The Jewish Americans
PBS, January 9, 16, 23
The Jewish Americans
By Beth S. Wenger
Doubleday, 388 pages,$40.
About halfway through the first installment of David Grubin’s three-part documentary “The Jewish Americans,” a voice-over reads an 1862 letter from a northern Jewish officer, one Marcus Spiegel. In it, Spiegel explains to his wife why it is that he is willing to fight, perhaps die, for the Union. The letter is loaded with pathos, because Spiegel was subsequently killed in an ambush in Louisiana. This short sequence is an obvious echo of one of the most famous moments in one of the most famous PBS documentaries, Ken Burns’s “The Civil War.” There, over a painfully haunting fiddle tune we hear a similarly haunting letter from another union soldier this one destined to die at Bull Run. Grubin’s nod to Burns expresses, in miniature, the central message of “The Jewish Americans”: We Jews have been here from the start. We have loved America as much as anyone. In the face of discrimination, we have prevailed.
This is inspiring, but hardly new. Be that as it may, Grubin, who produced and directed “The Jewish Americans,” and Beth Wenger, who wrote the fine companion volume, tell the familiar story well and with admirable speed. They cover both an impressive number of Jewish achievements and a wide swath of anti-Jewish feeling. Using a mixture of archival footage, photographs and a number of contemporary interviews, the TV show touches on all the old standbys of Jewish American history. They’re all represented here: The early peddlers, Judah Benjamin, Justice Brandeis, Yiddish theater, Bess Myerson, the Borscht Belt, not to mention Leo Frank, the Rosenbergs, Father Coughlin and Henry Ford. In a rich, unsentimental account of the Lower East Side, there is a section on the Forverts and its pioneering editor, Abraham Cahan, nicely punctuated by the comments of JJ Goldberg, the English-language paper’s current editorial director. This evocation of the period of the great immigration is studded with unexpected pleasures such as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’s tribute to his grandfather, the great Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky, and praise from “Dear Abby” for Cahan’s famous column, “The Bintel Brief.” (“He was a poet,” she says. “Me, I’m just an advice columnist.”)
According to “The Jewish Americans,” dos goldene land has lived up to its promise. But the series also contains a rueful subplot; it indicates that Jewish success in America has led Jews away from di goldene keyt, the golden chain of Jewish religious tradition. Accordingly, the last half-hour of the final installment is devoted to contemporary Jews’ attempts to re-create that tradition. As one of the interviewees says, his father went to synagogue because he was a Jew. His grandchildren go to synagogue in order to become Jews. It is a good point, nicely turned and brings the series to an appropriate end.
Perhaps it is too easy to complain about omissions in a documentary that spans three centuries in just less than six hours. Nevertheless, some things do stand out. Because Grubin — and to a lesser extent, Wenger — concentrates on those critical moments when Jews entered (and conquered) domains of American life that had previously been denied them, they tend to ignore what happened afterward. While a nice segment of the documentary is devoted to Irving Berlin, no mention is made of Rodgers and Hammerstein, let alone Stephen Sondheim. Sure, Thomashefsky was great, but Dustin Hoffman has arguably been more important to the history of Jewish Americans. He is the Bess Myerson of Hollywood, the first Jewish actor to be allowed to look like a Jew while keeping his obviously Jewish name.
It is also odd that the series refuses to mention Jews’ contributions to high culture. Although the entrance requirements to the arts are awfully tough and the gatekeepers particularly fierce, Jews have made a considerable mark on “serious” music, painting, literature and dance. Those iconic anthems of Americanism, “Appalachian Spring” and “Fanfare for Common Man,” were written by a gay Jewish communist from the Bronx, Aaron Copland. Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize. (To be fair, he does appear in Wenger’s volume. But he’s the only one.) Lincoln Kirstein founded the American Ballet, and, after Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko is probably the most famous of the Abstract Expressionists. These were no small feats.
But in the end, such details are only details, and there is a broader and simpler question to raise about “The Jewish Americans”: Do we need to hear this particular version of our story yet again? My parents’ generation could be justly proud of how far Jews have come. Victims of overt and covert forms of Jew hatred, they could be justly worried about antisemitism. I know a number of people in my middle-aged cohort and younger who are both proud and worried, but not in the same way and not to the same degree. They live and experience Judaism quite differently. Children of successful assimilation, they are trying to go somewhere beyond or, rather, behind it.
