'We know we belong to the land': Jews and the American musical theater

Jewish assimilation into mainstream American culture can be viewed as a theatrical venture. For Jews in America, theater served as both a metaphor for the presentation of self in everyday life and a cultural form in which they participated in highly disproportionate numbers. An almost exclusively Jewish genre, the American musical theater offers a fascinating and heretofore unexamined illustration of the theatrical strategies of Jewish assimilation. The Broadway stage was a space on which Jews envisioned an ideal America and subtly wrote themselves into that scenario as accepted members of the mainstream American community. The Broadway musical created both a new sense of what it meant to be Jewish (or "ethnic") in America and a new understanding of what America itself meant. Through song, dance and shtick, Jewish artists invented a language of symbols, gestures, sounds, costumes and narrative forms that came to be closely identified with the "real" America.;The dissertation traces a set of transformative arcs in American political, cultural and ethnic history that are described in detail in Chapter One. Chapter Two focuses on the end of the immigrant era, using The Jazz Singer (1925), Whoopee (1929) and Girl Crazy (1930) to explore the vaudeville aesthetic of ethnic quick-changes. Chapter Three depicts the rise of the Broadway musical team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. A close examination of their Depression-era musical Babes in Arms (1937) reveals how Jewish composers and writers articulated a secular Jewish liberalism on the Broadway stage. Chapter Four shifts to the partnership of Richard Rodgers with Oscar Hammerstein, describing how their first musical, Oklahoma! (1943), began to integrate song and story in order to delineate the racial and ethnic boundaries of the wartime American community. Chapters Five and Six delve further into the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein, examining the shifting attitudes of these writers to questions of difference and community during the Cold War in South Pacific (1949) and The King and I (1951).