ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the Jewish use of blackface was closely connected with dominant American and, more generally, English-speaking understandings of race and the situation of Jews in the racial order during the second half of the nineteenth century. With the influx of mostly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and mostly Italian immigrants from the Mediterranean countries, the black—white divide was inflected by crucial concerns among the dominant race as to who was racially white. The structural importance of blackface for those preoccupied with defining who could be classified as white decreased. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Jews, and the recently whitened Irish, established and dominated a new form of entertainment known as the torch song. For Jewish and Irish-background singers like Brice, Tucker and Morgan, and Holman, coon shouting in white vaudeville and revue established their whiteness as it acknowledged their marginality.
