Synopses & Reviews
You see it everywhere: on bumper stickers, tee shirts, lapel pins, in shop windows, and in front of nearly every school or government building. Yet while the American flag is ubiquitous, as a symbol it is both heavily freighted and misunderstood.
Now an acclaimed European professor of American history brings a fresh perspective to the American flag, exploring its political, social, and cultural significance across the broad swath of its history. Mining a rich vein of materials from history, literature, music, and popular culture, Arnaldo Testi analyzes the symbolic importance of the flag to the national consciousness of this “nation of immigrants” and sees in it the very contradictions that make up our history: secularism and sacredness, freedom and empire, inclusiveness and aggressive self-confidence.
Using sources as diverse as Walt Whitman and Jimi Hendrix, and events as divergent as the American Revolution, the moon landing, and the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Testi reveals the central importance of the flag to the creation of our nation, the evolution of our national character, and the spread of American culture and power across the globe, while illustrating the varied and often conflicting meanings different Americans ascribe to it.
Whether you worship the flag or revile it, respect it or ignore it, Capture the Flag offers the reader a colorful and compelling exploration of the sway it holds on the American imagination.
Review
“
Is Diss a System? brings back Milt Gross with a bang. Artist, tongue-twisting language humorist, Gross was a great figure of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century, sadly forgotten . . . until now! Kelman has given us all a gift by selecting, annotating and celebrating a multiculturalism that rings with humor, humanism and a spirit we all need as much as ever. Hurrah!”
- Paul Buhle, editor of Jews and American Comics
Review
“Nearly thirty years before my birth, Milt Gross had already turned the kind of English that I heard every day into great and significant art, delighting kids like me as much as he offended the Pecksniffian alte kakers who sought to purge American Jewish culture of every trace of real Yiddish and real Yiddish life. Gross was the bomb under Molly Goldberg's tukhes.
Is Diss a System?, a book that needs to be spoken as much as it needs to be read, makes some of his best work available to an audience that might never have suspected what its been missing.”
- Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu
Review
“It is Grosss good fortune, and ours, that a most recent generation of Americans has reclaimed him as its own or, at the very least, brought his talents to the fore once more. Is Diss a System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader is a case in point, a showcase of his many gifts. . . . In his championing of Milt Gross, Kelman assumes his rightful place as a cultural archaeologist of American Jewrys vernacular culture. He belongs, in fact, to a new generation of American Jewish intellectuals who are determined to recoverand to celebratewhat their forbears had consigned to the attic or dismissed as a curiosity.
- The New Republic
“Milt Gross is a lost wonder of the American literary funhouse. A blessing on the head of Ari Y. Kelman for bringing him, roaring, back to mad and vivid life.”
- Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
“Nearly thirty years before my birth, Milt Gross had already turned the kind of English that I heard every day into great and significant art, delighting kids like me as much as he offended the Pecksniffian alte kakers who sought to purge American Jewish culture of every trace of real Yiddish and real Yiddish life. Gross was the bomb under Molly Goldberg's tukhes. Is Diss a System?, a book that needs to be spoken as much as it needs to be read, makes some of his best work available to an audience that might never have suspected what its been missing.”
- Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu
“Is Diss a System? brings back Milt Gross with a bang. Artist, tongue-twisting language humorist, Gross was a great figure of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century, sadly forgotten . . . until now! Kelman has given us all a gift by selecting, annotating and celebrating a multiculturalism that rings with humor, humanism and a spirit we all need as much as ever. Hurrah!”
- Paul Buhle, editor of Jews and American Comics
Review
"More important than merely rescuing Gross from obscurity, however, Kelman provides important context for Gross's work, and in the process reminds us that history has more than a written and visual dimension." "Kelman's 50-page introduction is an indispensable guide to the personal, cultural, and sociological context that produced these hybrid works that are still entertaining today." "Highly recommended for the 'Jewish comics' or 'Jewish Americana' collections in academic, public, and synagogue libraries." "Kelman adeptly introduces Gross's work, providing "translations" of Gross's fabricated English-Jewish speech, contextual information on related cultural forms and other ethnic portrayals of the period, and footnotes detailing personalities and events mentioned. He also provides brief introductions to the five reproduced works. Augmented by the editor's careful, concise explanatory text, this welcome book puts a scholarly focus on aspects of cartooning normally ignored--comic strips and gag cartoons." "NYU Press' is a very welcome reprint of some of [Gross'] best work. Dazzling stuff."
Review
"Testi shows that the flag sits at the intersection of all that is held to be American."-PopMatters,
Review
"Testi approaches his subject thoughtfully but not uncritically, and in prose that is rendered lively and conversational by Noor Giovanni Mazhar's smooth translation. This is the kind of cultural study that is deeply informed by historical fact, and it covers nearly everything that one might consider essential, from arguments over flag-burning to changing attitudes on how the flag can be appropriately represented in the visual arts."-MR Zine,
Review
"Testi's highly readable and enjoyable small volume covers the abundant ground that lies between Betsy Ross and the flag wars following September 11, 2001."-Eran Shalev,H-Net Reviews
Review
". . . the book touches on many interesting controversies (with the focus, as the title suggests, on exactly who owns the flag and whom it represents) and usefully presents a foreign perspective on the subject."-R. J. Goldstein,Choice Magazine
Review
" . . . a charming little book, a quick read, and an interesting outsider's evaluation of the United States through its most potent symbol." -Scot M. Guenter,The Journal of American History
Synopsis
Milt Gross (1895-1953), a Bronx-born cartoonist and animator, first found fame in the late 1920s, writing comic strips and newspaper columns in the unmistakable accent of Jewish immigrants. By the end of the 1920s, Gross had become one of the most famous humorists in the United States, his work drawing praise from writers like H. L. Mencken and Constance Roarke, even while some of his Jewish colleagues found Gross extreme renderings of Jewish accents to be more crass than comical.
Working during the decline of vaudeville and the rise of the newspaper cartoon strip, Gross captured American humor in transition. Gross adapted the sounds of ethnic humor from the stage to the page and developed both a sound and a sensibility that grew out of an intimate knowledge of immigrant life. His parodies of beloved poetry sounded like reading primers set loose on the Lower East Side, while his accounts of Jewish tenement residents echoed with the mistakes and malapropisms born of the immigrant experience.
Introduced by an historical essay, Is Diss a System? presents some of the most outstanding and hilarious examples of Jewish dialect humor drawn from the five books Gross published between 1926 and 1928—Nize Baby, De Night in de Front from Chreesmas, Hiawatta, Dunt Esk, and Famous Fimmales—providing a fresh opportunity to look, read, and laugh at this nearly forgotten forefather of American Jewish humor.
About the Author
Ari Y. Kelman is an assistant professor of American Studies at University of California, Davis. He is the author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States.