The sound of "New Jews": David Rakoff and Jonathan Goldstein. (2024)

ABSTRACT

This essay reads the "soundwork"--radio and podcastwriting and performance--of two Canadian Jews, David Rakofif andJonathan Goldstein, as exemplary cases of the representational patternsscholars attending to American popular culture since the 1990s haverecently begun to analyze under the rubric of "New Jews."Focusing particularly on work that has been broadcast on the popularradio shows/podcasts This American Life (1995-) and WireTap withJonathan Goldstein (2004-15), this essay surveys the representationalstrategies through which these performers invoke Jewishness andCanadianness over hundreds of hours of scripted and improvised audioperformances. I argue that the remarkable taken-for-granted approach torepresentation in Rakoff's and Goldstein's work is due, atleast in part, to the positioning of Jews and Canadians as potentiallyoverlooked minorities in the late-twentieth- and earlytwenty-first-century United States.

KEYWORDS: podcasting, radio, soundwork, Jewish, Canada

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On May 30, 1997, This American Life--an iconic public radio programthat would go on in the mid-2000s to become one of the most widelyconsumed and influential podcasts in the United States, and eventuallyin the world--aired an episode titled "Who's Canadian?"In it, the show's host, Ira Glass, chats with one of his frequentcontributors, David Rakoff, about an intriguing facet of Canadianbehavior. "I'm told," Glass begins, "that Canadianstend to know who else is Canadian who's famous." Rakoffacknowledges the phenomenon, and then, to illustrate it, goes on to lista number of Canadian celebrities. He notes, further, that he is aware ofthe Canadianness even of celebrities about whom he knows nothing else:"There is a woman named Shania Twain," Rakoff explains."She is Canadian. I know that she's Canadian. I do not knowwho the hell Shania Twain is. I don't know what she does. And yet,For some reason, I know that she's famous in America and thatshe's Canadian." Glass asks him how he comes by hisinformation about Canadian celebrities. "Did your parents talk toyou about it?" Rakoff, who earlier has described this species ofknowledge as "chemical," suggests that "there's achip in my head or something because I simply happen to know that."Later, he invokes stereotypical northern imagery: "I just think itcomes in off the breeze or in a cold front. And I know. I just know inmy heart who's Canadian. It's so strange."

It is a little odd, even if Rakoff's explanations arecomically exaggerated. Yet, despite being an American, Glass is nostranger to this practice of celebrity claiming. "As somebody whogrew up as a Jew in suburban Baltimore," he explains, "thisgame of Who's a Canadian, it was very, very familiar. Every adult Iknew in Baltimore played a very similar game. See now, among myparents' generation, there was the game of Who's a Jew?"Rakoff responds, archly, "Oh, yeah. I'm somewhat familiar withthat game. So can you imagine what the double triumph is ifsomeone's a Canadian Jew?" (1)

Glass and Rakoff do not speculate as to why in particular Canadiansand Jews, and Canadian Jews especially, would enjoy this game. The gameis not unique to these groups, of course, but neither is it ubiquitousamong all minority groups in the United States. (It is comparativelyhard to imagine an African-American feeling it worthwhile or satisfyingto point out to someone, apropos of no particular point in aconversation, that a celebrity like Kanye West, or Neil deGrasse Tyson,or Oprah Winfrey is African-American.) One explanation is that in thelate-twentieth-century United States, notwithstanding that Jewishnessand Canadianness were affiliations that often retained value for theirbearers, unlike blackness they could also be easily shrugged off, orsimply overlooked by a casual observer.

To take Rakoff's example of Twain: her celebrity depended onher successful execution of country and rock music formulas developed inNashville, New York, and Los Angeles, and her hits did not typicallyevoke her upbringing in Timmins, Ontario, with any specificity. Soalthough her Canadian background was mentioned in most reviews of herwork, an American listening to top 40 radio in the 1990s was likely notto have realized that Twain was Canadian--and that possibility is whatmade it worthwhile for Canadians to point out her Canadianness. The sameis true of the other celebrities Rakoff names; he does not nameCanadians whose nationality is itself what makes them famous, like, say,Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. A similar point can be made aboutpointing out the Jewishness of celebrities in the United States: becauseso many Hollywood stars of the twentieth century changed theirrecognizably Jewish names to uninflected American ones, and because tosucceed they mastered the cadences and appearances of Hollywood speech,dress, and behavior, pointing out their Jewishness has often beenunderstood as a way of simultaneously recognizing the possibility andpower of assimilation and asserting one's own identity distinctfrom that of the American majority. (2) What Glass and Rakoff'sconversation, and the phenomenon it reports, indicates, is thatlate-twentieth-century Jews and Anglophone Canadians, living and workingin the United States, were likely to be aware of assimilation as sonatural, as so easily available to them--a kind of defaultposition--that it constituted a threat to their distinctness. CanadianJews living in America, like Rakoff, could be said to experience thisphenomenon doubly.

This helps to explain why Rakoff and another Canadian Jew whosimilarly rose to prominence as a writer and performer on Glass'sThis American Life, Jonathan Goldstein, offer such powerful,paradigmatic examples of what scholars refer to as "New Jews"in analyses of American popular culture since 1990. Like Glass, and manyother American Jewish writers and performers of their generation, Rakoffand Goldstein fit the description offered by Naomi Sokoloff, summarizingNathan Abrams's recent study of the Jewishness increasinglyrepresented in film since the 1990s. Such New Jews "are not afraidto self-identify as Jewish, nor are they afraid to take Jewishness forgranted"; they manifest an "ordinary or quotidian Jewishnessthat needn't explain itself, but nonetheless allows Jewsuninhibited enjoyment of insider jokes and cultural references,"and they reflect "self-acceptance" that tolerates or embraces"satiric or ironic depictions of Jews" and "even Jewishself-hatred ... as an authentic expression of Jewish experience."(3) Rakoff and Goldstein, pardy by virtue of being Canadian Jews,exemplify these qualities even more clearly than many of their AmericanJewish peers, both when they represent themselves as Jewish and whenthey represent themselves as Canadians.

Rakoff and Goldstein belong to more or less the same generation.Rakoff (1964-2012) was born in Montreal and raised in Toronto; Goldstein(1969-) was born in Brooklyn and raised in Montreal. Though somewhatdifferent, their families both identified as secular and as highlyconscious of their Jewishness. Rakoff attended Bialik Hebrew Day Schooland Labor Zionist youth movement activities, and he has described hischildhood home as decorated in "typical late-twentieth-centurysecular-humanist Jewish psychiatrist." (4) Writing in the thirdperson, Goldstein characterizes his family as one that "byanyone's standard ... was Jewish," but "played by theirown rules": not keeping the Sabbath, but observing Yom Kippur; noHebrew, but "a few Yiddish words, half of which were made up";no Torah, but yes The Ten Commandments; not kosher but"kosher-style." Another detail suggestive of the family'sintense but unorthodox Jewishness, as Goldstein experienced it, is thefollowing recollection about his name: "When I was born, my mothergave me the Jewish name Khone, but the thing is, Khone isn't reallya Jewish name at all. It's just crazy-talk, something my mothermade up." (5) (Actually, Khone is by no means unheard of as aYiddish name; it is not clear whether or not Goldstein knows this.)

