scholarly journals A White, Jewish, Rap-Infused Desire for Blackness: David Burd's Lil Dicky

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-88
Author(s):  
Ethan Sabourin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Identity Markers

Known by his moniker Lil' Dicky, David Burd has been making rap music with an exceedingly Jewish twist for several years. This paper examines the Jewish and racial implications, and especially the intersections between the two, in Burd's lyrics and videos. Using James Baldwin's commentary on the Jewish-American condition in "On Being 'White' and Other Lies" as a starting point, I consider how Burd utilizes Jewish identity markers as a stand-in for Blackness in order to give his rap a unique ethnic position. Through three of his songs, I analyze the ways that Burd's relationship with race has evolved, culminating in his 2018 single "Freaky Friday" where Lil' Dicky and Chris Brown 'switch bodies'. In this song Dicky is able to say the N-word by having been placed by Burd into a Black body. Burd's music reflects a piece of contemporary, White, Male, Jewish consciousness and has implications for those who see themselves reflected in it.

Policing Black sound: performing UK Grime and Rap music under routinised surveillance

Soundings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 75 (75) ◽  
pp. 55-65
Author(s):  
Cheraine Donalea Scott
Keyword(s):  
Rap Music ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
Artistic Freedom ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right

The recent sounds of BLM protests can be thought of as reconstituting George Floyd's extinguished voice - amplifying his solitary protest against restraint through creating a ruckus that interrupted the wider silencing of Black voices. UK Grime and Rap music is another way in which these silences are being challenged today, in the face of all the attempts to police it and close it down, and to restrict the artistic freedom of young Black musicians, especially as expressed in Drill music. Policing Black sound is part of the wider policing of the black body - and restrictions on Black music are discussed in relation to the many laws on anti-social behaviour that have been enacted since New Labour's first creation of ASBOs. David Starkey's fear about whites becoming black is linked to a long-held fear on the right about the potentially corrupting effect of Black music on white listeners, and its perceived threat to the status quo - the spread of a 'dub virus'.

Israel for American Eyes: Literature on the Move, and the Mediated Repertoire of American Jewish Identity, 1960–1980

AJS Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Omri Asscher
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Hebrew Literature ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
American Jewish Identity ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Inherent Feature ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

The translation and mediation of literature can play an important role in the ideologically charged transfer of ideas between cultures. This paper approaches the English translation of Hebrew literature as a subtle form of cultural appropriation, whereby agents such as literary critics, scholars, editors, and translators mediated Israeli notions and narratives into Jewish American literary discourse. The article discusses forms of mediation of Hebrew literature in the 1960s and 1970s that promoted a more progressive, yet less secular, notion of Judaism than that depicted in the source works, and subdued an antidiasporic view of Jewish identity. It shows how high moral standards were represented as an inherent feature of Judaism, and Israeli society was portrayed in a more positive moral light than in the sometimes self-critical source texts. American Jewish readership was thus introduced to a notion of Judaism that the agents assumed would be “easier to stomach” than that of the source literary works, and could serve to reinforce some of the tenets of contemporary American Jewish identity.

Revolution and After

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 158 ◽  
pp. 126-154
Author(s):  
Stephanie Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Selection Of

In 1988, the Cuban collective ABTV engaged in its first of several acts of art-historical homage. ABTV (Tanya Angulo, Juan Pablo Ballester, José Ángel Toirac, and Illeana Villazón) photocopied reproductions of Sherrie Levine's After Series, the now canonical work of postmodernism in which Levine rephotographed reproductions of selection of photographs by America's white male modernist masters. This essay takes ABTV's homage as the starting point for an inquiry into the relationship between postmodernism and postcolonialism. How, it asks, has an obsession with “ends” shaped our histories of photography and revolution?

Willy Loman and Postwar Jewish Insecurity

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-76
Author(s):  
Mark Hodin
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
American West ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Land Of Israel ◽  
Death Of A Salesman

Abstract Willy Loman’s cryptic Jewish identity, recognizable but absent, has long been considered an act of ethnic betrayal, evidence of Arthur Miller’s inauthenticity as a Jewish writer. However, as scholars recently have explored the undercurrent of anxiety running beneath the surface of postwar Jewish life, Willy’s feelings of rootlessness, and his worries over American success, seem now particularly “Jewish.” Arguing that Willy Loman represents a postwar Jewish-American identity crisis, not a suppressed Jewish essence, the article analyzes the reception of Death of a Salesman (1949) in the Jewish press, from the pulpit, and within the synagogue community. Throughout, Willy’s preoccupation with acceptance and his eventual self-destruction resonate uncomfortably with the nightmare of European catastrophe that American Jews were then processing. In this context, the article claims that Biff’s attempt to counter his father’s world of selling by laboring in Texas, an action usually interpreted through myths of the American West, may have been read by Jewish Salesman audiences through a discourse of postwar Zionism they knew well: namely, the resettlement of Holocaust refugees in the land of Israel.

scholarly journals Imagining Exodus for Israel-Palestine: Reading the Secular and the Sacred, Diaspora and Homeland, in Edward Said and David Grossman

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hartnell
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Cultural Affiliation ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Natural Target

