Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema

Notes on Sontag and “Jewish Moral Seriousness” in American Movies

111 Sarah Kozloff Notes on Sontag and “Jewish Moral Seriousness” in American Movies Serious Jews In her widely read 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag places the camp aesthetic in direct opposition to a more elevated mode, in what seems almost like a throwaway thought: The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it’s not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a peculiar affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard—and the most articulate audience—of Camp. (The analogy is not frivolously chosen . Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony [my emphasis].) (Against Interpretation 291–92) Sontag’s main thrust in her essay is on sketching the outline of the space held by camp. She never defines the other pioneering force, “Jewish moral seriousness.” Nor does she explain her linkage of these sensibilities to Jews and gays, other than to write, 112 Sarah Kozloff The reason for the flourishing of the aristocratic posture among homosexuals also seems to parallel the Jewish case. For every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it. Jewish liberalism is a gesture of self-legitimization. So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it. Needless to say, the propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction. The Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness [my emphasis]. (Against Interpretation 292) These quotations merit discussion. First, one spots a conflation in these passages of two different words and concepts: Jews as liberals morphs into Jewish “moral seriousness” in the first paragraph and then back again to Jewish “liberalism” in the second. Surely not all moralism is liberal, nor are all kinds of liberalism moral. However, Sontag here posits Jewish moral seriousness as liberalism. Second, “seriousness” is a strangely old-fashioned term for such a sixties radical as Sontag. It reverberates with echoes of its strongest popularizer, the Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who toiled for many years as an inspector of schools in the belief that culture should concentrate on “high seriousness” as opposed to Philistinism. Although in other passages Sontag goes out of her way to critique Arnold ’s humanism, using Arnoldian vocabulary as a touchstone turns out to be a common trope in her criticism, as literary critic James Seaton has painstakingly traced (122–25). Indeed, “seriousness” becomes Sontag’s lodestone. Craig Seligman notes, “In 1988 Sontag told an interviewer, ‘Sometimes I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending—but then I say all is everything—is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness.’ She has no higher term of praise” (5). Ultimately Sontag turned against the frivolity of camp—even in 1964 she revealed, “I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.” She skewered the class ties of camp: “The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence” (Against Interpretation 291). (Years later she even vehemently repudiated this essay on camp [Castle].) Seriousness became her highest criterion. But if seriousness has a long history as a term of approbation in arts and culture, the intriguing aspect of Sontag’s oracular pronouncement in 1964 113 Notes on Sontag comes from ascribing modern seriousness—primarily? exclusively?—to Jews. After all, Matthew Arnold was a devout Christian; his literary criticism was firmly ensconced in a Christian context. Although Sontag traced her heritage to Polish Jewry, according to her, her family had been entirely secular for three generations (Sontag, Stress 308). Even the extent to which her Jewish background was part of her self-identity is unclear: on one hand, Susan Sontag once defined herself to a friend as first a Jew, second a writer, and third an American (Rollyson and Paddock 161). (Jewishness seems to always...