American Jewish Cultu|E

IN SEARCH OF AMERICAN JEWISH CULTU|E IN SEARCH OF AMERICAN JEWISH CULTU|E STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD Brandeis University Press published by university press of new england hanover and london Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755 © 1999 by Brandeis University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 54321 CIP data appear at the end of the book A portion of the chapter “Shoah” is from Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Volume VIII, A New Jewry? America since the Second World War, edited by Peter Y. Medding. Copyright © 1992 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc. Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life jonathan d. sarna, Editor sylvia barrack fishman, Associate Editor Leon A. Jick, 1992 The Americanization of the Synagogue, 1820–1870 Sylvia Barrack Fishman, editor, 1992 Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Jewish Fiction Gerald Tulchinsky, 1993 Taking Root: The Origins of the Canadian Jewish Community Shalom Goldman, editor, 1993 Hebrew and the Bible in America: The First Two Centuries Marshal Sklare, 1993 Observing America’s Jews Reena Sigman Friedman, 1994 These Are Our Children: Jewish Orphanages in the United States, 1880–1925 Alan Silverstein, 1994 Alternatives to Assimilation: The Response of Reform Judaism to American Culture, 1840–1930 Jack Wertheimer, editor, 1995 The American Synagogue: A Sanctuary Transformed Sylvia Barack Fishman, 1995 A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community Diane Matza, editor, 1996 Sephardic-American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy Joyce Antler, editor, 1997 Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture Jack Wertheimer, 1997 A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America Beth S. Wenger and Jeffrey Shandler, editors, 1998 Encounters with the “Holy Land”: Place, Past and Future in American Jewish Culture David Kaufman, 1998 Shul with a Pool: The “Synagogue-Center” in American Jewish History Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman, 1999 Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin, 1999 A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews Stephen J. WhitWeld, 1999 In Search of American Jewish Culture for my mother, who lives for others Contents Preface xi definitions 1 conditions 32 musical theater 59 music 88 theater 115 race 139 shoah 168 faith 197 prospects 224 Notes 249 Acknowledgments 295 Index of Names 297 ix Preface “The fact of Jewishness has been nothing but an ever-growing good to me,” the poet Delmore Schwartz wrote “with gratitude,” in the safety of the United States in 1944. This caprice of birth was central to his sensibility and was, indeed, “nothing but a fruitful and inexhaustible inheritance.”1 It deserves historical scrutiny; and a critical interpretation of American Jewish culture, as it has evolved over the twentieth century, is what this book is intended to provide. The questions it addresses are how a nation’s culture has differed because of the presence of Jews, and how they invented a dis- tinctive culture without the feeling of living in exile. The time is, if any- thing, overripe for a work that traces what their culture has meant to Jews and to other Americans. This volume purports to help meet that need, by suggesting the impact both of Jews on American culture and of America on Jewish culture. However notable the Jews’ contribution to art, thought, and expres- sion, this minority is very small. Genesis 22:17, which is read in the prayer book at every New Year, promises that the Hebrews will be as numerous as sand. This is a pledge the deity did not keep. Though more Jews have lived in twentieth-century America than anywhere else, they rarely have risen much above 3 percent of the population. Indeed, the Jewish role in Ameri- can life could easily have been ignored earlier. When the Constitution was ratiWed, Jewry constituted one-twentieth of 1 percent of the population, and as late as 1880 had risen to only half of 1 percent.2 For longer than the Wrst century of the republic, its history could be recounted without refer- ence to Jews. Occupying a penumbra, this minority was too peripheral to matter. Both as a percentage and in sheer numbers, American Jewry has been de- clining of late, a tendency that shows every sign of continuing. The twentieth century may therefore be regarded as special, a belle époque, a sublime peak in the history of Jewish involvement in a “host” society. In making themselves so smoothly and so decisively into Americans, Jews did not use tiny proportions as an alibi but have instead loomed large in the evolution of the nation’s culture. They “are amazing people. They are truly amazing” was how the most admired actor of the past half century bestowed praise in 1996. “Per capita,” Marlon Brando claimed in a television