“Shazoom. Vas ist das Shazoom?” Mad Magazine and postwar Jewish America

ABSTRACT

Mad Magazine, founded in 1952 by a group of Jewish New Yorkers, is the most important and popular humour magazine in the United States. This essay charts the many ways that Mad spoke about changes occurring in postwar Jewish American life by focusing on the first 10 years of Mad, as this was the era when the magazine spoke with the most intensely Jewish poetics. The aim is twofold: (1) to establish that the magazine was in fact part of a postwar, Jewish cultural tradition and (2) to show how the writers and cartoonists used the magazine to confront and challenge the massive shifts in postwar Jewish life. The essay discusses a number of ways in which Mad was Jewish American in tone and focus, such as the dominant use of Yiddish, satirizing the American downplaying of the Holocaust, the rise of McCarthyism and the changing gender roles that arose as a result of suburbanization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Leah Garrett is the Loti Smorgon Professor of Contemporary Jewish Culture. She has published four books and numerous essays on modern Jewish literature. Her most recent book, Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel, was short-listed for this year’s National Jewish Book Award.

Notes

1. Profound thanks to Maria Reidelbach and Eddy Portnoy for their excellent suggestions for improving this essay. For discussions of the impact of Mad on Jewish life, see Abrams (2014). For a consideration of Mad and American culture, see Kercher (2006, 112–113).

2. My interview with Al Jaffee can be found in the 21 Febuary 2016 edition of The Forward newspaper in the culture section. For the on-line version see http://forward.com/culture/yiddish-culture/333672/al-jaffee-explains-how-mad-magazine-made-american-humor-jewish/.

3. Much of the humor in Mad is of the type that Ruth Wisse has labelled “talmudic humor,” see Wisse (2013, 22). For a discussion of talmudic humor that includes an excellent bibliography of sources on the topic, see Brodsky (2011, 13–32). For a consideration of the Jewish American roots of comedy, see Bloom (2003).

4. In the late 1960s, the magazine would start to use the words Jew and Jewish in their references. Abrams (2014) outlines a number of those instances. Harvey Kurtzman’s discomfort with the word Jewish extended to his short book (1988) that describes his background and work. In it he never mentions his Jewish roots.

5. Abrams (2014) discusses other ways that he views the magazine as being Jewish.

6. As was the trend with second-generation Jewish immigrants, both Gaines and Kurtzman served during the Second World War and their portraits of war came from first-hand knowledge. Although they supported the war against the Nazis, their critiques focused on the unfolding Korean War. For analysis of their deeply subversive war comics “Two-Fisted Tales” and “Frontline Combat,” see Schelly (2015, 165–216) and Kitchen and Buhle (2009, 49–80).

7. The information on the history of Mad Magazine comes from the following sources: Reidelbach (1991), Kaplan (2008), Schelly (2015), Kercher (2006), Abrams (2003), Kitchen and Buhle (2009), and Jacobs (1972). There is also a recent edition of the journal Studies in American Humour, 30 (Lee and Bird 2014) that is a “Special Issue: Mad Magazine and Its Legacies.” In Abrams (2014) he details the numerous Jewish writers and artists at Mad.

8. For a study of second-generation New York Jews, see Moore (1981).

9. During this era the Jewish comic book artist, Bill Finger, created Batman and the Green Lantern, and most of the publishers of comic book, such as Max Gaines, were Jewish. For analysis of the Jewish roots of American comics, see Fingeroth (2007) and Buhle (2008).

10. For a challenge to the idea that Superman was a hidden Jew, see Portnoy (2013).

11. Examples include, Mad 2 (Dec–Jan 1953–1954), 6; Mad 10 (Apr 1954), 29; Mad 12 (Jun 1954), 5, 14; Mad 15 (Sept 1954), 7; Mad 16 (Oct 1954), 2; Mad 8 (Dec 1954), 1; Mad 19 (Jan 1955), 25; Mad 23 (Apr 1957), 23.

12. The other frequently used word was “veeblefetzer” that again has a Yiddish flavour but seems to have been Kurtzman’s invention, combining some Yiddish rooted words in order to comically connote ideas related to modern robots and appliances.

13. The term now even has its own Wikipedia entry, although it is mistaken about its first usage in Mad.

14. For example, see a series of letters from these “chapters” in Mad 21 (Mar 1955), c.

15. For instance in the many letters to the editors by readers asking about the terms, the editors and readers never mentioned that the words they were discussing were Yiddish or Jewish.

16. The closest they ever came to mentioning the Jewish victims of the Nazis was in the parody of the whitewashing of postwar movies about the war. In the panel depicting how movies during the war portrayed the Germans, it shows the officers beating an old man while saying “All right, you svine! Der Fuhrer needs Slave Labourers, zo let’s go! But first ve vill torture you a little for beink anti-Nazi, for beink non-Aryan … ” (Mad 59 (Dec 1960), 36). Both “slave labourers” and “non-Aryan” were code words for Jews.

17. For an extended description of Gaines' grilling by the subcommittee, see Jacobs (1972, 104–115). For a general examination of the 1950s attacks on “Juvenile Delinquency” and a discussion of the subcommittee’s investigation and Gaines response to them, see Gilbert (1988).

