There is a tremendous amount of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel material out there. Sometimes it’s good to toot our own horn and show what an incredible people we really are, and how a lot of the hatred is basically jealousy and resentment.
Jack Cohen
Recently I watched a BBC TV program entitled “Broadway Musicals: a Jewish legacy” by Alan Yentob, the presenter for Imagine, a BBC series (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03j11q6). I highly recommend it as a watchable and enjoyable show. It establishes without a shadow of doubt that Jews were primarily responsible for the development of the characteristically American musical tradition. They took the musical theater pioneered by Gilbert and Sullivan in England and through the Yiddish theater in NY made it into something of their own.
Their names are legend, George and Ira Gershwin (Gershwine), Harold Arlen (Hyman Arluck), Jule Styne, Irving Berlin (Israel Beilin), Jerome Kern, Sigmund Romberg, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein (partly Jewish), Lorenz Hart, Yip Harburg, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Kurt Weill and then another generation, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Barry Manilow, Marvin Hamlisch, Michael Tilson Thomas (whose grandfather was the famous Yiddish actor Boris Tomashevsky) and so on. There was a strong influence of Jewish musical themes in their music that made it popular. The sole successful exception to the Jewish domination was Cole Porter, and he was influenced by his Jewish rivals.
In their plots and stories these Jewish musicians and lyricists inserted a large dose of Jewish liberal attitudes, even if they could not tell their own Jewish story, they used the stories of others to portray it, for example through the Black experience (“Porgy & Bess” by Gershwin), or Puerto Ricans (“West Side Story” by Bernstein) or homosexuals (“The Birdcage” by Mike Nichols (Peshkowsky)) and so on. They gave us such beloved American musicals as “Show Boat,” “Oklahoma“, “Carousel“, “West Side Story,” and so on. Some songs specifically give away the Jewish zeitgeist “there’s a place for us” from West Side Story, “somewhere over the rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz”, and of course there was “Fiddler on the Roof” (Bock, Harnick and Stein) that finally did tell the Jewish experience directly and was a world-wide success.
Apart from the composers, there were the singers (Al Jolson (Asa Yolson), Fanny Brice, Barbra Streisand) and the actors (John Garfield (Julius Garfinkle), The Marx Brothers, Edward G. Robinson (Emmanuel Goldenberg), Walter Matthau, Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske), Lee J. Cobb (Leo Jacob), Matthew Broderick (his mother was Jewish), and so on and so on. From the time that Leonard Bernstein refused to change his name on the advice of maestro Toscanini, to the success of Fiddler, one could say that Jews were accepted in the American cultural tradition. And so far I have not mentioned physics and other sciences and Nobel Prizes. What is the common factor, the intense creativity and innovation of the Jews. If only the creative genius of the Jewish people had not been partially wiped out by the scum of European culture, who knows what could have been accomplished.
