A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Most damaging of all to the assimilationist cause was the continued association of Jews with primitive sexuality. In 1915, soon after a Jewish manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta named Leo Frank was convicted of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old Gentile girl named Mary Phagan, the Southern politician Tom Watson wrote, “Every student of sociology knows that the black man’s lust after the white woman is not much fiercer than the lust of the licentious Jew for the gentile.” After a judge commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, a group calling itself “the Knights of Mary Phagan” kidnapped Frank from prison and hanged him from a tree. On October 16, 1915, exactly two months after the Frank lynching, members of the vigilante group helped to reestablish a new Ku Klux Klan, an organization dedicated to the proposition that “every influence that seeks to disrupt the home must itself be destroyed.” Above all, the new Klan declared that “it is committed to the sacred duty of protecting womanhood; and announces that one of its purposes is to shield … the chastity of womanhood. The degradation of women is violation of the sacredness of human personality, a sin against the race, a crime against society, a menace to our country, and a prostitution of all that is best, and noblest, and highest in life.”

  The Klan, which reached a membership of four or five million and a high degree of respectability by the middle of the 1920s, is most famous for lynching black people, usually for alleged sexual assaults against white women. But it spent much more of its time and resources policing the voluntary sexuality of white women, in particular the female renegades of the age. The KKK focused most closely on dance halls and automobiles, both of which, the Imperial Wizard of the Klan warned, subjected weak-willed women to “seductive allurement.” In hundreds of towns and cities where the Klan had organizations, it conducted campaigns against dance halls, which they called “vile places of amusement.” They lobbied local governments to regulate or shut down dance halls, and often, when that wasn’t successful, they burned them down. The Klan always claimed to be protecting white women from the aggressions of men from other races, but it seems that they were really protecting white women from their own desires. And they had good reason to be concerned. Most Klansmen in the 1920s were living in cities that were rapidly filling up with blacks, Jews, and Catholics, and with women—in particular white working-class women—who were eager to participate in the new, sexually liberated culture that was available there.

  Arguments about “unassimilable” Jews were particularly compelling in Congress. In 1921 the chairman of the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the House of Representatives, Albert Johnson, quoted diplomats in eastern Europe who warned the country was in danger of being overrun by “abnormally twisted” Jews, “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.” Congress then passed the Emergency Quota Act, which severely restricted immigration from eastern and southern Europe.

  Throughout the 1920s, newspapers, politicians, and ministers charged Jews with bringing radicalism and sex into the country. Auto magnate Henry Ford gained a wide following by publishing a series of articles in his Dearborn Independent newspaper on the menace of “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” Ford’s claims that Jews dominated the banking industry were overstated, and his allegations of an international Jewish conspiracy to destroy Anglo-Saxon culture appear to have been fantasy. But on the Jewish role in promoting sex, Ford was onto something. Musical theater had indeed become “a flash of color and movement—a combination of salacious farce and jazz music.” There is no question that at the time Ford was writing, as he said, “the rage is for extravaganza and burlesque” featuring “fleshly spectacles set off with overpowering scenic effects, the principal component of which is an army of girls whose drapery does not exceed five ounces in weight.” Who could deny that by the 1920s, “frivolity, sensuality, indecency” ran rampant in American popular culture? The new culture “gravitates naturally to the flesh and its exposure, its natural psychic habitat is among the more sensual emotions.” It most certainly represented “a frontal attack on the last entrenched scruple of moral conservatism.” The 1920s was the “age of the chorus girl, a voluptuous creature whose mental caliber has nothing to do with the concern of drama, and whose stage life cannot in the very nature of things be a career.” And, yes, most of the theaters, dance halls, and movie palaces were “under Jewish control.” No historian would deny Ford’s claim that “in New York, where Jewish managers are thicker than they ever will be in Jerusalem, the limit of theatrical adventures into the realm of the forbidden is being pushed further and further.” It is well documented that more than any other ethnic group, Jews owned and operated “the centers of nervous thrills and looseness.” Yes, the “throngs who indulge in indecent dancing” did so in what Ford called “Jewish jazz factories.” Largely because of such enterprises, American entertainment had become a “welter of sensuousness” and “voluptuous abandonment.” Ford summed it all up by declaring, “the Jews have introduced Oriental [meaning Asian, Mediterranean, and African] sensuality to the American stage.” All this was true.

