A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Chicago and one of the great jazz clarinetists of his age, went so far as to declare his racial defection. After a teenaged excursion to Missouri, he remembered “the Southerners had called me a ‘nigger lover’ there.”

  Solid. I not only loved those colored boys, but I was one of them—I felt closer to them than I felt to the whites, and I even got the same treatment they got… . By the time I reached home, I knew that I was going to spend all my time from then on sticking close to Negroes. They were my kind of people. And I was going to learn their music and play it for the rest of my days. I was going to be a musician, a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can.

  Mezzrow performed in otherwise all-black jazz bands, married a black woman, and moved to Harlem. He not only declared himself a “voluntary Negro” but also became a “bad nigger.” In the 1930s, Mezzrow established himself as the primary drug dealer in the jazz scene, and in 1940 he was arrested and convicted of possession and intent to distribute marijuana. When he arrived at Riker’s Island, he told the guards he was black and was sent to the segregated prison’s Negro section.

  In 1946 Ebony magazine honored Mezzrow in a feature story titled “Case History of an Ex-White Man,” for being “one of the few whites” to have “passed through the Jim Crow portals of Negro life to live on equal terms with its harried inhabitants.” Of course, the article noted, “Physically speaking,” Mezzrow “couldn’t pass for Negro by any stretch of the imagination; his skin is too white.” Nonetheless, the article maintained, his “conversion to ‘the race’ has taken place largely within himself. In psychological makeup, he is completely a black man and proudly admits it.”

  THE JEW IS A WHITE MAN

  To many historians, Jewish attachment to jazz, basketball, dance halls, and blackface was evidence of Jewish assimilation into American culture. Yet those scholars do not appreciate that there have been many and conflicting American cultures. The Jews who danced orgiastically and called themselves niggers became “bad” Americans.

  To understand that even during the Jazz Age “good” Americans did not have rhythm, we need only listen to the music that was played and the dances that were danced in institutions that trained immigrants to be American. The historian Derek Vaillant has written that social workers among immigrants in the first decades of the twentieth century “moved swiftly to single out specific musical forms, such as ragtime and jazz, and their audiences for censure if they challenged conventional expectations of self-control, women’s place, sexual mores, and youth behavior, or if they appeared to encourage social mixing.” Fearing “the attendant evil of the modern styles of dancing,” social workers and city officials banned the playing of “ragtime music or any other music with suggestive titles or words, or with any form of improper dancing” at dances catering to immigrants. Forbidden moves included “close dancing,” “improper position,” “a distorted position,” and “freak, unnecessary or indecent movements” such as “suggestive wiggling, frequent low dipping, [or] extreme swaying.” Dancers were allowed only to exhibit “self-control and self-government” in their movements.

  Jewish American leaders were among the first to warn that improper dancing and other forms of un-American behavior were more likely to break out among immigrants who lived in close proximity to blacks. In 1911 a writer for the Forward, the leading Jewish American newspaper, decried the mixing of Jewish shopkeepers with blacks. “To make a living, the grocer must give up all of the comforts of the ‘outside’ civilization” and live among the “old, ramshackle ruins” of the “Negro neighborhood,” where his children are “influenced by the half-wild and barbaric street life of the black.” The grocer “learns the black’s English, and finds himself at a very low station in life.” In the Yiddish press of the 1920s and 1930s, according to historian Hasia Diner, “[t]here were probably more articles on black crime than on any other single black theme in the Yiddish press.” The headlines for these articles “were either gruesome or explosive: ‘Crazy Negro Kills 4 People in Chicago,’ ‘Mad Negro Bites Policeman, Who Dies,’ ‘Black Accused of Trying to Chloroform a White Girl and Rape Her,’ and ‘Negro Found Guilty of Murder of Girl: Two More Girls Attacked Brutally Yesterday,’ typifies the Yiddish press style.”

