Jewish Humor and Commercial Entertainment in Early 20th-Century Europe and America

The seminar explores the relationship between humor, popular culture and Jewish ethnic identity in early 20th-century Europe and America. It argues that self-deprecating humor and satiric performance of Jewish stereotypes were not expressions of self-hatred, but complex cultural gestures that led to in integration within mainstream society. Topics to be considered are: the joke as a social gesture; the Jewish music hall as an urban institution;the politics of blackface in American Vaudeville; the East-European Jews in Hollywood.