The Jewish Decadence

Jonathan Freedman is the Marvin Felheim Collegiate Professor of English, American Studies, and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture; The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Anti-Semitism, and the Making of Literary Anglo-America; and Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity.

Preface, by Daniel Hack and Amy Hungerford
Introduction: “Our Two-Step Is the Modern Decadence!”
1 Qu’est-ce que c’est la décadence? And What Does It Have to Do with Jews?
2 Oscar Wilde among the Jews
3 Salomania and the Remaking of the Jewish Female Body from Sarah Bernhardt to Betty Boop
4 Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust
5 Pessimism, Jewish Style: Jews Reading Schopenhauer from Freud to Bellow
6 Walter Benjamin’s Paris, Capital of Jewish Aesthetic Modernity
7 Dybbuks, Vampires, and Other Fin-de-Siècle Jewish Phantasms
Conclusion: The Deca-danse; or, The Afterlife of the Jewish Decadent

Notes
Index