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“We Know We Belong to the Land”: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Andrea Most
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Abstract

In the early twentieth century, a period of mass immigration, Jewish assimilation into mainstream American society was largely a theatrical venture. The musical theater, a predominantly Jewish field that portrayed a variety of American experiences, offers powerful illustrations of theatrical strategies of Jewish assimilation. The groundbreaking Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1943), created during one of the most anti-Semitic periods in United States history, exemplifies how ethnic outsiders demonized a racial other in an effort to be considered white and thus to be included in the utopian (theatrical) community of America.

Information

Type
Special Topic: Ethnicity
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 1: Special Topic Ethnicity , January 1998 , pp. 77 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

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