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Jazz Age Jews. |
List Price: $37.95
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Description:
Jazz Age Jews tells the stories of Arnold Rothstein, the gangster accused of fixing the 1919 World Series; Felix Frankfurter, the defending lawyer for the infamous Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial who went on to become a Supreme Court justice; and Al Jolson, who starred, in blackface, in the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. These three minibiographies, elegantly written by historian Michael Alexander, compose one big story about Jews in the 1920s who thought of themselves as outsiders. Most historians explain this situation as an effect of anti-Semitism; Alexander argues that Jewish outsider status was a theological phenomenon. Jews who migrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought with them the belief that "humiliation and alienation were signs of being God's chosen people." Therefore, "In America, when Jews were not being marginalized, they identified with those who were," as demonstrated by the three life stories in Jazz Age Jews. Their stories, as told by Alexander, are "are about making it but thinking you haven't. They are about being there but believing you are held back." They offer succor to all Americans who "despite evidence of their own success, understand themselves best by identifying with those who have least." --Michael Joseph Gross
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