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

From The Lower East Side To Hollywood: Jews In American Popular Culture is a fascinating examination and documentation of the contribution Jews have made to American popular culture. Scrutinizing the ripples of effect from prominent individuals such as Gertrude Berg, Woody Allen, Roseanne Barr, Cyndi Lauper, and many more, From The Lower East Side To Hollywood deftly combines scholarship, philosophy, and sociology into a most remarkable study of the complex fabric of modern American values and entertainment. A very highly recommended and exceptionally welcome contribution to Judaic Studies and American Culture Studies academic reference shelves and supplemental reading lists, From The Lower East Side To Hollywood will also hold immense appeal for the non-specialist general reader as well.

I'm 24 years old, and I thought Paul Buhle's "From the Lower Eastside to Hollywood" was an absolute joy to read. It not only provided a sweeping, exciting history of the contributions of Jews and Jewishness to the shaping of popular culture, but motivated me to find out more about this history-- which takes on an added fascination through Buhle's narrative. The book dances along, weaving back and forth between the stories of particular characters and convergences, and the moral impulse-- egalitarian, rebellious, transcendental-- at the core of Jewish popular culture. I learned many new things, and new connections and emphases were made that had a big impact on me. One of the most exciting parts of the book was Buhle's description of the Lower East Side at the turn of the century, a thriving nest of Jewish immigrant life to where much of the roots of modern popular culture can be traced (and where "[r]ebellion was in the life's blood of creative purpose"). (On a personal level, my great-grandparents lived on the Lower East Side close to the time Buhle describes, providing an added interest for me). Buhle emphasizes the centrality of the Yiddish language-- and Yiddishkayt (roughly meaning "Yiddish-ness")-- in Jewish culture and the extent to which it trickled into and shaped broader popular culture, as well as the egalitarian and ethical impulses which have permeated the Jewish contribution to popular culture. In addition to all this, Buhle explores the (unfortunately) neglected lineage of comics-- from the earliest Jewish satirists to MAD magazine and Harvey Pekar-- as a particularly Jewish art form. As an added bonus-- and a fitting one, for an author so passionately invested in his subject-- Buhle's story is sprinkled with touching personal anecdotes of his own that color in the narrative with an added human touch. And there's much, much more. The history of Broadway and Hollywood, for instance, are fascinatingly re-discovered through the lens that Buhle uses to put that history together, both inseparable from their Jewish origins and ethos. Buhle views popular culture, and the inescapable, omnipresent Jewish contribution to it, as expressive of the latent yearnings of a people for something that transcends the doldrums of alienation and atomization. This impulse-- of mass culture "as portending self-healing and total democratization rather than exhaustion of resources and an endless individual isolation"-- runs like a thread throughout the entire book and gives it an urgency one would not expect. I highly recommend it.

Norma Rae, in the movie that bears her name, asked the Jewish union organizer why he was a political activist. He replied, "History," as if, as a Jew, he had no choice but to work toward creating a more humane society.In his stunning book, Paul Buhle brilliantly analyzes the enormous contributions of the uniquely Jewish characteristic of "reflexiveness" to twentieth centruy American popular culture. This concept comes close to the two core values that educators Deborah Meier and Paul Schwarz of the Central East Secondary School in New York City contended should be taught in schools: "empathy and skepticism...the ability to see a situation from the eyes of another and the tendency to wonder about the validity of what we encountered."These two humanistic values, empathy and skepticism, emphatically are not part of the "accepted" culture that the American educational system traditionally transmits. Instead, our schools tend to stress patriotism, obedience, and the legitimacy of the existing stratified social system.Through their substantial influence on theater, film, music, and comics, Jewish performers have provided a totally different social construction of reality, a more humane, even oppositional imprint on popular culture. Jewish artists have utilized empathy and skepticism to transform American political values in a more progressive direction.If Jewish artists had attemted their task in a didactic, heavy-handed manner, they undoubtedly would have been unsuccessful. Instead, the key to Jewish influence on American culture has been Jewish HUMOR. From Sholem Aleichem to Lenny Bruce, to the contomporary work of Harvey Pekar, Jewish humor has resonated with mainstream America. In this process, Jewish artists have absorbed the cultures other ethnic groups--Irish, Italian, African American--and furnished comic relief to ordinary people suffering from the trials of everyday life.Beyond his enormous contribution to the scholarship of the history and sociology of American culture, Buhle's book is eloquently written, with great charm and humor. I come away with a much deeper understanding of individual redemption and of the way in which Jewish influence of popular American culture has effectively been an alternative, sometimes avant garde, form of socialization to the American school system.

Although Paul Buhle enjoys a high profile as chronicler of the American left, he is also one of our foremost scholars of Jewish popular culture. There is an obvious connection here since the two worlds tend to overlap, particularly during the period when Jews were overwhelmingly proletarian, suffering discrimination and identifying with society's underdogs. This has little to do with organized Judaism as such but more with the general zeitgeist of the Jewish people, which Buhle describes as "Yiddishkayt" or "Jewishness." Although Buhle himself is not Jewish, he learned Yiddish as part of his PhD language requirements. This language would be essential to his studies of the roots of the American left, many of whose founding fathers wrote in this highly vernacular tongue. His engagement with Jewish culture deepened in New York City during the 1960s radicalization, when some of the elder statesmen of the left who had fled persecution in Eastern Europe and Russia recounted their past to this up and coming scholar. Anybody who passed through Union Square Park on 14th Street during this period would still be able to see clusters of mostly Italian and Jewish trade unionists arguing the fine points of anarchism or socialism. The book follows the chronological path of Jewish popular culture as it wends its way from Vaudeville to contemporary television. Much of the pleasure of taking this grand tour is discovering the "Yiddishkayt" roots of various figures who straddle both periods. One of the most striking examples is Leonard Nimoy, who played the pointy-eared and impassive Vulcan on television's "Star Trek." Nimoy began acting as an amateur in a high school production of Clifford Odets's "Awake and Sing," a classic example of Jewish radical theater. As a young professional, Nimoy started off in Los Angeles's Yiddish theater, while taking acting lessons from blacklistee and Jew Jeff Corey. Soon he began acting in avant-garde productions of plays by Genet, including "Deathwatch." In the role of a prisoner, Nimoy found "himself totally alienated from both worlds, the society outside, and the one within the prison walls," according to his 1975 memoir. It is not too much of a stretch to conceive of this as preparation for his role as the quintessential alien -- Spock. Jewishness and the avant-garde lead in unexpected directions.Such are the discoveries to be found in this singularly well-researched and entertaining study of an important aspect of American popular culture.