Jewish Americans on Screen

PBS pontificator Roger Rosenblatt once had an interesting pop culture theory: Of all America’s ethnic groups, the three that have most succeeded at putting over their story as America’s own have been the Irish, the Blacks, and the Jews. Some other time I’ll examine the Celtic twilight of The East Side Kids or Darby O’ Gill and the Little People. But in the meantime, take a look at a few movies about Jewish Americans. There aren’t as many onscreen as you probably think.

Biblical epics? Holocaust dramas? Fiddler on the Roof? Critical parts of Jewish history, but they aren’t about the everyday lives of Jews in America. This post is one boomer’s purely subjective look at some films, mostly about the kind of people I might have grown up with. There are a lot of Jewish people in Hollywood history. But for the longest time, they shied away from making films about themselves.

The Jazz Singer (1927) is a striking exception. Today it’s regarded, not totally accurately, as the first sound film. The son of a cantor has drifted away from the faith, shattering the father-son relationship. The son is a singer in jazz clubs, but at the end of the movie he comes home, literally and spiritually, to the Temple. Al Jolson was already a nationwide star of musical theater and vaudeville; he was a natural choice to bring singing to the formerly silent screen. The talking, the part that people remember, was almost incidental while the picture was being filmed. (It was remade in 1980 with another musical star from outside Hollywood, Neil Diamond.)

The Warners Vitaphone story of Jacob Rabinowitz/”Jack Robin” was enormously successful because it touched on the experience of so many other US immigrant groups: the desire to assimilate, along with wistful regret that the customs and language of the Old World were disappearing. In the Fifties, that was true of all my friends’ families, gentile or Jewish; our grandparents had some strange customs and ‘funny’ accents that back then, could be mildly embarrassing to us kids at times.

America, in The Jazz Singer, is a tolerant and welcoming place, the best the Jews ever knew. It was decades before Hollywood made a major return to the subject. That changed abruptly in 1947 with Gentlemen’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck as a gentile writer who poses as Jewish to research a story on anti-Semitism. It was not only prestigious, but popular, at a time when memories of the atrocities of WWII were fresh. Ironically, most of the key Hollywood people involved with the movie were not Jewish, including 20^th Century Fox studio boss Darryl Zanuck.

For the next decade of Hollywood’s golden age, the subject largely went quiet again on the big screen.

Based on Herman Wouk’s best seller, 1958’s Marjorie Morningstar was a romantic melodrama about Marjorie Morgenstern, a sheltered, innocent girl from a well-to-do family who rejects her parent-picked fiancé and defiantly goes off to work in a girls’ summer camp. Once she and the other girls discover the boys in the summer stock theater troupe across the lake, plenty of moonlight boating was ensured. Marjorie (Natalie Wood) instantly falls in love with the footlights, and with Noel Airman (Gene Kelly), a charismatic theater director who becomes, in effect, her Rhett Butler, the lasting hero and heel of her life’s romantic saga. They move to Manhattan. As the (slightly) renamed Marjorie Morningstar, her theater career soars; his does not.

The filmmakers don’t dodge the obvious ethnicity; you know that it’s a Jewish family. That’s the world it matter-of-factly takes place in. BTW, if you see this glossy, thoughtful Technicolor soap opera (and you should sometime; it’s pretty good), you just might recognize a modern TV show that uses a slightly different formula with similar ingredients, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, set in the same world of the late 50s, in prosperous upper west side apartments, in Greenwich Village, and especially at summer camp in the Catskills.

Hollywood’s production Code frowned on depictions of whole ethnic groups unless they were generic and positive. Films, and more so, TV, usually tried to avoid controversy. But around the turn of the Sixties, writers began to chafe at restrictions of all sorts. Entertainment with an unreservedly east coast Jewish flair became a specialty of network television—Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers. Comedians like Morey Amsterdam, Alan King, Shecky Greene, Sam Levenson, and many others appeared on Ed Sullivan and The Tonight Show, bringing a distinctive style of humor to places around the country that hadn’t yet seen many Jewish people in person.

Goodbye Columbus (1969) was a wry, bittersweet romcom hit about the fate of a young couple’s summer romance in New York’s upscale suburbs.

Richard Benjamin plays the young guy. He’s a good actor who can put over a joke. In truth he isn’t nearly as important to the story as his girlfriend, Brenda Potamkin, played by Ali MacGraw. Like a lot of jokes that become tiresome and offensive clichés, “Jewish American princess” was in truth not much different than being an Italian American or Iranian American or any other kind of princess—the key word here is “princess”, but the cliché was current then, and that’s the way she was described in the media. An over-the-top wedding reception is very funny, but the Jewishness of Goodbye Columbus is strictly cultural, not religious.

The movie only lightly touches on another cliché, the allegedly charmed life of “the rich Jews”. It makes the point that day-to-day life for most Jewish Americans wasn’t and isn’t nearly as inside-y and glamorous as some seem to think.

Superficially Brenda Potamkin’s father might look like one of those so-called “rich Jews.” He’s got a mid-sized plumbing supply business in industrial Brooklyn, and a fine five-bedroom home in the suburbs. But in big picture terms, that doesn’t remotely make him rich-rich, as the ladies of The View might put it.

Old man Potamkin works six days a week at a battered desk off to the side of his noisy warehouse, as he has since his late father ran the company, phoning delinquent customers to pay up, while an unforgiving calendar keeps him on the treadmill of paying rent, forestalling his own creditors, and meeting a payroll. There’s a Yiddish expression, “the business is a noodge;” a fretful lot of endless work that never lets up, never lets you relax. That was the day-to-day reality of mercantile life in yesterday’s harder times.

One of the most measured and moving of onscreen American Jewish sagas is 1990's Avalon, by Barry Levinson. Set in his native Baltimore, like so many of Levinson’s most memorable films, it follows the story of Levinson’s own family, roughly 1905-’70, as an extended family of immigrants builds a small retail business from the ground up and moves to a modest suburban home. Like so many families of every ethnic group, they start climbing life’s ladder. The younger of the fictional Krichinskys anglicize their names (to Kaye or Kirk) and move into selling television sets after the war, eventually becoming big enough to afford to advertise on TV themselves.

The family has its share of misfortunes: a streetcar accident, a warehouse fire, surviving a stabbing during a robbery gone wrong. But one misfortune that doesn’t appear is prejudice. The struggles of K and K Discount Furniture have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. From the very first minute of the film, the Krichinskys express gratitude for being in America. Their lives here are marked by opportunity and hard work, not fear.

A closing note: Some identity groups can be…touchy about casting issues, but I’ve rarely if ever seen a Jewish complaint about being portrayed by gentiles. The post already mentions Gene Kelly, Ali MacGraw, and Natalie Wood. Hollywood’s purely “honorary” Jews have also included Charlton Heston (The Ten Commandments), Aidan Quinn (in Avalon), Meryl Streep (Kramer vs. Kramer) Hector Elizondo (Nothing in Common), Robert De Niro (Casino), Al Pacino (Hunters) and most recently, Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

A special mention in the make-up department must be given to Tom Cruise as studio boss Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, but top prize goes to Eddie Murphy as the old Jewish guy, “Saul” in 1988’s Coming to America.