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Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and Jewish American Experience (review)

“The American theater,” writes Julius Novick in his introduction to Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish American Drama and the Jewish American Experience, “has not lacked for dramatists who are Jewish, but they are seldom thought of as ‘Jewish dramatists’” (1). Indeed, most of the plays and playwrights covered in this slim but ambitious volume would not seem out of place in a generalized survey of twentieth-century U.S. drama. Yet Beyond the Golden Door is neither an exercise in ethnic reclamation nor an attempt to expose a previously obscured Jewish history of the American stage. Rather, Novick seeks to demonstrate that “Jewish American drama chronicles and analyses the Jewish American version of an all-but-universal experience. We all live in the tension between what we came from and what we have come to; we are all faced with the challenge of making some accommodation between them” (5). For Jewish Americans, this tension is particularly rooted in the traumatic migration from Europe to “the Golden Land” of America. Hence the book’s title, which points to the site of Novick’s inquiry: how does an immigrant culture retain its identity after immigration? Unlike some recent studies, such as Andrea Most’s Making Americans and my own Acting Jewish, Novick’s book does not consider theatre itself as a means of answering this question but chooses instead to focus on how playwrights working across a range of dramatic genres have used the stage to reflect an ongoing struggle for self-definition. The result is a deft survey that shows how Jewish American plays “provide a running commentary on the Jewish encounter with America – and, by extension, America becoming and being itself” (7). Following a brief introduction, Beyond the Golden Door is organized in ten chapters. The first three follow a chronological progression through the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter one, “The Golden Land,” uses two oft-discussed plays, Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908) and Samson Raphaelson’s The Jazz Singer (1925), and one more obscure comedy, Aaron Hoffman’s Welcome Stranger (1920), to introduce the tension between “old world” Jewish identity and the pressures to REVIEWS