Embracing the Krypton mensch

It’s possible, given the many distractions in your life, that you have never considered the possibility that Superman was a nice Jewish boy from Krypton. Or that Betty Boop might have been an equally nice (and, in her way, equally venturesome) Jewish girl from Brooklyn, out for a little fun in the secularizing America of the 1930s.

It is one of the many virtues of J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler’s “Entertaining America” that it obliges you to think metaphorically about these figures. Superman was, after all, the creation of two Jewish cartoonists from Cleveland. More important, he was a one-man Diaspora from a world about to be destroyed. And he first appeared in Action comics just as the Nazi “supermen” staged Kristallnacht and then spent the rest of his exemplary career not being anyone’s victim. Ms. Boop, too, was the creation of Jews, and her profile in this volume shows her most basic conflict as the one with her conservative, old-world parents, who disapproved of her flighty flapper ways. What they couldn’t accomplish the Catholic prudes who ran the old Motion Picture Production Code did: They forced her to lengthen her skirt and abandon her flashing garter.

This conflict between traditional ways and largely symbolic modernism of course animates “The Jazz Singer,” famous as the first (partial) talking picture but possibly more significant as a touchstone cultural artifact. It tells the story of a Jewish lad, Al Jolson’s Jackie Rabinowitz, raised to be a cantor but drawn to show biz. In Samson Raphaelson’s original Broadway show, Jackie gave up Broadway success in order to sing the Kol Niedre at Passover -- his dying father’s wish. In the movie, however, Jackie has it both ways. He sings in temple but rushes uptown to become a musical comedy star too -- with his mother beaming tearfully in the audience.

There’s a lesson in that revision: that acculturation, driven irresistibly by the mass media, was inevitable in 20th century America. “Entertaining America,” which is the companion volume to an exhibition of the same name that opened in February at New York’s Jewish Museum, is very good, and subtle, on this subject. It demonstrates that Jewishness was one of the givens of early movies and broadcasting -- not exactly flaunted but not entirely avoided either. Dialect comedians were everywhere. The Marx Brothers made obvious references to Yiddish language and culture, and Irish James Cagney, who had learned Yiddish on the New York streets, memorably spoke it from the screen in “Taxi.” Charles Chaplin, who was not Jewish but was widely believed to be, allowed people to think he was if they so chose. To deny Jewishness, he thought, might aid and comfort anti-Semites. And then there was Gertrude Berg’s great creation, “The Goldbergs,” about a Jewish family, which played in every known medium (including comic strips) from 1929 to 1956. It was embraced by Americans of all ethnicities for the solid, middle-class values it promoted.

In postwar America, about the time anti-Semitism became the subject for serious, socially conscientious films (“Crossfire,” “Gentleman’s Agreement”), comic ethnicity largely disappeared from the media. It was thought to be tasteless, and, in 1952, Henry Popkin wrote a famous article in Commentary about popular culture’s “vanishing” Jews. They sort of returned as what Hoberman calls “bad boy” Jews, sometimes acknowledged (“Goodbye, Columbus”), sometimes not (“The Graduate”) in ‘60s comedies, which finally granted young Jewish males the Philip Rothian freedom to be sexually transgressive, just like everyone else.

I think “Entertaining America” may underestimate the significance of Jewish stand-up comedians sitting down on late-night television’s couches, the way Yiddish catch phrases have leaked out of show business into the common speech of Americans. Some sort of unconscious acceptance of Jews as a nonexotic presence in popular culture occurred beginning in the ‘60s. At the very least, the old anti-Semitic code words for them (“Orientals,” “Asiatics”) were schpritzed away. But when we finally arrive at “Seinfeld,” Shandler writes “[S]ome American Jews identify the series as a Jewish cultural touchstone, while others see it as a signpost of Jewish demise.”

That’s one of the unanswerable questions on which this book is poised. What is lost in authenticity, what is gained in generalized tolerance as Jews lose their accents, their singularity, in their mass cultural representations? But that question cannot be posed in a vacuum. And “Entertaining America” does not do so.

From nickelodeon days, corporate show business has been subject to peculiarly vicious anti-Semitic attacks, and this book offers a depressing record of that assault -- by Henry Ford, by Father Coughlan, by the anti-Communist, subtextually anti-Semitic congressional investigations of film and broadcasting in the 1940s and ‘50s. Everyone understood -- more or less correctly -- that immigrant Jews, blocked from participation in established business, had gravitated to this new enterprise. Indeed, they established a show business “culture” that, to some degree, pertains to this day. And so what? I ask. For we also understand, I think, that their essential strategy was to create products that propagated mainstream -- not to say super-American -- values. On the whole, the tough-guy moguls turned timorous when official America looked askance at some of their creations, especially when they seemed too liberal politically or erotically. By and large, they consistently tried to placate the political right and the morally censorious, when, I believe, they need not have.

For there is a desperation in America’s need for entertainment. Even in the days when public opinion polls showed a striking (and shameful) degree of reflexive anti-Semitism in this country, no one stopped going to the movies or listening to the radio. It was the same, later, with television. Neither whispered innuendo nor strident boycott (nor, for that matter, critical cavil) could stand in the way of a country daily, dementedly, seeking to swoon into enchantment at best, escapism at least. It was a triumph the Moguls, the terror of European pogroms bred in their bones, the Holocaust fresh in their minds, could never fully enjoy. Or assert without fear.

They did not understand that they were Shamans and that theirs was a new kind of power -- corporatized magic, if you will -- that was beyond the reach of all criticism, limpid or loony. It could, when the winds were right, put over anything -- the “vulgar modernism” (to borrow from a previous Hoberman title) of Al Jolson, the post-ironic ironies of Jerry Seinfeld, the crass and sentimental spectacle of “Titanic.”

Wait a minute. With pictures like “Titanic,” we enter a realm beyond the purview of “Entertaining America,” but a major motif of Hoberman’s new collection of essays and reviews, “The Magic Hour.” In it he argues that American movies, are now largely beyond the control of individual corporate leaders. Today’s typical American movie, he writes, “is an increasingly uninteresting bridge between the multimedia barrage of prerelease promotion and a potential package of spin-offs, career moves and tie-in.” These pictures are no longer “product,” as Hollywood once called them; they are merchandise. As such, they are not subject even to rudimentary aesthetic, ideological (or human) calculation. They are not made for audiences but for focus groups. They need not be produced, only managed through the marketing process by faceless functionaries, and the kinds of issues that animate the tormented history “Entertaining America” so ably illuminates are at last moot. When he writes as a traditional critic, going one-on-one with a film, Hoberman is mainly discussing films from places like China or Iran, which stand far outside our mindless production machinery. But he knows that his days are numbered, that criticism, like moguldom or auteurship, is no longer a calling to which one may reasonably aspire anymore, but a historical curiosity.