[These days, flourishing popular culture studies unearths more
heavily-Jewish subjects long buried away. Along with them, the old
divisions of Right and Left within Jewish American life seem to be on
display once more.]
[[link removed]]

JEWS AND AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE AGAIN, UNDER STRESS  
[[link removed]]


 

Paul Buhle
November 28, 2023
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ These days, flourishing popular culture studies unearths more
heavily-Jewish subjects long buried away. Along with them, the old
divisions of Right and Left within Jewish American life seem to be on
display once more. _

,

 

Fran Drescher, Jewish union militant, forceful anti-capitalist in her
own Hollywood world, even maybe a socialist. No one like her at the
head of the Screen Actors Guild (now SAG-AFTRA) since Ed Asner, but
with a Queens somehow-yiddish accent and body language, she brings
back memories of garment union strikes more than a century ago. Other
Jewish union leaders and activists are not hard to find these days,
nor cultural workers unembarrassed to take on the modern-day class
struggle. Collectively, they represent something bigger and more
complex than the issues seemingly at hand. 

These leaders and their activist cadre are, whether they know it or
not, the continuity part of a deep culture, a Jewish American popular
culture leaning Leftward toward a more egalitarian order. They are
also part of a resistance against the other, more respectable Jewish
leadership, the successful businessmen and philanthropists who
dominate the institutional world. Yesterday’s tenant versus a
landlord, garment worker against the sweatshop owner, even militant
young woman activist against a bureaucratic and sexist union
leadership, is today’s activist in labor, environment and peace. The
powerful naturally curse them, a curse that passes through the
generations, and the activists struggle to find their own voice across
the same generations. 

The struggle is often waged within popular culture, the one place
along with unions where the Jewish Left has made itself felt in the
US. Way back in 2007, the three volumes of essays that I had collected
and edited under the title of _Jews and American Popular Culture_,
the writings of some forty writers, enjoyed a send-off at the Center
for Jewish History in Manhattan. We had a fine, generationally diverse
crowd. A few rows behind me sat Richard Adler, the lyricist of
“Hernando’s Hideaway” from the pro-union musical “Pajama
Game.”Up on the stage, a handful of the contributors, mostly young
and female, leaped at the chance to describe a generational shift.
They were writing dissertations about subjects that no senior
professor would likely have approved even thirty years earlier: Jewish
cuisine and fashion innovators, Jewish women’s sports (there was a
lot of Jewish sports: good archives had been kept in Chicago and
elsewhere), nose jobs, the adult film industry, crime families and so
on. 

It was a pretty leftwing night in its own, definitely scholarly way,
setting off my own stream of memories as oral historian and radical
curiosity-seeker.  The Jewish impact on basketball (known during the
1920s-30s as a sport uniquely suited to strategy, tactics and hand-eye
coordination) recalled the famed CCNY coach who wrote sometimes for a
Popular Front youth magazine, as any reference to Barbra Streisand
brought back memories to _The Way We _Were. Or to the story of Joe
Louis chatting days before a big fight with Lester Rodney, the sports
editor of the _Daily Worke_r (and an interviewee of mine). Or to the
big Hollywood movies written by the hugely successful scriptwriters
who would go on the Blacklist in 1950 (I interviewed a few of them).
Or to Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson Woody Guthrie, three Gentiles who made
it big in Jewish popular culture. On that particular night, I headed
uptown to stay with a guy actually raised in the Borsht Belt, working
in his father’s semi-kosher bodega, meeting famed former boxer
Barney Ross and his pal, a former weight-lifter known in his prime as
“the Mighty Atom.”

Decades ago, even the discussion of  an obvious topic, “Jews and
Hollywood,” raised eyebrows. Even talking about it out loud, many
thought and a few oldtimers whispered to me when I lectured to old
timers in the 1980s, somehow encouraged antisemitism. Well into the
1960s, Jewish film and television stars, with few exceptions, had
adopted Gentile names, for mostly good reasons. Investigating
committees in the same New York courtroom of the early 1950s saw
(mostly) Jewish Communists and (mostly) Jewish publishers of comic
books, accused of promoting the same dangers, the subversions of
American society, especially of Christian youngsters among others who
did now know enough to resist.

These days, with the flourishing popular culture studies, new journals
and well-attended classes in such previously-improbable zones as comic
art,  unearth more heavily-Jewish subjects long buried away. Along
with them, the old divisions of Right and Left within Jewish American
life seem to be on display once more, with familiar tropes set deeply
in popular culture. Movie stars at the top of their profession join
leading business executives to warn against the twin dangers of
antiSemitism and of Jews disloyal to Israel. And once again, as
repeatedly for the generations since immigration,  educated Jewish
youngsters in particular seem triballly disloyal, while oldtimers,
furious and vindictive, seek to hand out punishments.

Within the misunderstood world of Jewish American culture we might
find some ways to look at the “Jewish Crisis” anew. Pushed aside
as new immigrants and Jews, the creators of music, movies, theater,
popular journalism had powerful lessons to offer, and they weren’t
all about personal success followed by philanthropy. The feeling of
“outsideness” offered a sense, inconsistent but real, of
identification with the other outsiders. In the fears for their
extended families left behind in Europe,  a vivid feeling of
resistance to the rise of race-based rightwing movements, and a
determination to find somehow the key to another, better world order.

_Paul Buhle is, most recently, coeditor of W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of
Black Folk: A Graphic Interpretation. He has been a historian of
labor and of Madison, Wisconsin’s political traditions. He recently
left Madison to return to Providence, Rhode Island._

Thanks to the author for submitting this to xxxxxx.

* Jewish Left
[[link removed]]
* Jewish Culture
[[link removed]]
* Popular Front
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]