  Most important, the Yiddish press highlighted the danger of mixing with blacks. “The Forward ran several long articles on Harlem nightlife, partly to discourage Jewish youth from slumming there.” All the newspapers concluded that “it was dangerous for whites to patronize Harlem cabarets and saloons.” In Diner’s survey of Yiddish newspapers from 1915 to 1935, she found eight reports of Jewish women being attacked or raped by black men, several other articles on Jews being shot or stabbed by blacks for no apparent reason, and scores of reports of black violence against Jews during robberies, “not just of merchants but of Jews waiting on subway platforms, walking in the hallways of apartment buildings, passing on the streets, or in their homes.”

  At about this time, Jewish biology began to change. In the 1920s and 1930s, several Jewish American intellectuals argued that Jews were in fact a distinct “race” but one whose characteristics were perfectly consistent with American respectability. In his Famous Musicians of a Wandering Race (1928), Gdal Saleski argued that “the bloodstream of the Jew courses through the spiritual veins of every major art that modern civilization has risen to honor” and praised Jewish American composers whose work was “entirely free from the barbaric influence of jazz and from the lurid wail of the saxophone.” Similarly, Mac Davis’s From Moses to Einstein: They Are All Jews (1937) presented sixty biographical sketches of Jews who made “immense” contributions to civilization as “soldier, statesman, explorer, pugilist, poet, scientist, rabbi, actress, [and] business man” without mentioning any of the equally prominent Jews in blackface minstrelsy or jazz.

  While some in the non-Jewish press noticed that Jewish athletes shared with African Americans a “natural” facility with their bodies, many prominent Jews steered attention to their upstanding demeanor. Harold Riegelman, a national leader of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, praised Jewish athletes for their “sportsmanship on the athletic field,” “their reserve and decency of deportment,” and “the inherent fitness of their character.” The American Hebrew hailed University of Michigan football star Benny Friedman for his “character, intrinsic merit, and pleasing deportment” and basketball legend Nat Holman for his “dignified bearing” as “a man of culture,” his “well-enunciated speech” and “poise,” and his “clean, high-minded Americanism.” The Jewish editor of Ring Magazine, Nat Fleischer, noted Benny Leonard’s “hair-trigger brain.” Even Leonard himself argued that “it was the Jewish fighters who put the science in the game.” Jewish scholar Max Margolis helped counter comparisons to black physicality by declaring in a 1923 issue of the B’nai B’rith News that biologically, “the Jew is a white man.” Some went so far as to claim that anyone who excelled with his body could not be a real Jew, as the Daily Jewish Courier said in 1923 about Jewish boxers:

  as for our highly honored members of the fighting fraternity, we may say that if the Jewish people has anything to contribute to the common civilization and culture of the race, such contributions are rather to be sought in the realm of their intellects than in their fists… . As a matter of fact, none of these pugilists may be said to be Jews except in the accident of their birth.

  Similarly, a 1939 booklet distributed by the Anti-Defamation League stated categorically that Jews had achieved whiteness. “Scientifically and correctly speaking, there are three great races in the world: the black, yellow, and white. Within the white race all the sub-races have long since been mixed, and we Jews are part of the general admixture.”

  Some who acknowledged Jewish participation in jazz credited Jews with civilizing the music. Critic Abraham Roback argued in 1927 that “The … people to bring into the wild gyrations of the original jazz a note of restr
aint, of anxiety and foreboding were the Jewish song writers who were versatile enough to catch the spirit of Negro music… . If you ask what America would have done without the host of Jewish … composers, and what the music of the street would have been like, the answer would be that jazz would still have had its day, but it would have been a more puerile and less varied kind of jazz… . The original Negro jazz is shapeless and chaotic. In most of the Jewish versions you can follow motifs.”

