'With the hips from New York': Jewish women, stereotypes, and the twentieth-century American stage.

摘要

The physical appearances, behaviors, ideologies, and experiences of Jewish women have long been fodder for demeaning cultural stereotypes. This dissertation investigates the staged self-constructions of three Jewish American female theatre artists whose theatrical endeavors engaged and challenged such stereotypes. These artists are vaudeville performers Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice, both of whom earned immense popularity during the first three decades of the twentieth century by crafting Jewish stage personas for themselves, and acclaimed playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who created self-referencing Jewish female characters in several late-century, award-winning plays. The diverse self-stagings of Tucker, Brice, and Wasserstein offer a range of alternatives, beyond the polarities of acceptance or rejection, for how Jewish American female identity might be enacted and received. Tucker and Brice both performed variations on a stereotype of Eastern European immigrant Jewish women, transgressing the reductive expectations for this figure, while boldly exploiting her in commercially-successful stage ventures. Beginning in the 1970s, playwright Wasserstein picks up this thread in her scripted constructions of Jewish American female stage characters who similarly reflect and subvert aspects of more recent, but equally degrading cliches about how Jewish American women think and behave. Wasserstein's characterizations highlight contemporary anxieties regarding the interplay among race, religion, ethnicity, and gender, but they also parallel the constructions of Tucker and Brice, in one instance even echoing the complexities of Tucker's early-career blackfaced coon-shouting.;This interdisciplinary study situates its investigations of these theatre artists within the larger questions of how Jewish American identity has been theatrically constructed, performed, and received in the United States. In comparing the performances of two entertainers of the first third of the twentieth century with the writings of a theatre artist of the last third, this study draws on extensive archival research as well as analyses of play scripts, essays, interviews, and reviews. It reads bodily enactments alongside of dramatic literature, analyzing historical findings as well as texts, and imaginatively constructing not only performances but also audience responses.