"Overall, <i>The Jewish Decadence </i>is a richly rewarding read, blending deep knowledge, provocative insight and unsparing honesty to the role Jews have played in fin-de-siècle culture of Europe and the USA. Barely a page goes by with an insight into cultural production and consumption and unexpected links between creators, places and ideas. This book will be of value to anyone wishing to under early Modernism and Jewish contribution to vanguard art."

- alexanderadamsart: Reviews of art, culture and literature,

"Freedman’s argument, that Jewish novelists, poets, actors, and philosophers reworked the<br /> discourse of decadence, which often linked Jewishness to decline, to their own ends in order<br /> to generate a Jewish response to the conditions of modernity, is compelling. More importantly,<br /> it offers a model of how work on afterlives and transnational circulation can avoid the trap of<br /> thinking in terms of unidirectional influence and attend to the agency and creativity of those<br /> influenced."

Journal of British Studies

Bringing his capacious cultural expertise and scholarly rigor to a wide-ranging exploration of the association between Jews and decline and degeneracy, Jonathan Freedman performs an erudite, original, and wonderfully chutzpadik act of reclamation.

- Alisa Solomon, Columbia University,

“This book takes us on an extraordinary journey through what the author calls ‘something like modernity,’ as it is to be found in dance, literature, song, painting, theatre, film, and history.  Decadence turns out to mean what it seems to mean, and an almost unimaginable range of other things as well. Its richness, as well as its constant entanglement in ideas of Jewishness, would have caused any other writer either to simplify or get lost, but Freedman wittily and resolutely does neither. His book is ‘example-drunk,’ as he says, but it doesn’t stumble. It celebrates complication and reflection and masquerade, and we find ourselves wishing the show—the one he is evoking and the one to be seen in the fabulous evocation itself—would never end.”

- Michael Wood, Princeton University,

“Freedman reconceives of Jews as architects rather than victims of modernity. Although Jews were often demonized as sexual and artistic deviants, they also entered into dialogue with their detractors by contesting or reshaping the prejudices of the day. Most important, Jews played a central role in European culture as artists, critics, sponsors, networkers, and entrepreneurs; throughout the book, Freedman spots Jews where none have been discerned before, testifying to their ubiquity among the avant-garde.”

- Maud Ellman, University of Chicago,

"A book that transforms our experiences of familiar works and encourages us to carry on the work of Jewish cultural studies, following the example of one of its most gifted practitioners."

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