Rakoff first moved to New York as a teenager to matriculate atColumbia, while Goldstein stayed in Montreal and received degrees fromMcGill and Concordia. In the decade or so after earning theirundergraduate degrees, both wrote while supporting themselves with jobsthey found unpleasant--Goldstein in telemarketing in Montreal; Rakoff,only slightly more glamorous, low down in the hierarchy of New Yorkpublishing--before their association with Ira Glass's This AmericanLife allowed them to become full-time writers. Rakoff connected with theshow through his friend, David Sedaris, while Goldstein came toGlass's attention because of spoken word radio pieces he hadperformed for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Montreal.Rakoff went on to a modest acting career and greater success as awriter; he published many essays--collected in three volumes, Fraud(2001), Don't Get Too Comfortable (2005), and Half Empty (2010),for which he received the 2011 Thurber Prize in American Humor--as wellas a novel-in-verse, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish, thatappeared after his death in 2012. Goldstein, meanwhile, has published anovel, Lenny Bruce Ls Dead (2001), a book of reimagined Bible stories,Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! (2009), and a collection of essays,I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (2012).

These handfuls of books notwithstanding, Rakoff's andGoldstein's most significant work has been done in audio productionand performance, and specifically in their pieces for This American Lifeand for WireTap with Jonathan Goldstein, a weekly half-hour radio seriesthat ran on the CBC from 2004 to 2015. A standard episode of ThisAmerican Life might include three or four thematically linked acts, inwhich any single act might present a personal essay (the form in whichRakoff most typically contributed), a short story, a radio drama, aninterview, some found or archival audio, or a conventionally reportedradio feature, along with Glass's introductions and framingcommentary. If This American Life, despite its occasional laboriousdemonstration of its "factual, journalistic credentials," canbe said to exhibit a "blurring of fact and fictional modes" ofstorytelling, Goldstein's WireTap deliberately exploited thegeneric confusion possible in an audio format to disavow any clarityabout the factuality of the material it presented. (6) It offered asimilar mix of content to This American Life but, crucially, alsodevoted a significant portion of its time to sketch comedy, usuallypresented in the form of recorded telephone calls between Goldstein andother people (hence the show's name). Importantly, the show offeredvery little in the way of framing that indicated the factuality or genreof any single segment in a given episode. Segments in an episode ofWireTap are not introduced and labeled generically, as they would be onThis American Life, but, whether they are factual interviews withauthors or cultural figures or sketch comedy pieces involving fictionalcharacters (sometimes posing as authors), they simply begin with thesound of a ringing phone or with a person's voice speaking. When aperformer on WireTap appears not as him- or herself but as a character(as Rakoff frequently does), the only indication the show offers of thecharacter's fictional status is in the brief final credits("On WireTap today, you heard ..."), where the name given willbe that of the performer rather than the fictional character.

The sheer variety of Rakoff's and Goldstein's radiopieces is difficult to convey. To This American Life they individuallycontributed mostly personal essays and reported features, on a dizzyingarray of subjects, though when performing together they mostly presentedsketch comedy. One of their most well-received WireTap segmentstogether, later replayed on This American Life, is a reading of acorrespondence between Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of FranzKafka's Metamorphosis, and Dr. Seuss, the pseudonym of TheodoreGeisel, in which the latter's letters are written in rhyme. Anotherpiece, likewise produced for WireTap and then replayed on This AmericanLife, had the two friends performing as Fred Flintstone and BarneyRubble, leaving each other increasingly irate voice mails. (7) Overeleven seasons, WireTap presented about three hundred half-hourepisodes, totaling somewhere upwards of 140 hours of original audiomaterial, and Rakoff and Goldstein, between the two of them, recorded onthe order of twenty hours of audio material for This American Life. Thisvast corpus is easy to access--all of This American Life and most ofWireTap can now be streamed, free, online--and extremely popular.According to the show's producers, This American Life currentlyattracts over 3 million listeners a week between its broadcast andpodcast forms; reliable statistics on WireTap's listenership arenot available, but the show often appeared on the charts of top podcastsin Canada, and it has garnered mention regularly in articles on therenaissance of radio production in the podcasting age. (8) Despite theirpopularity, complexity, and availability, though, these audio programshave attracted surprisingly little attention from scholars ofliterature, performance, or popular culture. As one historian of radiorecently noted, "The new soundwork industry"--of which theseshows and performers can be taken as exemplary--has been "oftenleft to the side" and "barely acknowledged," even withinthe field of media studies. (9)

In and of themselves, the techniques through which Rakoff andGoldstein identify themselves as Jews in their audio performancesresemble those deployed for the same purpose throughout North Americanliterary and popular culture of the previous century. These include bothdirect and indirect statements of Jewish identity; the insertion ofHebrew and Yiddish loan words and syntactical features into otherwisestandard American speech; the invocation of cultural and ritualsignifiers; and the construction of a shlemiel or nebbish character asspeaker and protagonist. Unlike many of the most recognizable literaryand popular cultural works in which Jewishness has been presented usingthese techniques to Americans in the twentieth century, however, inRakoffs and Goldsteins performances Jewishness rarely plays a centralrole, nor is it likely to be a specific or meaningful factor in theconflict driving an essay or story. In other words, in contrast to suchworks as Abraham Cahan's Yekl, Abies Irish Rose, The Jazz Singer,Jo Sinclair's Wasteland, Philip Roth's Portnoys Complaint, orAnnie Hall, almost never do Rakoff and Goldstein's stories presentJewishness as one term in a dichotomy, the yang to Americas ormodernity's yin. In response to one of his own producers, whor*marked in a 2013 interview that he "seem[s] to distance [himself]from Jewish tradition and identity while at the same time embracing itin some ways," Goldstein remarked, "I don't know that Idistance myself from it. I think it informs everything I do. I think Idon't worry about it very much. I just figure that it's inthere, so it doesn't preoccupy me." (10) This remark aptlycaptures the way Jewishness functions in Goldsteins work, and inRakoffs, too: theirs is a ubiquitous, acknowledged Jewishness that israrely a subject of concern or sustained interest. Indeed, journalistswriting about Goldstein's WireTap almost never mention thatGoldstein is Jewish or consider that his show has any particularinterest in Jewishness. (11)

Rakoff's and Goldstein's representational choices reflectthis Jewishness-taken-for-granted, recognized but far from the center ofattention or focus. When they identify themselves as Jewish, forexample, the writers often, even typically, use oblique phrases thatstop short of claiming an identity in the simplest or most recognizableway. For example, in his second appearance on This American Life (onDecember 20, 1996), Rakoff tells the story of his performance as SigmundFreud in the Christmas window of Barney's Department store oneDecember, and he has occasion to laugh at putative passersby who thinkhe might not be an actual person: "Where on Earth," he jokes,"would they make mannequins that look so Jewish?" (12) Rakoffnotes that he "look[s] so Jewish" not directly, but refractedthrough the perspective of hypothetical observers who, his remarkassumes, would be able to perceive his features as marking himethnically (whether or not any actual observers did so). Rakoff does notspecify which physical or physiognomic features mark him visually as aJew, but the statement also assumes that the listener of This AmericanLife, hearing Rakoff say this, will feel that he or she would haveknown, seeing Rakoff in that window, that he is not a mannequin but aJew.

In other This American Life stories, Rakoff jokes that he has"Hebraic immunity" when a Christian tries to missionize him insmall-town New Hampshire, (13) and includes himself in a description ofa group of people as "knock-kneed Hebrews." (14) In theseexamples, Rakoff identifies himself as Jewish with just a touch of ironyor indirection: by the 1990s, American Jews had not been commonlyreferred to as "Hebrews" for many decades. (15) Rakoff couldhave just as easily, and much more conventionally, claimed "Jewishimmunity" from the missionary appeal, or called himself a"knock-kneed Jew." Choosing the less conventional descriptorreflects a bid for interestingness, and a choice based on his assumptionthat his listeners will know that he knows that "Hebrew" is anold-fashioned way of saying "Jew"--and that they will alsoknow, as well as he does, that he does not really mean anything when hesays Hebrew: he is not, that is, using the word "Hebrew" so asto associate himself with the Biblical Israelites or with Hebrewspeakers in Israel. He is simply avoiding the most obvious, most direct,term.

