[HANASHIR:14721] Jewish entertainers in America (long but interesting)

[rahel <rahel...>]

Hi Everyone,

I am not sure what the policy is on forwarding articles - but I am going to 
take the liberty to do so in this case because this one is so very apropos 
to our conversations of late. There is a lot of good information here and 
food for thought. Rahel

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>Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 08:21:02 +0200
>Subject: Fw: Jewish entertainers in America (long but interesting)
>
> > In an early episode of The Simpsons, Krusty the Clown is
> > invited to dinner and says grace in Hebrew. "He's talking
> > funny talk," says Homer. Lisa points out that Krusty is
> > Jewish. Homer is incredulous. "A Jewish entertainer?
> > Get out of here!" The whole programme turns out to be a
> > strange meditation on the history of Jewish entertainers
> > in the US. Bart and Lisa are trying to reunite Krusty
> > (real name Hershel Krustofsky) with his father, Rabbi Hyman
> > Krustofsky, who disowned Krusty when he gave up the rabbinate
> > to become a clown. "A musician or a jazz singer, this I could
> > forgive," the rabbi tells his son. "But a clown!"
> > This parody of The Jazz Singer is given a further twist
> > because Rabbi Krustofsky is played by comedian Jackie Mason,
> > who himself trained to be a rabbi.
> >
> > The history of Jewish entertainers in America, from The Jazz
> > Singer to The Simpsons, is examined in a major exhibition
> > at New York's Jewish Museum.
> > ("Entertaining America: Jews, Movies & Broadcasting", at the
> > Jewish Museum, New York, until September 14.)
> > At first glance, the story looks familiar enough:
> > the rise of Jewish entertainers from Lower East Side
> > slums to Hollywood. Most were descended from Jewish immigrants
> > from eastern Europe and Russia at the turn of the century,
> > including Harry Houdini - the son of a Hungarian rabbi -
> > Louis B Mayer, Al Jolson, the Warner brothers and the Marx
> > brothers. Sam Goldwyn was born Shmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw,
> > Irving Berlin was born Israel Baline in Russia, and Kirk
> > Douglas, real name Issur Danielovitch, was the son of Russian
> > immigrants.
> >
> > A hundred years later, Adam Sandler's career took off with
> > his performance of The Chanukah Song on Saturday Night Live,
> > and today hardly a top American TV show is without a Jewish
> > character, from Rachel in Friends to the Broflovskis in
> > South Park, from Toby Ziegler to Grace Adler.
> >
> > But as the exhibition makes clear, the story of Jewish
> > entertainers in the US is far from straightforward.
> > Instead of the rise from rags to riches of myth, the
> > real history is full of twists and turns, of silences
> > and disguises.
> >
> > Jewish entertainers disguised themselves in many ways.
> > Most obviously, they changed their names. David Kaminsky,
> > Joseph Levitch and Benny Kubelsky are hardly household
> > names. Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis and Jack Benny are.
> > The same goes for Edward Iskowitz (Eddie Cantor),
> > Nathan Birnbaum (George Burns) and Emanuel Goldenberg
> > (Edward G Robinson). Even a younger generation were forced
> > to Americanise: Leonard Schneider (Lenny Bruce) and
> > Melvin Kaminsky (Mel Brooks) broke through in the 1950s
> > and 60s, Roseanne Barsky (Barr) later still.
> >
> > They also changed their appearance, from the blackface
> > of Al Jolson to the greasepaint moustache of Groucho and
> > the curly light wig of Harpo. Sam Goldwyn was worried
> > that Danny Kaye looked "too Jewish", so the studio dyed
> > his red hair blond. Fanny Brice's nose job in 1923 was
> > well publicised, meriting no fewer than four items in
> > the New York Times, and prompting Dorothy Parker's line:
> > "Fanny Brice cut off her nose to spite her race."
> >
> > One of the most telling examples comes from 1950s TV
> > drama. Many of its pioneers were Jewish, most famously
> > Paddy Chayefsky. A contemporary of his, writer Ernest
> > Kinoy, recalls how in the days of live TV, "You'd come
> > into Studio One, or NBC, and Philco, and you'd tell them
