TO BE A JEW in twentieth-century America was to be an outsider. We Jews gathered in temples and schools, we bought properties, physical and intellectual, to maintain control of our environments. We formed our own magazines. We exploited ourselves and others. Ashkenazi Jews can pass as non-Jewish when it suits us, or Jewish again when we wish to be “chosen.” And when blame is to be assigned, or walls erected, we can once again pass or not pass depending on the ideological needs of the times. The tension inherent in assimilation and rejection, donning and discarding a mask, is at the center of Philip (Goldstein) Guston’s work. It also accounts for some of the resentment, bitterness, and neuroticism embedded in so much twentieth-century art and entertainment. Guston lives in this tradition with Joan (Molinsky) Rivers, Saul Bellow, Rodney (Jacob Cohen) Dangerfield, Aline Kominsky-Crumb,

>"TO BE A JEW in twentieth-century America was to be an outsider. We Jews gathered in temples and schools, we bought properties, physical and intellectual, to maintain control of our environments. We formed our own magazines. We exploited ourselves and others. Ashkenazi Jews can pass as non-Jewish when it suits us, or Jewish again when we wish to be “chosen.” And when blame is to be assigned, or walls erected, we can once again pass or not pass depending on the ideological needs of the times. The tension inherent in assimilation and rejection, donning and discarding a mask, is at the center of"