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I Hear America Kvelling engages three twentieth century performances that deploy Jewish-ness to embrace, encourage and interrogate Democratic Ideals put forward by American Romanticism: self-reliance, speaking a universal truth from the depths of a particular self and realizing emancipation as not only a legal status but a cultural, social, emotional, intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. The Zionist pageant The Romance of a People was produced at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, just six months into Hitler's chancellorship and only a few years after the issuance of a British White Paper that restricted Jewish settlement in Palestine. To overcome these obstacles and secure ties to Christians in the United States, The Romance placed the Jewish Nation in the center of a popular narrative about the West's civilizing taming of the East. I argue that the pageant effectively conflated an American narrative with a Zionist narrative and in so doing signified Zionist ideology as Jewish ideology. Angels in America has gotten a lot of scholarly attention, including attention to its efficacy in dispelling (or reinforcing) anti-semitism. In this study, I try to shift critical focus away from the politics of defamation. I look instead for Angels' dramaturgical deployment of Jewish-ness (history, practice, ritual, philosophy) as a critical tool. I argue that a Jewish sensibility is a key component of its liberated multicultural dream of a radical democracy yet to come. The mass public funeral procession for the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem was an effort to stage first-generation Jews' readiness for American citizenship—a status that I argue depended not only upon civic orderliness, but also on bodily comportment and the performance of collective affect that conformed to Anglo-Protestant standards of legibility. Jewish mourning was demonstrated during the long procession as aesthetically beautiful and morally uplifting, thereby reminding us of the ties that bind representational (theatrical) practices and representational politics. The study proposes that Jewish difference has re-shaped both Jewish and North American self-understanding and that performance events have been efficacious catalysts for the negotiations, rehearsals and proposals that open imaginations, make ideological space for, and bodily engage the dynamics of sociopolitical change.
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