Buhle, Paul. New York: Verso, 2004. 304 +
ix pp., $37.00 (CAD). ISBN: 1-85984-598-3.
[1] From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular
Culture is a comprehensive inquiry into the impact of Jews
on the rise and development of American popular culture. Paul
Buhle explores a wide range of media—stage, screen, radio,
television, music, fiction, and comic art—seeking to discover
the “Jewishness” of American popular culture, and
in the process seeking to reveal “real antidotes to what
ails us all” (6).
[2] The book hit the shelves before Catholic League president William
Donohue said on national television that “Hollywood is controlled
by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism
in particular” (MSNBC, Scarborough Country, December
8, 2004), and evangelical Internet author Edgar Steele accused Jews
of fighting to ban Christmas. But readers will no doubt be
familiar with the intimate links in American history between attacks
on popular culture and attacks on Jews. From the Lower
East Side to Hollywood provides a history of American artists
and entrepreneurs, primarily Jewish, who creatively dodged, exposed,
lampooned, and embarrassed every effort by Christian conservatives
to blame the Jews for moral transgression, and to censor and control
the culture in support of their narrow, intolerant interests. Buhle’s
subjects face down anti-Semitism and social injustice with equal
amounts of passion, irony, and self-consciousness. In these
pages, the reader will encounter a radical history that really can
provide “an antidote to what ails us,” as Buhle hopes. Rebelliousness
is part of American popular culture, embedded there by those who
were doubly alienated, as Itche Goldberg noted, suffering and benefiting
from “rejection [and persecution] by the Gentiles, but also
their own rejection of the narrowness of the rabbi and merchant
dominated shtetl life” (216).
[3] Buhle shepherds his study in a general chronological direction
from immigrant Jews’ Yiddishkayt to the world of the
postmodern. Readers looking for a historiography concerned
with causality will be disappointed, at least initially, because
Buhle proceeds by analogy (and in the process, makes a satisfying
contribution to feminist historiography). The subjects of
this study are innovators, artists who spent their lives in self-conscious
experimentation with forms and memories. Using an analogical
approach, Buhle highlights the distinctive and abiding quality of
the Jewish contribution to American popular culture, which is reflexiveness,
at once the self-consciousness of the immigrant Yiddishkayt and
the self-reflexiveness of the postmodern.
[4] Reflexiveness, Buhle writes, is “a sort of internal dialogue
within and about mass culture,” and reflexive culture “moves
back and forth between the avant-garde and the mass” (4).
It is “a continuing impulse to recuperate and remix,” a “combination
of deep Jewish traditions with the latest artistic experiments” (5). One
fine example of this quality of reflexiveness appears in Chapter
Five, where Buhle offers a vivid study of Harvey Kurtzman and his Mad
Comics (1952-1955), bringing Mad to life in the
mind of a reader (like myself) not fortunate enough to have read
the comics.
[5] Characterized by radical politics and a no-holds-barred commitment
to parody, Mad lampooned popular comic books such as Superman (renamed Superduperman)
and Archie (Starchie), the latter a great raspberry
blown at the Catholic-based Legion of Decency and its infamous “Comics
Code.” Buhle describes Mad Comics’s
satire of movies like High Noon and television shows like Dragnet,
the Disney studio, and Joe McCarthy. The send-ups of mass
culture and political repression were not the only accomplishments
of Mad Comics. In their bold experimentation with form,
the Mad artists recalled the ironic comedy of Yiddishkayt,
and anticipated the deconstructionism of the postmodern by several
decades.
[6] Easily the most problematic feature of the book is that it necessarily
raises the question of Jewish identity. Buhle writes that
he is “joined to the largest question of Jewishness” because “various
Jewish creators of popular culture have given shape to my imaginative
impulses since age five or six if not before” (6). By
extension we are all, Jew and Gentile, implicated in the question
of Jewish identity, as we are all shaped by “the Bush White
House’s favorite hawk intellectuals” and by “the
peacenik/ environmentalist countervisions heard … in music,
comics, films, and the Internet” (7). The problem with
the question of identity is that it tends to be reductionist in
theory, while ignoring the complexities of identity in the lives
of individuals. Buhle avoids falling into the reductionist
trap by directly engaging with the self-conscious, reflexive scrutiny
of Jewish identity, in all its complexity, practiced by the subjects
of his book. It is possible that Buhle’s claim—that
there is something uniquely Jewish about reflexiveness in American
popular culture—will not stand after further applications
of his ideas. But the value of reflexiveness as a critical
concept will endure.
[7] From the Lower East Side to Hollywood is fun, providing
new insights into favourites like Lenny Bruce, Zero Mostel, Leonard
Nimoy, and Ben Katchor. Buhle writes from a perspective of
lifelong intimate engagement with his subjects. Reading about
the culture and its creators from such a personal point of view
is the next best thing to seeing movies or reading pulp fiction
or comic books. Buhle works as both historian and tour guide, moving
through the history of American popular culture using stories, theory,
criticism, interviews, and anecdotes in a manner that feels organic. The
excursion through the book put me in mind of walking through a city
like New York and viewing the old and the new in the smallest detail,
and in terms of the larger impact. While the book is too mature
for most undergraduate readers, it is a necessity for most libraries. I
highly recommend it to scholars and students interested in the history
of American popular culture, the question of the Jewish impact upon
it, and the larger question of the meanings and purposes of popular
culture.
Beth Davies-Stofka
Front Range Community College
Westminster, Colorado
bdavies@estreet.com
