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 itâs becoming âinâ to be Jewish.
LENNY BRUCE, 1960
Hereâs a foreign song I learned in Utah: âHa-vah, Ha-vah Na-gee-lahhhh!â
BOB DYLAN, 1962
Whoâs 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 listâof 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 âmembers of the tribeââand the consequent projection of group identity onto themâis a common ethnic practice, certainly not unique to Jews but especially pronounced among them. Itâs fair to say that the habit of citing Jewish celebritiesââDidja know, Natalie Portman is Jewish!ââis characteristic of many Jews, and the persistent behavioral quirk has even been given a name: âJewhooing.â1 The puckish term befits an activity that some see as ethnocentric and crassâone 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 âmade itâ in the arena of American popular culture for the simple reason that their idolsâ 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 differenceâthe 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 âpassingâ as gentiles and begged to be outedâyet such habits die hard. Hence âThe Chanukah Song,â Adam Sandlerâs playful musical accounting of âpeople that are Jewish like you and meâ became a sort of Jewhooing anthem in the mid-1990s.2 The songâs lyrics humorously enumerated Jewish celebrities of the pastâfor example, Kirk Douglas, Dinah Shore, the Three Stoogesâwhile 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 Angelesâs Jewish Journal puts it, âI check surnames. Itâs a reflex, and I canât help it. If youâre like most Jews I know, you do it too.â3 Though some call it shallow, the reflex is lodged deep in the psyche of the American Jew. Jewhooingâor Jewish celebrity consciousnessâprovides 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 Jewsâ 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, â[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.â Sarna further comments that such themes âcharacterize all minority group history in America.â5 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 âplay in Peoria.â 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 âTalkinâ Havah Nagilah Bluesâ in his coffeehouse set. As I have suggested, Jewish fans of celebrities likewise exhibit the tension between assimilation and identityâcheering 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 concernsâa 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 âlive[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.â7 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 intimacyâwe feel we know them, often calling them by their first names. Both Jews and celebrities are in a sense âchosen peopleââseemingly âchosenâ by some higher power, but at the same time âpeopleâ like everyone else. This study of their interrelation will further illuminate their social and symbolic function within American lifeâand more specifically, within the context of the American âreligionâ 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 Jewsâthird-generation American Jews, to be exact. All four became extraordinarily famous at the same historical momentâtheir careers can therefore be viewed in parallel. And all four expressed some measure of Jewishness in their public personaeâbut 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 antiheroâhis 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 Dylanâwell, 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 historyâthe 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 Jewsâand 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 âthe Sixties.â Jewhooing the Sixties offers the revisionist view that the earlier part of the decade, sometimes called the âKennedy yearsâ or the âcivil rights era,â 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 recordâin 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 deathâyet 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 townâBob Dylanâa 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 yearsâ time. Four very different celebrity figures, with four distinct paths to fameâyet they appeared on the scene almost simultaneously. As one of them would later recall, âIn 1961, a whole new world opened up for me.â8 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 figureâs initial rise to fame during the early 1960s, and then proceeds with a review of his or her Jewish celebrityâthat is, the Jewish implications of that celebrity imageâto 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, âItâs interesting to see who we choose as our celebrities, yâknow, and why, what makes them tick. You can learn a lot about a society by who it chooses to celebrate.â9 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 celebrityânotions I will develop more extensively later. But first we must simply ask, âWhat is celebrity?â In 1961, Daniel Boorstin defined âthe celebrity [as] a person who is known for his well-knownness.â10 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, âcelebrityâ is attached to the most inconsequential public figures, so âcelebrity worshipâ 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 achievementâthe word derives from the Latin for âmanifest deedsââwhereas 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 Boorstinâs notion of âwell-knownnessâ 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 oneâs fame, the achievement, and more on the quality of fame itself, or as Bob Dylan once put it, âfamiousityâ13âthat is, the nature of oneâs 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 figuresâthe 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 celebritiesâthe 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, âcelebrity cultureâ), and here will principall...