JEWHOOING THE SIXTIES: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity, by David E. Kaufman. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012. 340 pp. Illustrations, Notes, Index. Paper, $40.00. www.upne.com.
By Abraham Hoffman
LOS ANGELES — “Jewhooing” is a term applied to a prominent person who is of the Jewish faith. Unlike “outing,” which identifies a person who though “in the closet” is identified as gay or lesbian, a term with negative connotations, Jewhooing is a generally positive appellation in the sense that the person “is one of us,” someone who elicits ethnic pride.
David E. Kaufman profiles four people who have been the subjects of Jewhooing since the 1960s, an era he argues was a pivotal time for American Jews. Until then, popular culture was a largely gentile, white-bread society in which prominent Jews, especially in popular culture, changed their Jewish-sounding names to more innocuous ones: Emanuel Goldenberg to Edward G. Robinson, Bernard Schwartz to Tony Curtis, Betty Joan Perske to Lauren Bacall.
Kaufman describes Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand as major figures that first rose to fame in the early 1960s. He devotes most of his book to these four people, separating myth from fact to assess their influence on an American society that is markedly different in the 21st century from what it was six decades earlier. Kaufman sees the early 1960s as a time when talented American Jews could perform in their fields of expertise without disguising their Jewishness (except for Dylan, but he was outed as Jewish early on).
Thanks to these performers, Jewhooing today may not have the same effect for Jews who cheer their successful co-religionists; it would seem that having a Jewish surname, or a so-called Jewish nose, isn’t such a big deal anymore. Kaufman takes the reader on an exciting journey to find out how it got this way.
As noted, Kaufman explores the myths underlying the influence of Jewish performers. For Sandy Koufax, the myth likely seems the largest of the four people he discusses. At a time when Jewish athletes were rare in baseball (except Hank Greenberg), Koufax was an outstanding pitcher for the Dodgers, the youngest player to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Jews remember him mainly, however, for not pitching in the first game of the 1965 World Series that just happened to be on erev Yom Kippur. Despite Koufax’s insistence that his asking to be taken out of rotation was no big deal, Jews interpreted this request as a refusal to dishonor the holiest day of the Jewish New Year, and that is how they remember him, salute him, celebrate him. Koufax said he wasn’t much of an observant Jew, but that didn’t matter. He remains a hero, and when the legend becomes more important than the fact, print the legend (or so sayeth the old John Wayne film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).
In contrast to the adulation of Koufax, Lenny Bruce does not get very many accolades from the American Jewish community. Paralleling Koufax‘s peak career years, Bruce influenced generations of stand-up comedians who generally celebrate his impact on their comedy routines. Bruce broke new ground in his daring to use Yiddish words as part of his patter whether or not the gentiles in the audience understood them. Hip gentiles got the message soon enough by hearing his hilarious “Jewish or goyish” routine.
Unfortunately, being a pathbreaker may put one on a pantheon admired by later generations, but at the time it could get you into trouble, and Bruce had plenty of troubles: a serious drug problem, harassment by police for his using obscenities, embarrassment of Jews who expected comedy to be less ethnic and more conventional unless it was in the Catskills, not on TV or LP records.
Bruce died in 1966 of a drug overdose, but he left a comedic legacy and a host of American Jewish (and non-Jewish) comedians who acknowledge their debt to him
Bob Dylan provides yet another example of success in the early 1960s, only in his case he denied his Jewishness while still a teenager, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, a bar mitzvah boy who claimed an autobiography that continuously morphed into weirdness and denial. Coming from an observant Jewish family in a small Minnesota town, he shed his Jewish affiliations the way a snake sheds its skin, changing his name, claiming he was an orphan, a Native American, a chameleon of biographical variations.
His talents as composer and songwriter brought him early success, but his real background was exposed in a Time article in 1965. Dylan continued to mutate, from folk singer to rock musician to born-again Christian back to Judaism. Kaufman does what he can with all the subterfuge and pretense, citing numerous biographies that present widely (and wildly) different portraits of Dylan.
Where Dylan denied his Jewishness (even as everyone Jewhooed him), Barbra Streisand embraced it. The only change she made was to drop the second “a” from Barbara, and she flatly turned down the suggestion that she could be more glamorous if she got a nose job.
Streisand has always played herself—what you see is what you get, a Jewish girl from Brooklyn possessed with incredible musical talent. Yet initially she wanted to be a stage actress. In her several careers—singer, Broadway stage, motion pictures—she has been enormously successful, a role model for Jewish girls who now think twice about changing their names or getting their nose done. Her legions of fans adore her, yet there are also detractors, anti-Semites who don’t like Jews, as well as timid Jews who can’t handle her in-your-face attitude.
Taken together, the four American Jews profiled here by Kaufman, making their mark almost simultaneously in the early 1960s, make that decade a significant turning point in how American Jews see themselves as a part of American society, not just apart from it. Kaufman doesn’t write their biographies (there are plenty of those already published). He presents the view of the biographers who have written about Koufax, Bruce, Dylan, and Streisand, but like the blind men in a cave trying to describe an elephant, the biographies offer very different descriptions of their subjects.
In this book, which is fun to read, Kaufman pulls it all together, accepting the contradictions while trying to make sense of the influence of four very significant Jews in American popular culture.
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Abraham Hoffman is the book review Editor for Western States Jewish History and teaches history at Los Angeles Valley College. This review is reprinted with permission from the Winter 2015 edition of Western States Jewish History.