Goldstein similarly acknowledges his Jewishness obliquely. In aThis American Life story about his relationship with hisgirlfriend's daughter, Goldstein says, "In what I considered abit of cultural exchange, I had her sit on the couch and listen to thesoundtrack from Fiddler on the Roof." (16) In the piece, Goldsteinhas specified neither his own background nor the girl's, but theline operates on the assumption the listener understands, first, thatGoldstein is Jewish and the girl is not, and, second, that Fiddler onthe Roofs perhaps the most widely recognized representation of Jews inAmerican popular culture. With a few exceptions, the presentation ofGoldstein's Jewishness on This American Life assumes, to put itanother way, that everyone listening will already presume that he isJewish--presumably on the basis of his name, if nothing else. (17)Another telling example of this occurs when, during a break midwaythrough an episode, Glass says, "Coming up, so two pigs, a parrot,a Jew, a Canadian, and David Sedaris walk into the second half of theshow"--taking for granted that listeners will figure out thatGoldstein is both the Jew and the Canadian, though Goldstein himselfdoes not invoke or signal his Jewishness or Canadianness, directly orindirectly, in the story that follows. (18)

On WireTap, Goldstein frequently includes markers of his and hisguests' Jewishness, but most often these are subtle inclusions ofJewish linguistic material that might go unnoticed by many of hislisteners, Jewish or not. As in contemporaneous films analyzed by NathanAbrams, Goldstein's radio show includes "suggestive andun-translated phrases (as well as rhythms, cadences, and even made-upwords) in Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish, and other languages familiar toJews, with no concern as to whether audiences understand them ornot." (19) Specifically, Goldstein and his guests use, withoutexplanation or translation, words such as "shlepping,""shtik," "shmegegee," "tukhis,""mishigas," "chutzpah," "shmuk,""nebhish," and "oy vey," drawn from Yiddish. (20)These are Yinglish words that appeared in Leo Rosten's The Joys ofYiddish in 1968 because they were beginning to be more commonlyencountered in American English, (21) but it is also not unheard of forGoldstein to include a complete Yiddish phrase in an appropriatecontext. In the episode "The Lothario," for example, he quotesan elderly gentleman in a Florida retirement community as saying thatwhen he sees a particular woman, he gets a "tsiet in hartsn."Such use of Yiddish remains postvernacular, and Goldstein repeats theman's translation ("You know what that means? It means I get atug at the heart"), but, as usual, he does not indicate that thephrase comes from Yiddish rather than any other language. (22)

Goldstein also brings grammatical constructions perhapsinconspicuously drawn from Yiddish into his English. For example,Goldstein or his interlocutors will occasionally use the phrase "byyou" instead of "for you" or "to you." (23) Allof the above are typical features of what the sociolinguist Sarah BuninBenor calls the "American Jewish linguistic repertoire,"linguistic features commonly used by and characteristic of American andother Anglophone Jews, and which can be used to identify oneself, orsomeone else, as a Jew on the basis of linguistic choices. (24) Benorhas pointed to popular culture examples to demonstrate how "youngAmerican Jews are using Yiddish-influenced English to indicate facets oftheir ethnic and religious selves." (25) But she also insists thatthe American Jewish linguistic repertoire may be used eitherdeliberately or unintentionally. Some speakers deploy such linguisticmaterial to differentiate themselves deliberately, while others remainunaware that their grammatical and lexical choices align them with aspecific linguistic community. Some listeners will perceive theselinguistic choices as characteristic of a specific community, whileothers might not.

Less likely to be missed are Goldstein's invocations ofculinary, ritual, or cultural signifiers associated with Jews andJudaism. Still, these too are presented in such a way as to indicatethat Goldstein assumes that his listeners will either already know whatthey are and why he is invoking them, or they will not know and do notneed to. Discussing deaths and funerals, Goldstein and his guestsregularly allude to rabbis' involvement. (26) On one occasion,confused by the meaning of one of Aesop's fables, he calls a rabbifor advice. In the majority of these cases, the show invokes or involvesa rabbi without explaining why it is doing so--and in the case of therabbi called for advice about a fable, no Jewish sources are mentionedin his response. (27) Goldstein expects his audience to grasp therelevance of a Jewish rather than a Christian perspective. Otherallusions of this sort include regular mentions of bar mitzvahs, andrarer mentions of such aspects of Jewish culture as the "hora"a "shiva house," the Kaddish, kosher meals, Hanukka miracles,or Hanukka in general, as well as references to cultural signifiersincluding Barbra Streisand's film Yentl and authors like MichaelChabon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sander Gilman, and Philip Roth. (28)Fiddler on the Roof is alluded to on multiple occasions. (29) Again,these references tend not to be explained or dwelled upon. In theepisode "Broken Telephone," Goldstein tries, unsuccessfully,to meet up with a friend for a screening of Streisand's Yentl.Which film the friends want to see does not matter in the episode (whichfocuses mainly on the frustrations caused by Goldstein's not havinga call-waiting feature on his phone). The selection of Yentl functionssimply as an allusion that will be meaningful to those listenersfamiliar with Streisand's film and its place inlate-twentieth-century North American Jewish life. (30) What does theallusion communicate to those informed listeners? Not much more thanthat Goldstein is the kind of Jew who takes pleasure in popularHollywood movies about Jews.

The least concrete, most slippery, but perhaps also most ubiquitousway in which Goldstein's and Rakoff's work resonates withearlier and contemporary representations of Jews in North Americanliterature and popular culture is in their construction of themselves asshlemiel or nebbish protagonists. This is especially slippery because,though such types originated in Jewish culture, they had, by the 1990s,so deeply penetrated American culture as to lose any Jewish specificity;David Sedaris, for example, is often called a nebbish in the press bywriters who know he is not Jewish. (31) Yet Rakoff'sfish-out-of-water travel pieces--whether he is climbing a mountain inNew Hampshire or attending a survivalist camp--position him as arecognizable type: the citified, effete Jew who lacks supposedly manlyskills. (32) Likewise, Goldstein's sketch comedy pieces on WireTapoften present him as a stammering pushover more likely to respond toprovocation with a smart remark than with force--a type familiar fromthe protagonists of Woody Allens oeuvre and many other sources. (33)Non-Jews create similar characters for themselves all the time, butattending to the fictional, radio host Jonathan Goldstein character as abumbling nebbish offers one more way to understand Goldstein'sremark about how Jewishness "informs everything [he does],"but "doesn't preoccupy [him]."

It could be argued that most of the invocations of Jewishnessmentioned above are so widely recognizable that they do not require anyexplanation, elaboration, or context. If those words already appeared inRosten's The Joys of Yiddish of 1968, why would one bother to glossthem in the 2000s? Still, an examination of a few less typical earlyepisodes of WireTap in which Jewishness figures more prominently--notjust as an offhand reference or two, or in the general sense of ashlemiel or nebbish protagonist, but as a significant element of apiece's plot or argument--suggests that it is implausible thatGoldstein chooses not to translate or to contextualize Jewish referencesin his work because he expects all his listeners to be knowledgeableabout Jews. Rather, he seems to be refusing to fall into the patterndiagnosed by Ruth Wisse, a few years before the debut of WireTap, inTova Mirvis's debut novel The Ladies Auxiliary. "[Mirvis]feels obliged," Wisse wrote, "to explain one Jewish ritual perchapter to educate a potential readership of Jews who may know as littleas gentiles about their religion." (34) Goldstein surely does notperform for a more knowledgeable audience of Jews or non-Jews--broadcastnationally by the CBC, his show almost certainly reaches many listenerswith virtually no exposure to Jews or to Jewish culture--but, unlikeMirvis and others, he does not feel it is his responsibility to makerituals or other aspects of contemporary Jewish life and culturecomprehensible to his audience.

