What I Learned from My New Book

By PAUL BUHLE

Ask a large group of American Jews, "What institution or event do you most identify as the source of self-identity?" and I bet the answer would be neither the synagogue, nor the Jewish State… but the Jewish Film Festival.

My opinion is informed by a specific experience. As co-curator the 2005 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, I witnessed a substantial cross-section of Jews—old and young, female and male, gay and straight—turn out for eight days of films and discussion. But pop culture substantially shaped by Jewish Americans is more than a source of pride. It is also a message that gets broadly disseminated outside of the U.S. (This helps explain why, as my Jewish students at Brown regularly report on their “year abroad,” their new, non-American friends seem to love our popular culture as much as they dislike our foreign policy.)

The history of Jews and pop-culture is surprisingly broad. Parts are still being explored—and re-explored—by scholars. Thus, Jews and American Popular Culture, a 1,000-plus page, three-volume series I recently edited, contained many revelations to me, on subjects as varied as Jewish women in amateur sports and the Jewish role in the Olympics. The most innovative essays were for the most part written by young scholars on under-explored subjects. I learned new facts about Young Adult literature, advice columns, comic strips, klezmer; animated films, boxing, talk radio, rock and roll; pulp literature, Yiddish radio, and even, sad to say, pornography.

Which is not to discount more familiar areas of study: popular adult literature, Yiddish theater, film musicals, vaudeville, Broadway, stand-up comedy, department stories, or for that matter, crime. But even with these, younger scholars are looking at things differently, from the way they use archival material to the way that they see images of comics or physical nudity. Feminist and queer scholarship have played important roles here, but so have wider access to information on the internet, the opening of film studio archives, the extensive use of oral history among older generations of Jewish entertainers and entertainment entrepreneurs… and so on.

“What’s Jewish about it?” Such is the inevitable and entirely appropriate question. To say that Jewish Americans created it, shaped it, even sold it to willing consumers is insufficient. To say that they put some of themselves into it has been true from the first days of American cinema and the Hollywood moguls. The crucial issue is the degree to which it defined what was “Jewish” about Jewish-Americans, not only for the domestic (gentile or Jewish) audience but for a world-wide following.

The students in my current seminar, “Jewish Americans and the Hollywood Film,” pose and debate these questions each week. There is no one answer. But the active presence of creative Jewish Americans in each phase of cinema history, from Al Jolson and John Garfield to Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and even Adam Sandler, supplies a vital clue. In creating popular culture, Jewish Americans seek to create a society, not just a national but world culture, in which they could live and create as equals. No small aspiration.

So what do 54 scholars, from klezmer savant Henry Sapoznik to documentary filmmaker Aviva Kempner, have to offer today’s Jewish readers? What do we now know about Yiddish-language radio, the fiction in the old Yiddish Forward, and Borsht Belt economics that we didn’t know before? What more do we need to learn in order to grasp the importance of the subject for the future of a secular Jewish-American self-identity? The questions are intriguing, and the scholarship now being done—in new ways, on new subjects—will bring us closer to the answers.