Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century

Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century
ISBN-10
0814349641
ISBN-13
9780814349649
Category
Social Science
Pages
332
Language
English
Published
2024-05-21
Publisher
Wayne State University Press
Author
Miriam Eve Mora

Description

For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream. Carrying a Big Schtick dissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life.

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