The question of how film and popular culture register the emotional landscape of Jewish America in the twentieth century, and how Jewish artists in particular (actors, writers, filmmakers, movie producers) express their Jewish “identity” (currently a problematic term, under interrogation in Jewish studies) through their performances on stage and screen continues to engage scholars of Jewish American culture.

Earlier approaches to the question of Jewish “experience” as “reflected” in film were told via sweeping comprehensive surveys, chronological in approach, presented as thematic narratives (studies by Patricia Erens and Lester Friedman are the most prominent examples of this mode). Newer work in Jewish cultural studies, by contrast, complicates the very idea of “Jewishness” itself, rethinking the dynamic between ethnicity and cultural production; these scholars – in particular Jonathan Freedman, Bryan Cheyette, and Rachel Rubinstein, among others – seek to alter our understanding of the sites, genealogies, and contours of Jewish culture, highlighting a range of fluid, at times unsettling, encounters between Jewish American modes of expression and dominant as well as minority cultures. As Freedman argues in his important Klezmer America (2008, 15), “Jews, Judaism, and/or Jewishness … remain central to the process of ethnocultural rechurning,” an interactive dynamic that drives much US multicultural art. The term “rechurning” conveys the re-visionary potential latent in key texts like The Jazz Singer or Death of a Salesman. In the case of the books under review, Eric Goldman's The American Jewish Story through Cinema adopts a more traditional approach to its subject, while Andrea Most's Theatrical Liberalism offers a more provocative mapping of Jewish American popular culture in the twentieth century. In each case, their work reveals both the limitations and the achievements of their respective modes of cultural analysis.

In his focussed historical contextualization of selected major – and, by extension, mainstream – twentieth-century films, Goldman claims that film can provide a window through which we can observe the “changing and evolving sensibilities of the American Jew” (xii) over the past century. Goldman's narrative is chronological; his movie choices are for the most part canonical. Goldman's strength as a film scholar is his ability to uncover the deeper contexts, the untold stories, behind those films which, he feels, are representative of the Jewish “story” in the New World. For example, in the case of The Jazz Singer (1927), Goldman provides a helpful (if familiar) genealogy of the famous Jolson movie, showing how Samson Raphaelson adapted his original story “The Day of Atonement” (1922) into the Broadway play The Jazz Singer (1925) starring George Jessel, and finally how Warner Bros. radically transformed the stage version into a vehicle for Jolson, the most popular entertainer in America at the time. Goldman also traces the subsequent variations of the “jazz singer” motif, from the Yiddish cinema's response in The Cantor's Son (1937), to the later – and still relatively obscure – versions on film (1952) and television (1959) starring Danny Thomas and Jerry Lewis respectively, and to the better-known iterations by Neil Diamond (1980) and The Simpsons (“Like Father, Like Son” (1991)).

Yet despite his narrative retracing the “jazz singer's” history, Goldman leaves this archetypal Jewish story, which explores the pathos of Americanization and its troubled (and for some, troubling) emotional–filial–racial meanings, curiously underanalyzed. About the famous Warner Bros. version, Goldman concludes, “The Warner brothers transformed The Jazz Singer from a play about the complexities of the new American life, where family and peoplehood still had worth, into a film with a strongly assimilationist message” (40). Surely the “jazz singer” as key Jewish trope requires a thicker, more engaged analysis. Doesn't the scrubbed Thomas and Peggy Lee version (the famous singer plays his shiksa girlfriend), set in upscale Mainline Philadelphia, tell us something about the contemporary assimilationist anxieties of Jewish America, surfacing in response – as Philip Roth's early stories reveal – to a Jewish culture riven by shame, haunted by traumatic memories still under repression in early 1950s America? Doesn't the Yiddish Cantor's Son rewrite the Jolson story as an utterly fantastic vision of reverse pilgrimage (the would-be popular singer returns, in the end, to his old haim, the Polish shtetl, to marry his Old World sweetheart), a poignant countervision of the film's troubled portrait of Americanization as a form of New World debasement?

Moving chronologically, Goldman's analysis of his next set of movies, the famous “problem” films of 1947, Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement, displays the benefits of historical digging. Drawing on unpublished archives, Goldman tells the fascinating story of how each film was eventually scripted, cast, and produced, along with their respective popular receptions. For those students of US film history familiar with the work of Steven Carr on the Hollywood response to anti-Semitism, they will find much to enlighten them in Goldman's clarifying account. Goldman unearths the correspondence between Dore Schary (the producer of Crossfire) and Eliot Cohen (the influential editor of Commentary magazine in the 1940s who opposed the release of the film, believing that Crossfire would fan anti-Semitic flames); Goldman also shows how the films' respective producers (Darryl F. Zanuck in the case of Gentleman's Agreement, a gentile) rushed the production schedule in order to have their own film premiere first. Indeed, Goldman's description of the debates and responses to pre-screenings of both movies, of the exchanges between Schary (who emerges as a heroic figure, resisting Jewish worries about portraying anti-Semites on screen) and his Jewish critics, provides the richest contextualization available of these two canonical films. In the end, Goldman argues that because of the public airing of such a taboo subject like anti-Semitism, and the intra-mural struggles over the films' imagined threat to the still-wary Jewish community in America, the appearance of Crossfire and Gentleman's Agreement “were part of a coming of age for America's Jews” (96).

