University Place

Vaudeville's "Hebrew" Hits

– It’s my pleasure to introduce the first speaker, the noted journalist and author Jody Rosen. Jody is, in addition to being a UW alum, class of ’92ish, we’ll get to that. Jody is an American journalist and author. He’s a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. You may have read him in the New York Times Style Magazine, where he is a contributing writer and critic at large. He’s written for New York Magazine, he’s written for The New Yorker, at Slate Magazine and Entertainment Weekly, often writing on music and pop culture. He’s the author of “White Christmas, “the Story of an American Song,” a wonderful book telling the history of that song, “White Christmas,” that very iconic song. He has a new book coming out, it’s not out yet, but it’s called “Two Wheels Good: “the Bicycle on Planet Earth and Beyond,” which will come out in 2020 from Crown Books Random House. And he is the, he’s compiled an absolutely phenomenal collection of music called Jewface, which you’ll hear about, it relates to today’s lecture. These are old Vaudeville recordings from the first two decades of the 20th century that Jody excavated somewhere in New York City.

I still don’t know how Jody did that, but he found these buried somewhere in New York City. They became the inspiration for his CD called “Jewface” which I highly, highly recommend it. I recommend it. I use it in my classes every year, and it’s really a wonderful cultural artifact worth hearing. It’s the basis of today’s lecture called “Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars: “Vaudeville’s Hebrew Hits.” So please join me in welcoming Jody Rosen.

(audience applauding)

– Okay, hi there. Thank you, Tony, my old pal, Tony, who I’ve known for several years now.

And thanks to Judith and to Chad and to everybody here for making me feel so welcome.

And thank you, everybody, for turning out. I did not know about the existence of the Greenfield Summer… What is it? The Greenfield Summer Institute, and I feel like I should probably attend every year, sitting there.

But it’s true, I did attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In fact, it was exactly 30 years this coming fall that I first showed up here.

I guess I’d say I represent a certain storied Wisconsin tradition in that I attended the school. I didn’t quite graduate from this school. I was on the five, maybe the six-year plan, in my case, but I have many wonderful memories of Madison. I biked around town yesterday and was happy to re-meet the city.

And I have a Proustian relationship with that, do they still have the cheese soup in the Rathskeller Union? Okay. That I’m going to have to re-experience.

(chuckles)

But anyway, let’s get to the topic at hand.

I want to start by asking a question today, by invoking a mystery, a perhaps insoluble mystery, what is a Jewish song? You can hear me, right, everybody can hear, I’m projecting?

– Raise the microphone.- That I don’t think, I can’t raise it. I’m just going to have to stoop, okay.

We’ll work it out, okay. I’m just going to talk louder, how’s that?

Okay, so this question, what is a Jewish song, it’s an ancient question. Think of the famous lines in the 137th Psalm, how can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land? That’s a rough translation.

Those Israelite exiles weeping by the riverbanks, the Babylonian riverbanks with their harps in hand, at least we like to picture them that way. They were grappling with this same conundrum. What, exactly, is a Jewish song, and how should one sing it? Now, a half century ago, the great German Jewish musicologist Curt Sachs came up with an answer. He proposed a kind of Jewish musical litmus test.

A Jewish song, he said, is a song created by Jews, as Jews, for Jews.

Fair enough, that certainly works for Jewish liturgical music and for Jewish folk songs and maybe for the Yiddish lullabies that your Bubbe sang to you, or maybe some of you have sung yourselves. And it works for Hatikvah, and it works for Hava Nagila, of course. Think about the music that Curt Sach’s definition leaves out. Think about American popular music. What do we do with the Jewish songwriters of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway and the Hollywood movie musical? What do we do with Irving Berlin here, or George and Ira Gershwin or Richard Ridgers and Lorenz Hart, or Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, Dorothy Fields, Sammy Cahn, just to name a few. And what about the heirs to those musicians, the Brill Building songwriters who created so many of the indelible songs of the 1950s and ’60s, of the rock and pop songs of that era? Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Carole King and Gerry Goffin here, Phil Spector, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Neil Sedaka, and so on. Or what about Alan Jay Lerner or Frederick Loewe or Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim?

What about the songs they wrote for My Fair Lady or West Side Story? Did those qualify as by Jews, as Jews, for Jews? And what about Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, or these guys

(chuckles)

(audience laughing)

Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond? What about the songs belted out by Al Jolson at the Winter Garden, or Fanny Bryce in the Ziegfeld Follies? Or Lou Reed at Max’s Kansas City?

Or the Ramones, Jews from Queens, at CBGBs?

