June 7, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Philip Roth and Sarah Silverman

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]

On humor, gender, and Jewish American artists.

As I noted in this 2015 post (on Ann Basu’s wonderful scholarly book States of Trial: Manhood in Philip Roth’s Post-War America), and as has continued to be the case in the years since, I’ve dedicated far more of my last decade or so of scholarly attention to Philip Roth than I would have ever predicted would be the case. There’s a lot I like about Roth’s writings, including to be sure his investigations (through but not limited to a Jewish American lens) of many of the historical and cultural questions that have come to define my own AmericanStudies interests. But he’s also one of the funniest writers about whom I’ve had the chance to write; many of my favorite American writers and works tend to be understandably short on laughs, which is of course generally necessary for their topics and themes but which is also ironic given my own love of all things humorous (including, my sons would demand I mention, a notable penchant for groan-inducing Dad Jokes).

As my 2017 class on Mark Twain illustrated with some frequency, though, humor doesn’t always translate well across time periods and contexts. While I believe much of Roth’s humor does still resonate successfully in our 2019 moment (anybody who’s been or probably even just been around a teenage boy can testify to the cringe-worthy accuracy of some of the obscenely over-the-top early chapters in Portnoy’s Complaint [1969], for example), much of it also feels dated and problematic. That’s particularly true for the ways Roth depicts his female characters, from his hysterical (in both senses) Jewish American mothers to the hysterical (ditto) Jewish American significant others to the hysterical (samesies) shiksa love interests. His male characters and protagonists are of course themselves far from immune to his humorous and satirical lenses—but because they are generally his narrators (and almost always his central perspectives), we still gain access to their layers and nuances in a way that he frequently denies for his female characters. While humor often depends on stereotypes, that’s always a fine and fraught line to walk, and Roth too often crosses it to sexism and misogyny when it comes to his depictions of women.

As usual, I would advocate for an additive model when it comes to such complex questions. That is, I think it’s still well worth reading Roth, both to critique him and his works when necessary and for all the other reasons I’ve gestured at here and elsewhere. But these problems with gender make it vitally important to engage with Jewish American female artists (who have often taken a backseat to Roth and his male peers), from historical figures like Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska (the subjects of Wednesday’s post) up to contemporary voices. There’s no shortage of wonderful such contemporary voices, but when it comes to Jewish American humor I would highlight the work and perspective of the amazingly talented Sarah Silverman. Silverman’s prolific career to date includes groundbreaking stand-up comedy, an impressively diverse acting resumé (her voice work for Wreck-It Ralph’s Vanellope will make her an eternal favorite in this AmericanStudier’s household), and most recently the political satire TV show I Love You, America. With that latter work in particular Silverman has turned her comic lens on American cultural and social questions just as potently and successfully as did Roth in his best works, which both reveals the role of multimedia forms in 2019 and reminds us of that every individual artist can and should be complemented with the voices and works of other talented folks.

Next journey tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?

June 6, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Hank Greenberg

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]

On why we should better remember one of the first and greatest Jewish American athletes.

Like Jackie Robinson, in whose story Greenberg played a small but important role (on which more below), Henry “Hank” Greenberg wouldn’t need anything outside of his baseball talents and successes to be remembered as a titan of the sport. One of the greatest sluggers in baseball history, in an era when home runs were pretty hard to come by (and despite losing four prime years of his career to military service, on which more below), Greenberg was a two-time AL MVP in his nine seasons with the Detroit Tigers (1933-1940 and 1945-1946), a four-time AL home run champion, holds the American League record for the most RBIs in a single season (183, in only 154 games), and was the first player to hit 25 or more home runs in a single season in both leagues (doing so with Pittsburgh in the NL in 1947, his final season in baseball, at the age of 36), among many other accomplishments. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, and again, should be remembered first and foremost as one of his sport’s premier stars for a decade.

Yet also like Robinson, Greenberg was a pioneer as well as a star: the first Jewish American baseball player, and the first Jewish American star in any of the major sports. One of four children of David and Sarah Greenberg, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Romania who owned a New York textile plant, Greenberg was born Hyman Greenberg in Greenwich Village in 1911. Although he was not denied entrance to the major leagues because of his ethnicity (indeed, he made his debut at 19, the youngest player in the league at the time), Greenberg did face persistent bigotry and discrimination; in one particularly striking incident, during the 1935 World Series an umpire had to clear out the entire Chicago Cubs dugout because they would not stop yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Moreover, his religion and culture presented unique challenges over the course of his career, as exemplified by his famous 1934 decision not to play in a game on Yom Kippur; he balanced that decision by choosing to play on Rosh Hashanah, in a game in which he hit two home runs and led the Tigers to a 2-1 victory, and Detroit Free Press columnist Edgar Guest honored Greenberg’s talents and Yom Kippur decision with a celebratory poem.

