Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity--Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand.

Alexander, Michael Scott

Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity--Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand. By David E. Kaufman. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012. iv + 340 pp.

As I review David E. Kaufman's recent book about what he calls "Jewhooing," the Jewish folk practice of identifying which celebrities are Jews, I've also just learned that today pop singer Paula Abdul is receiving her bat mitzvah at the Western Wall. Can this be true? Is Paula Abdul actually a Jew? Despite a certain shame in my celebrity awareness and curiosity, I am simply too intrigued to resist. An internet search brings me to JewOrNotJew.com, and indeed I learn that Abdul's father was a Syrian Jew from Aleppo and her mother an Ashkenazi Jew from Canada.

Who knew? Who cares?

Well in fact a lot of American Jews seem to care. At first glance, one may wonder why Kaufman has chosen to explore this esoteric American custom of Jewhooing. It's just a parlor game, isn't it? Can this casual practice really be significant? The ritual itself feels slightly disreputable, not to be discussed in serious society, let alone in the pages of a Brandeis University publication. Yet after finishing Kaufman's book, I think most readers will be persuaded that the subject is important. Perhaps Jewhooing is even among the most significant folk practices working to hold American Jewry together. Those marginal Jews who have little feeling for the ritual, liturgical, and cultural boundaries which are typically thought to circumscribe Judaism and Jewry may still open the newspaper and say to themselves: "Well, would you look at that ... The new Wonder Woman is a Jew!" And that raw tribal connection to a celebrity is the solid content of their Jewish identity. Judging by Kaufmans evidence that Jewhooing started in earnest in the 1960s, spawning at that time a cottage industry of Jewhooing publications and media, the practice has been going on now for fifty years, passed down over several generations. So it seems that many of the hallmarks of what Edward Shi Is defined in his book Tradition (2006) as signaling a legitimate tradition are present with Jewhooing.

Who knew?

Kaufman focuses on celebrities of the 1960s, members of the third generation of the Ashkenazi migration to America. He has chosen a comedian (Lenny Bruce), two singers (Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand) and an athlete (Sandy Koufax). According to Kaufman, Jewish celebrities of this generation were the first objects of Jewhooing proper. They were unlike Jewish celebrities of the second generation (say, the comedians and singers Al Jolson and Fanny Brice, or the athletes Andy Cohen and Benny Leonard) who were first and foremost celebrities for Jews, performers who intentionally played to the tastes of their own ethnic group or who were primarily marketed to that group. Only far along in their careers did second generation Jewish celebrities gain mainstream American interest. Not so the celebrities of the third generation. These later performers became mainstream American celebrities first, before they became objects of Jewhooing. Sometimes the Jewishness of Kaufman's celebrities of the 1960s was obvious and nurtured, as in the cases of Lenny Bruce and Barbara Streisand, who intentionally continued earlier "stage Jew" type performances by utilizing copious amounts of shtick (Lenny Bruce's later work is practically indecipherable without some knowledge of Yiddish). But sometimes the Jewishness of the performer was incidental or even lacking. The extent of Sandy Koufax's Judaism was his decision to stay in his hotel room for Yom Kippur on the first day of the World Series of 1965. Unlike Andy Cohen of the New York Giants (recruited to draw Jewish audiences to the Polo Grounds in the 1920s) and "The Hebrew Hammer" Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers, Koufax's mainstream American celebrity had almost nothing to do with his ethnicity or religion. The extent of Bob Dylan's Judaism and public Jewish identity was even less. Yet all were claimed by Jews as M.O.T. ("members of the tribe") for their American celebrity. This "outing" of Jews, as it happened in the 1960s and continues today, appears to be doing significant identity work for those who do the outing, which is a lot of us.

Looking back over Kaufman's career, one can see that his serious interest in the significance of raw tribal connections goes back to his first work on the synagogue-center in Shul with a Pool (1999). Perhaps more than praying together, Jews who schvitz together and have their kids play basketball together have stayed together. Jewhooing is an akin tribal phenomenon, different only in that it is more purely a folk tradition with no seminary leadership or institutional support. Actually, that's not true. How many museum exhibits about American Jewry have we seen in recent years which are essentially tantamount to Jewhooing? How often do Jewish newspapers, publications, and even academic histories essentially lionize American celebrities as Jews even when there is little Jewish connection to their celebrity other than in their genes? Often, I think. Is American Jewry evolving into an ethnic clan with a virtual celebrity leadership? More thinking has to be done to consider this issue--serious thinking--and with this unique and brave book Kaufman has gone far in establishing a framework with which to begin our thinking. Besides this important theoretical contribution, Kaufman's prosopography of celebrity is simply impossible to put down. These are four great American stories, even when the extent of their Jewishness must remain open for debate.

Michael Scott Alexander

University of California, Riverside