ABSTRACT
Jews were most active in the fight for social justice for African Americans. At the same time, there were some Jews, men, who expressed their disillusion by turning away from white popular music and towards African-American electric blues. This chapter is about these Jews. Jews had played a key role in the folk revival movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Much of this music derived from recordings of poor Southern whites, though there was a leavening of early blues. In New York, which was the centre of the folk revival, many of the Jews who moved from the folk revival to electric blues did so by way of an increasing interest in acoustic blues. The Rolling Stones and many of the other British Invasion groups, were performing a similar mediatory role to that of the Jewish Blues Project and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Levine excavates the Jewish anxiety in Mailer's depiction of the hipster as a literary critical exercise.
