“In Jewish-created American popular culture . . . the distance between God and the theater is far shorter than one might assume.” So begins Andrea Most, in her ambitious and captivating study. Indeed, this assertion lies at the heart of her book: American Jews did not, as is widely assumed, engage with popular culture as a means of escaping their religious roots but as a means of expressing them in a new and modern arena. The process whereby Jewish artists negotiated a role for traditional Jewish values and beliefs within an American liberal framework led to the creation of a particular secular Judaism that Most describes as theatrical liberalism. Works that constitute a theatrical liberal worldview celebrate theatricality and the donning of disguises as external acts that can effect internal change; more significantly, they describe a tension between what Most calls the “liberal rhetoric of rights and the Judaic rhetoric...

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