Or to bring things right up to the present day. What about this guy, the current, the holder of the current number one album in the United States. Scorpion, this is the rapper Aubrey Drake Graham, better known as Drake, one of the most popular and critically lionized musicians in the world? He’s an Afro Canadian-American Jew.

In fact, Curt Sach’s by Jews, as Jews, for Jews formulation fails to account for so much of the messy sprawl of 20th and 21st century popular music, which from “I Got to Right to Sing the Blues” to “I Got to Be Me,” there’s Jewish convert Sammy Davis, Jr.

To “You Got to Fight for Your Right to Party” by the Beastie Boys, two Jewish kids from Brooklyn and one from Manhattan, my generation. All of this music has been inflected by a distinctively Jewish talent for composing and performing, for playacting and passing and pastiche.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that Jewish music is a dizzyingly broad and fluid category, encompassing an extraordinary range of sounds and styles and ideas and themes from the sacred to the secular, from the normatively Jewish to the Jewish to the seemingly not at all Jewish, from the crypto-Jewish to the pseudo-Jewish to the wanna-be Jewish. Perhaps the best way to approach this question, “what is a Jewish song,” is to turn, to return, to that wellspring of Jewish wisdom, I’m talkin’ about the Borscht Belt. There’s a famous joke, worthy of a Catskills comedian.

And the joke is usually attributed to another great Jewish songwriter or composer, Jerome Kern.

The story goes that Kern and the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein were discussing the possibility of doing a musical based on the life of Marco Polo. Hammerstein said to Kern, here is a story laid in China about an Italian and told by an Irishman. What Kind of music are you going to write? To which Kern replied, it’ll be good Jewish music.

(audience laughing)

Of course, some songs are more Jewish than others. You might say, uncomfortably Jewish. Consider this song, from which I take my title today, a Vaudeville hit of 1916, “Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars.” The song tells the story of a certain old man Rosenthal, a terminally ill Lower East Side Jew, a businessman in the schmatte business, in the garment trade, who is obsessed with collecting an unpaid debt before he dies.

Its minor key melody drips with stylized Jewish woe. Its lyrics were delivered by Vaudevillians in a ridiculous mock Yiddish accent. It’s a comic novelty song, but the comedy is coarse, drawing on age-old stereotypes of Jewish miserliness and greed. All in all, “Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars” would seem to be far from anyone’s idea of good Jewish music, yet look closely, and you’ll see that the song just about meets Curt Sach’s criteria. It was composed by a Jew, Irving Berlin.

Published by a Jewish-owned publishing firm, and performed by Jewish singers before Jewish audiences. I’m going to play a little bit of the song now, the first verse and the first chorus, and you can follow along with the lyrics. This is from a 1916 wax cylinder recording.

(“Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars” by Irving Berlin)

• Old man Rosenthal lay sick in bed

• Soon the doctor came around and said

• There’s no use crying, the man is dying

• He can’t live very long

• Send my son here to my side

• They heard the old man say

• I’ve got something to tell him before I pass away

• Soon his son was sitting by his bed

• What’s the matter, Papa dear, he said

• The old man said, my son, before my days are done

• I want you to know

• That Cohen owes me ninety-seven dollars

• And it’s up to you to see that Cohen pays

• I sold a lot of goods to Rosenstein and Sons

• On an IOU for ninety days

• Levi brothers, they don’t get any credit

• Right, they owe me for one hundred yards of lace

• If you promise me, my son

• You’ll collect from every one

• I can die with a smile upon my face

(audience laughing)

(audience applauding)

– Yeah, okay, you get it. I like this audience. Okay, so what you’ve heard is one of the most famous songs from the repertoire of the so-called Hebrew comedian, a fixture of the variety stage from roughly 1890 to about 1920 and one of the first pop stars that America ever knew. Today, we like to forget how thoroughly our musical heritage is entangled with the tradition of minstrelsy, of ethnic impersonation, but for decades, crude racial and ethnic caricature was America’s favorite form of entertainment. And few performers were more popular than Vaudeville’s wearers of Jewface. So for the next few minutes, I want to look back on this primordial Jewish American musical and theatrical tradition and now largely forgotten tradition, and I think this can help both enlighten the question I asked in the first place, what is a Jewish song, and perhaps shed some light on the whole question of Jewish entertainment that we’ll be hearing about over the next few days here. So, the Hebrew comedian.

The Hebrew comedian had a distinctive schtick, and he had a distinctive look.