The second WireTap episode ever aired, titled "PositiveThinking," is summarized by the CBC as follows: "In an effortto transcend what some may describe as a melancholy disposition,Jonathan Goldstein consults a creative visualization instructor, andself-help albums from the 1950s." In the episode, Goldsteinspeculates as to the origins of his personal negativity, and he notesthat he grew up under the influence of an "old country"perspective in which one worries about the "evil eye." He thencalls up his mother to ask her about her own inability to enjoy goodnews or dwell on positive thoughts. She tells him, and the CBC audience,about her compulsion to utter the phrases "kenehore" and"borukh hashem" whenever someone tells her good or hopefulnews. Goldstein also prompts his parents to recall placing a red ribbonin his pocket before his bar mitzvah to ward off the evil eye. (35)Goldstein can be understood as suggesting, in this episode, that asignificant facet of his radio persona--his pessimism--derives from hisroots in Eastern European Jewish culture: "kenehore" is, ofcourse, a Yiddish formula to ward off the evil eye (literallytranslating as "no evil eye"); "borukh hashem" is aHebrew phrase meaning literally "bless God," used in the senseof "thank God"; the use of scraps of red cloth as an antidoteto the evil eye is an Ashkenazi folk tradition. (36) Here is a clearexample, then, of how, for Goldstein, Jewishness "informseverything": his mother's Eastern European Jewish customs haveinfluenced his own personality in a profound way. Yet, if taken as anintroduction to an aspect of Ashkenazi folk customs for a broad NorthAmerican radio audience, the episode is remarkable for what it omits. Noone says that the family is Jewish or utters the word "Jew,"and while his mother offers vague translations of the phrases, no onementions what languages or religious traditions they come from. Surelythat is not because everyone in Goldstein's listeningaudience--including every Canadian who turns on the CBC and happens tocatch the show--already knows all about these phrases.

A similarly structured WireTap episode tided "How I Became SoHostile" begins with a friend of Goldstein telling the radio hostthat he has "a deep-seated hostility toward people, and I'mnot sure why you have it." The friend goes on to ask, "Forinstance, at Passover, when they're asking the Four Questions, whyare you standing in the corner with your parka on?" This remark, ina longer conversation about Goldstein's hostility, seems like thekind of passing, unmotivated reference to Jewish ritual that is typicalof the show, as discussed above. Goldstein then calls a former employee,followed by one of his elementary school teachers, to ask them what theycan tell him about the origins of his hostility. The third call he makesis to Ronald Goldman. Goldstein introduces Goldman as the author of abook titled Questioning Circumcision, but following a general pattern,he does not cite the book's subtitle, A Jewish Perspective, eitherduring the episode or during the credits when the book's title isrepeated. (37) Goldstein calls his parents in the final segment of theshow and only then refers to a "bris," using the Yiddish termfor the Jewish religious ritual of circumcision. He translates this as"circumcision" to make sure that no one in the audience isconfused, but he does not say that a "bris" is a Yiddish wordor that it refers to a Jewish ceremony. Later, when his father refers tothe "mohelj Goldstein interrupts to translate that term,too--"you're talking about the guy who did thecircumcision," he says--again, not explaining that this is aYiddish term and that moheis are Jewish functionaries. The response tothe question posed early in the episode is that nothing particularlyhappened at his bris to inspire or instill Goldsteins hostility; on thecontrary, he urinated on the mohei, proving that, in his father'swords, "even then you were a contrary little S.O.BAs in"Positive Thinking," this WireTap episode may be seen asproviding a kind of introduction to the Jewish ritual of circumcision ina specific time and place: Goldstein's mother describes thecatering and the setting, and their conversations convey some of theambivalence that some Jews of Goldstein's and his parents'generations might feel about the practice. Yet, it is very unlikely tofunction that way, as it never explicitly tells a listener unfamiliarwith "bris" and "mohet' that these are Jewish terms.(38)

These episodes exemplify a kind of ambivalence in relation toJewishness. Goldstein posits Jewishness as fundamental to his characterand persona, as the original source of his personality, and yet he mosdyrefrains from invoking or citing it clearly. It is also worth examininganother episode that deals much more directly and more substantivelywith Goldsteins experience of being Jewish as a young man, tided"Messiah '83." Here, Goldstein recalls that when he was ateenager he fell under the influence of a charismatic Chabad emissary,who had been sent by the Lubavitcher rebbe "to the suburbs ofMontreal to recruit lapsed Jews." Goldstein explains that his ownfamily was not religious, that his father, in particular, was skepticalof rabbinical authority and especially disdainful of synagogue. "Hecomplained about the hard wooden pews," Goldstein recalls,"the incomprehensibility of the Hebrew language, and the way thatsynagogue, rather than inspiring him, made him feel like he was beingsuffocated in a claustrophobic closet that reeked of old-mansmell." Yet the young Goldstein found himself attending partiesthrown by the Chabad rabbi for holidays like Purim, and discussing withhim such elements of traditional Jewish religion and folklore as golems,dybbuks, and the coming of the messiah. All of this is discussed withmuch explicit and direct discussion of Goldstein and his family'sresponses, as Jews, to the rabbi's exhortations, and the episodeclimaxes with an awkward scene in which Goldstein's father, drunk,gets out of hand at a Sukkot party. Much of the material in the episodereappears in other places in Goldstein's oeuvre--the interactionswith the charismatic rabbi and the obsession with messianism are tropesin his novel Lenny Bruce Is Dead (2001); the radio piece, with veryminor edits, was republished as prose in Guilt & Pleasure in 2006 as"Messiah in a Bottle"; and at least a dozen sentences from theepisode appear with extremely minor changes in the preface toGoldstein's collection of rewritten Bible stories, Ladies andGentlemen, The Bible! (2009)--all of which suggests that when Goldsteinthinks most intently about what it means to be Jewish, he thinks aboutthese specific experiences. (39) The detail that is perhaps most tellingabout the original episode, however, is that when Goldstein describesthe holiday of Sukkot--one of the rare times Goldstein seems to presentthe kind of public service message that Wisse laments in Mirvis--hemakes the mistake of referring to the booth that Jews traditionallybuild for the holiday as "a Sukkot? not realizing that"Sukkot" is plural and that the singular is"Sukkah." (40) The mistake itself is not significant, but whatit suggests, more than anything else, is that prior to broadcasting thepiece, Goldstein did not run the episode by a rabbi or a friend moreknowledgeable about traditional and religious Jewish culture thanhimself. Especially because the fact-checking standards at This AmericanLife, where Goldstein trained as a producer, would require such detailsto be verified carefully, this suggests that Goldsteins attitude towardthis material is that it is, quite simply, the stuff of his life. Hismemory is all the verification he needs. His is a Jewishness comfortablewith itself, unself-conscious, and disinterested in the imposition ofoutside authority.

