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

6. Epilogue: Jewhooing into the Twenty-first Century

6 E P I L O G U E Jewhooing into the Twenty-first Century When you feel like the only kid in town without a Christmas tree, Here’s a list of people who are Jewish, just like you and me . . . adam sandler, “The Chanukah Song” Jewish celebrity begets Jewhooing.1 Hence each of the preceding chapters began with a brief history of the early 1960s rise of our four famous American Jews—Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand—and then concluded by surveying the Jewhooing of their celebrity personae over the subsequent half-century. That the phenomenon is alive and well in the early twenty-first century may be illustrated by two concurrent events of late 2010, which together encapsulate the state of Jewhooing in the new millennium. The first was the opening of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and the second was a promotional film made for a philanthropic organization, the American Jewish World Service. In the first case, Jewish celebrity was highlighted as an intrinsic element of the American Jewish experience. In the second, Jewish celebrity consciousness was gently mocked, and in the process unpacked and deconstructed. In both cases, celebrity was put to the good use of raising funds for Jewish causes—and in both cases, Jewhooing came into play. Before looking more closely at these two simultaneous though contrasting expressions of Jewhooing, it behooves us to take a retrospective view of the phenomenon overall—a phenomenon, as it turns out, that has only gained in momentum in the new century. 265 266 J E w H O O I N G T H E S I X T I E S A Brief History of Jewhooing Historian Susan Glenn first adopted the term Jewhooing in a 2002 article , defining it as “the social mechanism for both private and public naming and claiming of Jews by other Jews.” She illustrates the concept by recalling “what parents and grandparents like mine did when, while reading the newspaper or watching television, they wondered out loud if this or that public figure or celebrity—perhaps with their Christiansounding name and all-American looks—was or wasn’t a member of the tribe.”2 Having defined the term, Glenn traces its history from the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901–1905 through several midcentury Who’s Who–type listings to the fin-de-siècle examples of Adam Sandler’s 1994 “The Chanukah Song” and the 1997 outing of Madeleine Albright as a Jew. Glenn describes “The Chanukah Song” and its sequels as “gleeful and irreverent send-ups [that] poke fun at the private and public rituals of Jewhooing, even as they participate in them.”3 With its key line, “When you feel like the only kid in town without a Christmas tree, here’s a list of people who are Jewish, just like you and me,” the song has become the major touchstone of the Jewhooing trend, generating numerous sequels, tributes, and parodies—all succinctly surveyed by Eric Goldstein in his 2006 history of American Jewish identity, in which he writes, “Both the success of the recording and the admiration Sandler drew from Jewish listeners around the country suggested that the song had hit on some of the most important issues of identity confronting American Jews at the turn of the twenty-first century.”4 That the song belongs to a longer tradition of Jewhooing is demonstrated by its lesser-known predecessor, Steve Kurland’s 1984 comedy song “Famous Jews.”5 Kurland’s repeated chorus, “There are so many famous Jews,” frames lengthy lists of wellknown Jews both in show business and other areas of popular culture, and includes the occasional humorous verse such as this: Come next high holiday don’t be surprised if, say you’re sitting in a shul somewhere and Dylan comes in to pray!6 Given this comical aspect of Jewhooing, Glenn’s brief history of Jewhooing places too great an emphasis on serious reference works such as encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries. The spirit of Jewhooing is both more lighthearted and more celebratory than that, better evidenced by local Jewish newspapers and popular publications such as Mac Da- 267 E P I L O G U E vis’s They Are All Jews (1937) and Jews at a Glance (1956). Such booklength listings of “great Jews” were expressly intended to build Jewish pride by “reveal[ing...