This is a photo of the variety stage star, Joe Welch, on the cover of a song sheet from 1899, and it gives you an idea of the regalia. The Hebrew comedian typically wore a phony beard

and a huge hook nose, which was created with a generous application of a kind of putty. It was called Jew Clay in the trade.

(audience laughing)

This character wore oversize shoes, a tattered black jacket or overcoat, a derby cap pulled down tightly across his head so his ears jutted out. This is the actor David Warfield, a serious stage actor who also did Jewish turns.

And here are some more photos of Hebrew comedians. What you’re looking at here is a performer’s personal letterhead, kind of an advertisement for his act, essentially, which he would use to contact Vaudeville theater and circuit owners. Here’s another example, same thing, for the comedian Billy Moya, showing him both in and out of his Jewish getup.

And this is a set of stereo views, which I found on eBay. Presumably, these were viewed in an old Nickelodeon or a dime museum or something, but it’s a little narrative there, and you can see it’s set in a rag shop. (chuckles)

So, the character portrayed by the Hebrew comedian blended stereotypes old and new. He was a grasper and he was a greenhorn, a kind of Shylock lifted out of Venice and deposited in the teeming polyglot Lower East Side. He went by various names, Rosenstein, Levinsky, Cohen. He typically worked in the rag trade in the clothing business or in pawn shops. On the sheet music covers for a lot of these songs, you’ll see the three-ball icon of the pawn shop.

And this character was above, was obsessed above all else with making money. He was a buffoon, forever losing his shirt in card games or losing his girlfriend to an Irishman.

And he’d get beat up by the Irishman, generally, too. He’d lose a fight to him, as well. Occasionally, he’d leave New York and head West, determined to become a cowboy or an Indian chief, an adventure that would, you know, invariably end with a pratfall, like into a cactus or something like that. Slapstick, in fact, was a mainstay of this act, and you can catch some of the flavor of it from this little movie. This is a silent film clip from the year 1903 with the wonderful title, “A Gesture Fight in Hester Street.” The film depicts a squabble between two Jewish peddlers over turf on Hester Street, that center of sidewalk commerce on the Old Lower East Side.

So there’s the guy selling his stuff.

And here comes another peddler with his push cart, oops!

I guess this is the gesture fight,

(audience laughing)

which becomes an actual fight.

And here comes the Irish cop, okay.

(audience laughing)

So on the one hand, Hebrew comedians were just that. They were comedians, slapstick specialists, joke tellers, monologue artists. The first million-selling comedy record was comedian Joe Hayman’s 1913 recording of the monologue “Cohen on the Telephone,” which spawned a whole industry of Cohen routines, including dozens of knockoff recordings, sequels. But the centerpieces of the Hebrew comedians act were these songs. Now, in the beginning of this industry, this kind of genre, in the 1880s, late 1880s, early years of the 1890s, these were mostly Jewish-themed kind of parodies and sendups of well-known pop hits, but by the turn of the century, Tin Pan Alley publishers were churning out hundreds of original numbers which were delivered by Vaudevillians in thick dialect, Jewish dialect, over these brooding pseudo-Judaic melodies and punctuated by frequent cries of, oy, always oy, oy, oy.

There was “My Loving Yiddisha Queen” and “My Little Yiddisha Queen.”

“My Yiddisha Butterfly.”

And “My Yiddisher Blonde.”

(audience laughing)

And there’s “Yiddisha Nightingale,” another Irving Berlin song.

And another Irving Berlin song, “The Yiddisha Professor.” “Love Me to a Yiddisha Melody. “Oh, you kiddisha!”

(audience laughing)

“At the Yiddisher Ball.” And this was, of course, the Ragtime Era, and there were numerous Jewish-themed kind of riffs on the popular dance music, “The Yiddisha Rag.”

“Jerusalem Rag,” “Rachel Rubenstein’s Rag.”

“The Shultzmeier Rag,” a Yiddisha novelty.

And “Yiddle on Your Fiddle Play Some Ragtime,” another Irving Berlin song.

There was “Under the Hebrew Moon,” “Under the Rosenbloom.”

(audience laughing)

And my personal favorite, a surreal Jewish variation on the Tin Pan Alley staple about– You know all songs about lovers spooning under this or that tree, “Under the Matzos Tree.” I’ve never seen any, one of those. But it’s probably, it’s next to the lake where the gefilte fish is swimming around.

And of course there was Abie, we mustn’t forget Abie. A stock character in Hebrew comedy was Abie, and he turned up in the titles of many songs, “Abie, Take an Example from Your Fader.” “Abie Dots Not a Business For You.”

(audience laughing)

And this one, which minces no words, “Get a Girl with Lots of Money Abie.”

