Joseph H. Udelson

Television was first successfully demonstrated in 1925; and in 1941 the Federal Communications Commission authorized commercial telecasting in the United States. During the intervening sixteen years the technology of television had been revolutionized, and there had been created an integrated television system. These developments were accomplished amid intense engineering and corporate rivalries of international scope. The result of this competition was the formation of the American television industry composed of three distinct systems: the engineering, the programming, and the promotional. The industry had already reached maturity by the eve of the Second World War, and only the world-wide wartime disruptions prevented its immediate marketing.

Udelson provides a trenchant analysis of Zangwill's works set within a historical context, i.e., Jewish emancipation and the dilemma of how one might remain fully Jewish while becoming fully modern.