What You Ain't Heard Yet: The Languages of The Jazz Singer

The 1927 film The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length American film to use sound-film technology, thereby displaying to audiences not only utterance in English but also in Yiddish and Aramaic. This article explores the role of the three Jewish diaspora languages in the film by focusing on several of the film's musical sequences. By examining the interplay of song lyrics and liturgical text with the film's story, one can see how the film portrays the mutual incomprehensibility of Orthodox Jewish life and American popular culture. In such a way, the film keeps careful account of the cultural erosion and crisis of cultural succession in the generation that succeeded the Jewish immigrant culture of the early twentieth century.