This paper takes as its starting point Edward Said's distinction between 'religious' and 'secular' modes of cultural affiliation. As these simultaneously diverging and converging modes also trammel the particular grounds of thinking that have been Said's natural target of criticism - Zionism - his work speaks particularly powerfully to the debate surrounding the religious genealogy of Jewish identity. This paper argues that Said's interventions on Zionism highlight as problematic the position whereby the 'Ingathering of the Exiles' is promoted as coexisting with a 'diasporic consciousness' nurtured by Judaism during exile; messianic hopes of religious Jews cannot be reconciled with physical return to the Promised Land; identity circumscribed by ethnicity and place cannot stand in as exemplary for the exiled, unsettled and ultimately homeless identity trumpeted by discourses of the 'post', as many contemporary theorists would have it. And yet through an exploration of the writings of David Grossman, whose construction of Jewish identity is envisaged through the regulating, competing and collaborating tropes of Zionism and Diaspora, I argue that this position is crucial for the elaboration of Israeli identity. I also argue that in fact there is room within Said's thinking both for the anti-essentialist elaboration of 'homeless' identities as well as 'the permission to narrate' an identity politics, and that his own distinction between the 'secular' and the 'religious' begins to disassemble. I explore this blurring of the sacred and the secular through the prism of Exodus - as both concept and narrative. This paper suggests that it is precisely Said's achievement to embody these tensions between religion and its other, divine providence and human agency, historical materialism and postmodernism, alienation and its perennially tempting opposite: home.

Urban Street Faith

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kymberly N. Pinder
Keyword(s):  
Public Art ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
Urban Street ◽  
The One ◽  
Biblical Figures ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines contemporary black public art in Chicago, including Bernard Williams's black biblical figures in the apse of Saint Edmund's Episcopal Church. As a principal artist in the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG), Williams has been the lead restorer for most of murals by William Walker. The Saint Edmund's committee directed the content of Williams's mural at the church in relation to the newly installed stained glass program of important black heroes. Father Richard Tolliver considered murals and stained glass an integral part of his revitalization of Saint Edmund's. Williams also helped restore Frederick D. Jones's mural at the First Church of Deliverance (FCOD) and created a number of local community murals. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Damon Lamar Reed's mural ministry consisting of murals, graffiti, rap music, and T-shirts. Like the conflations of the black Christ with the pastor at Pilgrim Baptist Church and FCOD, Reed's work merges the painted image of Jesus with that of a real black body, the one within the T-shirt.

Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 149-182
Author(s):  
Leslie Dorrough Smith
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
White Male ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
Media Frames ◽  
Sex Scandals ◽  
The Media ◽  
Reagan Era

Chapter 5 shows how the media’s portrayal of sex scandals may appear to hold wayward politicians responsible, but ends up reinforcing a white heterosexual double standard influenced by evangelical thinking. This occurs when white male politicians are portrayed as shameful but relatively benign while the women around them (including their wives) are often equally shamed. The chapter examines the conditions behind today’s sex scandal reporting, including the 1980s televangelist sex scandals and other Reagan-era events that heightened public interest in journalism on sex. It examines multiples media frames used to portray white politicians as silly, their lovers as immoral, and their wives as unattractive and power-hungry or silent and weak. A case study compares the media coverage of Anthony Weiner with that of Arnold Schwarzenegger to show that stereotypes about Weiner’s Jewish identity and his virtual sexting habit rendered him a much weaker figure than Schwarzenegger, whose sex scandals were almost non-events.

Equation of motion for a charged bound particle in a zero-point field

1990 ◽  
Vol 68 (6) ◽  
pp. 508-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Battezzati
Keyword(s):  
Diffusion Equation ◽  
Probability Density ◽  
Equations Of Motion ◽  
Zero Point ◽  
Black Body ◽  
Random Force ◽  
Black Body Radiation ◽  
Stochastic Force ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Point Field

A method previously proposed by the same author, of solving the equations of motion in the presence of friction and an external stochastic force, is applied to the nonrelativistic Dirac equation for a charged bound pointlike particle in a black-body radiation field. It separates the particle velocity field, under the assumtion of stationarity, into a position-dependent component and a randomly fluctuating component depending mainly upon the time. This description of the possible stationary states of the bound particle in the random force field is taken as a starting point for establishing a diffusion equation in configuration space. Since we identify the first component with the drift velocity, we show that it must be the solution to a modified Hamilton–Jacobi equation by using a term that is the counterpart of the quantum modification to the same equation, which has as a first approximation exactly the same form. This term gives results proportional to the diffusion coefficient and, thereby, to the spectral density of the external random force. The diffusion equation that is obtained has complex coefficients and therefore it defines a probability density for the complex values of the variable coordinate. We propose an interpretation of this probability density, based on a specific example.

A Chosen People in a Pluralist Nation: Horace Kallen and the Jewish-American Experience

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Greene
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
American Experience ◽  
American Jewish Identity ◽  
Ethnic Pluralism ◽  
Horace Kallen

AbstractThis article examines the ways that ethnic pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism coexisted in philosopher Horace M. Kallen’s thought from the time that Jewish identity began to play a significant and positive role in his own self-conception, roughly in 1900, until his coining of “cultural pluralism” in 1924. Kallen conceived of pluralism, in large part, to address concerns about American Jewish identity, but its conception created a vexing problem for Jews. If Jews were the “chosen people,” then how could they fit into a model of the nation that emphasized equality, or at least harmony, between many different groups? Kallen would solve the dilemma of pluralism and chosenness by advocating that American Jews maintain their particularity on the basis of cultural distinctiveness rather than of superiority. Interrogating Kallen's thought on this question illuminates how his enduring theory of cultural pluralism owed its origins, in part, to specific Jewish concerns and how it developed in conjunction with a sustained struggle to articulate a meaningful Jewish identity that would prove continuous across generations. Kallen’s solution to the dilemma of pluralism and Jewish exceptionalism also demonstrates one instance of how debates about Jewish particularity profoundly influenced understandings of cultural, racial, and religious difference within American democracy during the early twentieth century.

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