From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American popular culture Paul Buhle Verso, 304pp, £16 ISBN 1859845983

There is a beautiful Yiddish word, broyges - meaning part quarrel, part blood feud, with overtones of bitterness and ingratitude - which indicates what I would very much like to avoid. Like anyone else working on the history of American radicalism, I owe an enormous debt to Paul Buhle. His encyclopaedic knowledge of the field is legendary, as is his generosity to young researchers. How many other scholars, embarking on an oral history of ageing blacklist victims, and sensing that many expressed themselves best in their native Yiddish, would undertake to learn the language? And Buhle isn't even Jewish! Which may be where his difficulties begin.

Buhle's latest book has neither an argument nor much of a structure. Instead, he offers an abundance of affection for his subjects, who range from long-forgotten stars of the Yiddish Theatre to a group of up-and-coming auteurs of illustrated narrative such as Art Spiegelman. Although the Jewish roots of many classic comics, such as Superman and Spider-Man, have been traced before, most recently in fictionalised form by the novelist Michael Chabon in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Buhle, a regular comic-book maven (expert), brings his narrative right up to the present day.

Where Buhle goes astray is in assuming the existence of some distinctly Jewish contribution to popular culture - a kind of kosher Kryptonite - while at the same time trying, a little strenuously, to prove its existence. The result, which will be familiar to readers of ethnic-minority newspapers, is an exhaustive attempt to catalogue the achievements of community members. Certainly, Jews were, and continue to be, prominent in American films, popular music, comedy, television. But so are Italians and, to a slightly lesser degree, Irish-Americans. Moreover, as Buhle himself admits, it is "black culture" that lies at "the heart of [any] distinctly American popular culture". As their immediate predecessors in the slums, Jews often found themselves in close proximity to black people - something that could lead either to empathy (as in the case of Arnold Perl, the blacklisted screenwriter who wrote the original screenplay on which Spike Lee based Malcolm X) or exploitation (as with the Chess brothers and Chuck Berry). The twists and folds of that uneasy, unequal, but incredibly productive cultural collaboration could easily fill a book, but Buhle barely glances at them.

Instead, he devotes page after page to his own passion for underground comics. Now don't get me wrong. One can hardly overstate the influence of the satirical Mad magazine on the politics, sensibility and sense of humour of a generation of American men. And the mainstream discovery of idiosyncratic geniuses such as Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb - both subjects of recent film biographies - is a welcome development. But in a book purporting to be about all of popular culture, it seems strange to the point of obsessive to give comic strips equal weight with films or television, and greater weight than music.

Buhle would have been better off devoting the pages he spends lovingly chronicling obscure underground journals to the historical, political and cultural context that he says, in one of his more acute observations, allowed American Jews "to enact creatively the lives of others as well as of themselves". Much of that story has already been told by Michael Denning in his superb book The Cultural Front (also published by Verso). But there is much more to tell, especially as Denning ends his narrative in the 1950s. Yet Buhle does not even mention Denning's work.

Perhaps defensive about his own goyishe (outsider) status, Buhle continually overestimates the contribution of his subjects' Jewishness to their cultural significance. When an artist whom he likes does not fit the mould, he stretches, blithely arguing, for instance, that Robert Crumb is "genetically Gentile, but cryptically Jewish". And although his command of Yiddish may be fluent, he has a patchy feel for Judaism as a religious culture. He refers to a tractate of the Talmud as a "portion", and uses "Yehudim", which is simply the Hebrew plural for "Jews", as pejorative slang for stuffy German Jews.

But his real problem is that, in his heroic labours to convey the vast void left by the vanished world of Yiddishkayt, he forgets that the aim of all this effort was simple pleasure: a few laughs, a spritz of seltzer water on a hot day. My parents, who both misspent portions of their early twenties working at hotels in the Catskills - my mother playing the piano, my father waiting tables - used to cherish a Borscht Belt comedy record with the title When You're In Love, the Whole World is Jewish. As I read Buhle's lengthy anatomy of the Jewish contribution to American popular culture, I could not help thinking that he would have done better if, like the artists on that album, he had seasoned his ethnic musings with a few jokes.

D D Guttenplan is the London correspondent of the Nation

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