Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Although throughout this book, the identification of a Jewish "race" is associ ated with an anti-Semitic impulse, Jewish usage of "racial" terminology indi cates a certain ambivalence. See Harriet D. Lyons and Andrew P. Lyons, "A Race or Not a Race: The Question of Jewish Identity in the Year of the First Universal Races Congress;' in Ethnicity, Identity, and History, ed. Joseph B. Maier and Chaim I. Waxman, 499-518 (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983). Even today, many Jews use the term "the Jewish race" with pride. 2. The Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, which began in late eighteenth century, Germany, was a response to the European Enlightenment. Middle-class Jews, anxious to distance themselves from the ghetto and religious prejudice, sought to modernize Jewish communities by exposing them to secular thought. The Maskilim (the proponents of the Haskalah) believed that Jews were persecuted because they differed from dominant communities in terms of culture, language, education, dress and manners. By modernizing their schools, learning the spo ken language of the country in which they lived, and adapting their manners to those of their neighbors, it was hoped that individual Jews would be treated like any other citizens. 3. Steve Allen, Funny People (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), 11. 4. Most of the women listed here are not discussed further in this book, although I would like to suggest that they could be. Also, this study does not confine itself (at least in its earlier chapters) to comic performance. I present this list self consciously and order it alphabetically as an attempt at organization. As Henry Bial notes, a significant characteristic of recent studies in Jewish popular culture is the use oflisting and categorization of characters, artists, and performances as ( often ambiguously) Jewish. See Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), l38-42. As I will discuss below, my choice to "read Jewish" is based on both issues of personal self-identity and (almost certainly not unrelated) the desire to contribute to an analysis of performances that are too often "simply" understood as either "Jewish" or "female." Having worked in this area of study for over a decade and almost exclusively within non-Jewish environments, I realize that many people do not necessarily recognize performers as Jewish. The most common response in the South West of England (where I live) to the 168 NOTES statement that I am writing a book about female Jewish performers is to ask who these women might be. I usually offer a version of this list and do so here for a similar reason. 5. For instance, when feminist theories of "women's humor" began to develop in the mid-1980s, the Jewishness of performers such as, for example, Joan Rivers and later Roseanne, was either left unmentioned or uninterrogated. 6. Bial, Acting Jewish, 141. 7. Qtd. in Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama/Theatre/Performance (London: Routledge, 2004), 223. 8. See, for instance: Bial, Acting Jewish; Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860-1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psycho analysis, Staging Race (London: Routledge, 1997); Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon: essays on theater and gender (London: Routledge, 1997). 9. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 147. 10. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993),234. See also Geraldine Harris, Staging Femininities: Perform ance and Performativity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999),77. 11. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 1. 12. Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities;' The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1997). Although the modern application of the word "diaspora" by Jews dates from the advent of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, Jews have considered themselves a peo ple of diaspora since their exile to Babylon after the destruction of the First Temple in 596 B.C.E. The concept of the "wandering Jew" who reputedly holds no allegiance to his/her "host" country has acted as a further justification for anti-Semitic persecution and intolerance. To be Jewish has been considered, at best, a hyphenated identity, despite strategic and occasionally full assimilation into dominant cultures. 13. Homi K. Bhabha, "Signs Taken for Wonders," in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffen, eds., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 35. 14. See Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 15. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction ofWhite ness (London: Routledge, 1993). 16. Davida Bloom, "White but Not Quite: The Jewish Character and Anti-Semitism Negotiating a Location in the Gray Zone Between Other and Not," Journal of Religion and Theatre 1, no. 1 (2002): 12. 17. Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters, 131. 18. Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (London: Routledge, 1991),3. 19. Ann Pellegrini, "Interarticulations: Gender, Race, and the Jewish Woman Question," in Judaism since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, 49-55 (London: Routledge, 1997),50. 20. Gilman, The Jew's Body,S. NOTES 169 21. Ibid., 63. 22. Ibid., 84. 23. Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 28; emphasis original. 24. For a discussion of the stage representation of fa belle juive in the nineteenth century, see Erdman, Staging the Jew, chap. 2. 25. Jean-Paul Sartre,Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1976),48-49. 26. Gilman, "Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess;' in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, 97-120 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Carol Ockman, "When Is a Jewish Star Just a Star? Interpreting Images of Sarah Bernhardt;' in Nochlin and Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text, 121-39; Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties; Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon. This book owes a large debt to their work. 27. I am using "Jewess" and "La Belle Juive" (which would technically translate as "The Beautiful Jewess") as synonymous terms throughout this book. 28. Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties, 43. 29. Marjorie Garber, Symptoms of Culture (London: Penguin, 1999). 30. Gilman, The Jew's Body, 2. 31. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Picador, 1988),295. 32. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French armed forces, was wrongly condemned for spying for the Germans and was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. By the late 1890s, rabid militarism and anti Semitism were rife in France. Bernhardt was passionately pro-Dreyfusard and by the following year "came out" as a Jew. Following intense pressure from Dreyfusards, the case was tried again, and Dreyfus was found guilty but par doned. It was not until 1906 that the verdict was reversed in a civil court. Dreyfus was restored to his army rank, fought in Word War I, and was awarded the Legion of Honor. In 1914, Bernhardt too was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. 33. Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996). 34. Similarly, I have excluded women who performed almost exclusively in Yiddish theater-even the more powerful and flamboyant ones such as Dinah Feinman (a leading lady who performed many of Bernhardt's roles), Fanny Waxman (an actress-manager), and Miriam Karalova (who moved from performing in her parents' traveling circus to prima donna, travesty, and, later, character comedy roles)-as they were mainly performing to Jews and within a Jewish context. Although some Yiddish plays certainly dealt with dominant cultures' percep tions and projections of Jewishness, they were produced mainly for "internal consumption." 35. I similarly decided I could not include women who converted to Judaism once their careers had been firmly established. I do not, for example, feel that Marilyn 170 NOTES Monroe's conversion in order to marry Arthur Miller justifies an analysis of her career as a Jewish woman. 36. Carol Ockman, "Was She Magnificent?: Sarah Bernhardt's Reach;' in Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, ed. Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, 23-73 (New York: The Jewish Museum; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005),71. Chapter 1 1. Qtd. in Sander L. Gilman, "Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Modern Jewess," in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb, 97-120 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995),111. 2. Qtd. in Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (London: Virago Press, 1992), 106. 3. Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997),97-98,99. 4. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 169. 5. Qtd. in Romy Golan, "From Fin de Siecle to Vichy: The Cultural Hygienics of Camille (Faust) Mauclair;' in Nochlin and Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text, 159. In this chapter, I will discuss the significant slippages between the "lewd Englishman" and "Jewess addicted to morphine;' as embodied by Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt. It is worth noting that although Bernhardt undeniably used opiates occasionally, I have seen no evidence that she was ever "addicted" (unlike her sister Jeanne, who died in 1884). Opiates were readily available and legal at the time, however; many "addicts" were middle-class women who never felt withdrawal symptoms or had problems accessing these drugs, and so the question of addiction rarely arose. The "cunning Belgian" is more difficult for me to locate. It is well-known, however, that the French and Belgians have fre quently expressed their nationalisms through antagonism toward the other.

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