Rakoff, for his part, also deals more directly than usual withJewishness in a couple of his essays. There too what one encounters isan experience of Jewishness not overly concerned with any kind ofreligious or identitarian strictures and downright disinterested in theidea that someone might not feel that the sort of thing he does isJewish enough. The essay he titled "Arise, Ye Wretched of theEarth" when it appeared in print, previously broadcast on ThisAmerican Life, describes his brief stint on an Israeli kibbutz, at theage of fifteen. He ended up there because of the Labor Zionistactivities he participated in as a child in Toronto, where he learnedsome Hebrew and Yiddish. Yet, in his account of the experience, being ona kibbutz did not deepen his connection to Israel. On the contrary,after deciding that he was not comfortable handling live chickens andswitching to another job, one of the kibbutznik calls him"gveret" (lady), impugning his masculinity because he"doesn't like the chickens." Rakoff describes this,somewhat improbably, as the impetus for a significant personal epiphany:

 At that very moment I saw that I would never live on a kibbutz. I would not lose my virginity that summer to any of the girls from the group. Indeed, I would not care to do so. I am grateful to that macho blowhard. He made me consciously realize what I had always known but been somehow unable to say to myself: He's right, I don't like chickens ... I like men. (41)

Instead of cementing his identity as a Jew or Zionist, the kibbutzexperience by accident confirms Rakoff in his recognition of his ownhom*osexuality. Despite the intention of this passage, the realizationthat he would never live on a kibbutz has little to do withRakoff's sexuality--he could have, and certainly must have,encountered macho jerks elsewhere--but the piece seems typical of Rakoffin that, as a good-natured contrarian, he never wants to react in theexpected way to an experience.

This contrarianism is explicitly and charmingly articulated inanother essay in which Rakoff deals at length with his Jewishness.Originally published in Gourmet magazine and tided "DarkMeat," it is a series of meditations about eating pork as a Jew,predicated on "a larger universal truth ... that between Jews andpork there is no greater love." (42) He surveys various relevanthistorical tidbits--the Pittsburgh Platform, anarchist Yom KippurBalls--but his key point is a personal one: "I almost never feelmore Jewish than in that moment just before I am about to eat pork"(89). It is not only that before eating pork he experiences a"split second of silent acknowledgment ... that this is meatineluctably bound up with my grim history" (89). Eating pork alsosatisfies him because it constitutes a rejection of traditional Jewishpractice that does not, however, threaten his identification as a Jew.As he explains:

 We are all Jews. We are the true Big Tent. It is this that I taste [when eating pork]: the fact that I do not have to be "on the bus." I can, in fact, stand by the side of the road with a sign that says DOWN WITH BUSES!--or, more authentically phrased: BUSES? FEH!--and still be able to claim full and proud membership. Which I do, emphatically. (90)

Nothing in Rakoff's oeuvre casts any doubt on his "fulland proud" embrace of Jewishness, but it is an important aspect ofthat embrace that it is most available in a moment that Rakoffexperiences as a breach. There are plenty of Jews for whom the eating ofpork is not fraught in the way it is for him--but, for him, it isprecisely because of his deep sense that Jews should not eat pork thathe enjoys it.

When Rakoff describes himself as "the Jewish hom*osexualwriter: the ultimate degenerate," or explains that the only actingroles he is offered are as "Jewy McHebrew or Fudgy McPacker,"it is not at all the case that he has internalized anti-Semitism andhom*ophobia, as it may seem, but precisely by contemplating these mostunsympathetic perspectives he affirms his identity. (43) At least partof the explanation for why he is able to do so is that he did not feelhimself subject to any kind of limit, in his professional career,because of his gayness or Jewishness. As he told an interviewer,

 It has been my boundless privilege as a writer to not be fettered by these strictures. I am gay, I am Jewish, and I am a writer. I've appeared at readings or universities, occasionally under the auspices of one of those identities, but never for a moment have I been told, either explicitly or implicitly, that either of them limits my readership or the subjects I can write about. (44)

For Rakoff, as for Goldstein, Jewishness can both inform everythingand not preoccupy him, because it has not been, in his social andprofessional experiences, an imposition or problem. It has always beenvolitional, something he can affirm when he chooses, and ignore whenthat is more convenient.

Neither Rakoff nor Goldstein would downplay their Canadianness,even if Goldstein was always a dual Canadian-American citizen and Rakoffnaturalized as an American in his thirties. Both treat being Canadian,like being Jewish, rather lightly, aware that--even on the CBC!--it willonly be as present in their lives and work as they want it to be. In thecatalog of Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America (2012),Rakoff notes more than once just how easy Canadianness can go unnoticed:he not only gestures, in general, to how Canadians who move to theUnited States "pass immediately--aside from a few rounded vowelshere and there--and slip undetected into the normative culture,"but he also tells the story of when he was studying abroad in London,after a year or two at Columbia, having a professor hear his"trans-Atlantic accent" and assume, annoyingly, that "wehave an American in our midst." (45) As Rakoff explains, in a storyfor This American Life about a group of Austrians who have come to NewYork, "As a Canadian, I also understand ... what it's like tocome from a small country, seemingly culturally indistinguishable fromits dominating adjacent neighbor." (46) To be perceived as aCanadian, at least in America since the late twentieth century, Rakoffsuggests, one has to insist on the distinction.

Indeed, Goldstein remarks, in a WireTap episode titled"Canadian Content," that what makes him more Canadian thanAmerican, despite his dual citizenship, is precisely that he is"always trying to see the difference between us and them. It'sone of the ways that we, as Canadians, define ourselves. By saying'We are not American. We are different.' And piling up thesedifferences, in spite of our many similarities, becomes a matter ofnational pride." And yet when Goldstein's WireTap emphasizesCanadian distinction, typically the differences it seizes upon arecomically, laughably, ridiculously minor ones. In the episode "TheMeasure of a Man," for example, Goldstein and his American friendGregor Erhlich discuss the differences between their countries."Let me tell you something about Canada as an American, okay?"Gregor begins, but he does not have much insight. Instead, he complainsabout the metric system: "When you go to the store, you have to buyin grams--it's maddening," he says. He impugns metric measureswith increasingly implausible arguments, suggesting that Canadianscannot understand phrases that use imperial measures ("the wholenine yards," "give an inch, take a mile"). Goldsteinobjects that Gregor is talking nonsense and, of course, he is. The ideathat a system of measurement would be significant in creating asubstantive cultural distinction--maybe even the idea that there is asubstantive cultural distinction between the United States and Canada atall--is the joke here.

For Goldstein and Rakoff, overemphasizing one's Canadianness,making too much of it, would be laughable. In the WireTap episode"Of Space, Time, and Money," Rakoff appears in the role of acharacter named Douglas Glance, who presents himself "as a Canadianartist living abroad, sort of an artistic ambassador to the world, forCanada." He calls Goldstein to pitch a show idea: a series ofportraits of Canadian artists like himself, treating the issue of"what is it, specifically, about the Canadian way of looking at theworld." As Rakoff-as-Glance tells Goldstein more about his artisticlife in New York, he turns out to be an increasingly ridiculous figure,sleeping on the sofa of a couple of other Canadian ex-pats in Brooklyn,without any artistic achievements to speak of. The piece can beunderstood as poking fun at provincial Canadians who dream they willmake it big upon moving to New York.

