REVIEWS: 1

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Coming on a wave of scholarship dealing with Jews in American popular culture and the provisional nature of Jewish identity, this study stands out as particularly smart and incisive. Bial takes us from the 'active vanishing' Jews (p. 155) of Gentleman's Agreement, The Goldbergs, and Death of a Salesman to the watershed of Fiddler on the Roof, which first packaged 'selective aspects of Jewish culture for consumption by a general audience' (p. 155), to the first 'sexy' Jews (Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand) and finally to recent plays by Kushner, Mamet, and Wasserstein in which 'the desire to remember the Jewish past' becomes 'a guide to acting Jewish in the present' (p. 136). The chapter on contemporary playwrights feels like oranges set down in a field of apples, given that all the other examples are drawn from popular culture, mass media, or plays (like Death of a Salesman) that have had an extraordinary cultural impact.