Why study Jewish Popular Culture?

I study cultural production mainly of Jews of Eastern European and "mixed raced" (wow, we need a new term, it sounds so archaic) descent because I know either directly or indirectly and paradoxically, it will address Jewish negotiations of being both insiders and outsiders in North America. As much as Jews have felt at home in the U.S. and Canada the last 50 years or so, many of us have felt insecure, as one student told me. To be Jewish is to never know or feel complete acceptance.
This feeling of belonging and not belonging simultaneously, at least unconsciously, may place Jews on the white side and Jews with African heritage on the black side of the racial fence but it does so with various caveats. In postmodern televisual Jewish texts like Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Fried Chicken and Latkas, complex discussions of identity, race, sexuality overlap as they are taken up and speak to the limitations of these categories that flatten them out and empty them of history. They blur simplistic divisions of race, culture, gender and sexuality by challenging dominant notions of masculinity and heterosexuality.
In these texts, Jews, male Jews for the most part (yes, I and others will hope this will change. Lisa Edelstein, pictured above, of House, a staple on many sitcoms in the 1990s, appeared on Seinfeld as George Constanza's girlfriend), are, at times, not likable, insecure, selfish, effeminate, as Gary Shandling states, appear to be "people struggling" (2007). Humanity becomes center stage through productions of inhumanity and anxiety. How to be a man? How to be a Jewish man? How to be a mensch on such a public stage?

For me, it is not about looking for answers, it is about joining their struggle, their ambivalence about growing up Jewish in a world that offers no incentive to be Jewish. When I consume these texts I am forced to confront myself, all Jews are, in such personal ways, which is perhaps why these productions cause so much discussion and mixed reaction. At the very least, I think many would agree, they spark discussions that are integral to Jewish identity, assimilation and continuity. That's why I study Jewish popular culture at this time.