  Others simply wished that the Jews would leave black music alone. As Rabbi Steven Wise wrote in 1924, “Jazz is one of the inevitable expressions of what might be called the jazzy morale of mood of America … when America regains its soul, jazz will go, not before—that is to say, it will be relegated to the dark and scarlet haunts whence it came and whither unwept it will return, after America’s soul is reborn.” Belle Moskowitz made it her life’s work to rid her people of their rhythm. She told her brethren, “you cannot dance night after night, held in the closest of sensual embraces, with every effort made in the style of dancing to appeal to the worst in you and remain unshaken by it.” Moskowitz and other reformers led a campaign to regulate the styles of dancing in dance halls, and by the 1920s, more than sixty city governments passed ordinances banning “lascivious,” “debauched,” and “sensual” movements on public dance floors. Jewish movie executives soon instituted a similar purification program in their industry. In 1934 they began to enforce the Motion Picture Production Code, which forbade, among many things, the presentation of “dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passions,” “dances intended to excite the emotional reaction of an audience,” “dances with movement of the breasts,” and “excessive body movements while the feet are stationary.”

  RISE OF THE NERD

  Yiddish-language newspapers during the 1920s and 1930s paid careful attention to black-Jewish relations and helped establish what might be called the liberal Jewish view on race. Influential, widely read papers such as the Forward, the Morgen Journal, and the Tageblatt “agreed upon very little,” according to historian Hasia Diner, but “race and the lot of black Americans proved a striking exception.” All the major Yiddish papers condemned legal segregation, supported civil rights, and praised black achievements. But they also made it clear that Jews and blacks should be culturally separate. Blacks had rhythm; good Jews did not. In the Yiddish press, according to Diner, “descriptions of Negro life in Harlem were replete with dancing, gyrating men and women, the sounds of bongo drums (which one Tageblatt writer called ‘their national instrument’) resounded, and exuberant vibrant music filled the streets.” In one article, Maurice Schwartz, a star of Yiddish theater, “claimed in no uncertain terms that rhythm ran in the Negroes’ blood.” Similarly, the English-language Jewish Tribune wrote that one should “expect colored dancers to put about fifty times more pep into a performance than the average white girl cares to attempt.” And the American Hebrew declared that “the rhythm of the Negro is vicious, it is of kinesthetic urge. One sways and bends with it.” Overall, Jewish papers asserted that “musical and rhythmic expression were the most distinctive characteristics of black cultural life.” But in the very same issues in which civil rights were championed and black musical genius celebrated, warnings were made to Jews who might cross the color line. Occasional references were made to the apparent affinity several Jewish entertainers had for black music, but any similarity between the two groups was attributed to suffering, not sensuality. As a Forward review of The Jazz Singer put it, the film’s “Negro songs” contained “the minor key of jewish music, the wail of the Chazan, the cry of anguish of a people who had suffered. The son of a line of rabbis well knows how to sing the songs of the most cruelly wronged people in the world’s history.”

  During World War II, with success demanding national unity, the federal government officially welcomed Jews into the white race. In 1943 the Immigration and Naturalization Service for the first time denoted all Europeans as “white” on its forms for immigrants seeking American citizenship. The military remained thoroughly segregated between black and white—even blood supplies from black and white donors were kept separate—but extraordinary measures were taken to merge Americans of European origins. According to the historian Gary Gerstle, the military for the first time formed regiments of white men of every ethnicity and nationality.

  Sometimes together for as long as four years, these units became extraordinary vehicles for melding the many streams of Euro-Americans into one … And this assimilatory process was racialized from its inception because no blacks and few Asians were permitted to take part, in the sense that they were excluded from regiments defined as white.

  The effect of this integration was profound. According to historian Eric L. Goldstein, “More than any other wartime development, the thorough integration of Jews and Catholics into the American military helped cement the public’s view of these groups as unambiguously white.” Suddenly, Jews and Italians were members of “ethnicities” rather than races. In the 1940s, best-selling books such as Ruth Benedict’s The Races of Mankind and Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race rejected the existence of races among Europeans and claimed that differences among whites were cultural rather than biological. Opinion polls conducted after the war showed that for the first time, a majority of Americans did not identify Jews as a race.