  JEWISH JAZZ FACTORIES

  The eminent Jewish historian Howard Sachar estimates that in the first decades of the twentieth century, 75 percent of the prostitutes in New York were Jewish and 50 percent of the brothels were owned by Jews. In the 1920s roughly 20 percent of the prisoners in New York state jails were Jewish. Much of the liquor consumed in the United States during Prohibition was delivered by Jewish bootleggers. As we have seen, Jews were the pioneers in the underground contraceptives industry. They made another major contribution to sexual freedom in America by radically increasing the publication and distribution of pornography. Jews made up the major portion of those arrested for violating the Comstock Act and other obscenity laws between 1880 and 1940. As pornography expanded in the years between the world wars—a time described by one commentator as “sex o’clock in America”—Jews established themselves at the center of the industry. Historian Jay A. Gertzman argues that moral reformers during this period were “correct to claim that the traffic in ‘pornography’ was vigorous in the 1920s and 1930s, and that Jews were preponderant as distributors of gallantiana [erotic fiction], avant-garde sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and the most flagitious materials.”

  Jews were a bodily people in many ways. Today few Americans know—or can believe—that Jews were once the most natural athletes in the U.S. The first professional basketball association, the American Basketball League (ABL), was dominated by Jewish players from its founding in 1925 into the 1950s. In the first two decades of its existence, the league’s winningest teams were the Cleveland Rosenblums, led in the backcourt by the “Heavenly Twins” Marty Friedman and Barney Sedran; the all-Jewish Brooklyn Jewels; the Philadelphia SPHAS, an acronym for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association; and the New York Celtics, who were led by the sport’s first superstar, Nat Holman. Born and raised on the Lower East Side, Holman was described by one sportswriter as “an artist” on the court who “direct[ed] the short passing, weaving, meshing, game” and “revolutionized basketball.” The SPHAS, who won seven ABL championships, featured many of the best players of the era, including Harry Litwack, Cy Kaselman, Moe Goldman, Shikey Gotthoffer, Irv Torgoff, Max Posnack, Jerry Fleishman, Inky Lautman, Red Klotz, Davey “Pretzel” Banks, the son of a Lower East Side pretzel maker, and the pride of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Harry “Jammy” Moskowitz. The SPHAS dominated the American Basketball League, capturing seven league championships in twelve seasons. A writer for the 1926 Reach Basketball Guide called the SPHAS “one of the greatest, if not the greatest combinations in basketball history.” Sports historian Peter Levine found that in the 1930s and 1940s, roughly half of the ABL’s players were Jewish, and in a compilation of the ABL’s top scorers for the 1940–41 season, “36 of the 61 names listed are clearly identifiable as Jewish.” The top eight scorers that season were all Jewish, including the league’s leading scorer, the SPHAS’s Petey Rosenberg.
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br />   Jews dominated college basketball as well. In 1921 the American Hebrew declared that “the immigrant boys” on college basketball teams had achieved “supremacy of brawn, speed and skill.” And in 1935 the Jewish Chronicle noted that in collegiate athletics, “basketball and Jewish stars are synonymous.” Indeed, through the 1940s, colleges with predominantly Jewish student bodies wiped the hardwood with their Gentile rivals. Between 1919 and 1956, the nearly all-Jewish City College of New York team compiled a 423–190 record, and New York University, known by some as “NYJew,” won 429 games and lost 235 from 1922 to 1958. Many pundits of the time tried to explain Jewish basketball prowess as biological: Jews were naturally more dexterous and had greater intrinsic athletic ability than non-Jews. Others, such as New York Daily News sports editor Paul Gallico, combined this belief with more traditional stereotypes. Writing in the 1930s, Gallico claimed that basketball “appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background [because] the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart-alecness.”