Goldman's selected survey of Jewish experience then moves from the immediate postwar era to the 1950s (represented by The Young Lions (1958)), to the 1970s and 1980s (represented by the figure of Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973) and The Prince of Tides (1991)). The strongest chapter in The American Jewish Story charts the work of Barry Levinson, above all his “Baltimore”-inspired sequence Avalon (1990) and Liberty Heights (1999) – memory films that explore the meaning and legacy of immigration and the comedy and trials of subsequent Jewish family life from the early twentieth century to the 1950s and 1960s. For Goldman, each of these films exemplifies, indeed enacts, a core theme of Jewish American experience: Streisand's strong feminist–Jewish profile, expressive of 1970s feminism in general; director Levinson's own “religious struggle and a tension between ritual and memory” (168) embodied in his searching, conflicted characters. In a brief coda, Goldman discusses the making of Everything Is Illuminated (2005), Liev Schreiber's deeply personal adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel about Old World return and New World memory, the legacy of the Holocaust, and its haunting shadow for younger generations.

In the end, however, Goldman's selective case studies remain relatively static; his habit of plot summary rather than deeper analysis tends to inhibit a more complex understanding of the Jewish American narrative than his chosen films can illuminate. At the same time, Goldman's contextualizing of his canon invites scholars to reconsider films such as Crossfire and especially the underappreciated The Young Lions with fresh eyes, with a sharper perspective regarding how these films can deepen our sense of the ways – however problematically – cinematic art can refract American Jewish “experience” in the twentieth century.

In contrast to Goldman's limited sampling of Jewish film texts, Andrea Most's claims for the explanatory power of what she calls “theatrical liberalism” in Jewish American expressive culture are wide-ranging, indeed seemingly all-encompassing. The term itself is a bit spongy; it can absorb a range of literary artists, religious and social theorists, and musicals throughout the history of Jewish American culture, above all in the 1920s and 1930s, and then later, during the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s. Most associates “theatrical liberalism” with something elemental about Judaism itself. She begins by reading the biblical story of Jacob (“a proto-modern figure” (32)) and his twin Esau as the ur-example of acting “Jewishly.” In this account, “Jacob is multiple and complex, an actor” (35, original emphasis). Thus the figure of Jacob, as a performing self, anticipates what she calls “theatrical liberalism”: the “Jewish” tendency to resist fixed identities, a belief in the inherent fluidity of the self, and the embrace of a moral perspective based on the importance of community. Most aligns these social and cultural ideals to the legacy of liberal Protestant America, where Jews, already possessing “a deeply theatrical sense of self” (39) found themselves safely at home by the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus in the encounter between an accommodating host society and a wandering tribe quickly feeling at home in an imagined promised land, Most argues that “a new form of American culture” was born: “theatrical liberalism, which combined salient features of Protestantism, liberalism, Judaic rituals and attitudes, and the inherent theatricality of a nation in formation” (39).

In this respect, the combustible interaction between liberal modern America and the inherently “performing” Jewish self generated enormous creative energy, on display above all in various forms and modes of popular entertainment, including the daemonic energy of, say, an Al Jolson or the emergence of the backstage Broadway musical. Jewish actors on stage and screen thus found a welcoming home in America (though, curiously, Most omits brilliant ethnic shape-shifters like the Marx Brothers and Paul Muni, figures who would seem to fit her thesis perfectly).

Impressively, in often superb and surprising readings of an eclectic array of plays, films, actors' performances and musical composers, Most reveals how theatrical liberalism's invitation to self-fashioning shaped a vast archive of now-canonical texts and figures of popular culture. The list includes The Jazz Singer, Showboat (1927), Pal Joey (1940), West Side Story (1957), the verbal antics of Sid Caesar, the figure of Willy Loman (instead of breaking into song at the end of Death of a Salesman (1949), Most argues that “Willy goes into a memory” (119)), Roth's Zuckerman novels (“Self-making is at the root of Nathan's idea of performance” (228)), and even the radical theatre director Richard Schechner, who sought, in the 1960s, to break down the structures between audience and actors in the hope of recasting the theatre as a utopian space.

Ultimately, however, Theatrical Liberalism's core set of ideas casts such a wide net that it becomes difficult to distinguish between those figures and texts that might not “fit” into Most's vision. “The model of an American liberal self,” she argues,

Is there, one might ask, a countervoice to Most's idea of Jewish theatricality? If, as Most argues, “American Jewish writers and artists utilized non-racial and anti-essentialist models of identity in order to argue forcefully against the snare of racial self-definition” (68) (as Philip Roth does in The Human Stain (2000)), then who among significant Jewish – or even non-Jewish, for that matter – creators and disturbers speaks on behalf of a problematic, antiliberal racial and ethnic essentialism?

Interestingly, Most's encompassing vision of theatrical liberalism seems aligned with Freedman's largest claim about the achievement of Jewish culture in Klezmer America: Jewish artists have always been, and continue to be, in an aesthetically enabling and mutually creative relation with “other others” – with fellow “ethnic” creators and disturbers and shape-shifters engaged in a “rechurning,” a continuous stirring of the collective multicultural pot. In this respect, Theatrical Liberalism should achieve an important place in the new Jewish cultural studies.