Jewish Studies 259 - JEWS & AMER POPULAR CULTURE

Jews’ contributions to American popular culture over the past two centuries, from Emma Lazarus’s verse on the Statue of Liberty to Jill Soloway’s television series Transparent. Negotiating identity within different popular media, with attention to specific Jewish communal rhythms and to the American social, political, and cultural climate. Traces concerns of Jewish American identity in such forms as graphic art, comedy, music, film, theater, and poetry. Topics include immigrant self-fashioning, inter-generational family dynamics, ambivalence around acculturation, Holocaust memory and Old World nostalgia, and the subversive wit of confessional, postmodern voices.