Book Review

A Right to Sing the Blues does not present the much-needed history that its subtitle implies, but it does offer an instructive analysis of the articulation of black-Jewish relations in American music before 1940. Writing within an American studies genre that has increasingly focused on ethnic boundaries and the rhetoric of identity, Jeffrey Melnick challenges the oversimplifications that have defined the so-called "Black-Jewish relationship."

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In the first three chapters of the book, Melnick discusses the rise of Jews to prominence in the music business between the 1890s and the 1920s, when blackface entertainment still prevailed. Melnick sees the ubiquity of Jews in blackface as a first sign that Jews would play "a major role in the manufacture of the racial stereotypes on which American popular culture depended." Although this seems overstated, Melnick does demonstrate that musical Jews invented a mythology about themselves and their relationship to African Americans. Some, like Irving Berlin, were uncomfortable about their association with black entertainment, while others, like George Gershwin, delighted in cultivating an image of intimacy with black culture. Yet they all propagated the stereotype that Jews possessed a racial gift for interpreting black music and thereby shaping American sensibilities. Melnick's discussion of Gershwin as an icon of Jewish-black symbiosis is particularly interesting.

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