Jewhooing the Sixties: American Celebrity and Jewish Identity—Sandy Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand

4. Bob Dylan: Wandering Jew

4 B O B D Y L A N Wandering Jew Dylan is a wandering Jew. He leaves Minnesota for New York. He leaves the folk world for rock ’n’ roll. He leaves the city for the country. And for the last 15 years, he’s been on tour almost all the time . . . as many readers of this newspaper [the Forward] know, he’s really Robert Zimmerman, right? A nice Jewish boy from Minnesota. He can deny it, he can sing songs for Jesus, but he is one of us, right? It’s such an interesting phenomenon—the tenacity of Jewishness, the paradox, embodied by Dylan himself, of diasporism and identity. We wander, we wear masks, we change our names as did Dylan—but there’s always that thrill when we see a landsman. jay michaelson, “He Wandered the Earth as an Exiled Man” Bob Dylan, like Lenny Bruce before him, is an icon of Jewish iconoclasm. Both were pathbreaking artists of the early 1960s who had the chutzpah to perform their own words and express their innermost thoughts—until then a rarity in American entertainment—and both became pivotal figures in popular culture, forever changing the nature of their respective art forms. In the words of one historian, Dylan “reclassified the job of pop musician as audaciously as Lenny Bruce was redefining the role of a comedian.”1 Though both were personally absent from the counterculture of the later 1960s, their bodies of work exerted a profound influence on an era of political protest and cultural revolution. Like the controversial comic, the folk/rock singer-songwriter expanded the boundaries of our language and of our very consciousness. Journalist Nat Hentoff, who knew and interviewed both men, described Dylan’s stage presence in 1975 as “that cracking, shaking energy 155 156 J E w H O O I N G T H E S I X T I E S which reminds me of another klezmer on the roof, another Tateh in ragtime , Lenny Bruce.”2 Music critic Robert Shelton similarly compared Dylan’s music to Bruce’s comedic style: “Like Lenny Bruce, he was riffing , in and out of communication, like a jazzman going in and out of a melody line. It was word music, chin music, symbol music.”3 Dylan himself mentioned his contemporary in several contexts,4 and in 1981, fifteen years after Bruce’s death, recorded a song titled “Lenny Bruce.” In paying tribute to the departed comedian, Dylan used the occasion to implicitly measure his own rebellious posture against a kindred soul: “He was an outlaw, that’s for sure / More of an outlaw than you [read: Dylan] ever were. . . . Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.”5 Dylan’s real-life brother, David Zimmerman, had stayed close to home and was more the “nice Jewish boy” type; whereas Bruce, fellow iconoclast and provocateur, was anything but. Despite the two performers’ similarities, the nature of their fame diverges considerably. Where Bruce’s image has subtly shifted about in the years since his death, Dylan’s has gone through radical changes during his lifetime, from early on to the present day. In fact, Dylan did something that no Jewish celebrity or other American pop figure had ever done before. As he became very, very famous, and indeed throughout his career, he continually changed—changed his name, his style, his look, his voice, changed his persona in every way. Before Dylan, the famous tended to establish a persona that resonated with the public, and then stick with it—why mess with a good thing? Dylan, on the other hand, Record jacket for single “Lenny Bruce,” by Bob Dylan (1981). 157 B O B D Y L A N never embodied the conventional type of fame, and did not attempt the construction of a fixed identity—but rather, he pursued its deconstruction , and came to personify the postmodern notions of masking and performance . Famously, he once joked, “I have my Bob Dylan mask on.”6 Later, he played a man named “Alias” in Sam Peckinpah’s film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973); and more recently, he made a film with the purposefully enigmatic title Masked and Anonymous. In addition to his estimable prowess as a musician and lyricist, Dylan was a seminal figure in American culture for his protean self-invention, for the bafflingly cubistic images he projected in...