(audience laughing)

Now, the sheet music cover features here, features this inset photograph of the Vaudevillian Harry Cooper in his full Jewface. You can see his nose is clearly prosthetically-enhanced here, that’s not his natural nose. The sheet music covers often featured the photographs of the performers who interpolated these songs into their acts on the popular stage. And as you may have noticed, some of the earlier sheet music examples, there were female comediennes, too, but unlike the male performers, the women dressed elegantly, in a la mode. Their Jewishness was expressed through dialect and through gesture, but not through their clothing. The stereotypes were not as coarse. So here, you can look at this, this one again, that’s Maud Raymond.

I don’t know if you can see her picture, it’s kind of dim there, but she’s wearing one of these wonderful feather-topped hats that were the height of fashion in 1910.

Of course, Jews were hardly the only group to be ridiculed in song and on stage. The popular culture of the period, comic strips, sound movies, popular novels, joke books, et cetera, joke books, joke books, were full of ethnic and racial caricatures, a reflection of the wide public fascination with and anxiety about the millions of foreign immigrants and southern black migrants who had streamed into American cities in the latter decades of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. But Tin Pan Alley songwriters took to this ethnic burlesque with special relish, cranking out Irish songs and Italian songs and Chinese songs, and of course the ubiquitous, extremely popular and very disturbing these days, blackface coon songs. This song was written by a black man, Ernest Hogan, a huge, huge hit of the turn of the century.

And there were endless admixtures and miscegenation and intermarriage fantasies, songs like “Since Arrah Want to Married Barney Carney,” the wedding of a Native American woman and an Irishman.

Some of you may know the “Abie’s Irish Rose,” the very famous early 20th century Broadway hit which, I guess that was in the Rodgers and Hart song “Manhattan,” of course, they make reference to that. Well, that was enormous, it held the record for something like 50 years for the longest run on Broadway. And that, of course, was another one of these stock, intermarriage kind of, comedies.

One of my favorite kind of audio documents which captures the mix of this kind of melting pot of pop music is this one,

Al Jolson’s “The Spaniard that Blighted My Life.” This is from 1913, on the recording. Jolson, who of course is a Jew, he can be watching, not even put on stage, he would perform this song in blackface. Of course, he’s Jewish. He sang it in an upper crust kind of English, patrician English accent, and the music was this ersatz Spanish music with castanets and everything, so this, it’s just, it’s totally Dada.

Now, of these ethnic caricature songs, the dialect numbers, of course, the blackface songs were by far the most ubiquitous and the most popular, but the Jewish songs really were the next most popular, the next most widespread. As we’ve heard, we’ve listened to “Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars,” they were recorded and released commercially on wax cylinder records and on 78 disks. They were performed onstage in lowly dives down on the Bowery and in the classy uptown venues and in big shows like the Shubert brothers’ annual Passing Show and, of course, in the Ziegfeld Follies, the kind of the show. And in fact, always kind of a bellwether of what’s hot in pop in 1910, for instance, there were no fewer than four of these Jewish numbers in the 1910 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies. Now, the popularity of this music alarmed certain Jews, Jews of a certain station in this country.

At the 1909 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the governing body of the Reform Movement, of course, the CCAR passed a motion to, quote, take up the matter of the caricature of the Jew on the stage. The goal, the rabbis wrote in their annual conference report, was to drive this violent, outrageous, and undignified creature from the boards. Hebrew comedy had become so popular, the rabbis said, that it was the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a class than all over causes combined.

And the rabbis zeroed in, in particular, on what they called these cruel and immoral songs. They petitioned Tin Pan Alley firms to stop publishing them. They asked, demanded, that Vaudeville touring circuits not let Hebrew comedians perform. And yet, while there is no doubt that Hebrew comedy invoked these old libels and drew on elements of classical Jew hatred, the act could hardly be construed as a clearcut case of anti-Semitism for a simple reason, Hebrew comedy was almost entirely a Jewish enterprise. This irony was noted in an editorial in Baltimore’s Jewish Comment newspaper in 1913. I’m going to read a little bit of what they wrote. “We have taken but a mild interest in the campaign “against the Vaudeville stage Jew, “not because he is not an objectionable personage “in most instances, “but because we thought there was something insincere in the campaign.

