Chicken Soup, or the Penalties for Sounding too Jewish

Volume 9, No.2 Winter 1991 55 CHICKEN SOUP, OR THE PENALTIES FOR SOUNDING TOO JEWISH1 Sander L. Gilman Sander L. Gilman is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Humane Studies at CorneIl University and Professor of Psychiatry (History) at the CorneIl Medical CoIlege. He is the author of numerous works on inteIlectual and literary history. The paperback edition of his Jewish Self-Hatred (Johns Hopkins) appeared in 1990. Can the study of the relationship between German Jews and Eastern European Jews provide a model for the image and the response of different marginal groups in different historical circumstances? To begin to answer this I want to turn to the work of one of the foremost sociologists of the Jewish experience, Jackie Mason. The career of Jackie Mason, the last of the "borscht belt" comics, had an extraordinary rebirth during 1987. An act designed for the Catskills which had brought Mason to fame during the 1960s (including a much publicized spat with the TV power Ed Sullivan) led to bankruptcy in 1983. Suddenly this same act became the vehicle which brought him stardom (again) in the late 1980s. Mason understood what had happened: "The Jewish people took me for granted, the young people saw me as an anachronism, then I went to Broadway where I never ever thought I'd succeed." And the reason for his invisibility was his language: "People said I was too Jewish-and I even. suffered from anti-Jewish prejudice from Jews themselves. There was a profound rejection problem: the reverse discrimination of Jews against other Jews who talk like me in show business. I think they were ashamed and embarrassed about my accent, that I was somehow symbolic of the whole fear that Jews would be discriminated against again." 2 For Jackie Mason, the move to Broadway provided a neutral space in which sounding Jewish, which in our contemporary American 1This essay served as the keynote address at a conference on the relationship between German Jews and Eastern European Jews held in the spring of 1990 by the German Department at Columbia University. 2Glenn CoIlins, "Jackie Mason, Top Banana at Last," The New York Times (24 July 1988), Section 2: pp. 1, 14. 56 SHOFAR context means speaking with a Yiddish accent, was no longer associated with a "Jewish" environment; that is, the audience (Jewish or not) no longer identified with the comic as a representative of the self. During the fall of 1989 Jackie Mason starred in an ill-fated "sit-com" entitled "Chicken Soup" on ABC. It was canceled on November 8, 1989, even though it was the 13th highest rated network television show. USA Today, a good barometer of middle-class opinion, thought "Mason's ethnic shtick wouldn't play to the masses." 3 The use of the Yiddishism in this very phrase placed the discourse of this Jew who sounds too Jewish beyond the pale of polite language, the language of middle class comedy. We have seen in the past decades, as Henry L. Gates, Jr. has recently noted, that the representation of the African American on American television has moved from that of Amos and Andy to Dr. Clifford Huxtable, from the representation of the African American sounding too "black" to one possessing the dominant discourse of American culture.4 For Jews, the seeming lack of movement from the Jackie Mason of the 1960s to the Jackie Mason of the 1980s was offensive. The Jewish Defense League picketed the ABC studio in New York and "Dan Bloom, a Jewish children's book author from Alaska, tried organizing a grass-roots campaign against the show ... He didn't like the Jewish stereotypes portrayed." Bloom observed: "I ... got the feeling he offended many Jews in America. They've heard this type of humor in their homes, but in the public living rooms of America for everybody to hear it seemed embarrassing." 5 Gates quotes W. E. B. Du Bois from 1921 that "the more highly trained we become, the less we can laugh at Negro comedy." The Jew who sounds too Jewish, for some American Jews, represents the hidden Jew within, the corrupt Jew of the Gospel, the mark of difference which offends...