Jonathan Freedman - The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity

Jonathan Freedman

The University of Chicago Press CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-58092-0 (cloth)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-58108-8 (paper)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-58111-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226581118.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Freedman, Jonathan, 1954 author.

Title: The Jewish decadence : Jews and the aesthetics of modernity / Jonathan Freedman.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020053635 | ISBN 9780226580920 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226581088 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226581118 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Decadence (Literary movement) | Civilization, ModernJewish influences.

Classification: LCC PN56.D45 F74 2021 | DDC 809/.911dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053635

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my family and all whove cared for me,

with thanks to the friends who helped this book come to life

The book in your hands is a labor of love. For upward of thirty years, Jonathan Freedman has brought news of the vital, resurgent, brilliant presence ofJewish life and thought in literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In four monographs and multiple edited volumes, he has ranged across genres high and lowfrom the novels of Henry James and the films of Alfred Hitchcock to klezmer bands and French cabarets. A keen interpreter and historian of criticism, he has shown how Jewish intellectuals shaped their times and the institutions we still inhabit today, despite the forces arrayed against their presence and their points of view. His uncontainable gift for language brings art, culture, and a vast cast of characters to life on the page. As few critics can, he connects his readers to his ideas and subjects with the appeal of a friend, by turns gossipy, argumentative, erudite, and lyrical.

We are delighted to welcome The Jewish Decadenceinto the world alongside Jonathan Freedmans previous monographs: Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture; The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America; and Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. Returning here to his enduring interest in aestheticism, Freedman identifies and constellates traces in the archives of cultural history to show how Jewish creativity and Jewish experience flowed into and reshaped the mainstream of Anglo-American and French culture at the dawn of the twentieth century. Ranging widely, he tracks the ways Jewish thinkers, writers, performers, and their familiars, from Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt to Marcel Proust and the creators of Betty Boop, found rich materials for self-making in fin-de-sicle European decadence. Freedman renders them with an incomparably humane imagination, interpreting their struggles and glories as defiant responses to an aesthetic movement that saw decay and decline in their very ways of being.

To preface this joyful book is also to acknowledge a loss. Just after the manuscript of The Jewish Decadencewas sent to editors at the University of Chicago Press, Jonathan Freedman suffered a catastrophic stroke. It left him unable to bring the book through the publication process himself, and though we can celebrate its publication with him, he cannot be the full participant in its reception that he would surely have been.