Jews in American Pop Culture

1 Credit · Level: Undergraduate

The plethora of Jews in America’s theater, movie, music, comics, and television industries has attracted a great deal of notice from observers and from Jews themselves. But Jewish involvement in the development of American popular culture is about much more than religious identification or ethnic jokes. In this course, we explore questions of Jewish identity and social change, as well as the influence of politics, gender, race, and sexual identity on the production of culture. From earlier twentieth century entertainers like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Sophie Tucker to later legends such as Stephen Sondheim, Barbra Streisand, Lenny Bruce and Superman, and on to contemporary figures like Sarah Silverman and Jerry Seinfeld, the study of Jews in American popular culture invites us to reflect on what it means to live as a minority in society, as a Jew in a democracy, and as an American in the modern world.