Serious Jews: Cultural intimacy and the politics of Yiddish

This article shows how the concept of cultural intimacy can help scholars better analyze ethnoracial identity politics in the United States. It draws on ethnographic research with Yiddish language activists, or “Yiddishists.” Yiddishists define their engagement with the language through a discourse of “seriousness”—marked by hard work and intensive study. Seriousness, as a kind of affective orientation and cultural aspiration, offers Yiddishists a powerful, if subtle, resource to contest power relations in the American Jewish community. Through everyday discourses and performances of seriousness, Yiddishists set themselves apart from an American Jewish “mainstream,” or “establishment,” while simultaneously critiquing the grounds on which mainstream American Jewish institutions and individuals claim to speak on behalf of the community. Seriousness does this, I contend, by resignifying dominant American Jewish language ideologies about Yiddish as signs of American Jewish cultural intimacy—specifically, communal embarrassment over perceived deficits in knowledge about Jewishness.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the contributions of the Greater Orlando case study and addresses the role of Latinos in challenging the south’s historic black-white racial binary. The chapter argues that the ethnographic fieldwork provides evidence of the social construction of a distinct Hispanic race and addresses the complexity of ethnoracial identity categorizations by examining the racialization of Hispanics and how they self-idenify.

Genre, Ethnoracial Alterity, and the Genesis of jazz manouche

Based on the music of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt, jazz manouche is a popular genre that emerged during the late twentieth century. This article examines the historical development of jazz manouche in relation to ideologies about ethnoracial identity in France. Jazz manouche is strongly associated with French Manouches, the subgroup of Romanies (“Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. In the decades following Reinhardt's death in 1953, some Manouches adopted his music as a community practice. Simultaneously, critics, promoters, and activists extolled the putative ethnoracial character of this music, giving rise to the “jazz manouche” label as a cornerstone of both socially conscious and profit-generating strategies. Drawing on analysis of published criticism, archival research, and interviews, I argue that ethnoracial and generic categories can develop symbiotically, each informing and reflecting ideologies about cultural identity and its sonic expressions. Jazz manouche grew out of essentializing notions about Manouche identity, while Manouches have been racialized through reductive narratives about jazz manouche. In this case, an investigation of genre formation can inform understandings of ethnoracial identity and national belonging.