ABSTRACT
Torch songs are usually associated with the 1920s and 1930s. Central to the Jewish relationship with the torch song is the idea of 'uncivility'. This chapter focuses on the relationship between torch songs, race and female Jews. Through the 1940s and 1950s, Jews were integrated into American whiteness. Torch singing, with its possibility for what white Americans could regard as uncivil expressiveness, becomes in the 1960s and 1970s a marker of Jewish ethnicity. With this in mind, the beginning of this shift to a new Jewish visibility can be identified by Barbra Streisand's presentation of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl, the film of which was released in 1968. The white Joplin remained an outsider, not only because of her whiteness but also because her singing was too lacking in black vocal style to appeal to African Americans and too raw and excessive to appeal to the mainstream white audience.
