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

“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 Bruce’s observation that it had become “cool” to be Jewish, Kaufman states that it is an open question as “to what degree Bruce served as a catalyst for the historic change he observed.” He traces the “jewhooing” of Bruce through the 70s, 80s, and 90s and shows Bruce influencing a generation of comedians and foreshadowing the rebellious ethos of the Sixties. Though Bruce’s successes were ambivalent and short-lived, and his relationship to his Jewishness was complicated and transgressive, the Jewish content of his work was obvious and overt.

Not so with Bob Dylan. In 1963, Andrea Svedberg's now infamousNewsweek article outed Dylan: rather than the angsty, bohemian, Woody Guthrie-like character he had constructed, Bob Dylan was found to be Robert Zimmerman, who came from a nice, middle-class Jewish family from Minnesota. Yet, Dylan continued to eschew his Jewish name and his heritage, even famously converting to Christianity in 1979.[4] Kaufman underlines Dylan’s consistency in this regard, and his fierce determination for “the individualist’s right to define himself outside of categories imposed by others.”[5] However, despite this desire, there remained “the extraordinary urge of others to see him as a Jew” (p. 210). While this fits into Kaufman’s narrative of celebrity as it is received, it is difficult to see how Dylan’s complete rejection of his Jewishness fits into the larger framework of his argument. Dylan was “read” as a Jew by many in the American public, in spite of his self- identification. Kaufman seems to want to push beyond reception and discover if Dylan was “really” a Jew. In fact, it seems as if Kaufman does not buy the idea that Dylan did not “really” identify as a Jew. While noting that Dylan has consistently avoided any overt affirmation of his ethnic origins, Kaufman speculates that “as far as we know, [Dylan] may very well continue to think of himself as a Jew” (p. 160). And again, that “it is entirely possible that Bob himself continued to feel Jewish within” (p 164). In the introduction, Kaufman explains that he would gladly interview the subjects “if offered” but that “the figures themselves would have little to say to inform my inquiry into the culture of celebrity surrounding them” (p. xxii). Nevertheless, Kaufman speculates about a subjectivity that is either unknowable, or else is something he could have asked Dylan himself.[6] He does effectively analyze the reception of Dylan by Jews—their pride in his accomplishments and their hurt when he converted to Christianity—which mirrors the complexity and contradictions inherent in American Jewish identities of this period. Kaufman admits that the question of whether Dylan’s work contains meaningful Jewishness remains open, as does the question of whether he’d count as a “Jewish Hero”

(p. 211). Given such inconclusiveness, this chapter is the weakest link in Kaufman’s argument, but then again, the book would likely have felt incomplete if Dylan had been left out.

Barbra Streisand, on the other hand, is an unequivocal Jewish hero (like Koufax) whose work included overt Jewish content (like Bruce). Her rise to celebrity was meteoric, and her Jewishness identity unapologetic. Streisand can switch her ethnic persona off and on at will, employing a “Jewface” that is instrumental, and an identity which she deploys with comedic and/or dramatic purpose. He writes that for her, “Jewishness ... is an essential part of self, intrinsic and permanent, and at the same time, is a constructed identity that can be deconstructed, a mask that can be taken off, an identity that one may escape” (p. 232, italics original). Streisand was both sex symbol and ugly duckling—“Marilyn Monroe meets Groucho Marx”—and was a second-wave “feminist before the feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s” (p. 249). Kaufman leans on Camille Paglia’s analysis of Streisand’s sexuality and politics, seeing in her (and hearing in her very diction) a Jewish radicalism stretching back to the 1930s. Her longstanding “gay appeal,” and the troubling of gender when her character passed as a man in the film Yentl (Paglia, cited by Kaufman, would contrast her “male” empowerment verses her “female” emotionalism) show Streisand crossing boundaries other than ethnic. Kaufman does not delve into to controversy surrounding the unsubstantiated rumor that Koufax is gay, nor how Bruce reported he was feeling “attracted physically to a few of the fellows” to get out of the U.S. Navy.[7] Since the issue of Koufax’s sexuality is not explored, and neither is Bruce’s naval discharge, Streisand must carry most of the queer freight.[8] As the only woman of this group, Streisand functions as both cultural and gender symbol, possessing multiple identities that are thus more challenging to untangle. Are the descriptions of her as “kooky,” “offbeat,” and “nutty” simply codes for “Jew” (as Kaufman suggests) or might they also have gendered or other meanings? A conversation with gender and queer theory literatures might have been interesting here. All in all, tackling Streisand’s contribution to this narrative and her demi-mythic career in a single chapter is a tall order, and Kaufman does a fine job of it.

