Carrying a Big Schtick

Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century

Miriam Eve Mora

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780814349649
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Jewish masculinity as a diverse set of adaptive reactions to masculine hegemony and the political, religious, and social realities of American Jews throughout the twentieth century.

For twentieth-century Jewish immigrants and their children attempting to gain full access to American society, performative masculinity was a tool of acculturation. However, as scholar Miriam Eve Mora demonstrates, this performance is consistently challenged by American mainstream society that holds Jewish men outside of the American ideal of masculinity. Depicted as weak, effeminate, cowardly, gentle, bookish, or conflict-averse, Jewish men have been ascribed these qualities by outside forces, but some have also intentionally subscribed themselves to masculinities at odds with the American mainstream. Carrying a Big Schtick dissects notions of Jewish masculinity and its perception and practice in America in the twentieth century through the lenses of immigration and cultural history. Tracing Jewish masculinity through major themes and events including both World Wars, the Holocaust, American Zionism, Israeli statehood, and the Six-Day War, this work establishes that the struggle of this process can shed light on the changing dynamics in religious, social, and economic American Jewish life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Arrow Aimed at the Mauschel’s Heart: Gendered Antisemitism and the Muscle Jew
• 2. Jews of “Weak Physique”: Masculinity, the Strenuous Life, and Jews in America at the Turn of the Century
• 3. Uptown Jews and the “Downtown Element”: Class Distinction and Jewish Manhood
• 4. We’ll Take Your Rejection and Raise You One Nationalism: American Jews and Zionism
• 5. The Hardiest Canard: Jewish Participation in the Great War
• 6. “Shalom with Honor”: American Men and the Second World War
• 7. The Noble Perished and Ignoble Survivors: The Holocaust and Jewish Manhood
• 8. From Sabra to Citizen: The Yishuv, the Jewish State, and the American Imagination
• 9. “Israel Is We”: Jewish America, Postwar Affluence, and the Six-Day War
• 10. Substituting the Bomb for the Book: Jewish Men, Protest, Revolution, and Upheaval
• Conclusion: The Bear versus the Giant Lobster
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index