The one set of markers that distinguish Canadians from Americansmost regularly on WireTap, and that seems most substantive, aredistinctions of speech and accent. Goldstein, for example, once remarkedthat "'Yo' might be the most un-Canadian word I can thinkof." (47) In an episode called "Into America," Goldsteincalls RakofF to ask him for advice before giving a public talk inChicago. Rakoff tells Goldstein to avoid the word "drama"entirely, because Goldstein's Canadian pronunciation soundsprovincial and embarrassing. Goldstein then calls his father, who grewup in Brooklyn but has lived in Montreal for the last thirty-five years,and when he asks him about how it felt to become a Canadian, they focus,again, on relatively minor differences of pronunciation and accent. (48)This accords with what the sociolinguist Charles Boberg has recentlynoted about accent and Canadian culture: given "the closesimilarity of American and Canadian culture at many levels, subtledifferences in form of expression--as opposed to content--may take on aheightened importance in distinguishing Canadian from American culturalproducts." (49) The Molson Brewing Company's "TheRant" (2000), a television advertisem*nt that managed to become aCanadian popular culture phenomenon by affirming a Canadian identitydistinct both from Americans and from stereotypes of Canadians, providesevidence for this assessment, mentioning three specifically linguisticdistinctions that it posits as particular to Canadians. (50)

As we have seen, one of the ways that Goldstein and Rakoff indicatetheir Jewishness is through similarly subtle features of language; thatthey do the same with their Canadianness suggests that the aural mediumin which they perform may not be incidental in understanding how theyare able to be at once so powerfully identified with minority groupsand, at the same time, not particularly concerned about thoseidentifications.

The linguistic choices through which Goldstein and Rakoff identifyand distinguish themselves as Canadians and as Jews are simple enough tocatalog. One aspect of the representation of Jewishness on WireTap, andin Goldstein's oeuvre more broadly, that is more difficult toanalyze is the issue of Jewish-sounding voices. Goldstein himself andmany of the most frequent performers on the show--Howard Chackowicz,Joshua Karpati, Gregor Ehrlich, Jon Tucker, and Goldstein'sparents, Buzz and Dina Goldstein, among several others--have voices thatmight strike listeners as sounding Jewish. Of course, any sense of whatthe Jewish voice sounds like will be, inevitably and entirely, astereotype, one belied by the actual diversity of Jews and their speech.Still, such stereotypes have played a significant part in Americanpopular culture for decades. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler havenoted, considering the first several decades of American radio, that"though dialects, names, and other markers were used to signalvarious ethnic groups on radio, they were also understood as somethingthat anyone could learn to imitate and reproduce. As central asethnicity was to radio comedies, the medium also intimated that theseidentities were performative rather than innate. (51) In a move thatresonates with the representation of Jewishness in American audio mediathroughout its entire history, Rakoff himself demonstrates how aputatively Jewish voice can be performed, in the audiobook of HalfEmpty. Rakoif normally speaks and performs his radio pieces in what onejournalist has called "a low-pitched purr," but when, in thataudiobook, he recites a passage in which he imagines "what on earththe Old World, necromancing Litvak primitives from whom I am descendedwould make of me"--several sentences, hypothetically spoken bythese Litvaks, follow this introduction--his voice, evidendy to soundJewish, becomes much more singsongy and considerably higher-pitched thannormal, each sentence rising to end in a question. (52) Many of thevoices heard on WireTap are high-pitched in a similar way.

One place to turn for a description of what Goldstein's voicesounds like is to WireTap itself. Goldstein's voice is occasionallydiscussed by his guests in terms that resonate with stereotypes aboutJewish voices, even if they do not explicitly describe it asJewish-sounding; in other words, rehearsing the patterns in relation toJewishness at work in other aspects of the show. The discussion of hisvoice tends to be highly self-deprecating, emphasizing implicitly orexplicitly how inappropriate for radio it is. In particular, an episodecalled "Fresh New Voice" proposes that Goldstein has receivedfeedback, at his network's behest, from a test audience. After theaudience heard his voice, he says, "evidently, the words'whiny' and nasal' came up a lot." (53) In otherepisodes, Goldstein's guests tell him his voice is "whiny, yetabrasive, shrill but also grating," that he sounds "tired andbored" and "miserable," and that he reads a script"like somebody who's about to die, like just in your lastminutes of being alive." (54)

These descriptions of Goldstein's voice are not unlikedescriptions of Ira Glass's voice; journalists profiling Glassoften fall back on "nasal," and Glass was recently quoted by areporter as saying, "if you compare my voice with a really greatradio announcer, I'm just a whiny Jew." (55) AndWireTap's other characters' voices also resonate with thesestereotypical ideas about how Jews sound. Karpati's voice, forexample, is so shrill and high-pitched that in one WireTap episode hisvoice is, for comic purposes, mistaken for a woman's ("hisvoice gets kind of squealy when he gets upset," Goldstein says,"but he is, in fact, a man"). (56) Buzz Goldstein speaks witha pronounced Brooklyn accent, while Dina Goldstein whines in a wayreminiscent of Estelle Harris's iconic performance as EstelleCostanza on Seinfeld.

All these voices might be understood as evoking a stereotype ofJewish speech to the degree that they share what Joseph Litvakdescribes, in an essay on the "aesthetics of Jewishness," as"a lush repertoire of whines and whimpers ... the harsh effects ofnasality and dentalization that ... characterize Jewish speech fromcoast to coast." (57) This contemporary stereotype about Jewishvoices echoes what anti-Semitic texts have had to say on the subject,too. A Nazi propaganda book for children, published in 1938, noted thatamong many other physical and behavioral features, a Jew can beidentified by his "prattling on in a peculiar nasal voice,"and Sander Gilman has pointed out that as early as in Stendhal'sLife of Rossini (1824), Jewish voices were already being explicitlyassociated with a "nasal intonation." (58) That such auralqualities, supposedly particular to Jews, are deliberately exaggeratedby the characters on WireTap suggests the aptness of Sokoloff'sdescription of New Jews as tolerating or embracing "satiric orironic depictions of Jews" and "even Jewish self-hatred ... asan authentic expression of Jewish experience." On WireTap, onehears stereotypes about the Jewish voice, which found enthusiasticexponents in anti-Semitic propaganda, spoken now, proudly, byunself-conscious Jews.

Sander Gilman's essay "The Jewish Voice," publishedin 1991, understood the Jew who sounds Jewish as a figure potentiallymarginalized by, or excluded from, the Anglo-American popular culture ofits day. Gilman quotes Daphne Merkin's remark about "the dreadstigma of 'too Jewish' a voice," and his essay suggests,on the evidence of the recent cancellation of Jackie Mason's sitcomChicken Soup, that "the Jew who sounds Jewish, for some AmericanJews, represents the hidden Jew within, the corrupt Jew of the Gospel,the mark of difference which offends even after the Jew is integratedinto the mainstream of American culture." (59) Even if thestereotypically Jewish voice was relatively common in America at thattime, Gilman's analysis continues, it was not comfortable withitself: "Being a New Yorker in the 1990s means soundingJewish--being a Jew in spite of oneself.... But only if one isdiscomfited by the very awareness of one's difference, ofone's identifiable sense of sounding too Jewish." (60) Thedifference between 1991 and the 2000s in this regard is striking.

Although the sitcom Seinfeld had already premiered in 1989, beforeGilman's essay was published--after studio executives had debatedwhether or not it was "too Jewish"--it was a few years later,with the introduction of Estelle Harris and Jerry Stiller'scharacters, that the show presented its most stereotypically Jewishvoices to great popular and critical acclaim. (61) Then This AmericanLife premiered in 1995, carrying the voice of a self-described"whiny Jew" to millions of American public radio listeners andmaking the radio safer than ever before for people whose voices are not"pretty." (62) Because of these and many other examples ofJewish-sounding Jews who were embraced by large audiences by themid-1990s, when the first episode of Goldstein's WireTap aired in2004, it would be hard to argue that "the Jew who soundsJewish" any longer bore a stigma in the North American media. Whichhelps to explain how Goldstein could produce a broadcast show, availableto millions of Canadian and American listeners, in whichcharacters' voices sounded so very, unapologetically, Jewish.

