Jewhooing the Sixties

American Celebrity and Jewish Identity—Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand

David E. Kaufman

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611683158
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand first came to public attention in the early 1960s, a period Kaufman identifies as historically ripe for American Jews to reexamine their (Jewish) identities. All four achieved extraordinary success in their respective fields and became celebrities within an American context, while at the same time they were clearly identifiable as Jews—although they were perceived to be Jewish in very different ways. Kaufman investigates these celebrities' rise to fame, the specific brand of Jewishness each one represented, and how their fans and the public at large perceived their ethnic identity as Jews. Situating Koufax, Bruce, Dylan, and Streisand within the larger history of American Jewish celebrity, Kaufman argues that the four early 1960s figures represent a turning point between celebrity Jews of the past—such as Hank Greenberg, Groucho Marx, Irving Berlin, and Fanny Brice—and those of the present, such as Jon Stewart, Matisyahu, and Natalie Portman. Providing an entry into Jewish celebrity studies, this lively narrative explores the intersection between popular celebrity and Jewish identity and thereby examines the cultural construction of Jewishness in the latter half of the twentieth century.

1

INTRODUCTION

Jews, Celebrity, and the Early 1960s

In 1961, a whole new world opened up for me.

SANDY KOUFAX, 1966

Well, fortunately, by some twist of Fate it’s becoming “in” to be Jewish.

LENNY BRUCE, 1960

Here’s a foreign song I learned in Utah: “Ha-vah, Ha-vah Na-gee-lahhhh!”

BOB DYLAN, 1962

Who’s an American beauty rose, with an American beauty nose?

BARBRA STREISAND, 1964

This is a book full of lists, and at the most basic level is itself a list—of four famous Jews. It thus exemplifies the very phenomenon it describes: our constant inventorying of, and enduring fascination with, Jewish celebrity. The naming and claiming of famous “members of the tribe”—and the consequent projection of group identity onto them—is a common ethnic practice, certainly not unique to Jews but especially pronounced among them. It’s fair to say that the habit of citing Jewish celebrities—“Didja know, Natalie Portman is Jewish!”—is characteristic of many Jews, and the persistent behavioral quirk has even been given a name: “Jewhooing.”¹ The puckish term befits an activity that some see as ethnocentric and crass—one might even object that it is not a fit topic for a serious study of American Jewish identity. But this book intends to be just that, proceeding from the assumption that Jewhooing, while embarrassing to some, is really just the tip of the iceberg and points to a deeper relationship between Jews and celebrity overall. In the first place, Jews take pride in their fellow Jews who have “made it” in the arena of American popular culture for the simple reason that their idols’ success and acceptance reflects their own. In no uncertain terms, the sheer popularity of the Jewish celebrity demonstrates that Jews are a part of America. Yet at the same time, the special talent and heightened status of the Jewish celebrity suggests Jewish difference—the notion that Jews, despite their broad integration and participation in American life, nonetheless remain distinctive, even exceptional, and thus stand apart from America. The Jewish celebrity embodies both ideas simultaneously, subtly synthesizing them, and for this reason above all, American Jews are prone to point out the famous among them.

The Jewhooing impulse was perhaps more ubiquitous in an earlier time, when most Jewish celebrities were “passing” as gentiles and begged to be outed—yet such habits die hard. Hence “The Chanukah Song,” Adam Sandler’s playful musical accounting of “people that are Jewish like you and me” became a sort of Jewhooing anthem in the mid-1990s.² The song’s lyrics humorously enumerated Jewish celebrities of the past—for example, Kirk Douglas, Dinah Shore, the Three Stooges—while its performance highlighted the Jewishness of Sandler himself. Like him, many celebrities today seem far more comfortable in their Jewish identities, no longer changing their names or otherwise evading ethnic identification, so we might reasonably expect Jewhooing to be in decline. Yet the tendency to cite famous Jews is still quite common and easily observable. As the editor of Los Angeles’s Jewish Journal puts it, “I check surnames. It’s a reflex, and I can’t help it. If you’re like most Jews I know, you do it too.”³ Though some call it shallow, the reflex is lodged deep in the psyche of the American Jew. Jewhooing—or Jewish celebrity consciousness—provides a novel way to study American Jews and Jewish identity, and is treated here with seriousness and nonjudgment. It is, moreover, the linchpin of the central theme of this book: the interrelationship of Jews and celebrity. Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity is a full-length study of this relationship, viewing it through the prism of four case studies of Jewish celebrity, and situating it within the broader field of American Jewish history.