Kaufman’s examination of the cultural construction of Jewishness in the latter half of the twentieth century and intersection between popular celebrity and Jewish identity is well done. He deftly shows how Koufax, Bruce, Dylan, and Streisand both reflect and embody the tension between success in American assimilation and the maintenance of ethnic distinctiveness. Kaufman demonstrates how the early 1960s was “a time when American Jews began to feel more Jewish, but it was also a time when they more fully entered into their identities as Americans” (p. 264). The four figures he profiles are illustrative of the complexity and fluidity of Jewish identity formation in this era. With respect to his thesis about the special significance of the early 1960s and pre-1967 Jewish identity formation, his argument might have been strengthened by engaging with more of the relevant literature, perhaps Hasia Diner’s We Remember with Reverence and Love. Diner argues that the broader possibilities for “counterculture Jews” were made by the cultural work of the postwar Jewish generation, and that the veterans of the Jewish counterculture of the 1960s “accepted a particular and very flawed version of the postwar era.”[9] A conversation with Diner or other such literature may have sharpened Kaufman’s argument in that respect. All in all, Jewhooing the Sixties is a welcome addition to the field and a useful resource in celebrity and Jewish studies.

Notes

[1]. There are no new interviews with the subjects, and Kaufman asserts that “the figures themselves

[2]. p. 266, quoted in Susan A. Glenn, “In the Blood? Consent, Descent, and the Ironies of Jewish Identity,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 2 (2002): 139–152, doi:10.1353/jss.2002.0006.

[3]. “Let Me Explain Jewish and Goyishe To You,” LP, Live At The Curran Theater, Fantasy Records (1971); see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD6Oi2kySSU.

[4]. In 1984, Dylan self-identified as a Bible-believing Christian: Kurt Loder, “Bob Dylan, Recovering Christian,” Rolling Stone(June 21, 1984), http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-recovering-christian-19840621, accessed November 24, 2013.

[5]. For more on this idea, see David A Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

[6]. To be fair, Bob Dylan may be one of the most secretive and elusive persons in the entire rock-and- roll substructure. However, he has given interviews recently. See Mikal Gilmore, “Bob Dylan Unleashed: A Wild Ride on His New LP and Striking Back at Critics,” Rolling Stone (September 27, 2012), http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bob-dylan-unleashed-a-wild-ride-on-his-new-lp-and-striking-b ack-at-critics-20120927, accessed February 21, 2014.

[7]. Lenny Bruce to W. F. Fitzgerald, commanding officer of U.S.S. Brooklyn, May, 24, 1945, available at http://i.cdn.turner.com/dr/teg/tsg/release/sites/default/files/imagecache/750x970/document...(accesse d December 12, 2013).

[8]. In 2003, Koufax severed ties with the Dodgers after the New York Post, a News Corp. publication, intimated in a gossip column that Koufax cooperated with author Jane Leavy on a biography because she agreed not to reveal he was homosexual. Koufax returned to the Dodger organization in 2004, when the Dodgers were sold to Frank McCourt. After serving thirty months on theU.S.S. Brooklyn during World War II, Bruce went to the sick bay in May 1945 to report that he was “feeling a little gay.” He had numerous obscenity charges during his career as a comic.

[9]. Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 389.

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Citation: Tim Ruckle. Review of David E. Kaufman, Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity. H-1960s, H-Net Reviews. June, URL:2014. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38840

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