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
