Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

Not a book about Jewish jokes but rather a metacritcal analysis of the discourse on Jewish humor in Germany in the first half of the 20th century, this insightful and incisive volume ultimately explores the link between Jewish self-irony and its appropriation in anti-Semitic humor. Analyzing the work of figures from Sigmund Freud to Arthur Trebitsch, Eduard Fuchs, Siegfried Kadner, and Salcia Landmann, Kaplan (visual studies, Univ. of Toronto) maps out how Jewish jokes served as a crucial rhetorical figure in cultural debates in Germany. The author touches on issues of caricature, exile, free speech, and Jewish self-conception and on how the Nazis appropriated self-deprecating jokes to reinforce anti-Semitic propaganda. The final chapter concerns post-Holocaust German understanding of the Jewish joke, tracing the cultural debates synchronically and diachronically. An afterword on the Jewish joke in Trump's America demonstrates the link between the performances of Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen and their Weimar-era forebears, and how the same debates and perceptions of Jews and Jewish humor continue in the 21st-century US. The volume's historical and cultural analyses are valuable, but the significance of Kaplan's work is its demonstration of the real-world consequences of humor.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers.

Feldman and Zeitlin (both, Univ. of Chicago) have assembled an exceptional collection of papers focused on the human voice as an object of study. The volume is an outgrowth of the Voice Project, a seminar sponsored by the University of Chicago, and a related international conference held in 2015. The title itself is in response to philosopher Mladen Dolar's A Voice and Nothing More (2006), and Dolar provides an afterword to this volume. Contributors present a lively exchange of ideas across a broad range of fields. The 16 essays cover topics as far-reaching as the voice in Chinese opera (Zeitlin), screams in radio dramas (Neil Verma, Northwestern Univ.), the mimicking of vocal styles of others in recorded music (Laurie Stras, Univ. of Huddersfield, UK), the cultivation of "natural" or "pure" vocal production in opera (James Davies, Univ. of California, Berkeley), and the intentional cracking of the voice and running out of breath sometimes employed by professional singers (Feldman). Audiovisual examples accessed at the publisher's website enhance several essays. This is required reading for scholars, across numerous disciplines, who deal with the voice, whether spoken or sung.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.