| This study attempts to account for the unprecedented upsurge on American television from 1989 through 2001 of "Jewish" sitcoms---sitcoms featuring explicitly identified Jewish protagonists (e.g., Seinfeld, The Nanny, Dharma and Greg, Will and Grace). Drawing on the academic and journalistic discourse surrounding this trend, interviews with trend-show creators, as well as close readings of individual episodes and series, this study further seeks to situate the "Jewish" sitcom trend within larger trends in commercial television, the Jewish community(ies), and American society.;Following a contextualization of the "Jewish", sitcom trend in relation to "Jewish" televisual and other cultural representation, the trend is analyzed in depth through a periodization into three phases: phase one (1989--1992), the beginning of the trend, which emerged through a confluence of changing socio-political and industrial forces and culminated in the "decade-defining" Seinfeld; phase two (1992--98), which, although characterized by a new wave of "Jewish" sitcoms' (e.g., Friends, Mad About You, The Nanny), is shown to have operated "under the sign of Seinfeld"---that is, emulating and/or pointedly resisting Seinfeld's "no hugging, no learning" formula; and phase three (1998--2001), in which the predominant shows (Dharma and Greg, Will and Grace, Rude Awakening ) appear to have entered uncharted, "post-Jewish" territory where the fight to become Americans has been upstaged by the struggle to be, and define what it means to be, Americans and Jews.;What the "Jewish" sitcom trend as a whole appears to demonstrate is that American Jews and the "Jewish" television industry, if not U.S. society in general, are finding themselves increasingly at cross purposes, torn by contradictory drives to differentiate yet also to incorporate, to assert independence yet also to reconstruct consensus. The "Jewish" sitcom trend, I argue, has emerged through a complex negotiation of these integrationist and separationist pressures, signalling a renewed and heightened crisis in Jewish identity formation and representation that both reflects and informs a broader struggle over incorporation and diversity within U.S. television and society. |
