Modeling Citizenship

Preface: Modeling Citizenship and Modeled Selfhood

Preface: Modeling Citizenship and Modeled Selfhood Neil Diamond’s remake of the 1927 Jolson vehicle isn’t very good, but neither is it the vacuous, sentimental ego trip it’s been painted as. The Jolson version was centered on the myth of the melting pot—the hero escaped his ethnicity and became something new, an “American.” Here, the theme is more personal and psychological: Diamond must find a way to escape his father without renouncing his Jewishness. Nothing is followed through with much rigor, and the resolution is artificial, but the film at least has its teeth into something real. —david kehr As 1980 came to a close, the third week of December witnessed the cinematic premier of Richard Fleischer’s remake of The Jazz Singer at New York City’s Ziegfeld Theater.1 Carrying the provocative tagline “Sometimes you have to risk it all,” the 1980 version marked Jewish American singer/songwriter Neil Diamond’s film debut.2 Like its 1927 Al Jolson predecessor, Diamond’s The Jazz Singer tells the tale of a Jewish American son who refuses to follow his traditional father’s path. Drawn not to a life in his father’s synagogue but to a career on the popular American stage, the protagonist (Yussel Rabinovitch) navigates the contested waters of intergenerational disagreements and familial conflicts, fulfilling in the process an overwhelming desire for fame and fortune. Addressing the assimilative cost of success alongside the benefits of cultural Americanization , by the century’s end The Jazz Singer had emerged as a bona fide American immigrant fable, a legible corollary to official characterizations of the United States as “a nation of immigrants.”3 Irrespective of the film’s immigrant-focused frames and accessible narrative, Neil Diamond’s entry into U.S. filmdom was largely unsuccessful . In fact, the film’s byline about “risk” reads negatively given The Jazz Singer’s critical and commercial reception. Described by reviewers as “empty-headed,” “ill-begotten,” “unbelievable,” and “forgettable,” Diamond ’s The Jazz Singer failed to capture the public imagination like its predecessor of the same name.4 Instead, the film was a box office bomb and a critical disappointment, though the film’s soundtrack would reach xii / preface multiplatinum heights. The combination of poor acting, trite screenwriting , and wooden direction reinforced criticisms that The Jazz Singer story had become all too familiar, foregrounding film commentator Paul Brenner’s contention that this third version had become a “moth-eaten” narrative.5 Certainly, changes in the times undergirded such critiques. Nearly fifty years, a civil rights movement, cold war foreign policies, and sweeping immigration policy changes separated the acclaimed original from its panned successor. What is more, Diamond’s The Jazz Singer revision suffered from its strict adoption of the original plot. Released two years after the airing of Holocaust, a popular four-part Emmy Award–winning NBC television miniseries, The Jazz Singer’s preoccupation with Jewish American identity, a hallmark theme in the 1927 version, struck an anachronistic chord among audiences accustomed to an alternative, potent narrative of the Jewish global experience.6 In the aftermath of identity politics and black power protests, the 1980 version inexplicably included a blackface performance, eliciting ire from critics and audiences alike. Equally significant in the film’s lackluster reception was its questionable applicability to an approaching millennial moment. On the whole, New York Times critic Janet Maslin’s observation that Diamond’s fictional biopic “rehash[es] . . . a plot that makes not one bit of sense any more” makes plain the film’s less-than-enthusiastic reception . Simultaneously, Maslin’s characterization paradoxically bespeaks the film’s obsolescence and relevance to contemporaneous immigration law.7 In light of recent open-door immigration policies, apparent in the successful passage and deployment of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, the film’s focus on a Jewish immigrant was presumably out of sync with a contemporary “America” changed by the mass mid-century arrival of Asian and Latin American immigrants. The film’s primary narrative, centered on Jewish/Jewish American experiences, seemed more related to turn-of-the-twentieth-century waves of southern and eastern European immigrants than to post-1965 migrations from China, Korea, India, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Set within a cultural locale in which Jewish Americans occupied multigenerational positions as probationary white subjects, Diamond’s Americanization arguments with his orthodox father and underdeveloped contemplations of hyphenated immigrant identity were incongruous when situated against a mainstream reading of Jews as “model minorities” and “amalgamated Americans.” Still, in the...