Page - 12 - in Entangled Entertainers - Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

12 | Entangled Entertainers against it. Th e council has stated that “the worldview and also the laws of the Torah reject this [witchcraft and magic] as reprehensible practices and . . . categorically [prohibit] all magic as idolatry.” https://www.magisch.at/ (accessed 8 May 2019). 39. Evidence for the assumption that Jews have historically avoided popular culture can be found in the publication Blackface, White Noise by the American political scientist Mi- chael Rogin. In considering Steven Beller’s Vienna and the Jews (which deals almost ex- clusively with high culture), Rogin states that Viennese Jews distanced themselves from popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century. As a result of this inaccurate evalu- ation, he concludes that Jews were alienated from Viennese society and thus stoked the fl ames of antisemitism. See Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). To be fair, I should note here that Steven Beller does mention Jewish participation in the light en- tertainment industry (see Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews 1867–1938 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], 180). He also does this in A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 203. This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.