, and Maurice Sachs to demonstrate how decadence remained a vital component of Jewish negotiations with modernity through World War II and after, represents Freedman at his most skilled, his most astute, and his most enjoyable. Freedman's treatment of Cahun in particular, which highlights the photographer's use of fin-de-siècle motifs and allusions to deconstruct the notion of gendered and sexed identity, engages in striking readings of striking images, such as a 1928 self-portrait of an androgynous Cahun in something like a Harlequin costume, at once pointing back to Beardsley and forward to contemporary modes of conceptualizing gender identity. Across The Jewish Decadence, Freedman has made the case that playing with decadence enabled new forms of artistic creation on the part of Jewish subjects, and this consideration of Cahun remaking Beardsley and being read with such interest and sympathy alongside a figure like Gainsbourg fittingly closes and affirms that claim.