  As “naturally” gifted as they once were in basketball, nowhere did Jews demonstrate their innate athletic gifts more convincingly than in the boxing ring. Between 1900 and 1940, more Jews won boxing world championships—twenty-six—than Irish, Italian, German, or African American fighters. During this period, most of the greatest stars in the sport were Jewish. Benny “the Ghetto Wizard” Leonard held the lightweight title for eight years and is still widely considered the greatest fighter in that weight class in the first half of the twentieth century. Maxie “Slapsie” Rosenbloom and Barney “Battling Levinsky” Lebrowitz each held the light-heavyweight championship for five years. And Barney Ross, born Dov-Ber Rasofsky and the son of a rabbi, was the first boxer to win three different weight divisions, capturing the lightweight, junior-welterweight, and welterweight crowns during his ten-year career. Jews were so prominent in the sport that nine times between 1920 and 1934, Jews fought each other in championship matches.

  JEWISH NIGGERS

  In the music industry, for many years Jews were blacker than Negroes. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Jewish-owned company M. Witmark & Sons published and publicized many of the most important “syncopated” or “coon songs” of the era. Some of the Witmark brothers got their start in blackface minstrel troupes. The company also functioned, according to its historian, as “the amateur minstrel center of the country” largely through its “Minstrel Department.” The house published not only minstrel songs but also a full line of joke books, “Negro acts,” minstrel overtures, and finales. It supplied tambos, bones, slave costumes, and, of course, burnt cork. In 1899 the Witmark brothers published The First Minstrel Encyclopaedia and The First Minstrel Catalogue, which “covered every want of the amateur quite as well as the mastodonic Sears, Roebuck catalogue covers the needs of its vast patronage.”

  As the Irish faded out of blackface, Jewish immigrants stepped in with great enthusiasm. Historian Mark Slobin points to “the fact that virtually every Jewish American stage personality, from Weber and Fields through Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and Eddie Cantor, first reached out to American audiences from behind a mask of burnt cork.” The Jewish influx into blackface minstrelsy was so pronounced that the Morning Telegraph was compelled to announce in 1899 that “Hebrews Have Been Chosen to Succeed Coons.”

  For a time, many Jews considered themselves to have even more musical facility than the descendants of American slaves. In 1910 the young Irving Berlin wrote “Yiddle on Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime,” a tribute to Jewish rhythm. The song depicts a woman named Sadie at a wedding where “Ev’ryone was singing, dancing, springing.” When she heard Yiddle playing ragtime, “she jumped up and looked him in the eyes,” then shouted:

  Get busy

  I’m dizzy

  I’m feeling two years young

  Mine choc’late baby

  Berlin’s identification with blackness was even expressed in the way he taught himself to play music: he hit only the black keys, which he called “nigger keys,” on what he called his “nigger pianos.” Al Jolson was another chocolate Jew. According to his biographer Isaac Goldberg, Jolson was “the living symbol of the similarity” between blacks and Jews. As a young adult, Jolson was fascinated with black music and spent a great deal of time in Harlem, where in the 1910s he was the only white man allowed into Leroy’s, a black musical cabaret. Jolson emerged as a star in the 1911 musical La Belle Paree, in which he appeared as Erastus Sparkle, “a colored aristocrat from San Juan Hill, cutting a wide swath in Paris.” Among the featured songs was “Paris Is a Paradise for Coons,” which was written by the Jewish composer Jerome Kern. Over the next two decades, Jolson rose to the top of show business, performing regularly in blackface.

  In the same year that Jolson achieved blackface stardom, Irving Berlin penned his first hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” the first popular American song featuring syncopated rhythm. Its lyrics, which were meant to be sung in mock-Negro minstrel dialect, celebrated primitive musicality: “There’s a fiddle with notes that screeches / Like a chicken / And the clarinet is a colored pet / Come and listen / To a classical band what’s peaches … So natural that you want to hear some more.” Berlin had learned syncopation by listening to ragtime pianists at a Chinatown nightclub where he worked as a waiter. Berlin went on to write many of the most famous “black songs,” including “Harlem on My Mind” and “Supper Time.”