Judaism, as we all know, is unique in the United States in that it is both a religion and an ethnicity. The process of Americanization has produced great things, both for us and for America. Nevertheless, it has been won at some cost. And according to “The Jewish Americans,” it is religion that has paid the price. True enough, many of us have allowed our religious practice to dwindle and our faith to lose its urgency. By the same token, we have permitted our sense of cultural particularity to dwindle as well.
People often complain that Judaism as a religion has been reduced to bagels, lox and Zionism. The same is true of our ethnic identifications and their expressions, in no small part because the complicated and sometimes painful process of Americanization has as much to do with the terms of inclusion as it does with acts of exclusion. We have won a good number of our victories here by voluntarily shouldering what one sociologist has called the burden of American “civility.”
While “The Jewish Americans” charts the recent resurgence of American Jewish practice and spirituality, it neglects the equally recent movement to recover the wealth of an earlier Yiddishkeit. Like the “return to religion” and like “Judaism by choice,” the rediscovery of the mixed, rough-and-tumble culture of our grandparents and great-grandparents signals a renewed sense of the difference that Judaism makes. To understand where so many Jews in the United States now live both spiritually and ethnically, we should not merely retell the history of Jews who are Americans — we should also tell the story of Americans who are Jews.
David Kaufmann is a cultural critic for the Forward.
I'm very impressed to read in the Forward a criticism of the Jewish experience in America. Yes, the process of Americanization has dwindled the sense of cultural particularity. Most obviously, the American Jewish experience, in opposition to the many centuries of Jewish life before immigration to the USA (and in opposition to Jewish life in Israel), does not express itself in its own language. Any attempt to reassert Jewish particularity or Jewish cultural creativity without first recovering the historic Diasporic bilingualism is doomed to failure. Jews who for generations speak only American English are destined to be a community whose Jewish identity will be secondary at best - but more likely it will be a marginal Jewish identity.
I found it generally a very compelling series, given the limitations of 6 hours, and for, very timely, since I have just published a book covering many if the same issues from the vantage point of one American "shtetl", Brownsville. It is entitled Brownsville: The Jewish Years and is available via amazon or through me.
1/ Dustin Hoffman was the first Jewish actor allowed to look Jewish and keep a Jewish name? What about Eddie Cantor? 2/ According to the series: a/ all Jewish Americans have always been Ashkenazi (except Judah Benjamin) b/ Jewish Americans only live in New York with the exception of a few Southerners and the Hollywoood moguls. c/ Jews belong to either the Orthodox or the Reconstructionist movement-no other seem to have been named. d/ Jews have been Communists but never Republican.
Irving Berlin but no Gershwin brothers? Judah P. Benjamin but no Rabbi David Einhorn, who preached an anti-slavery sermon in slave state Baltimore, MD? No Emma Lazarus? These are only a few of the important omissions. I was totally disappointed.
I wasn't completely disappointed with this series--in fact, I enjoyed watching it--but I was concerned that the distinguished Jewish academics profiled fell so easily in lock-step with the boosters and cheerleaders for the monotonal/monochromatic story of Jewish success. Without reading the subtitles identifying speakers, one would be hard pressed to distinguish a Jewish historian from a director of Hadassah in this series. Such are the critiques that a Jewish viewer could make for this series. It surprises me, however, that both David Kaufmann and many of the commentators on this blog have overlooked how genuinely educational this series was for non-Jews curious to learn more about Jewish Americans. I participate in an e-mail list of alumni from a summer program headquartered in Lake Charles, LA--home, by the way, of one of the outstanding voices of the documentary, Tony Kushner (an alum of the same summer program!). Very few Jews have attended this program, quite obviously. (And of the Jews who did, it's worth pointing out that not one of them owned slaves or served as treasurer of the Confederacy....) Many of the people participating on the e-mail list commented on how much they learned and how much they enjoyed watching the series. Instead of taking this as an opportunity either to look in the mirror, or to complain that our particular portrait isn't represented there (where are the Jewish Republicans, indeed!) I think one should credit the series with providing a neat and entertaining narrative for viewers for whom these stories aren't "old hat." That, it would appear to me, is what educational television is all about.
