Front cover image for A right to sing the blues : African Americans, Jews, and American popular song

A right to sing the blues : African Americans, Jews, and American popular song

Jeffrey Paul Melnick (Author)
"Black-Jewish relations," Jeffrey Melnick argues, has mostly been a way for American Jews to talk about their ambivalent racial status, a narrative collectively constructed at critical moments, when particular conflicts demand an explanation. Remarkably flexible, this narrative can organize diffuse materials into a coherent story that has a powerful hold on our imagination. Melnick elaborates this idea through an in-depth look at Jewish song-writers, composers, and performers who made "Black" music in the first few decades of this century. He shows how Jews such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, and others were able to portray their "natural" affinity for producing "Black" music as a product of their Jewishness while simultaneously depicting Jewishness as a stable white identity. Moving beyond the narrow focus of advocacy group politics, this book complicates and enriches our understanding of the cultural terrain shared by African Americans and Jews
Print Book, English, 2001
First Harvard University Press paperback edition View all formats and editions
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001
Criticism, interpretation, etc
ix, 277 pages ; 24 cm
9780674005662, 9780674769762, 067400566X, 0674769767
1005081295
Introduction: The languages of Black-Jewish relations
"Yiddle on your fiddle": the culture of Black-Jewish relations
"I used to be color blind": the racialness of Jewish men
"Swanee ripples": from blackface to white Negro
"Lift ev'ry voice": African American music and the nation
"Melancholy blues": making Jews sacred in African American music
Epilogue: The lasting power of Black-Jewish relations