  In 1918, Al Jolson performed “Swanee,” a minstrel song written by the young Jewish songwriter George Gershwin. The song told of an ex-slave’s longing to be “among the folks in D-I-X-I-E,” where “the banjos are strummin’ soft and low” and “my mammy is waiting for me.” Gershwin’s subsequent career was built on black music, from Rhapsody in Blue to Porgy and Bess. He learned the sounds of spirituals, blues, jazz, and ragtime in Harlem nightclubs, which he began frequenting as a teenager. Jerome Kern, too, was both black and Jewish. In high school, he helped write a senior class minstrel show in which he played ragtime on piano. Kern’s score for the 1927 Show Boat, a collection of spirituals, ragtime, blues, and jazz, including the classics “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” is usually considered his greatest artistic achievement. In that same year, Al Jolson achieved iconic status with the release of the first “talkie” motion picture, The Jazz Singer, in which Jolson’s character repudiates his devout Jewish family for stardom in blackface theater.

  While Berlin, Gershwin, Kern, and Jolson tried to straddle the line between African American music and mainstream sensibilities, Harold Arlen appears to have fully embraced his blackness. Arlen’s father was a cantor with a reputed adeptness for improvisation. As a young musician, Arlen studied the “race” records of Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, and other foundational jazz musicians, and formed an association with the Cotton Club in Harlem. Arlen was put on the map in 1930 when his “Get Happy” was performed at the club. Over the next three decades, he wrote dozens of blues and jazz numbers, including songs for an “American Negro” suite in 1940 called Reverend Johnson’s Dream. The blues singer Ethel Waters was so taken with Arlen’s authenticity that she called him the “Negro-ist” white man she had ever known, and one of his songwriting colleagues claimed that more than just an imitator of African Americans, Arlen “was really one of them.”

  Many of the songs performed by Jewish entertainers were written by African American composers. Sophie Tucker, the “Coon Shouter” and “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” hired African American singers to give her lessons and African American composers to write her songs. Joe Sultzer of the Jewish vaudeville duo Smith and Dale credited black street performers on the Lower East Side in the 1890s as the inspiration for his act: “A colored fellow used to come and dance on our street. It was called buck dancing. He had sand and threw it on the sidewalk and danced. The sound of the sand and the shuffle of his feet fascinated me, and I would try to dance like him. It made me feel I wanted t
o go on the stage.” Less famous Jews were similarly taken with black music. In the 1880s, the journalist and social reformer Jacob Riis noticed that the “young people in Jewtown [the Lower East Side] are inordinately fond of dancing.” Jewish moral reformer Belle Moskowitz despaired that in Jewish neighborhoods, “the glare of lights and the blare of music strikes you on every side.” In the 1910s and 1920s, Hadassah chapters and Jewish youth and recreation centers in cities across the country regularly staged shows featuring Jewish entertainers in blackface singing in mock black dialect and dancing the most intricate jazz steps of the day.

  Jewish immigrants took over vaudeville theater in the early twentieth century and made it into a celebration of unseemly pleasures. Most disturbing to the disciplinarians of the time was the dancing of vaudeville performers—in particular the undulations of female dancers and the “tough dances” in which copulation was simulated.

  Like the first Irish immigrants, eastern European Jews who settled in the United States seemed unaware or unconcerned with the American color line. According to historian Jeffrey Gurock, they “showed no easily recognizable unwillingness towards living with and among blacks.” By the 1920s, thousands of Jews lived and operated businesses in the African American neighborhoods of Harlem and Chicago’s South Side.

  One of the more remarkable—and underreported—examples of Jewish identification with African Americans was the common use of nigger by Jews as a nickname. In Michael Gold’s autobiographical novel Jews Without Money, the narrator’s best friend is a “virile boy” named “Nigger.” Jewish gangsters who ruled many big-city streets in the early part of the twentieth century often adopted the same nom de guerre. There was “Yoski Nigger” of the Yiddish Black Hand, “Nigger Benny” Snyder of the Greaser Gang, Harry “Nig” Rosen of Philadelphia’s 69th Street Gang, and Isadore “Nigger” Goldberg of the Twentieth Ward Group in Chicago. There was even a Jewish brothel owner in New York known as “Nigger Ruth.” And down on Pell Street in New York’s Chinatown, there was a café owned and operated by a Russian Jew named “Nigger Mike” Salter, the man who hired Irving Berlin as a waiter.