Insofar as American Jewish history represents the confluence of American history and Jewish history, its major theme is the tension between American assimilation and Jewish identity, between social integration and group preservation. Though both assimilation and Jewish identity are somewhat hackneyed terms, the dialectic they represent, between American Jews’ enthusiastic embrace of the general culture and their continued engagement with Jewish culture, has been a characteristic tension of the American Jewish experience.⁴ As historian Jonathan Sarna explains, “[T]his tension pits the desire to become American and to conform to American norms against the fear that Jews by conforming too much will cease to be distinctive and soon disappear.” Sarna further comments that such themes “characterize all minority group history in America.”⁵ The relationship between Jews and celebrity reflects these themes well. By their very nature as popular figures, Jewish celebrities must appeal to the widest possible audience, having to “play in Peoria.” Yet at the same time, they grapple with the otherness implied by their Jewish origins, often resolving the dilemma by incorporating some token element of Jewish identity into an otherwise assimilated public image. One example is the actor Edward G. Robinson, who added the letter G to his stage name to recall his original Jewish surname, Goldenberg; another is Bob Dylan (born Zimmerman), who, in the midst of his early pretense of gentile origins, included a “Talkin’ Havah Nagilah Blues” in his coffeehouse set. As I have suggested, Jewish fans of celebrities likewise exhibit the tension between assimilation and identity—cheering the popular success and widespread social acceptance of their heroes on the one hand, while projecting Jewishness onto them (through the practice of Jewhooing) on the other. This inquiry into the nature of Jewish celebrity is thus a study of the challenge of balancing universalist and particularist concerns—a challenge crystallized by the phenomenon of Jewhooing, as it uniquely combines the universal appeal of celebrity with the more particular identification of celebrities as Jews.

The relationship between Jewish life and celebrity culture cuts deeper still, for in a more figurative sense, the two groups may be analogized. Jews and celebrities alike are small minorities of the population who tend to live in urban centers, especially the media capitals of New York and Los Angeles.⁶ As conspicuous elites, both are often objectified in the public eye and stereotyped in the popular imagination. Jews, like celebrities, are subject to love-hate reactions for their apparent claim of exceptionalism; and celebrities, like Jews, are outsiders who nonetheless embody the deepest values and aspirations of the majority. Perhaps most intriguingly, both are characterized by an intrinsic paradox. Author Norman Mailer, a Jewish celebrity himself, once defined a minority as someone who “live[s] with two opposed notions of himself. What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant, marvelous and awful, good and evil.”⁷ Jews, ever the model minority, are often said to manifest both a sense of their own specialness and a deep-seated insecurity. To the degree that this is true, such a contradictory nature may be understood as a legacy of the traditional belief in divine chosenness on the one hand and a collective memory of victimization on the other. Conditioned both by Judaism and by antisemitism, the image of Jews is alternately exalted and demeaned, and so paradoxically, Jews occupy a high and low status at once. Celebrities, too, have the dualistic nature of a minority and exhibit a similar internal contradiction. From one angle, they are idolized and revered as transcendent beings, looming larger than life and living larger than their many fans; while from another, they seem quite ordinary and accessible, entering our lives and our collective psyche in a relationship of intimacy—we feel we know them, often calling them by their first names. Both Jews and celebrities are in a sense “chosen people”—seemingly “chosen” by some higher power, but at the same time “people” like everyone else. This study of their interrelation will further illuminate their social and symbolic function within American life—and more specifically, within the context of the American “religion” of popular culture.

To gain better insight into the intersection of Jews and celebrity, I have chosen to concentrate on four figures who occupy both categories at once: Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand. All four are Jews—third-generation American Jews, to be exact. All four became extraordinarily famous at the same historical moment—their careers can therefore be viewed in parallel. And all four expressed some measure of Jewishness in their public personae—but in widely varying ways. Baseball pitcher Koufax famously sat out a World Series game for the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, and became an iconic Jewish hero as the result. Standup comic Bruce was the opposite of Koufax, a Jewish antihero—his subversive comedy contained a great deal of insightful observation on the Jewish condition, yet his celebrity was sullied by his reputation for unlawfulness. Singer-songwriter Dylan first attempted to hide his Jewish roots but then, once revealed as a Jew, continued to confound his fans with ever-shifting identities. And stage and screen star Streisand embraced her Jewish persona from the start, becoming the rare Jewish celebrity with both Jewish content and Jewish image. Koufax had the latter but not the former, Bruce the former but not the latter, and Dylan—well, Dylan is enigmatic on both counts. As models of American Jewish identity, the four celebrities thus represent a range of possibilities: Koufax represents religious propriety, Bruce ethnic sensibility, Dylan the elusiveness of identity, and Streisand, in a sense, represents Jewish representation. They are four very different kinds of Jews, and in sum may be said to reflect the very diversity of American Jewish life.

Yet despite their differences, the four share one key feature: they all attained their fame at the same moment in American history—the early 1960s. Focusing on the early 1960s as the critical era for our inquiry suggests a turning point in the history of both American celebrity and Jewish identity. As I will explore further, the period of the early 1960s, specifically the five years from 1961 to 1965, was a time of transition for both America and its Jews—and indeed, Jewish celebrity played a significant role in both American and Jewish historical development of the time. One unifying theme of this book, then, is the pivotal role of the early 1960s in American Jewish culture. Until now, that role has been largely overlooked in favor of the later, post-1967 period usually intended by the phrase “the Sixties.” Jewhooing the Sixties offers the revisionist view that the earlier part of the decade, sometimes called the “Kennedy years” or the “civil rights era,” is of vital importance in the history of Jewish popular culture and in the greater scheme of American Jewish history. Jewhooing the Sixties is a study of the special relationship that American Jews have with celebrity, interwoven with a look at the broader social and cultural role that Jewish celebrity played in the 1960s. The four case studies, though contrasting and divergent, together illustrate the nexus between Jews, their celebrities, and the Sixties era in American history.

