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  • Rogin's Noise:The Alleged Historical Crimes of The Jazz Singer
  • Joel Rosenberg
Michael Rogin . Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996, xvi + 331 pp.

[Author's Note: I was saddened to learn of the recent untimely death of Michael Rogin, whose book is reviewed here. Whatever the ways I have taken issue with this work, I believe that Prof. Rogin was a scholar of solid accomplishment, immense in its range and depth, and a thinker of outstanding power and creativity. I have decided not to alter the contents of my review, although much of what I say takes on new meaning from the hindsight of his passing.

—J.R.]

. . . it is in the American grain. Benjamin Franklin, the practical scientist, skilled statesman and sophisticated lover . . . [as] Rousseau's Natural Man. Hemingway . . . as a non-literary sportsman, Faulker as farmer; Abe Lincoln . . . [as] simple country lawyer. . . . Here the "darky" act makes brothers of us all. America is a land of masking jokers.

— RALPH ELLISON, "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke"1

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Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise addresses the meaning of blackface entertainment, especially as undertaken by Jewish performers at a certain stage of American vaudeville and film from the 1920s onward. Rogin, a cultural historian [End Page 221] and professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley, sets this subject in the context of an America misshapen by the lingering curse of slavery and racial bigotry. He writes with passion and engagement, registering deeply the open wound left by America's searing and unresolved racial guilt. It is the "white noise" about black America that is his focus—the theatrical rituals, the filmic myths, the cultural thefts, the racial fantasies, and psychosexual subtext of American popular entertainment. Rogin concentrates his impressively obsessive furor of interpretation on a kind of family romance, centering on the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, which he parlays, often quite ingeniously, into an emblem of America's enduring racial hangup.

Writing as a Jew, moreover, Rogin finds certain peculiar closet treacheries between Jews and African Americans at significant junctures of their history. He uses Jolson's surely callous caricature—by today's standards—of the black image, as a way of talking about how Jewish liberals have, in certain unconsciously systematic ways, failed black Americans—even as Jews have taken courageous and commendable stands on their behalf. It is the "on their behalf " that most haunts Rogin. Blackface is of interest in part because it is an act of ventriloquism—a speaking for, through, and instead of, mostly absent and silent blacks. It is a bodily possession and imitative substitution—an arrogation analogous, in certain embarrassing ways, to the ownership of person claimed by the antebellum slaveholder, whose world and ambience are celebrated most conspicuously in the blackface performance. Rogin goes to the edge of embracing the notion that Jewish involvement in the civil rights struggle was itself a form of blackface performance. But on this point his prose grows murky, and he never fully develops the moral and historical consequences of that thought—and perhaps for good reason. He himself was shaped significantly by the civil rights movement and has arguably been left high and dry by the decline, over the past several decades, of the much vaunted historical alliance between Jews and blacks. Rogin mentions, in passing, the black antisemitism of more recent times, but this line of reflection goes undeveloped in his account, and he is, in any case, more preoccupied with Jewish historical sins—at least, the primal one that this book reconstructs.

Accordingly, there's a distinctly confessional dimension to Rogin's book, signaled by occasional autobiographical flourishes—a frenzied mea culpa that arises [End Page 222] from the moral gaffes of Jewish vaudeville but reaches into Jewish-black relations of a later era, always with reference to the larger questions of American identity. In certain interesting ways, this book is an atonement ritual. Indeed, Rogin has a particular fondness for the word "contamination," which appears and reappears in many contexts, and it is thus perhaps no accident that the core text of...

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