“In the matter of the stage Jew, we find that in most cases, the actor is a Jew, “his manager is a Jew, and he is in a circuit “where the Jews have the most say. “And we may add that audiences “are largely composed of Jews, too. “The thing is Jewish from start to finish. “Christians do not demand or even strongly desire “to see Jewish acts. “As a matter of fact, many of them are so interlarded “with Jewish, with Yiddish phrases “as to be unintelligible to the non-Jewish audience. “They’re intended clearly for Jewish consumption, “and if Jews go, applaud, and come back for more, “what are you going to do about it?” Now, the editorialist wasn’t wrong. It’s well known that Tin Pan Alley, that epicenter of the American pop song business,

technically on West 28th Street in Manhattan, although it became, as you know, the term that was applied to the song business, kind of general term for songwriting and song publishing. That this place where the industry that gave us the, quote, Great American Songbook was largely dominated by Jews who were just a step or two removed from the pale of settlement.

Think of Irving Berlin, an immigrant who came over at age five from a Siberian shtetl, the Gershwin brothers, who were first generation children of Jewish immigrants, Harold Arlen, and so on. The commercial side of the pop song industry was also run by these Jewish strivers who, like their co-religious in Hollywood, brought energy and innovation to what had previously been a cottage industry. One of the first of these Jewish song moguls, a guy named Charles Kay Harris, hung a sign on his office door that said, “Songs written to order,” I love this, it’s like he was in the pants business.

(audience laughing)

And sure enough, every Jewish dialect number was either composed by a Jew, or nearly everyone was either composed by a Jew or published by a Jew or both. If you scrutinize these sheet music covers, you’ll see the names of these famous Jewish songwriters, Irving Berlin, of course, but also Gus Kahn and Edgar Leslie and so on. We’ve already seen on the sheet music for several songs some of these famous performers. This is Sophie Tucker. There’s Fanny Brice. That’s Eddie Cantor, “My Yiddisha Mammy,” that’s a kind of Jewish Jolson tribute.

And there’s Jolson himself as a young man in 1913, This is a song called “At the Yiddish Cabaret.” In other words, these songs were something of a special case. It was a different kind of minstrelsy. It was ethnic caricature that functioned as ethnic ingroup entertainment. So in the few minutes I have left, I want to listen to the music a little more closely, and I want to try and grapple with this question, why did Jews love this music that seemed to slander them? Well, let’s get a little better handle on the music itself.

Let’s return to “Under the Matzos Tree.”

Well, just have a listen. This begins with a little patter. This is how these songs were generally introduced on the stage.

There was shtick, and then they’d segue into the song.

–

[Sadie]

Abie, I don’t love you no more. I will marry Mike McCarthy.

–

[Abie]

What, the Irisher?

–

[Sadie]

Yes, he’s a great fighter.

–

[Abie]

He ain’t no fighter. Me and Henry Cohen and Jakie Strauss and these two cousins, we nearly licked him.

–

[Sadie]

Well, he’s a great policeman.

–

[Abie]

He’s no good, he’s always on the beat.

–

[Sadie]

Yes, but his beat is on the square.

–

[Abie]

He’s a loafer!

–

[Sadie]

Yes, he loves me, and I love him.

He looks so fine marching Saint Patrick’s Day with a green ribbon.

–

[Abie]

A green ribbon, oh, Sadie, take the Yiddisher with a greenback.

–

[Sadie]

No, Abie, you don’t love me anymore. So I’m going to leave with my Irish lover

Say how can you make such a face

What you going to do when the wedding’s over

What a sad disgrace for the race

Oy, oy you will cry

When I eat corned beef and cabbages

Oy, oy you will sigh

When you lose me little Abie boy

Your joy, my boy

Oy, oy - You can hear in that song that the melody is really interpolated actual Jewish music, that some of the intervals you’re hearing there come straight out of, you know, Jewish folk music and liturgical melodies, and so these sources would really have– They might have struck goyish audiences as sad and exotic and hence Jewish, but for Jewish audiences, they resonated in a different way.

They recognized the music that was being riffed on or actually fully interpolated into these songs. Now, the kind of romantics, the cartoonish romantic strife that we hear in this song is a staple of this genre. And invariably, Jewish men are the butt of the jokes. The songs depict the struggles of Jewish men to navigate the romantic perils of the big metropolis.

They implore the women to stay with them, but they farcically lose them to the lures of big city life and assimilation.

They lose them to Irishmen. “There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohn.” Okay, no comment.

(audience laughing)

And they lose them to that all-powerful, modernizing, democratizing force, American popular culture, as in “Sadie Salome Go Home,” which was Fanny Bryce’s breakthrough hit. This is an Irving Berlin song again, of course, about a guy, a Jewish man, who loses his girlfriend to the Vaudeville stage where she does like a hoochie coochie, you know, striptease routine.