> > this long story about this marvellous Italian family.
> > And they would say, 'It's too Jewish.' Because they knew
> > very well that it wasn't an Italian, but it was a Jewish
> > family. Paddy Chayefsky did it a number of times.
> > The Catered Affair is about an Irish family ... Marty,
> > the Italian butcher ... It was because a number of the
> > Jewish writers would come in with material, and the
> > networks would say, 'It's too Jewish. The rest of
> > America won't understand.' "
> >
> > Won't understand - or won't like? As the exhibition makes
> > clear, anti-semitism was never far away in the attacks
> > on Jewish Hollywood moguls in the 1920s, or in the radio
> > broadcasts of Father Coughlin, a popular radio personality
> > in the 1920s and 30s. In one of his most controversial
> > broadcasts, Coughlin criticised the disproportionate media
> > interest in Kristallnacht, insinuating undue Jewish influence
> > at work. He went on to speculate on the strange media silence
> > over the murder of "20 million Christians" by the Soviet
> > communist regime: "Why, then, was there this silence on
> > the radio and in the press? Ask the gentlemen who control
> > the three national radio chains; ask those who dominate the
> > destinies of the financially inspired press - surely these
> > Jewish gentlemen and others must have been ignorant of
> > the facts or they would have had a symposium in those dark
> > days."
> >
> > McCarthyism later revived an older discourse linking
> > Jews with communism, and six of the so-called Hollywood 10
> > (screenwriters, producers and directors held in contempt
> > of Congress for refusing to admit or deny communist affiliation)
> > were Jewish.
> >
> > Throughout the golden years of Hollywood, there were
> > plenty of reasons for Jews to play down their Jewishness
> > and promote their integration into the mainstream. An industry
> > run by Jewish moguls was notoriously quick to play down its
> > Jewishness, which never simply disappeared - how could it?
> > - but instead took on all manner of disguises.
> >
> > The story was just as complicated on television.
> > On the one hand, you had stand-up comedians like Milton
> > Berle, Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny and George Burns fronting
> > their own prime-time shows through the 1950s. Perhaps
> > the most famous example was Sid Caesar's Your Show of
> > Shows, whose writers included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks,
> > Larry Gelbart (best known now for M*A*S*H), Carl Reiner
> > and Neil Simon. On the other hand, although these stars
> > were Jewish, they could not be seen to be Jewish.
> >
> > According to Jeffrey Shandler, one of the exhibition's
> > curators, "Until the mid-1970s, explicitly Jewish characters
> > were seen in prime-time series only as comic foils or
> > as occasional guests." So, for example, Carl Reiner
> > (who won eight Emmy awards between 1956 and 67), who
> > based The Dick Van Dyke Show on his own experiences of
> > writing for Sid Caesar, had to take out the Jewishness.
> > Instead of Reiner and Caesar, the show had the
> > all-American Dick Van Dyke playing the Gentile lead,
> > Robert Petrie. You ended up with a strange kind of
> > cultural ventriloquism, with non-Jewish characters like
> > Marty and Petrie created by Jewish writers who wanted
> > to write about their own experiences but couldn't.
> >
> > As a result, many of the achievements of mid-20th-century
> > American popular culture now look as if they were
> > written in code. The films of the Marx brothers and
> > Billy Wilder, of course. Others are less likely.
> > Superman was created by two young Jews, Jerry Siegel
> > and Joe Schuster. The humorist Jules Feiffer sees
> > Superman as "the smart Jewish boy's American dream".
> > One minute the shlemiel in glasses, the next minute
> > Superman, all-American hero. "It wasn't Krypton that
> > Superman really came from," writes Feiffer, "it was
> > the planet Minsk."
> >
> > Or there's Philip Roth's take on White Christmas and
> > Easter Parade: "The two holidays that celebrate the
> > divinity of Christ - the divinity that's the very heart
> > of the Jewish rejection of Christianity - and what
