Beyond the Golden Door
Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience
Novick, Julius
Hardcover
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Clifford Odets. Arthur Miller. Paddy Chayefsky. Neil Simon. Jules Feiffer. Wendy Wasserstein. Tony Kushner. These leading American playwrights do not just happen to be Jewish: they are Jewish playwrights. They and other Jewish playwrights have written out of their own experience, for general American audiences, about what it feels like to be twentieth-century American Jews. Beyond the Golden Door is the first book devoted to showing how Jewish playwrights have dramatized the great struggle to balance Old World heritage with New World opportunitya struggle with implications for all American ethnicities.
BOOK REVIEWS
"What a delight to read Julius Novick. He chooses exactly the right plays to focus on, lays out their substance with clarity, and then selects precisely the right quotes from his great predecessors and contemporary scholars in the field to heighten his own astute delvings into this extraordinary wealth of material. Perceptively, he shows you how the plays link to one another to form one of the great chains that make up America's cultural DNA. This is a beautiful and necessary book."--Michael Feingold, chief theater critic, The Village Voice
An impressive display of the rich and varied contributions of Jewish playwrights to the American theatrical repertoire. With judiciously chosen examples, Novick demonstrates how, since the early twentieth century, plays about Jews have been moving and delighting audiences while showcasing the evolving challenges of being Jewish in America. This is a fine accounting of a significant component of American culture, a book to be hailed."--Ellen Schiff, author, From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama; editor, Awake & Singing: Six Great American Jewish Plays
Julius Novick offers a fascinating study of ethnic identity in America. Though this story is about Jews, about their particular and distinctive story, it speaks to a much broader story about the American mosaic. In a century wracked by interethnic savagery around the world, this book gives some real insight into how and why America is different. Written with the same sparkle and wry wit that has graced Novicks theater reviews over the years, Beyond the Golden Door is an entertaining read as well as a serious contribution to modern scholarship.--Eileen Blumenthal, Professor of Theater Arts, Rutgers University; author of Puppetry: A World History
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 1403970092
ISBN(13-digit): 9781403970091
Dewey Decimal: 812/.5098924
Library of Congress: 2007036453
Book Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 189
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