18. See, for instance, Mad 13 (Jul 1954), 9.

19. While the focus of this study is the first 10 years of Mad, the magazine’s most pointed attack on suburbanization was published in 1966 in The Mad Suburban Primer by Stan Hart and Bob Clarke.

20. Also as a parody magazine everything was fair game and if suburbanization was a prominent cultural force it would necessarily be attacked.

21. See, for instance, Kercher (2006), Gilbert (1981, 2005, 2006), Lukin (2008), Meyerowitz (1994), Abrams and Hughs (2000), Hoberek (2009), Foreman (1997), Coontz (2000, 23–41) and May (1988). As this trend in analysis of suburbia shows, Mad writers were not alone in attacking suburban life during this time period. During the postwar era, there were large numbers of critiques coming from a range of places: social scientists, popular magazines, novels, etc.

22. For the “Golden Age” designation, see Goren’s “A Golden Decade for American Jews: 1945–1955” (1997, 294–314). Goren’s chapter has some good information on Jewish suburbanization. For additional information on Jewish suburbanization, see Diner (2004, 259–304) and Heilman (1995, 8–46). Even the generally accepted notion that postwar Jewish prosperity was uniformly celebrated is challenged in Berman (2007) and Kranson (2015) shows how a profound discomfort with postwar affluence led Jewish youth to create counter-culture organizations.

23. See Diner (2004), Berman (2007, 409–434), Prell (2007, 114–41), Antler (1998, 233–55) and Prell (2007).

24. As Deborah Dash Moore pointed out to me, some suburbs, like those in Detroit, enabled Jews to “have it all” in terms of both urban (the auto industry) and suburban aspects, while others, like Levittown, the central suburb for previous New York City Jews and the focus of the Mad writers, had a much clearer severing from urban lifestyles. For a full consideration of the ways that Jews in Detroit negotiated the city/suburb dichotomy, see Berman (2015).

25. Schelly, Harvey Kurtzman, 288.

26. Page 7. See as well Berman’s (2007) discussion of Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, 419–20.

27. For an examination of the many and varied attacks on consumerism in American postwar culture, see Horowitz (2004).

28. See, for instance Mad 33 (Jun 1957), 17; Mad 35 (Oct 1957), 2–3; Mad 36 (Dec 1957), 47; Mad 50 (Oct 1959), 24. May (1998) examines how Cold War attitudes placed great pressure on suburban families to conform.

29. For analysis of the changing views of male roles during the 1950s, see Gilbert (2005, 62–80).

30. Berman (2007, 429–30) points out that the fear of the dominance of women in Judaism as a result of suburbanization was a focus of attack by male Jewish leaders at the time.

31. For an analysis of the manner in which mainstream culture pushed idealized, gendered ideas about the role of the new suburban ranch house in domesticity, see Clark Jr. (1989, 171–91). May (1988, 162–182) discusses how the suburban house was tied to Cold War politics.

32. Meyerowitz (1994, 229–262) argues persuasively that Friedan’s focus on a limited sample of women’s magazines meant she neglected how “low brow” and African American magazines were discussing postwar gender, leading Friedan to conclude that the pressure to be a housewife was everywhere rather than in her limited sample. The edited volume A Jewish Feminine Mystique? aims as well to extend ideas about Jewish women’s suburban life well beyond the narrow vision put forth by Friedan: see in particular Horowitz (2010).

33. It is interesting to note that the major feminist figure, Gloria Steinem, was first employed as Kurtzman’s assistant editor at his comedic adult magazine for Hugh Hefner, Help! Antler (1998, 259–284, 2010) traces the central impact of Jewish women on American feminism. The volume Jewish Feminine Mystique (2010) challenges many ideas about the perceived servility of the Jewish suburban wife. In particular, see Horowitz’s “Jewish Women.”

34. As Prell (2007, 127) points out, in the 1950s Jewish women continued to work in high numbers until they had children, then they left the workforce to raise their children and support their husbands, returning to work again once their children grew up.

35. See, for instance, “How to be a Mad non-conformist” Mad 47 (Jun 1959, 13–15) or the Mad 54 (Apr 1960) cover that states “This Magazine Is Revolting … Against Conformity!”

36. For instance in a comic portrait of the typical “Mad Readers” four are men and one is a hideous woman who can only get boyfriends if they want to steal her copy of Mad 11 (May 1954, 13). For a discussion of the male orientation of Mad Magazine writers, see Kercher (2006, 112–113).

37. For instance, in a parody about how to find a job, it is assumed all the job seekers are men (Mad 24 (Jul 1955), 50–51).

38. For a typical example see a parody of college students that assumes they are all men (Mad 5 (Jun–Jul 1953), 16–17).

39. The sole mention of civil rights is in “The Mad Time Capsule” for 1959 which amongst the long list of things included in the capsule such as “15,000 magazine articles about ‘togetherness’” we find “2000 unused report cards from Little Rock High School” (Mad 50 (Oct 1959), 13).

40. See, for instance, the magazine’s take down of the Good Humor Ice Cream Truck, an iconic image of the happy suburbs: in Mad’s rendition the suburbs are in fact filled with parents and children in despair (Mad 57 (Sept 1960), 8–9).