Sonic Miscegenation in the Jewish-Irish Marriage Plot

This essay explores how the Jewish-Irish marriage plot disrupts essentialist frameworks of social recognition through what I term “sonic miscegenation.” Focusing on Anne Nichols’s theatrical drama and novel Abie’s Irish Rose (1922/1927) alongside contemporaneous ragtime songs, I demonstrate how these works establish both romantic and sonic correspondences to undermine the presumed knowability of their stock characters. I suggest that the Jewish-Irish marriage plot dramatizes not only a romantic union of two ethnic “types” but also cross-cultural sonic amalgamations that liberate social identity from rigid typification. I contextualize sound as a central trope in melting-pot-era debates on Americanization, focusing on Horace Kallen’s orchestra metaphor in which he assigns inborn “timbre and tonality” to different ethnic groups. I then suggest that the Jewish-Irish marriage plot repurposes this metaphor, shifting focus from performing instruments to the act of listening itself. Through strategies like offstage wedding ceremonies, heard but unseen, characters who “pass” by manipulating names, and couples who use technology to enact each other’s cultural melodies, these works create reciprocal sonic resonances that undermine biological notions of ethnic difference. These acoustic intertwinements reimagine cultural belonging as porous and accumulative, challenging the figurative confinement of the self to a discrete musical instrument.