Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity

Abstract

"Jonathan Freedman argues that key terms central to the Jewish experience in America, notions like the "immigrant," the "ethnic," and even the "model minority," have worked and continue to intertwine the Jewish American with the experiences, historics, and imaginative productions of other groups: Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and gays and lesbians, among others. By interrogating the fraught and multidimensional uses to which Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness have been put in shaping the nature and properties of other categories of identity and experience, Freedman offers a richer understanding of racial, ethnic, and sexual categories in America and of the ethnoracial complexities facing the United States in the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.