On September 27, 1961, Sandy Koufax set his first National League strikeout record—in just a few years, he would attain sports immortality as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Two days later, on September 29, Lenny Bruce was arrested for the first time, beginning a downward spiral that would result in his premature death—yet the impact of his words would long outlast his lifetime. On the very same date, the New York Times published the first review of a new talent in town—Bob Dylan—a twenty-year-old unknown who would soon become the most influential musical artist of his generation. Parallel to Dylan, another young phenom appeared in Greenwich Village: Barbra Streisand, who made her off-Broadway debut in October and then auditioned for her first Broadway role in November of 1961. Only nineteen, Streisand rocketed to stardom and found herself playing the White House in just two years’ time. Four very different celebrity figures, with four distinct paths to fame—yet they appeared on the scene almost simultaneously. As one of them would later recall, “In 1961, a whole new world opened up for me.”⁸ And the same might have been said of an entire generation. Today, when we celebrate them, when we affirm their stardom through various forms of celebrity worship and adulation, we simultaneously shine a light on the time they represent in our collective experience. As it turns out, that brief era was especially important in the history of Jews and celebrity. So the title of this book, Jewhooing the Sixties, has multiple meanings: first, it refers to the pointing out of famous Jews from the 1960s; second, it points to the Jewishness of the Sixties, asserting a special Jewish significance of the era for both Jewish and American history; and last, it suggests an integral relationship between Jewish celebrity and American popular culture on the whole.

Accordingly, the four main chapters of Jewhooing the Sixties examine the key themes of pop celebrity and Jewish identity through the prism of the careers and personae of the four figures. Each chapter considers one figure’s initial rise to fame during the early 1960s, and then proceeds with a review of his or her Jewish celebrity—that is, the Jewish implications of that celebrity image—to the current day. More than a study of four famous American Jews, the book is a broader reading of American fame and Jewish celebrity writ large. If celebrity figures such as Koufax, Bruce, Dylan, and Streisand can be said to be emblematic of their time, then their appearance on the scene has much to tell us regarding the history of both America and American Jews at the same moment. In the chapters that follow, I delve respectively into the lives, careers, art, and images of the four stars. Though each of the case studies may be read alone, the book as a whole is conceived as a study of the interrelation of three discrete subjects: American celebrity, Jewish identity, and the early 1960s.

American Celebrity

In his 1998 film Celebrity, Woody Allen has a character remark, “It’s interesting to see who we choose as our celebrities, y’know, and why, what makes them tick. You can learn a lot about a society by who it chooses to celebrate.”⁹ With that principle in mind, Jewhooing the Sixties is a study of celebrity in America. Written from the perspective of American Jewish history, it presumes that celebrity must play some important role in American Jewish life, and further suggests that Jews must play some important role in American celebrity—notions I will develop more extensively later. But first we must simply ask, “What is celebrity?” In 1961, Daniel Boorstin defined “the celebrity [as] a person who is known for his well-knownness.”¹⁰ That description certainly applies to the Paris Hiltons and Kim Kardashians of our time, celebrities with no discernible reason for being celebrated. In its pejorative application, “celebrity” is attached to the most inconsequential public figures, so “celebrity worship” tends to be denigrated as a trivial and even venal pursuit, a form of modern idolatry.¹¹ In colloquial usage, celebrity thus often takes on a belittling quality, especially in contrast to its near synonym, fame. Fame implies greatness based on talent and achievement—the word derives from the Latin for “manifest deeds”—whereas celebrity is a less weighty term, evoking the public adulation, whether deserved or not, accorded the very well-known individual.¹²

But this common and colloquial usage is too limiting, as Boorstin’s notion of “well-knownness” may apply equally to the talentless and to the genius, to both the profoundly unimportant personage and to the figure of true greatness. If there is any meaningful distinction between fame and celebrity, it is that the latter focuses less on the underlying reasons for one’s fame, the achievement, and more on the quality of fame itself, or as Bob Dylan once put it, “famiousity”¹³—that is, the nature of one’s public image. As employed here, the term celebrity refers not just to the well-known figure per se, nor is it to be confused with the cultural products of such figures—the art, entertainment, or other noteworthy activities of the famous. Instead, celebrity refers to a set of complex relationships: between famous individuals and their public, between the image and reality of such individuals, and between the media-driven creation of fame and its unintended social consequences. As students of popular culture remind us, our lives and our very consciousness are shaped in significant ways by celebrities—the select individuals we choose to reward with extraordinary public recognition. Celebrity, in this view, has historical salience. The term encompasses both the famed ones and the culture of idol worship formed around them (hence, “celebrity culture”), and here will principall...