It is not difficult to find antecedents for the way that Rakoff andGoldstein relate to their Jewishness in earlier generations of NorthAmerican literary and popular culture--though perhaps it is not as easyto do so as it is to reel off the names of contemporary performers witheven wider reach in the media and popular culture who likewiseinstantiate the New Jew phenomenon. In radio and podcasting there areIra Glass and Marc Maron; in television such figures as Jon Stewart,Sara Silverman, Lena Dunham, and Larry David; and, in Hollywood film,Judd Apatow's stable of writers and actors, including Paul Rudd,Jonah Hill, and another Canadian Jew, Seth Rogen. To the degree that theNew Jews can be said to represent a genuinely original phenomenon, whatdoes the popularization of this sort of Jewishness in the media revealabout what life is like for Jews in North America at the beginning ofthe new millennium? Is it a salutary development that writers likeRakoff and Goldstein can be completely unembarrassed about theirJewishness, invoke it regularly, but also not see much drama, interest,or tension in it?

On the one hand, we might say that it reflects a time and place inwhich Jews could grow up secure in their Jewishness, feeling neither thestrain of anti-Semitism nor the pressure of assimilation. Jews likeRakoff and Goldstein could be themselves, and worry about the thingsthat everybody else worries about. Compared to many periods of history,and especially recent ones--or compared to the contemporary experiencesof Jews, in the State of Israel, compelled to take up arms to defendtheir way of life--this might seem like a blessing, a gift. Rakoff andGoldstein seem to have experienced their time as such. Despite theirdourness, they evince nothing but pride and happiness at being Jews.

On the other hand, it is by no means clear that such a situation isthe most promising grounds for the creation of extraordinary art.Writing early in the new millennium, the literary scholar JulianLevinson noted "a dominant impulse in much modern Jewish writing:the impulse to critique and displace the myths and institutions thathave structured traditional Jewish communal life." (63) But whathappens when Jews are no longer particularly upset about those"myths and institutions," because the myths and institutionsdo not appear to limit or add much to their lives? The critic WilliamDeresiewicz noted, in 2007, that "the most visible of the currentgeneration of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoidingtheir own experience because their own experience just seems too boring.What is there to say about it?" (64) This is not a particularlyaccurate description of all the "self-consciously Jewishnovelists" (or filmmakers) of the new millennium, and Rakoff andGoldstein undermine it further because they write almost exclusivelyabout "their own experience," which they do not find boring.And yet theirs is an experience that is almost always, in some sense,Jewish. What their work lacks, as Deresiewicz implies, is a sense ofJewishness as structuring, or limiting, or generating the mostmeaningful experiences in life, which animates much of what hastypically been discussed as Jewish literature. But as Jews who livesafe, comfortable lives in places where they are privileged and powerfulyet still have plenty to say--and in showing how that Jewishnessmanifests itself--the funny, honest performances of Rakoff and Goldsteinconstitute valuable archives.

JOSH LAMBERT is the academic director of the Yiddish Book Centerand visiting assistant professor of English at the University ofMassachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of American Jewish Fiction: AJPS Guide (2009) and Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture(2014), which won a 2014 Canadian Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thoughtand Culture. He serves as contributing editor of Tablet, and his reviewsand essays have appeared in such publications as the Forward, the LosAngeles Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the San FranciscoChronicle, the Globe and Mail, and Haaretz.

NOTES

(1.) Ira Glass et al., "Who's Canadian?" ThisAmerican Life 65, WBEZ/Public Radio International, Chicago, May 30,1997. Further citations to This American Life will appear as TAL.

(2.) For a critical discussion of this practice, as recorded inbooks cataloging Jewish celebrities, and linking it to therepresentation of Jews in film in the 1990s and early 2000s, see DanielItzkovitz, "They All Are Jews," in You Should See Yourself:Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, ed. Vincent Brook (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 230-51.

(3.) Naomi Sokoloff, "Cinema Studies/Jewish Studies,2011-2013," AJS Review 38, no. 1 (April 2014): 150.

(4.) Rakoff, Half Empty (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 29.

(5.) Goldstein, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! (New York:Riverhead Books, 2009), 1-2; Goldstein et al., "Performance,"Wire Tap with Jonathan Goldstein, CBC Radio, Montreal, November 6, 2005.Further citations of WireTap will be appear as WT.

(6.) Michele Hilmes, "The New Materiality of Radio," inRadio's New Wave: Global Sound in the Digital Era, ed. JasonLoviglio and Michele Hilmes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 55, 54.

(7.) WT, "Help Me, Doctor," March 16, 2008; and "ASecret History of Famous Friends," November 19, 2006; TAL, 470,"Show Me the Way," July 27, 2012; and 345, "Ties thatBind," December 14, 2007. On their relationship, see Goldstein,"Jonathan Goldstein Remembers David Rakoff," National Post,August 13, 2012.

(8.) "About," ThisAmericanLife.org. For such mentions ofWireTap, see for example Mark Oppenheimer, "NPR's Great BlackHope," Atlantic, June 19, 2013; and Jonathan Mitchell, "ModernRadio Drama," Transom.org, February 14, 2011.

(9.) Hilmes, "On a Screen Near You: The New SoundworkIndustry," Cinema Journal 52, no. 3 (spring 2013): 177. ShannonSteens "Neoliberal Scandals: Foxconn, Mike Daisey, and the TurnToward Nonfiction Drama," Theater Journal 66, no. 1 (March 2014):1-18, is a relatively rare example of an academic article treating ThisAmerican Life in some depth, though it treats a single episode ratherthan the show as a whole. Scholars have, however, examinedrepresentations of Jewishness on the American radio of earlier periods;see Ari Y. Kelman, Station Identification: A Cultural History of YiddishRadio in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press,2009); J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Entertaining America:Jews, Movies, Broadcasting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,2003); and David S. Siegel and Susan Siegel, Radio and the Jews: TheUntold Story of How Radio Influenced America's Image of the Jews(Yorktown Heights, NY: Book Hunter Press, 2007).

(10.) Cristal Duhaime, "Q&A with Jonathan Goldstein,"Carte Blanche 19 (winter 2013).

(11.) See, for example, articles that treat WireTap withoutmentioning Jewishness: Sara McCulloch, "There's No Time LikeTomorrow," Calgary Herald, January 19, 2013, J7; Alyson Grant,"Almost Eavesdropping," Montreal Gazette, November 16, 2005,Di; Murray Whyte, "Tapping into Radios Creative Potential,"Toronto Star, December 18, 2005, C13. It is rarer to find a review ofone of Rakoff's books that does not mention he is Jewish, but see,for example, Wendell Brock, "Actor-Author's Acerbic, On-TargetHumor Is 'Fraud' of the Funniest Kind," AtlantaJournal-Constitution, July 15, 2001, LexisNexis Academic; and BarbaraHoffman, "The Next David Sedaris? How New Essayist Is Edgy, Wittyand Gay--Just Like Someone Else We Know," New York Post, June 4,2001, LexisNexis Academic.

(12.) TAL, 47, "Christmas and Commerce," December 20,1996. See also Rakoff, Fraud (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 125.

(13.) TAL, 118, "What You Lookin' At?" December 18,1998. See also Rakoff, Fraud, 6.

(14.) TAL, 156, "What Remains," March 31, 2000. See alsoRakoff, Fraud, 214.

(15.) The renaming of the "Union of American HebrewCongregations" (founded and named in 1873) to the "Union forReform Judaism" in 2003 reflects how far out of favor the term"Hebrew" has fallen.

(16.) TAL, 212, "The Other Man," May 10, 2002.

(17.) The most significant exception is in TAL, 225, "HomeMovies," November 8, 2002, in which Goldstein describes in detail avideo made of a Rosh Hashana dinner at his parents' house when hewas a teenager.