And while Jewish women move fluidly across ethnic lines, giving birth to Irish or Yiddisher boys, the Jewish men invariably fail miserably, “It’s Tough When Izzy Rosenstien Loves Genevieve Malone.”

(audience laughing)

Of course, in this Hebrew comedy, the Jewish men aren’t so much interested in romance as they are in something else, in finance.

(audience laughing)

“Never Mind the Family Tree, Look at the Business Plant.”

(audience laughing)

Not a title that rolls off the tongue, exactly. And here’s yet another Berlin number, “Business is Business Rosey Cohen.”

Aren’t these sheet music covers wonderful? It’s great vernacular, lost vernacular American art. But notice here the kind of Art Nouveau dollar signs flanking the–

(audience laughing)

Yes, in Jewface songs, matters of the heart and business matters are always conflated.

We’re kind of pressed for time, so I was going to play you an example from–

–

[Audience Members]

Play it!

– You heard ’em, Tony, okay.

(audience laughing)

This is the chorus of “That’s Yiddisha Love.”

• Once you find a lady that is smart in the head

Then you ask her pa How much you get when you wed

Never mind the good looks Or the fancy pompadoodles

See that she can cook And make gefilte fish and noodles

Ask her if she’ll help you When the business goes bad

If she’ll take in washing Scrub the floor not get mad

If she’s honest and frank And has money in the bank

Oy, oy That’s Yiddisha love

(audience laughing)

– Okay.

(audience laughing)

Okay, but even more than the stereotype of the Jewish money grubber, these songs found comedy in a joke that still has currency today. I’m talking about the Jewish schlemiel, the misadventures of the hapless Jewish man.

(audience laughing)

So the songs depicted these failures of Jewish men to play these archetypal American roles, cowboys, right, Yonkle the Cowboy Jew. “I’m a Yiddish Cowboy, Tough Guy Levi.”

Here’s the Indian chief, “Big Chief Dynamite.” You notice the diamond broach that he’s wearing. This is tough stuff.

Baseball player, “Jake Jake, the Yiddisha Ball Player.” He strikes out, by the way.

(audience laughing)

Here’s the boxer, “There Never Was a White Hope “Whose Christian Name was Cohen.”

and here’s a World War I era song “Yankee Doodle Abie.” You can see that the Jewish soldier is kind of cowering behind the ammunition wagon while the battle’s raging, and look closely, you’ll see a diamond dripping out of his gun, yep.

So woven through these lyrics, the lyrics in these songs is rhetoric about the Jewish racial makeup.

You can see this stuff was, it was hardcore stuff. If we return to this cover, Jerusalem Rag, we might recall that in the first decades of the century, Jews were still categorized as nonwhite in the United States Census. Of course, this was also a kind of riff on blackface music because of, you know, ragtime music was associated with African-Americans and black performers for good reason, it was their music in the first place.

And the songs often depicted an embodied Jewishness.

“Yiddisha Eyes,” another Berlin song. “Yonkle the Cowboy Jew,” in this song, the cowboy is so lovestruck by a cowgirl that his Yiddish brain goes wild. And then there’s the kind of Jewish John Philip Sousa bandleader in “When Mose with his Nose Leads the Band,”

(audience laughing)

who conducts the orchestra with his nose. He doesn’t need a baton.

He uses his nose.

And then there’s a song called “Yiddisha Feet.” He’s got a Yiddisha face, he’s got a Yiddisha nose, and every other thing what on a Yiddisha grows. He’s got Yiddisha eyes, Yiddisha teeth, Yiddisha walking when he goes down the street. Oy, them Yiddisha feet.

(audience laughing)

Okay, so today, of course, these songs might strike us as problematic

(chuckles)

.

(audience laughing)

We might be able to appreciate why that Central Conference of American Rabbis were disturbed by these songs, and it might also be understandable that their appeal to the goyim, you know, to a native or nativist audience that was unnerved by the growing numbers and increasing social mobility of Jewish immigrants, but again, how do we account for their popularity among those Jewish audiences that applauded and came back for more, as the editorialists wrote? Well, for one thing, they performed a neat little trick. Even as these songs ridiculed Jews, they smuggled bits of Yiddishkeit into the American mainstream. So I was talking about the kind of harmonic tinge in this song, right? All these songs with their, the music, the Jewish musical motifs they drew on, this was a way that these things entered American popular song, and in fact, they were taken up, of course, not only by the Jewish songwriters of the period, famously the Gershwins and Harold Arlen, but also Cole Porter himself, who did, the great goyish Gentile songwriter of the period who famously said that he had discovered the secret to songwriting greatness, which is to write Jewish music. And when he wrote songs, his ballads like night and day. This was his attempt to write Jewish music. They were in minor keys and kind of had a brooding quality.

