From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture

Verso, 224 pages, $25

A book about Jews by a non-Jew, a book about Jews in American popular culture that is really a book about leftist Jewish artists, From the Lower East Side is much more successful as an account of the author's personal tastes and predilections.

While Professor Buhle of Brown University might know everything there is to know about comics penned by Jews, he finds it difficult, or possibly just not all that interesting, to avoid the history of revolutionary politics and focus solely on art. And this heavy-on-the-politics isn't the only imbalance in this book: the pages on comics far outnumber the pages on anything else, and music (especially the Zorn-led klezmer revival) and literature are given lamentably short shrift. Where are the assessments of Philip Roth, or Bellow, or even lesser-known lefties like Leonard Michaels? Don't tell me those guys are too arty to be considered pop.

Instead of offering a survey of these art forms, Buhle (hesitatingly) advances a thesis regarding the very nature of pop culture. It's his idea that in Jewish art, modernity and artistic "progress" do not exist. Or, to quote an idea from the book jacket that never finds such succinct expression in the text: "Buhle suggests that 'premodern' and 'postmodern' are arbitrary designations here, because the self-reflective content has always radiated an inner Jewishness." Which is a fine idea, but one that the book fails to support or even illustrate, unless of course an "inner Jewishness" means an amorphous blend of schlock and left-wing politics.

Though it was Groucho Marx who once said, "If you don't like my ethics, I'll get new ones," Buhle insists on finding some strain of revolutionary thought in almost every artist he assays. And so the book ends up reading like a succession of capsule biographies of those Buhle thinks were the key players in the 20th century Semitocracy of Pop. These players are almost invariably the offspring of leftist, if not wholly Red, parents (as if pop in this regard were a suffix for a social movement). The author then proceeds to deconstruct each artist's oeuvre with regards to political affiliation. But the great failure is not necessarily with the information in Buhle's book—which reads well, though haphazardly, as an encyclopedia—but in the analysis of the present: There is none, except a slightly elegiac tone employed when discussing the deaths of a few great Yiddish figures.

In any case, the facts aren't always there. For example, page 30's Walter "Domrosch" was indeed the head of the New York Symphony, but his name was Walter Damrosch, who also—though it isn't mentioned—conducted the world premiere of Aaron Copland's very Modernist Symphony for Organ and Orchestra in 1925 with high-priestess Nadia Boulanger as the soloist, years before he conveniently turned into a true populist, in the sense of popularizer, with the advent of WWII.

To begin a book with Moshe Nadir and the People's Art Guild and Irving Berlin (to cite three disparate examples: the Yiddish, the leftist and the capitalist genius) and to end it with Adam Sandler who, according to Buhle, "ran a close second to Jerry Seinfeld among American Jewish grad students as favorite Jewish celebrity at the start of the new century," is too strange not to be commented on.

Unfortunately, Buhle does not allow himself a real say on assimilation. How assimilation leads from Tin Pan Alley's Harold Arlen, the son of a Buffalo rabbi, or even Robert Zimmerman of Bob Dylan fame, to Sandler's platinum-selling "The Chanukah Song," is a story that has to be told. Because while Buhle is rightly enamored of avant-garde-leaning comix and all manner of Hollywood outcasts (he is also the author of five elegant volumes on the Blacklistees), he appears curiously out of his element when faced with mass cultural appeal shorn of any political agenda.

The much-vaunted melting pot of America has, by the beginning of this last millennium, boiled away its more ethnic elements. What remains is an aesthetic that is as much multicultural as it is non-cultural. What Buhle and his readers need to realize in assessing any immigrant contribution to American culture is that this country is the slowest and most luxuriously entertaining death conceivable for those who found salvation here. While political dissent as an outgrowth of outsiderness and plain Jewish contrarianism might still survive in admittedly lower profile media like Buhle's much-loved comix, it's high-time to give up any hope of revolution and just admit that the mainstream has assimilated us all to the point where Seinfeld's George Costanza' is more "Jewish" than most Jews. This metamorphosis has failed to achieve any political or cultural end beyond upward mobility, and much "Jewishness" in pop culture today is merely an empty exercise in nostalgia and kitsch: a throwback for throwback's sake back to the days of ethnic shtick, before the American-Jewish intermarriage rate topped 60 percent and Woody Allen relocated to the goyishe side of the Roaring Twenties, because nothing of the Now seems all that interesting, or even worth it. o