“A bad, bold, big-nosed, biblical brother”: refashioning the funny Jew in post-World War Two America

ABSTRACT

Film director Jonathan Kesselman’s 2003 comedy The Hebrew Hammer introduced a new Jewish superhero on cable television: a tough, hip, jive-talking “biblical brother” who battles anti-Semites on the streets of New York under the gaze of adoring children, desirous women, and admiring African-Americans. Although the Hebrew Hammer is a cool Jewish thug who transcends the exilic condition of the proverbially submissive diaspora Jew through his brawn and swagger, he is also funny; he is a gangster who exhibits the neuroses, complaints, and schlemiel-like stereotypes that lie at the heart of modern Jewish humour. The Hebrew Hammer represents the culmination of a trend in American popular culture that began in the 1950s with Lenny Bruce. An unapologetically proud Jew, Bruce deployed his comedy and his cool persona to demolish Gentile propriety. Proclaiming an affinity to other minorities who had also suffered at the hands of Anglo-Saxon Christendom, Bruce and his successors publicly mocked their history of exclusion and the legacy of racism. A narrative of shared affliction has allowed Jewish humourists to appropriate the stereotypes and cultural practices of African-Americans and other ethnic groups, and to embed them into their comedy, fusing them with familiar Jewish tropes. This is the foundation of a new Jewish humour, one that remains anchored in the past, even as it has been refashioned to suit a multi-cultural immigrant society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jarrod Tanny is Associate Professor of History and the Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of City of Rogues and Schnorrers: Russia’s Jews and the Myth of Old Odessa (Indiana University Press, 2011). He is currently writing a study on the history of Jewish humour.

Notes

1. Numerous scholars have traced the history of Jewish humour in the U.S.A., underscoring how the influx of Jewish entertainers radically transformed American comedy beginning in the early twentieth century. According to Steven J. Whitfield (2005, 33), the frontier ethos of cowboys and conquerors that had characterized nineteenth-century American humour gave way to the “character ideal of the loser, who is indifferent to practicality and to mastery of his environment,” prominent tropes in the Jewish diaspora humour imported from Europe. In The Haunted Smile, Lawrence J. Epstein (2001, xiii) argues that the mass immigration of Russian Jewry at the onset of industrialization – an age of uncertainty, dislocation, and apprehension – induced American society to turn to “history’s most famous outsiders” for humour “to deal with its own anxieties and to vindicate its desires.” Although Weinstein (2008, 33) largely concurs with these views, he maintains that the onset of the twenty-first century has largely witnessed the demise of the canonical neurotic Jewish schlemiel in favour of a “new comic sensibility” where “Jewish comics aren’t afraid of proclaiming their ethnicity.” The best recent scholarly work to situate American Jewish humour in its larger historical and global context is Ruth R. Wisse’s (2013) No Joke: Making Jewish Humor.

2. To be sure, Lenny Bruce was not the first American Jewish entertainer to exploit the comic possibilities through the injection of Yiddish words, inflections, and syntax into his material. Jewish dialect humour traces back to Vaudeville and even though it went out of fashion in the 1920s, variations of it still surfaced in the writings of Milt Gross, occasionally in the films of the Marx Brothers, on radio and television with Gertrude Berg and Milton Berle, and, perhaps most creatively, in the 1950s’ satirical music of Mickey Katz. According to Weber (1999, 141), Berle and Katz used dialect humour because of its “unmasking, demystifying powers … its ability to see through pretension … to reduce the mighty and awesome through the levelling playfulness of the earthy (sometimes scatological) ‘other’ tongue.” But Lenny Bruce was a pioneer because he deployed Yiddish in conjunction with a brazenly explicit attack on the sacred pillars and ineffable taboos of white puritanical America, including religion, race, and unbridled sexuality.

3. There is a growing body of literature on the complex place of the Jews in America’s ethno-racial mosaic in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In The Price of Whiteness, Eric L. Goldstein (2006, 235–236) argues that American Jews are increasingly “conscious of the way that being seen as white delegitimizes their claim to difference,” and, accordingly, will express “tribalist sentiment” under the right circumstances. Some scholars have explored the ways in which such ambiguities have surfaced in the Jewish humour of the past few decades. According to Roberta Rosenberg (2015, 116), producers of new Jewish comedy have rejected the traditional tropes of victimhood, anxiety, and alienation “in favor of a diaspora sensibility predicated on connection and a shared humanity” with the white Christian establishment. While it is true that Jewish humourists exude an unabashed self-confidence that is often absent from the humour of previous generations, Rosenberg does not account for the apparent rejection of whiteness and its implications, in films such as The Hebrew Hammer and the comedy of Sarah Silverman. Conversely, David Gillota (2013, 53) maintains that Jewish entertainers today have returned to “blackness,” what he calls “a new brand of Jewish blackface … in order to distance themselves from whiteness.” However, Gillota sees this as an early twenty-first-century phenomenon; he does not sufficiently acknowledge the seminal role of Jewish comics of the previous generation who problematized the place of the Jew on the American colour line, including Lenny Bruce, the satirical musician Kinky Friedman, and the creators of the television series All in the Family and Welcome Back, Kotter.