But the deeper appeal of this music, I would say, lay in the peculiarities of the historical moment that produced it. In a discussion of dialect joke-telling, the folklore scholar Dan Ben-Amos argued that these jokes are a form of, that dialect jokes are a form of verbal instrument which functions in the very process of assimilation and integration into the new society.

And this is an insight that certainly applies in the case of this Jewface music. By laughing along with songs that lampooned the struggles of these Jewish greenhorns, an audience of Jewish immigrants and first-generation Jewish Americans affirmed their sophistication, the fact that they had moved on and passed out of their own greenhorn phase. By writing and singing dialect songs that partook of these virulent Jewish stereotypes, the Jews of Tin Pan Alley and Vaudeville performed their Americanness, asserting that they were not the Jewish others who were the object of their ridicule. To mock the Hebrew was to cleanse oneself of the Old World taint. If you got the joke of a song like Dizzy Izzy or you got the joke of Rosenbaum, it’s pretty certain that you were neither Dizzy Izzy nor Rosenbaum. You were a different kind of Jew. But this music wasn’t just useful, it was enjoyable, as you’ve noted today

(laughing)

, it’s entertaining, it was funny, the jokes are still funny 90 or 100 years later. I got to play this song for you.

This is called “Pittsburgh PA,” it’s from 1920, it’s, you know the old joke, iceberg, Greenberg, what’s the difference, you know. It’s a joke about the suffix “berg.” I know that you will be surprised

When I tell you who was there

There was Greenberg, Romberg

Blumberg, Bromberg

Stamberg, Hamberg, Goldberg too

Ginsberg, Linsberg, Timberg, Bimberg

Weisberg, Eisberg, Silverberg too

But listen, people, that’s not all

Who else do you think was in the hall

There was Kleinberg, Weinberg

Feinberg, Steinberg

Sheinberg, Meinberg there

And say

The Bergs all came from everywhere

Every Berg in the world was there

And where do you think they held the affair

In Pittsburgh, PA

(audience laughing)

– Yup, it’s a good one.

Tony, this is the best audience. I can’t even believe it.

(audience laughing)

So Pittsburgh PA wasn’t just one of the funniest Jewface songs, it was a kind of swan song. By the late 1920s, these Jewish themes had largely disappeared from popular song. The Jewish audience began to move away from the old immigrant enclaves, you know, leaving the Lower East Side for places like the Grand Concourse up in the Bronx.

And the suburb.

(laughs)

And these same Jews, you might say, transitioned out of their own anxious, post-greenhorn phase, moving on to entertainment befitting more comfortable Jewish Americans, more acculturated Jews. The old-fashioned performers, the Jolson-style Jewish singers who danced and mugged and boomed their songs to the Vaudeville rafters, they gave way to a new breed of All-American singing stars. I’m thinking about Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallee, Fred Astaire, whose gentle, I guess we could say Gentile, crooning projected a kind of post-ethnic ease and suavity. And songwriters stopped chronicling Abie Cohn’s misadventures. They concentrated almost exclusively, think of the Great American Songbook, almost all the songs are 32 bars on the theme I love you.

Almost across the board.

In fact, the only explicitly Jewish pop hit of the kind of mid late 1920s was “My Yiddishe Momme,” Sophie Tucker’s kind of schmaltz-drenched look back at the Lower East Side, right, so here we are, we’re not making fun of the Lower East Side anymore.

• Of things I should be thankful for

I’ve had a goodly share

And as I sit in the comfort

Of a cozy chair

My fancy takes me to a humble East Side tenement

• Three flights in the rear

To where my childhood days were spent

• It wasn’t much like paradise

But amid the dirt and all

There sat the sweetest angel

• One that I fondly call

My Yiddishe Momme - And yet Jewface music was kept alive on the sly.

In the Catskills, on the cruise ship circuit, and in the heroically vulgar and exuberant English comedy music records of Mickey Katz, the clarinetist and bandleader. And what do you know, by the 1960s, Jewish themes would resurface on Broadway when a new generation of Jewish Americans extended their nostalgia back to the Old World, romanticizing, of all things, the deprivations and piety of life in the pale of settlement. What was “Fiddler on the Roof,” what was this score if not a collection of latter-day Jewish songs. If I were a rich man Ya ha dibba dibba dibba

Dibba dibba dibba dum

All day long I’d biddy biddy bum

If I were a wealthy man - And consider this incredible artifact, recorded by Bob Dylan the very same year that “Fiddler on the Roof” debuted on Broadway in 1964. Have a listen, it begins with Dylan announcing, here’s a foreign song I learned in Utah.

