Ruckle on David E. Kaufman, 'Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity'

H-1960s Ruckle on David E. Kaufman, 'Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity' Review published on Thursday, June 19, 2014 David E. Kaufman. Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life. Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2012. 360 pp. $40.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-61168-314-1; $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-61168-313-4. Reviewed by Tim Ruckle Published on H-1960s (June, 2014) Commissioned by Zachary Lechner Naming and Claiming: The Construction of Jewish Identity and Celebrity in the 1960s United States David E. Kaufman’s Jewhooing the Sixties is an in-depth examination of Jews and Jewish identity in American popular culture, focusing especially on the first half of the 1960s. Kaufman posits a tension between American Jews achieving success, or assimilation, and their maintaining ethnic distinctiveness. He argues that this dichotomy is resolved by, and also illustrative of, Jewish celebrity consciousness. Kaufman illustrates how the synthesis of Jewish celebrity and Jewish identity at this historical moment (i.e., the early 1960s) demonstrated a signature tension between the increasing integration by, and complex identities of, American Jews. That is, “Jews, despite broad participation in American life, nonetheless remain distinctive, even exceptional, and thus standapart from America” (p. 2, italics original). The central theme of Kaufman’s book is thus the interrelationship—a mutually constitutive relationship--between Jews and celebrity in America. Using this prism for his theoretical model, Kaufman refracts the case studies of four very different Jewish celebrities onto the screen of American pop culture in the early 1960s. Kaufman chooses four paragons of Jewish fame— the baseball player Sandy Koufax, the comedian Lenny Bruce, the singer- songwriter Bob Dylan, and actress and singer Barbra Streisand—as the subjects for each chapter- length treatment. Despite their differences, all four attained extraordinary fame in the early 1960s. Kaufman contends that this was a signature moment when “celebrity played a significant role in both American and Jewish historical development” (p. 5). He believes this pivot point has been overshadowed in the historiography in favor of the post-1967 period which followed the Six Days War. That is, his intervention re-periodizes an efflorescence of American Jewish cultural pride, and the genesis of this new consciousness, earlier in the decade. Kaufman says the title of the book is multivocal, and includes the idea of “the Jewishness of the Sixties” (p. 6, italics original). Thus the book, as a whole, posits a trialectic logic, tracing the interconnectedness of “American celebrity, Jewish identity, and the early 1960s” (p. 6). This timing was historically conditioned by the magnification of celebrity in this period (brought by changes in media technology), the increase in Jewish social success, and a more capacious acceptance by gentiles of Jews qua Jews and the public expression of Jewishness. Kaufman’s method is primarily synthetic, analyzing the voluminous literature on the subjects and treating it from the perspective of American Jewish history.[1] Kaufman borrows the term “jewhoo,” which refers to the inventorying or “naming and claiming” of Jewish celebrities, from Susan Glenn, Citation: H-Net Reviews. Ruckle on David E. Kaufman, 'Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity'. H-1960s. 06-19-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19474/reviews/32293/ruckle-david-e-kaufman-jewhooing-sixties-american-celebrity-and-jewish Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-1960s who herself discovered it at a now moribund website used for that purpose.[2] Implicit in his project is the historical salience of celebrity, and Kaufman locates his work not only in Jewish studies and American history, but also in celebrity studies, particularly the literature on the reception of celebrity. He notes there are a disproportionate number of Jews in the entertainment industry, and at the same time suggests that celebrity itself is analogous to the Jewish experience. In short, Kaufman argues that “celebrity has a certain ‘Jewish’ quality” and that celebrities are essentially “outsiders who have made good” much like American Jews in the twentieth century (p. 12). Though some Jews had previously achieved notoriety in American culture, Kaufman nominates the early 1960s as a critical moment when “both Jewish social success and the public expression of Jewishness” occurred (p. 43, italics original). While noting that all groups celebrate ethnic pride in the achievements of their famous members, Kaufman