The Jewish Mark Twain

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-jewish-mark-twain/355735/

” Her book is nothing less than a cultural history of American Jewry as refracted through its most celebrated artifact. Fiddler, which debuted in 1964, is placed within its moment. After a couple of decades of postwar assimilation during which Jews, like Catholics, won gradual mainstream acceptance, ethnic identity was beginning to reassert itself. The melting pot was being reimagined as a salad bowl, and the movement that Fiddler helped launch would eventuate, 13 years later, in Roots. Some potential backers worried that the show would prove to be “too Jewish.” Its Jewishness, in fact, turned out to be the key to its success.

But what exactly did that Jewishness consist of? If Fiddler marked the early days of multiculturalism, it also represented the climax of the process by which the Jews of Eastern Europe were rendered safe for their grandchildren, reduced to a set of reassuring stereotypes—poverty and piety, laughter and tears, candlesticks and chicken soup and “warmth”—that preserved them not so much in amber as in schmaltz. The paintings of Chagall, the photographs of Roman Vishniac (redacted to eliminate signs of prosperity or modernity), books like Life Is With People (1952) and, indeed, The World of Sholem Aleichem (1943): for the new suburbanizing Jews, those Unitarians with yarmulkes, such artifacts performed a complicated kind of psychic work. They gave them a past to adore, but also one that they could proudly leave behind”