Legal Commentary

Thanks again to Dan and Co. for inviting me back again. I plan on getting my feet wet by writing about a couple things that came up in January that I would have written about had my guest stint already started. Better late than never.

I want to begin with some thoughts on The Jewish Americans, the six-hour PBS documentary on the history of Jews in America that aired last month (and still can be seen on some stations this month). Generally, a very well-done and really enjoyable program. It felt a bit rushed or cursory at points, but that is to be expected, because you only can do so much in six hours.

But I definitely learned some new things and some things got me thinking. And I welcome comments on some of these points.

First, on a personal note, the program discussed the involvement of American Jews in the Civil Rights Movement of the south, including showing Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the one Jewish leader who spoke at the March on Washington. I am proud to say that Rabbi Prinz performed my Bar Mitzvah in 1981 at B'nai Abraham in Livingston, N.J., where he was Rabbi Emeritus. As students at the Hebrew School, we sort of knew about the rabbi's involvement with King. And the synagogue was founded on a combination of a traditional approach to religion and a progressive approach to politics. But 11-year-olds would rather have been out playing baseball than paying attention to such things. The documentary does show a picture of Prinz walking next to King during the March, which means I am two degrees of separation from MLK. So I have that going for me, which is nice.

Second, the American-Jewish community took on real worldwide influence after World War II in part because of the Shoah. The Jewish community in the U.S. at the time was around 5 million and prior to the War, American Jewry had been secondary and somewhat irrelevant, with the historic heart of world Jewry remaining in Europe. But with the murder of 6 million European Jews and the social and economic displacement of the rest, plus all those who were leaving Europe for the U.S. (especially just after the War), the United States suddenly had the largest, most socially and economically stable, and thus the most powerful, Jewish community in the world. This makes perfect sense; I just never had thought about it in these terms before seeing the program.

Third covers an area that greatly interests me--the Jewish influence on popular culture, especially the early days of television. Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner both insist they were doing funny, not Jewish funny, in the early days of television. True, much of it had been honed before overwhelmingly Jewish audiences in the Borscht Belt. And they were throwing a lot of Yiddish around. But, they insist, the humor had universal appeal. And Yiddish words just sound funny, as does a Jewish accent--part of what makes the Reiner/Mel Brooks 2000 Year Old Man so hilarious.

The point about universal appeal is well-taken. People need to relate to what they find funny and are less likely to relate to what seems foreign. But I think it also is accurate to say that they were, in fact, doing Jewish funny; they just were not calling it that. And that enabled it to have that mass appeal. The sub-text, of course, is that it would not have had that mass appeal if it had been explicitly Jewish (or at least "too Jewish").

And this arguably continues today. Think of all the quintessentially (if not stereotypically) "Jewish" sitcom and comedy characters; then think of how many are identified explicitly as being Jewish or have that aspect of the character developed in any way. Ross and Monica Geller on Friends? They were identified as Jewish, but they celebrated Christmas. The nebbishy George on Seinfeld? They made his character Italian. The smart, fast-talking, hyperkinetic mother-and-daughter team on Gilmore Girls (a show almost wholly written by a Jewish woman) were the scions of a wealthy family of Connecticut Protestants. Other obvious examples that I am missing, in either direction?

The "Jewish style" and "Jewish humor" has been internalized by this society as just "humor" and it plays well; it just is not identified as such (contrast this with when we talk about "British humor"). This is not a good thing or a bad thing; just a thing. That Jewish humor is so widely understood simply as American humor reveals how well assimilated into American culture and society Jews have become. But we can still note that the Jewish part of it remains implicit.