  During and after World War II, Jews acted on the fears of racial mixing by moving en masse out of Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, and other neighborhoods that were taking in black migrants from the South. Soon fewer Jewish Americans were participating in renegade culture than observing it. As Goldstein notes, “countless memoirs record the fascination of Jewish youth of these years with African American jazz artists, whose performances in nightclubs and dance halls they would often attend.” At the same time, the number of Jewish jazz musicians declined in the postwar period, and those who continued with the music—including such greats as Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Herbie Mann, Red Rodney, Stan Levey, Lou Levy, Paul Desmond, Teddy Charles, and Shelly Manne—tended to follow the postwar trend away from swing and into nondanceable “cool jazz” and intricate, highly technical bebop.

  Jews also abandoned sports, in particular sports considered to be less cerebral and more primitive than others. According to Jewish boxing historian Allen Bodner, “[b]y 1950, there were virtually no Jewish boxers, and their number has been minuscule ever since. A similar decline occurred among Jewish trainers, but Jewish managers, promoters, and matchmakers continue to maintain a presence.” According to Peter Levine, by the late 1940s, “Jewish dominance of the American Basketball League was in clear decline.” In the 1950 season, only ten of the top thirty-six scorers were Jewish, and in the following year, league rosters “indicate that only 9 percent, or 11 of the ABL’s players, were Jewish.” By the 1960s, “Jews were more likely to be found in NBA boardrooms than on the hardwood.” The most telling symbol of the Jewish loss of physical dexterity was the fate of the great Philadelphia SPHAS. In the early 1950s, the SPHAS, then led by the talented point guard Red Klotz, defeated the all-black Harlem Globetrotters in two exhibition games. Klotz later bought the SPHAS and changed the name of the team to the Washington Generals. In 1953 Klotz entered into an agreement to make the Generals the regular “opponent” of the Globetrotters in exhibition games staged to show off the black team’s spectacular skills. Between 1953 and 1995, the Generals won six games against the Globetrotters and lost more than thirteen thousand.

  After World War II, a physically inhibited, highly talkative suburban family replaced the blackface dancers and basketball players as the most famous Jews in America. What began as a radio program in the 1930s about Jewish family living in a Bronx tenement, The Goldbergs, became a television program in the 1940s and 1950s about the same family relocated to the suburbs and obsessed with “fitting in” with their new Gentile neighbors. In 1950 The Goldbergs was the seventh-highest-rated series on television; the show’s c
reator and star, Gertrude Berg, was awarded the Emmy Award for Best Actress; and Philip Loeb, who played the patriarch of the family, was named “Television Father of the Year” by the Boys Clubs of America. Whereas Jews in popular culture before the war whirled about the screen and performed high-tempo dance numbers, most of the action in the The Goldbergs takes place at the kitchen table or in the living room, where chess is played, classical music emanates from the phonograph, and the conversation focuses on how to become “more modern.” The topic of one episode is the shame that Berg’s character feels at not being able to participate in the new Latin dance craze. “You know I only waltz,” she says.

  Jews continued to be featured prominently in American entertainment, but further and further removed from the sounds and moves of blackness. In the 1960s and 1970s, the most famous Jewish entertainers were the great popularizers of classical music Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein; romantic balladeers like Eddie Fisher, Barbra Streisand, Eydie Gorme, Steve Lawrence, Burt Bacharach, Barry Manilow, and Neil Diamond; intellectual folk singers such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Carole King, Janis Ian, and Leonard Cohen; and a phenomenal number of film score composers including Alfred Newman, Elmer Bernstein, Bernard Hermann, Marvin Hamlisch, Danny Elfman, Jerry Goldsmith, Philip Glass, James Horner, Howard Shore, Alan Menken, and Randy Newman. The physically awkward but intellectually gifted nebbish was foregrounded in film and television by Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, and Richard Dreyfuss, and later by Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Larry David. By the late twentieth century, Jews had left the dance floor and arrived in America.