TY - BOOK AU - Litvak,Joseph TI - The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture SN - 9780822390848 PB - Duke University Press KW - Performing Arts / Film / History & Criticism KW - bisacsh KW - Performing arts KW - Electronic books N1 - Access copy available to the general public N2 - In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC's) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls "comic cosmopolitanism," an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the "uncooperative" witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to "name names" UR - https://openresearchlibrary.org/content/ed4b5d44-8bb6-4f9c-aed3-f27021e9e894 ER -