American Judaism in Popular Culture (review)

In the recent movie Wedding Daze (dir. Michael Ian Black, 2006), an Orthodox Jewish character has invented a new Jewish soft toy. Called “the Jewnicorn,” it is, as its name implies, a unicorn bedecked in Stars of David, which, when squeezed, recites a blessing in Hebrew. Although clearly inserted into the movie simply for laughs, the Jewnicorn is not as far-fetched as the filmmakers may think: Judith S. Neulander’s essay in this volume, “Tchotchkes: A Study of Popular Culture in Tangible Form,” points out that such trinkets have been existence in American Jewish popular culture since the late nineteenth century at least and have encompassed an array of comparably kitsch items.

Although not the lead essay, Neulander’s contribution gives an idea of the range of this collection, collated from the proceedings of the seventeenth annual symposium of the Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization at the Harris Center for Judaic Studies at Creighton University. This volume, number 17 in the series, includes thirteen other essays that cover topics such as Hollywood, the Three Stooges, S. J. Perelman, theater, Bob Dylan, rock ‘n’ roll, sports, and comics by contributors including Jenna Weisman Joselit, Lawrence Baron, Steven Alan Carr, Lynn Rapaport, Thomas A. Kuhlman, Ben Furnish, Nora L. Rubel, Jeffrey S. Gurock, Steven Horowitz, and Leonard J. Greenspoon.

In addition to Neulander’s piece, the other notable essays here are G. Andrew Tooze’s “David of Hollywood: Israelite King or American Superhero,” Dan W. Clanton Jr.’s “From Mr. Hankey to The Hebrew Hammer: Hanukkah in Pop Culture,” and Dereck Daschke’s “‘Oh Mama, Could This Really Be the End?’: The Apocalyptic Bob Dylan.” Tooze considers how, in what can now be considered a time-honored fashion, Hollywood remade the biblical character of David over as a cartoon hero, the prototype for Captain America, complete with cape and shield. Clanton, in contrast, analyses the appearance and use of the festival of Hanukkah in the television series South Park and Friends and the movie The Hebrew Hammer (dir. Jonathan Kesselman, 2003), respectively. If I have a minor criticism here, it is that his exploration of the popular cultural products could have been longer and more detailed in comparison to his section on the origins of Hanukkah. Finally, Daschke looks at the biblical motif running throughout Dylan’s music and in doing so shows how in appropriating the lines of the biblical prophets, Dylan, in a sense, became their modern incarnation.

While it was certainly pleasurable, for this reader at least, to see that the object of study in this volume is how Judaism as religion—as opposed to the more typical focus on Jewishness as ethnicity—has influenced American popular culture, it certainly would have been interesting to consider the other side of the equation: whether and how far popular culture has influenced American Judaism, particularly those branches of Orthodoxy that present themselves as impervious to the outside world.

Nevertheless, these minor criticisms aside, taken together, these essays provide a useful primer for the student seeking to discover the range of Jewish cultural production in the United States and add to the growing collection of similar studies, for example, You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, edited by Vincent Brook (2006). Such students may then even be able to take the next step and consider what the appearance of the Jewnicorn, or its ill-fated counterpart the “Jewla Hoop” (a Hula Hoop in the shape of a Star of David which, owing to its shape, doesn’t work), in Wedding Daze can tell us.