(18.) TAL, 315, "The Parrot and the Potbellied Pig," July21, 2006.

(19.) Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness andJudaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UniversityPress, 2012), 209.

(20.) See, for example, the use of these words: WT, "CareerOpportunities," March 19, 2006; "Halloween Special,"October 30, 2004; "New Technologies," December n, 2005;"Just Relax," February 11, 2007; "Never Say I LoveYou," March 8, 2009; and "The New Josh," November 25,2007.

(21.) Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish: A Relaxed Lexicon ofYiddish, Hebrew and Yinglish Words Often Encountered in English ... fromthe Days ofthe Bible to Those of the Beatnik (New York: McGraw-Hill,1968).

(22.) WT, "The Lothario," May 14, 2006. On postvernacularYiddish, of which WireTap furnishes a reasonable example, see Shandler,Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

(23.) See, for example, WT, "A Bottle of Seltzer," May21, 2006; and "Do Your Little Radio Show," March 5, 2005.

(24.) See Sarah Bunin Benor, "Mensch, bentsh, and halagan-.Variation in the American Jewish Linguistic Repertoire," Languageand Communication 30 (2010); "Ethnolinguistic Repertoire: Shiftingthe Analytic Focus in Language and Ethnicity," Journal ofSociolinguistics 14, no. 2 (2010): 159-83; and Benor and Cohen,"Talking Jewish: The 'Ethnic English' of AmericanJews," Studies in Contemporary Jewry 25 (2011): 62-78.

(25.) Benor, "Echoes of Yiddish in the Speech ofTwenty-First-Century American Jews," in Choosing Yiddish: NewFrontiers of Language and Culture, ed. Lara Rabinovitch et al. (Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 2012), 319.

(26.) See, for example, WT, "Carpe Diem," September 10,2006; "Goody Two-Shoes," June 4, 2006; and "The Measureof a Man," March 12, 2006.

(27.) WT, "The Bat and the Weasels," February 19, 2006.

(28.) For these references, see WT, "Broken Telephone,"August 14, 2004; "The Bat and the Weasels"; "CarpeDiem"; "Don't Go Changing," January 14, 2007;"Family Album," September 24, 2006; "Goody TwoShoes"; "The Measure of a Man"; "Never Say I LoveYou"; "Samson and Delilah," April 16, 2006; "SellingOut," October 15, 2006; "Splendours of the Small Screen,"May 24, 2009; "This One's for the Children," June 10,2006; "Who Wants to Live Forever?" November 2, 2008;"Gentlemen's Guide to Grooming," April 23, 2006; and"100 False Messiahs," March 15, 2009.

(29.) For example, WT, "Splendours of the Small Screen"and "Never Say I Love You."

(30.) WT, "Broken Telephone." On Yentl and its reception,see Pamela S. Nadell, "Yentl: From Yeshiva Boy to Syndrome,"in The modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema, ed. Lawrence Baron(Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 66-73.

(31.) Chris Jones, "Brilliance and Neurosis: Widely Thought ofas a Droll Ironist, David Sedaris is a Self-Doubting Savant,"Chicago Tribune, January 10, 2004.

(32.) See, for example, RakofFs act in TAL "What YouLookin' At?"; and Rakoff, "I, Nature Boy," Outside(October 2000). These pieces are reprinted as "In New EnglandEveryone Calls You Dave" and "Back to the Garden," inFraud, 1-15, 167-89.

(33.) For an episode in which Goldstein is bullied by everyone heencounters, see WT, "Haters," April 2, 2005. The classic workon the subject is Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1971).

(34.) Ruth R. Wisse, "A Reflection of Moral Collapse,"Haaretz.com, November 2, 2001.

(35.) WT, "Positive Thinking," July 10, 2004.

(36.) On such expressions and practices, see James A. Matisoff,Blessings, Curses, Hopes, and Fears: Psycho-Ostensive Expressions inYiddish, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 57-61.

(37.) Ronald Goldman, Questioning Circumcision: A JewishPerspective (Boston: Vanguard Publications, 1998).

(38.) WT, "How I Became So Hostile," February 19, 2005.

(39.) Jonathan Goldstein, "Messiah in a Bottle," Guilt& Pleasure 1 (winter 2006).

(40.) WT, "Messiah '83," August 21, 2004.

(41.) TAL, 116, "Poultry Slam 1998," November 27, 1998.See also Rakoff, Fraud, 23.

(42.) Rakoff, Half Empty, 84.

(43.) Ibid., 95; Rakoff, Frattd, 70.

(44.) "Interview with David Rakoff," Wag's Review 4(winter 2009).

(45.) David Rakoff, "The Aitch of Innocence," in Oh,Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America, ed. Denise Markonish(North Adams, MA: Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art andMassachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012), 337-38.

(46.) TAL, 124, "Welcome to America," March 19, 1999. Seealso Rakoff, Fraud, 152.

(47.) WT, "Canadian Content," September 18, 2004.

(48.) WT, "Into America," November 30, 2008.

(49.) Charles Boberg, The English Language in Canada: Status,History, and Comparative Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press,2010), 35.

(50.) See Robert M. Seiler, "Selling Patriotism/ Selling Beer:The Case of the 'I AM CANADIAN!' Commercial," AmericanReview of Canadian Studies 32, no. 1 (spring 2002): 45-66.

(51.) Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 102.

(52.) Rakoff, Half Empty (New York: Random House Audio, 2010), CD;Brock, "Actor-Author's Acerbic, On-Target Humor Is Fraud ofthe Funniest Kind"; see Rakoff Half Empty, 214.

(53.) WT, "Fresh New Voice," December 10, 2006.

(54.) WT, "Picasso Goldstein," September 16, 2007,"Of Space, Time and Money," February 8, 2009; and "TheTortoise and the Bunny," November 18, 2007.

(55.) Jessica Misener, "21 Reasons Ira Glass Is the MostPerfect Man Alive," BuzzFeed.com, May 17, 2013; Ellen fa*ggWeist,"Listening to the Distinctive Voice of Ira Glass," Salt LakeTribune, April 10, 2014; James Rainey, "Ira Glass,Storyteller," Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2010.

(56.) WT, "The New Josh."

(57.) Joseph Litvak, "The Aesthetics of Jewishness: ShelleyWinters," in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews and DavidMcWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 166.

(58.) Melvin Konner, The Jewish Body (New York: Schocken, 2009),97; Sander Gilman, "Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera ofthe Fin de Siecle," New German Critique 43 (winter 1988): 56.

(59.) Sander Gilman, "The Jewish Voice: Chicken Soup or thePenalties of Sounding Too Jewish," in The Jew's Body (NewYork: Routledge, 1991), 28.

(60.) Ibid., 30-31.

(61.) See David Zurawik, "A 'TooJewish'/Not-Jewish-Enough Jew for the '90s: Seinfeld," inThe Jews of Prime Time (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England,2003), 201-17.

(62.) "Sora Newman, who has been a trainer at NPR for morethan fifteen years," noted in the 2000s, suggesting Glass'sinfluence, "We have some people on our air who, in the heyday ofradio, would not have gotten jobs--they don't have prettyvoices--but they write for their own voices in a way that makes themgood storytellers" (132). Jonathan Kern, Sound Reporting: The NPRGuide to Audio Journalism and Production (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2008).

(63.) Levinson, "Is There a Jewish Text in This Class? JewishModernism in the Multicultural Academy," Michigan Quarterly Review42, no. 1 (winter 2003).

(64.) William Deresiewicz, "The Imaginary Jew," Nation,May 10, 2007.

JOSH LAMBERT

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST