Hip by John Leland

Author:John Leland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

This is a curious route to the American Dream. Why would Jews, whether in the music world or the civil rights movement, cast their lots with what James Baldwin called a “minority even more unloved” than themselves? Part of the motivation was money, of course. There was gold in the coon songs. Also, as Cornel West notes, the two groups were bound by a biblical sense of purpose, a literature based on the deliverance of their slave ancestors. And as Arlen observed, there were the shared musical sonorities.

But none of these factors explains the unique involvement of Jews in African American politics and popular culture. Other immigrant groups arrived with blue notes and stories of persecution and oppression. Yet only Jewish immigrants found a route to American acculturation—being accepted, respected and paid—through blackness. The historian Hasia R. Diner argues that for Jews in the early 20th century, taking up African American social causes “not only proved their credentials as Americans, conversant with the imagery of American ideals, but also provided them with a way of showing how useful Judaism could be in America.” Even this, however, does not go far enough to account for Rhapsody in Blue, let alone the Beastie Boys. Irving Howe suggests an explanation much closer to hip’s parameters. When they took over blackface from Irish immigrants, he wrote, “the Jewish performers transformed it into something emotionally richer and more humane. Black became a mask for Jewish expressiveness, with one woe speaking through the voice of another…. Blacking their faces seems to have enabled the Jewish performers to reach a spontaneity and assertiveness in the declaration of their Jewish selves.” The stereotypes, however, remained the same, and it is possible that Jewish involvement prolonged minstrelsy’s reign.

Howe’s argument is that as a persecuted minority, Jews used their access to African-American idioms not so much to express blackness as to transmit full-blown Jewish identity within America. This is where the story of Jews and African Americans meets the arc of hip, where language means more than it says and the mask reveals as it hides. Howe’s reading of blackface as a channel for Jewish self-expression, rather than a put-on, applies beyond the minstrel stage to artifacts like Mezz Mezzrow’s hipster memoir, Really the Blues (1946), or Beck’s 1996 “Where It’s At,” in which he raps about “two turntables and a microphone.” Like the city itself, blackface provided cover of anonymity, a chance to express traditional tribal emotions and still be au courant, hip. According to Howe, the burnt cork was a code, as cryptic and expressive as urban slang. Its message lay not in the root material but, as with the Heeb magazine cover, in the audacity of the play. Jewish immigrants—“rootless cosmopolitans” for whom change was a staple of continuity—could find true tribal expression in the straddle.

This negotiation plays out most vividly in Alan Crosland’s 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Viewed now, the movie is a revelation. The plot is straightforward ethnic melodrama: In an Orthodox home on the Lower East Side, Jakie Rabinowitz falls in love with the American sounds of ragtime.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.