inter- view, “Jews have contributed more to American—the best of American— culture than any other single group.” He asserted that “if it weren’t for the xi Preface Jews, we wouldn’t have music. If it weren’t for the Jews, we wouldn’t have much theater. We wouldn’t have, oddly enough, Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and all the standards that were written by Jews, all the songs that you love to sing.” Piercing the mysteries of a creative patrimony that scholars have tried in vain to solve, he added: “The Jews—the secret of the Jews is their worship for the word sachel [good sense]. That doesn’t mean that they are superior people; it just means that they are culturally advantaged in the same way that the Chinese and the Japanese are.” The actor revealed that his own “kids go to a Jewish school. Because I think that the Jewish schools . are . the best.”3 This book can be read as a gloss on his remarks. A century or so earlier, no observer of American vernacular culture could have foreseen such impact. The exemplar of Victorian seriousness, Matthew Arnold, had visited the United States in 1883–84 and, upon his return to England, put down the cultural life he had so recently observed: it was not “interesting,” he sniffed.4 That was just before Jewry was braced to play a role in making American civilization interesting. The major communal in- stitutions that would encourage and sanction Jewish culture in the New World had already been formed. The Jewish Publication Society of Amer- ica was created in 1888 to sponsor Jewish books in English, and four years later the American Jewish Historical Society was founded to explore—and celebrate—an integration so successful that the United States did not feel quite like the Diaspora. The basis for appreciating the literary antecedents of the new immigrants was established in 1899, when a Harvard instructor named Leo Wiener published his History of Yiddish Literature in the Nine- teenth Century. In 1898 editorial planning for the Jewish Encyclopedia be- gan. This monument to scholarship, realized in 1906, had then no counter- part among German and Austrian Jews, whose dazzling creativity earned them such preeminence in the Diaspora. By the turn of the century, the impact of the newcomers from Eastern Europe could already be measured. Although the federal government had begun identifying immigrants by country of origin in 1819, the separate cat- egory of “Hebrew” was included only in 1899; and at that moment a dis- tinctive contribution was registered. That year the American Jewish Year Book Wrst appeared; in 1900 the Zionist theoretician Ahad Ha-am, based in Odessa, predicted that the United States would become “the future center of Judaism.” Two years later Solomon Schechter, one of the world’s most prominent Jewish savants, arrived in New York City to head the newly re- organized Jewish Theological Seminary. The JTS quickly became a key in- stitution of scholarship and soon boasted of a major library.5 Most of the issues entangled in the meaning of American Jewish culture were already being articulated. The attorney Louis D. Brandeis assumed the leadership of the puny Zionist movement in 1914, and the philosopher Horace M. xii Preface Kallen worked out the vision of “cultural pluralism” by 1915. The public posture of the community would be largely determined by defense agen- cies created in that era, such as the American Jewish Committee (founded in 1906), the Anti-Defamation League (founded in 1913) and the American Jewish Congress (founded in 1917). The cultural groove that is the subject of this book had been dug, and only the variations would be played out for the rest of the century. Because so little rupture can be detected in the course of American Jew- ish culture, the story can properly begin in 1900, which is when Leo Stein, doomed to be recalled—if at all—as Gertrude’s brother, observed that “the Jew is becoming more numerous and prominent, and the eyes of the community are more and more Wxed upon him.”6 This new prominence was especially evident in the popular arts. In the Wrst century or so of the history of the republic, a reader had no more reason to expect to encounter any Jews in literature than had a Gentile to meet any Jews in life. Nineteenth- century Wction had no counterparts to transatlantic Wgures like Sir Walter Scott’s Rebecca, or Charles Dickens’s Fagin, or George Eliot’s Daniel De- ronda. “There is not a single Jewish character who can match any of these in popular appeal, symbolic value, or inXuence on the popular mind,” historian Louis Harap remarked, “and the Jew’s place in the context of Amer- ican literature before our century has been even further from the literary historian’s awareness and concern.” The performing arts would mark the change before serious literature would turn to Jewish subjects.

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