Red Hot Mama: The Life of Sophie Tucker by Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, and: The Eddie Cantor Story: A Jewish Life in Performance and Politics by David Weinstein (review)

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many of the performers aspiring to stardom on the stages and silent screens of America were Jewish immigrants and the children of immigrants. Most of them, fleeing the shtetls and crowded cities of Eastern Europe, brought the inflections and particular worldview of Yiddish language and culture to their lives in America. Among the many fields that would be radically altered by this population were most aspects of the popular culture industry: song-writing and promotion (including the production of sheet music), nickelodeons and movie theaters, vaudeville and other popular stage performances, and the development of both the film industry and the Broadway musical.

Several book-length studies have recently provided well-rounded pictures of major figures involved in the entertainment industry. The success and breadth of Yale’s Jewish Lives series is perhaps the best testament to the recent surge of interest in individual life stories, though excellent portraits of individual performers have been integral to some more wide-ranging studies, like the section on Al Jolson in Michael Alexander’s Jazz Age Jews (2001). One stand-out that bears mentioning is the 2003 exhibition catalog Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, edited by J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, which contains a dizzying array of short biographies, essays on culturally significant radio and television shows and films, and a section entitled “Nickelodeon Nation” that provides an invaluable overview of the links between Jewish immigrants and early twentieth-century movie houses, complete with a map that reveals the concentration of nickelodeons in lower Manhattan around 1910.

Against this framework, and very much in concert with the impulse to focus on popular culture as a reflection of American Jewish acculturation, biographies of Eddie Cantor and Sophie Tucker offer abundant resources. Tucker shines as the bold star of her own show in Red Hot Mama: The Life of Sophie Tucker by Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff, while Cantor receives a more nuanced, and somewhat more scholarly treatment, in The Eddie Cantor Story: A Jewish Life in Performance and Politics by David Weinstein. Both works provide comprehensive pictures of these two giants of the stage. Extensive archival research is augmented by interviews, and particularly in the Cantor book, the performer’s actions are firmly situated both within the political climate of his lifetime and Cantor’s relationship to his own Jewish identity.

Both stars exemplify the Jewish immigrant’s meteoric rise through the ranks of American popular culture; Weinstein informs readers who may not appreciate Cantor’s impact that his subject (whose parents immigrated from Russia to New York’s Lower East Side) was a blockbuster success, one of the biggest headliners in the country, with hit records, books, board games, buttons, and cigars sporting his image. Weinstein makes a strong case to support his contention that Cantor maintained a strong Jewish identity and was greatly concerned with the welfare of Jews around the world. Sklaroff, meanwhile, argues that not only was Tucker distinguished by the longevity of her sixty-plus years on the stage and the variety of media in which she worked, but also that she worked hard at burnishing her strong, feminine, yet often bawdy image while maintaining hard-headed control of her career and financial affairs.

In the 1910s, during a stint with the Ziegfeld Follies, Cantor was inspired by comedian Will Rogers to include political references and topical humor in his routines. This blend of comedy and satire would become a hallmark of Cantor’s performances throughout his career. He cleverly lampooned gender roles and employed racial and ethnic stereotypes for comic effect, sometimes to mock the people he was portraying, but also to throw societal hypocrisy into sharp relief. He took antisemitesto task—including...