Greenberg was more than just a star and a pioneer, however; he was also an inspiring American, on multiple levels. Most obvious, and certainly noteworthy, was his World War II service: initially deemed 4F for flat feet, Greenberg requested a reexamination and was allowed to enlist in 1940; when he was honorably discharged a year later due to age, he re-listed; and by the war’s end he had served a total of 47 months, the longest of any major leaguer. Yet just as inspiring were some of Greenberg’s deeply American moments on the homefront. Not only was he one of the only opposing players to welcome Jackie Robinson to the majors in 1947 (Greenberg’s last season), Robinson also credited Greenberg specifically with helping him through that particularly challenging first season. And long after their retirements, Greenberg and Robinson were two of the only players (past or present) to testify on behalf of Curt Flood’s efforts to eliminate the reserve clause, efforts that led to the creation of free agency and a far more equitable system for players. For all these reasons, I would put Hank Greenberg alongside Jackie Robinson as two of baseball’s most influential and inspiring as well as greatest stars.

Last journey tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?

June 5, 2019: Jewish American Journeys: Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska

[On June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming the first Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]

On the many distinctions and telling similarity in two compelling Jewish American books.

One evening about eight years ago, my younger son taught me more about the Jewish holiday of Purim, in a couple-minute, mostly understandable and criminally cute narrative based on stories they learned in their Jewish Community Center preschool, than I had learned in my prior thirty-plus years of life. There are various ironies of my personal and familial identity illustrated by that anecdote, including the reason for all eight of my maternal great-grandparents’ immigrations to America (to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in late 19^th century Eastern Europe), the complicated religious and cultural continuities and changes across my maternal grandparents’ lives and then especially my Mom’s, my own relationship to this Jewish American heritage, and, most ironically and yet most tellingly of 21^st century America, the simple fact that my sons, who are a quarter Jewish American and a quarter English-German American and half Chinese American, have (as attendees of that JCC preschool for a few years) already learned and engaged with and performed more of Jewish culture and story in their first decades of life than I ever have and likely ever will.

While all of that is, of course, first and foremost about myself and my multi-generational American family and identity, past, present, and future, it can also connect to an interesting pair of youthful literary characters—one real and autobiographical, one invented and fictional, but both Jewish American children whose lives and voices have a great deal to tell us about family, faith, and our national identities and stories—created by talented women writers in the early 20^th century. Young Mary Antin is the protagonist of Antin’s cultural autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), a book that takes its readers from the Pale of a Russian village to a nearly unequivocal celebration of the American Dream as this particular family and narrator find and live it; young Sara Smolinsky is the narrator and heroine of Anzia Yezierska’s realistic and modernist novel Bread Givers (1925), a work which begins with its ten year old narrator and her family already in New York and chronicles especially the cross-generational struggle between Sara and her domineering scholarly father Reb. Like their works and tones, the two writers seem in many ways fully distinct: Yezierska published half a dozen novels and multiple collections of short stories in a long and successful literary career that led her to Hollywood and a romantic relationship with John Dewey; Antin’s few published works, including the autobiography and one other book, They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914), a political argument for tolerant immigration policies, appeared within a few years of each other, after which she traveled for a few more years giving speeches about immigration before largely disappearing from the public eye.

They are indeed two very different Jewish American women and authors, and these books, like their others, certainly deserve to be read and analyzed on their own terms. Yet one very interesting and telling similarity lies in the emphasis that both authors and texts place on the wisdom and awareness possessed by their very young protagonists. (A feature shared by another, slightly later Jewish American novel, Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep [1934].) These young women are, of course, being created by older authors, and yet I would argue that neither the thirty-something Antin nor the forty-something Yezierska implies that young Mary’s or Sara’s perception and prescience are creations of their older selves. Instead, it is precisely these protagonists’ youth, and concurrent their explicitly hybrid Jewish American identities, when contrasted with the older voices and more static identities illustrated by both their more Old World-centered family members and their initial encounters with native Americans, that seems to give Mary and Sara their unique and impression perspectives, their visions (whether, again, more positively or negatively) of the communities (familial, spiritual, cultural, and national) in which they are growing up. A compelling lesson for all Americans, and one more reason to read these unique works by two hugely talented Jewish American writers.

Next journey tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?