(“Talkin’ Hava Nagila Blues” by Bob Dylan)

–

[Bob]

Here’s a foreign song I learned in Utah.

• Ha va ha va

• Na hava na

• Gi hava nagi

• La hava nagila

(Bob Dylan yodeling)

(harmonica playing)

– Now how about that for Jewish dialect comedy?

(audience laughing)

I think it’s fair to say that “Talking Hava Nagila Blues,” recorded in 1964, as I said, is one of the most mischievous songs ever recorded by Bob Dylan, who is the most dedicated mischief maker in the history of American culture. The song is a joke, obviously, but at whose expense? Who’s being sent up here is Dylan, aka Robert Zimmerman, making a sly comment about his own complicated Jewish passing act. Is he cracking a joke about the Hebrew language?

Is he lampooning Bar Mitzvah boys, phonetically championing their Haftarah portions?

Is his satire aimed at the Jews or at the goyim or both?

Or is he, you know, the song collectors, his fellow folk revivalists, the guys who went out into the land to find the songs of ethnics and rustics. You know, those people, Alan Lomax. Maybe he’s having a go at them. But, in any case, what we have here, we have the Jews who once struggled to escape their Jewish patrimony, a generation of Jewish baby boomers are now awkwardly trying to recapture it.

The Old World Jew who once mangled and malaproped their way through English has, in the person of Dylan, become

(laughs)

the New Jew, the alienated Jew.

So if Jewface music holds any lesson for those probing popular music’s Jewish question, I think it may be that we need a slightly subtler formula than by Jews, as Jews, for Jews.

Sure, it’s possible to detect echoes of Jewish folk songs in “Under the Matzos Tree” or to hear, as some commentators have, you know, generations of cantors behind the strains, sobbing behind the strains of the Gershwins’ Summertime. But I think that kind of musicological detective work goes only so far. Perhaps it’s better to note that popular music has been a venue in which issues of Jewish identity have been worked through very messily for generations now. From Irving Berlin’s “Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars” to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” from Sophie Tucker to the Beastie Boys, from the Marx Brothers, for that matter, to Jerry Seinfeld to Larry David for a century now. Conversations and arguments between Jews about Jewishness have been a prime source of entertainment for Jews themselves and for millions of Gentile eavesdroppers. I’m going to end today with this one remarkable song that was in the repertoire of the Hebrew comedian which continues to haunt American culture even today in a pretty crazy way. I’m talkin’ about this song, “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band,” this song about the Jewish bandleader, the Sousa, which was composed in 1906, actually by a trio of Irish songwriters.

It was a minor Vaudeville hit, and it was recorded that same year by Collins and Harlan who were one of the most prolific recording duos of the early sound era. Now, at that time, 18-year-old Israel Beilin was a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe, which is a saloon in Chinatown, New York. It was Beilin’s job to keep up with the latest hit songs so he could perform them for the clientele at this establishment.

And it’s a safe assumption that he would have heard and maybe even sung “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band.” Of course, a decade later, Izzy Beilin had a new name, Irving Berlin, and he had a habit of interpolating bits of other people’s songs, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, into his own numbers. And I’m convinced that’s what he did a century ago, exactly, when he sat down to write a patriotic song and plopped the precise six-note phrase that opens “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band’s” chorus into the chorus of his new song. Let’s listen to that little snippet. A B then starts to play

Plays all day

– They’re saying, the lyric is, A B then starts to play. A B then starts to play

Plays all day

– You hear it, right?

(audience chattering)

• God bless America

• A B then starts to play

Plays all day

God bless America

– So different tempos on these recordings, of course, and the notes and the rhythm, but the notes and the rhythm in which they’re sum are exactly the same.

The identical notation appears in the sheet music for each song. Now, there’s a Jewface legacy for you, hiding inside Irving Berlin’s great alternative national anthem, the song, of course, that comforted a nation on the eve of the Second World War, that all 100 U.S. Senators sang on the steps of the Capitol Building on 9/11.

An immigrant song of thanks. The song that’s still sung, unfortunately, during the seventh inning stretch of every game at Yankee Stadium, hiding inside “God Bless America” is this 100-year-old song about a Jewish bandleader who uses his enormous schnoz as a conductor’s baton. It’s an irony to savor, and when it comes to the question we began with, that’s my answer, thank you.

(audience applauding)