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Matthew H. Brittingham Book Review Joshua Louis Moss, Why Harry Met Sally: Subversive Jewishness, Anglo-Christian Power, and the Rhetoric of Modern Love Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 360 pages, ISBN 978-1-4773-1283-4 Joshua Louis Moss’s new book Why Harry Met Sally analyzes representations of romantic couplings between Jews and non-Jews in popular culture. In terms of scope, Moss is less interested in how Jews have depicted Anglo-Christian-Jew- ish coupling on their own terms, as in Yiddish or Hebrew literature. Rather, ex- amining broader trends in European and American popular culture, Moss shows how Jewish/non-Jewish couplings offer “a visceral, easily graspable template for understanding the rapid transformations of an increasingly globalized, mod- ern world” (4). That is to say, in European and American popular culture, Jew- ish/non-Jewish couples were commonly marshaled to play out the paradoxes and struggles of the modern mass media age. Moss situates his discussion around three periods, or waves, of Anglo-Chris- tian-Jewish couplings – 1905–1934, 1967–1980 and 1993–2007 – all of which push back against conservative cultural and political trends. His central method- ological contribution is “coupling theory”, whereby a couple should be read “as a single, entangled construction oscillating between holistic and fragmentary perspectives” (7). Further, he basically establishes the reasons for his “waves” in his coupling theory: “The coupling binary was flexible and adaptable. The couplings emerged at key historical moments to navigate the legacy of the Vic- torian era and champion the pluralism of an increasingly visible, libertine, mod- ern world” (10). Jewish/non-Jewish coupling allows for subversive and taboo discussions to be negotiated, though not necessarily resolved, in various histor- ical moments. Interestingly, in Part One, “The First Wave: The Mouse-Mountains of Mo- dernity (1905–1934)”, Moss begins his analysis with the baptized Jewish poli- tician and romance novelist Benjamin Disraeli, who married Mary Anne Lewis (non-Jewish and British elite). According to Moss, Disraeli’s marriage to Lewis DOI: 10.25364/05.4:2019.1.8 Book Review: Why Harry Met Sally | 127www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1