"Big Chief Izzy Horowitz": Theatricality and Jewish Identity in the Wild West

In the American musical theater, self-consciously theatrical characters have enormous freedom to determine their place within the social and cultural framework of the stage community. ¹ Unlike characters who lack theatrical self-awareness, those who can adopt numerous characters in the course of a single play, altering their outward appearance, language, and gestures to suit the moment, are especially powerful in the world of the musical. They establish a special relationship with the ultimate arbiters of theatrical success--the audience beyond the footlights. The audience members are in on the secret; having seen the performer transform him- or herself, they are not fooled by the changes and can share the pleasure of watching the rest of the cast--the straight men--become increasingly confused.

To American Jews of the 1920s and 1930s this ability to transform oneself was essential both on and off the stage. In the volatile interwar years in which American identity was perpetually being redefined, Jews often found themselves held up as examples in a public debate on immigration, assimilation and Americanness. ² The definition of the Jew was of particular concern: were Jews an ethnic and cultural group, and hence assimilable, or were they a racially distinct people who could never become true Americans? ³ In America there are only two operative racial categories, white and nonwhite, and privilege has always rested with the former. For Jews, especially those immigrating from Southern and Eastern Europe, being defined on the grounds of racial difference meant being defined as non-white. The danger of being essentialized, locked into an unwanted racial self-definition, therefore, was clear: to be racially other was to be forever excluded from the privileged white American community. ⁴ For this reason many Jews resisted racial definitions and clung tenaciously to the notion that one could become an American simply by adopting American culture, language and appearance. The musicals of the 1920s and 30s, many of them written and performed by Jews from immigrant backgrounds, likewise suggest a vehement opposition to rigid racial categorizations, advocating instead a more fluid conception of identity. Emerging from immigrant families and desperate to become Americans, Jewish performers in particular understood the crucial importance of being able to adopt whatever personae they chose. Their ability to become someone else with a simple change of costume helped them to negotiate the perilous landscape of American racial ideology both on and off stage.

A popular setting for late 1920s and early 1930s musicals, the Wild West in particular highlighted the importance of theatrical role-playing in an environment in which identity was inherently unstable. While the West may seem an unlikely setting for such an urban form as the Broadway musical, there are actually striking similarities between the mythical West of the nineteenth century and the mythical city of the early twentieth. According to Daniel Boorstin, "the modern American city [was] to be a twentieth-century American West, with its own special vagueness, its own mysteries, its own false promises and booster hopes" (246). Like the streets of New York City, the mythical nineteenth-century American West promised anonymity and freedom from conventional social hierarchies. ⁵ The newcomer in a Wild West town was like an immigrant--he started fresh. No one knew who he was, or where he came from, and so his chances of success depended on how well he inhabited the role he chose. ⁶ As in the theater, success in the mythical Wild West was largely dependent on the ability to perform-the best shot or the best horseman quickly earned the respect of the local community.

While both settings called for capable role-playing, however, the specific skills required for success in the West or in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York differed significantly. The mythical West was populated by the mythical Western man-the cowboy. Dubbed by Daniel Boorstin "the first American athletic idol...