Marc makes a good point. While I was watching, I wondered how many non-Jews would actually watch it. And I wondered how user-friendly it would be to non-Jews, especially in the opening shots where you see a scholar rocking back and forth while he studies, women lightling shabbos candles and making what would appear to a non-Jew to be weird hand gestures and the like. I couldn't tell who the show actually was aiming at, although as it moved on, it stressed how Jews were like other Americans, not unlike them. (That is, until the end, when religion came back into the picture.) I'm glad that Marc's experience shows that I was wrong.
Happy to oblige, Shalom. Zol zayn sholem. Shabbat Shalom.
Hammerstein? What about Gershwin? Actually, I thought the last part especially was much too New York-centric. When we arrived in Los Angeles in 1951 from Chicago, there were no New York Jews there. In our apartment building (NOT a suburban home) there were Jews from Canada and the Mid-West. (New Yorkers started arriving in force only after the public school controversy so ably depicted in the film.) Even a doctor and his family started out in an LA apartment, not a suburban villa. But then no one had a color movie camera in that neighborhood in the early 50's, which might explain why flowery suburban streets were over-represented in the documentary.
Dave is right to call me on my comment about Dustin Hoffman. I should have written something like: "He is the Bess Myerson of Hollywood, the first serious Jewish actor who hadn't previously been a song-and-dance man, the first to be allowed to look Jewish and keep his own, obviously Jewish name." I had in mind the studio executive pitching THE GRADUATE who showed a slide of Hoffman and said (if I remember), "Gentlemen, this is the face of the future." I have always assumed that he did not just mean that Hoffman was going to be a household name, but also that dramatic, obviously ethnic actors with obviously ethnic names, serious actors who were not originally famous as something else, could be/would be genuine stars. Julius Garfinkle had to become John Garfield, Emanuel Goldenberg had to become Edward G Robinson, etc. Even Israel Iskowitz/Kantrowitz changed his name, in part because of his wife (that's the Eddie part) but also for professional reasons (that's the Cantor part). od
As a non-Jewish watcher of this documentary, I would just like to say that I was absolutely riveted. I like to consider myself a well-read and cultured person and having grown up not far from New York City, I am certainly not unfamiliar with the culture and religion of Judaism. Yet I still learned a great deal - they never teach you in school that Henry Ford was a raving anti-Semite! My one complaint is that it was ONLY 6 hours long - I would gladly have watched 6 more hours.
I think it is interesting to consider that the purpose of the series was to entertain and interest, primarily, and perhaps only secondarily to educate. You don't draw in viewers with details, you draw them in with music, interesting filming techniques, and satisfying narratives of struggle and triumph, and of happily ever after. You raise a good question - do we need to hear this narrative yet again? I wonder how many of the viewers have heard this narrative before - from their families, from their religious schools, etc. As a fifth grade student, I remember reading a textbook in Sunday School that was devoted to this triumphal narrative of American success - and the television series presented the same information in the same manner in which it was presented to my 10-year-old class. I would think that viewers are ready for and capable of experiencing a more nuanced approach - but given the need for it to be, above all, entertaining, perhaps these hopes are too high.
For those looking for a daily dose of Jewish history including how events in the secular world impacted the Jewish people you might want to see This Day...In Jewish History http://ThisDayIn JewishHistory.blogspot.com
What timing? This excellent series hit the air just as my book on a tiny corner of Jewish America, Brownsville: The Jewish Years (amazon.com) . I dealt with the 40's and 50's in Brooklyn's Brownsville ghetto in some of the eventful times in American Jewish history. I felt the series covered a meaningful swath of the Jewish experience, including the all-important role Jews played in labor, the role of the forward (thanks JJ Goldberg). It was wonderful.
The program was definitely written from the non-religious Jewish point of view, embracing "the gay community" and "women Rabbis" (something which Judaism clearly stands against) and ignoring religious Jews and their work in preserving Judaism among the Jewish masses. Naturally, this program was not an all-rounded view of Judaism or American Jewish history.
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