> > does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them
> > both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas
> > into a holiday about snow."
> >
> > Superman, White Christmas and Paddy Chayefsky's Marty
> > all appeared between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s.
> > So too did Henry Popkin's article, The Vanishing Jew of
> > Our Popular Culture, examining "the great retreat",
> > the dramatic decline of Jewish representation in movies
> > and broadcasting on either side of the war.
> >
> > Then, in the 1960s, things started to change. Jews became
> > visible. In the 1960s the wigs, blackface and all-American
> > shtick gave way to Lenny Bruce, Dustin Hoffman and Woody
> > Allen. It was as if Clark Kent had stripped off his red
> > and blue costume and appeared, blinking in the sunlight,
> > with big nose, nerdy glasses and a foul but very funny
> > mouth.
> >
> > A number of factors were at work. America discovered the
> > Holocaust with the Eichmann trial and films such as
> > The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), Judgment at Nuremberg
> > (1961) and The Pawnbroker (1965). The Six-Day war and
> > the Yom Kippur war changed attitudes to Israel (and to
> > American Jews). There is the golden age of Jewish-American
> > writing: Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Bellow's Herzog (1964),
> > Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968) and Roth's
> > Portnoy's Complaint (1969).
> >
> > There was also a new generation of Jewish stand-up comedians,
> > who were more upfront about their Jewishness: Lenny Bruce,
> > Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer and Woody Allen. In an article
> > called The Yiddishization of American Humor, published
> > in Esquire in 1965, Wallace Markfield wrote:
> > "The Jewish style, with its heavy reliance upon Yiddish
> > and Yiddishisms, has emerged not only as a comic style,
> > but as the comic style."
> >
> > Finally, there was a cluster of films in the late 1960s
> > with a new generation of Jewish stars, who made no effort
> > to conceal their Jewishness: Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl,
> > Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. At the same time, Woody Allen
> > and Mel Brooks made their first films. Allen's wise-cracking
> > shlemiel and the in-your-face Jewishness of The Producers
> > ("Flaunt it, baby! Flaunt it!") had a huge impact on
> > the image of Jews in American culture. On Broadway,
> > Fiddler on the Roof ran from 1964-72, and through the
> > 1970s and 80s Neil Simon, Stephen Sondheim and David Mamet
> > created very different kinds of Jewish characters.
> > In almost every area of entertainment, American Jews had
> > joined the mainstream.
> >
> > Television, perhaps inevitably, caught on late. It wasn't
> > until the mid- to late 1970s that Jewish characters began
> > to appear on sitcoms: Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler
> > Moore Show, Alex Rieger in Taxi, Murray Klein in Archie
> > Bunker's Place. And, above all, there was Holocaust
> > (1978).
> >
> > It's not just a matter of ticking off Jewish characters
> > or issues as they appear on prime-time TV or in major
> > films. The point is that Jews were able to joke about
> > being Jewish, without code or disguise: the bits of
> > Yiddish in Blazing Saddles, the scene in Annie Hall
> > where Woody Allen imagines himself as Annie's Gentile
> > family see him - a Hasid with sideburns and a nose that
> > Olivier's Shylock would be proud of - and Billy Crystal
> > as the over-the-top Jewish witch in The Princess Bride.
> > All this paved the way later for Krusty the Clown saying
> > grace in Hebrew. American Jews, at last, were out of
> > the closet.
> >
> > Hence the joke when Homer says, "A Jewish entertainer?"
> > Lisa proceeds to reel off a list of Jewish entertainers,
> > including Lauren Bacall, Dinah Shore, William Shatner
> > and Mel Brooks. Homer looks at her in disbelief.
> > "Mel Brooks is Jewish?"
> > ----------
> > David Herman is a contributing editor for The Guardian (U.K.).
> >
> >

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