argues that the Jewish community is particularly prone to this sort of naming and claiming. This practice includes both the process of double coding, where a celebrity might be easily read as Jewish to their co-ethnics but not coded as such by the general public, as well as the practice of “outing” celebrities who had passed as gentiles and purposely elided their Jewish roots or ancestry (p. 266). Kaufman acknowledges that there are many definitions and beliefs about Jewish identity but prefers one that is constructed rather than immutable, and thus is “fragmented, conditional, and changeable” (p. 28). The aim of his book, then, is to assist our understandings of American Jewish identities, particularly as they were being constructed in the early 1960s, by focusing them through the theoretical lens of celebrity. The four celebrities that Kaufman uses to illustrate the complexity and fluidity of Jewish identity formation in the early 1960s—Koufax, Bruce, Dylan, and Streisand—represent archetypes, which Kaufman calls the “Super Jew”, the “Dirty Jew”, the “Wandering” (more accurately, the reluctant and reclaimed) Jew, and the “Hollywood” (or ethnically proud) Jew. The author’s narratives of these celebrities do the heavy lifting in his analysis as the “key texts” for this period of American Jewish life and popular culture. Baseball fans and teammates referred to Sandy Koufax as a “super Jew” for his success on the baseball diamond, yet he achieved nearly as much notoriety for famously refusing to pitch on Yom Kippur. Kaufman historicizes Koufax’s contributions to baseball and American culture in contrast to fellow Jew “Hammerin’” Hank Greenberg’s earlier heroics of the 1930s and does a fine job exploding myths about the pitcher as well as illuminating the tensions between the construction of Jewish masculinities and Koufax’s alleged intellectual approach to the game. Despite his 100-mile-per-hour fastball and loyalty to his teammates, Koufax still labored under accusations that he was effete and aloof and didn’t really enjoy baseball. It is significant that Koufax maintained his Jewish otherness while excelling at the most American of pastimes, baseball. This was an arena less open to Jews than show business. Koufax’s dual identities as both a “nice Jewish boy” and a masculine athlete encapsulated the tensions and complexities of Jewish identity on the national level. Ironically, Koufax, a secular Jew, was “idolized by other Jews for his casually inadvertent observance of a religious holiday” (p. 45). While not especially religious, Koufax nonetheless respected the traditions of Yom Kippur and refrained from work on that High Holy Day. Koufax’s narrative differs from the other subjects in the book, as his fame came in sports, where Jews excelled less frequently than in other entertainments and where successes like Greenberg had been the exceptions that proved the rule. Kaufman argues that Koufax exploded the popular stereotype of the Jewish male, who was seen as Citation: H-Net Reviews. Ruckle on David E. Kaufman, 'Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity'. H-1960s. 06-19-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19474/reviews/32293/ruckle-david-e-kaufman-jewhooing-sixties-american-celebrity-and-jewish Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-1960s “weak and uncoordinated rather than strong and athletic, emotive and neurotic rather than reserved and controlled” (p. 71). If Koufax was respectful, Lenny Bruce was the bad or “dirty Jew,” who troubled many of his co- ethnics by his use of Yiddish in public, his off-color comedy, and his outspoken social criticism. His unconventional private life (he married an ex-convict, non-Jewish stripper, for one) and ambivalent Jewishness also contributed to this negative image. Bruce’s polemical tirades against polite society, religious contradictions, and middle-class respectability made him an undesirable representative for mainstream Jews. His downward spiral into drug addiction, which ultimate took his life in 1966, and his numerous legal troubles reinforced the notion that Bruce was beyond the pale of polite society. And yet, Kaufman demonstrates how Bruce was the jester whose comedic routines brilliantly illuminated the complexities of Jewish identity, none more so than his “Jewish of Goyish” routine.[3] This “legendary deconstruction of modern Jewish identity” was his magnum opus (p. 99). Bruce’s use of “Jewface,” or the performance of Jewishness, in service of his comedy and his ethnic deconstruction, often both played on and subverted Jewish stereotypes (p. 125). Bruce’s Yiddish idioms would have been particularly salient to many Jewish viewers, but his comedy spoke to a much larger audience. While noting

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