The history of popular culture in the Habsburg Empire has aroused great interest in recent years. Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner's Unruly Masses: The Other Side of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (2008) opened up avenues for investigating the cultural history of Vienna outside of the realms of bourgeois high culture, and Mary Gluck's The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle (2016) provided new knowledge on urban Jewish popular culture in late-nineteenth-century Budapest. Klaus Hödl's book offers new insight into the entanglement of Jewish and non-Jewish popular culture in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The book seeks to overcome the historiographical neglect of Jews in Viennese popular culture around 1900 and widen the understanding of the Jewish experience in late-nineteenth-century central Europe. The author draws from his expertise in the field of Austrian Jewish studies as he provides rich details on Jewish performers and performance groups living and working in Vienna. He frames his analysis in a new theoretical background, accentuating the performative and contextual nature of Jewish identity and challenging the old dichotomies of Jewish/non-Jewish relations.

The main claim of the book is that Jews played a central role in shaping Viennese popular culture (7). The author supports this argument with empirical analysis of a variety of sources, ranging from popular plays and songs to newspaper material. Hödl focuses on the performative instead of the textual forms of popular culture by paying attention to the ways in which Jewish popular singers and performance groups operated between the Jewish and the non-Jewish spheres of life and participated in shaping the cultural fabric of the city at the turn of the century, an era dominated by antisemitism.

The study is divided into five chapters in addition to the introduction and the conclusion. Chapter 1 frames the research topic by asking the central question: Why have Jewish popular entertainers and their relationship to Viennese popular culture been such a neglected topic in the past? Chapter 2 investigates the most important Jewish performance groups and their impact on the entertainment industry. One of the main strengths of the book is that it introduces many interesting and under-researched historical actors, such as the Jewish Volkssänger Albert Hirsch (1841–1927). The book also sheds light on a rich variety of Jewish popular performance groups, such as the Lemberg Singspiel Society, the S. Fischer Society, and the Budapest Orpheum Society, which mediated between Jewish tradition and modern urban society, combining Jewish expressions and jargon with the contemporary Austrian dialect of the German language.

Chapter 3 focuses on the disputes over the arrival of non-Viennese performance groups onto the city's entertainment scene between 1901 and 1903. The analysis of the debate that escalated into the so-called “Volkssänger war” relies heavily on the way this controversy was reported in limited press sources and especially in the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, yet does not address and problematize the relationship between literary and oral forms of popular culture and their relation to vernacular folk culture. Chapter 4 adds another layer to the main argument by discussing how Jewish artists conceived time and space and how they took part in shaping an imaginary topos of Old Vienna that did not only present a counterpoint to the modern city, often depicted as “Jewish” in the popular discourses, but could also signify a past shared by Jews and non-Jews. Chapter 5 concludes the analysis of the Jewish popular performers’ self-understanding and introduces the concept of similarity as an analytical tool for Jewish/non-Jewish relationships and interaction.

Hödl strongly argues against the assimilation and acculturation narrative that has dominated the studies on late-nineteenth-century Viennese Jews since the 1980s. Building especially on recent scholarship in the German-speaking countries, he seeks to present a more nuanced picture of the Viennese Jewry while augmenting their significant role in shaping urban popular culture. Entangled Entertainers positions itself within the framework of Jewish studies, and its theoretical perspective combines novel theoretical considerations within the discipline, emphasizing the performative and contextually based notion of Jewishness and considering it unrelated to religious Judaism. Yet in the empirical chapters, the author rejects the views that approach Jewishness as a culture in the widest sense and focuses on the self-understanding of individual historical actors and their ways of negotiating Jewish difference, thus neglecting the more general—or invisible—Jewish influences on the cultural fabric of the city. The question of Jewish difference guides the framing of the research focus but also sets certain limitations on the study, as the binary categories of Jewish/non-Jewish make it difficult to discuss the plurality and paradoxical aspects of Jewish identities. For example, in Chapter 4 the discussion of the painter Tina Blau's and the author Felix Salten's nostalgia for Old Vienna neglects the issues of gender and the fact that Blau had converted from Judaism to Protestantism in 1883. Moreover, a closer look into the tradition of self-deprecating humor and other cultural strategies associated with minorities in general and with the Jews of nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe, in particular, would have provided some useful analytical tools for understanding the complexities of cultural entanglement.

This book provides an interesting outlook on the life and work of previously understudied popular singers and entertainers in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Informed by the most recent empirical studies and theoretical considerations within Austrian Jewish studies, it presents a new angle on the antisemitic climate of fin-de-siècle Vienna and a new reading of the ways in which Jewish and non-Jewish worlds overlapped and entangled, producing a rich and flourishing popular culture. It thus widens our understanding of the vast heterogeneity of Jewish influence in Austrian and Viennese history, which hopefully will continue to be a subject for further studies.