ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine how four parodists during the Age of Fracture constructed and contested ethnic identity. Alan Sherman relied on parody to perform postwar Jewishness as white to obtain the economic and political benefits accompanying whiteness. 2 Live Jews staked out a divergent position, using parody to distinguish Jewishness from whiteness. Cledus T. Judd constructed a specific vision of whiteness through borrowings that policed this identity’s difference from blackness. El Vez performs Chicano/an identity by hybridizing the cultural icon of Elvis. Despite these musicians’ range of borrowed styles and their differing political ideologies, all portray ethnicity as culturally constructed and rely on musical borrowings as a principal strategy for negotiating their place within a lingering black-white binary in the American racial imagination.
