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10 He died thinking he was poor and Jewish. —Jill Cosell on her father, Howard Cosell It should be no surprise to anybody who remembers Howard Cosell that even the date of his birth is a matter of controversy . In his first autobiography, Cosell, he writes that he was born on March 25, 1920.1 Other biographical references, however, list the year of his birth as 1918.2 A U.S. Census record taken in January 1920 only slightly clarifies the matter. Listed beneath Isadore M. and Nellie Cohen are sons Hilton and Howard. This is clearly the record for Cosell and his family, as the information corresponds with Cosell’s own published recollections—the names of his parents, the place of his birth, and his family name before he changed it to Cosell in the 1940s. Howard’s age appears to read “2 1/12,” but the handwriting is smudged and unclear; it could also say “1 11/12.”3 Beyond these vague census records, it is difficult to obtain any primary information about Cosell’s early life. Most of what can be learned about his youth comes from interviews with his family and with Cosell, a few scattered newspaper and tabloid articles, and, most voluminously, Cosell’s own published memoirs. These memoirs are revealing in the ways they illustrate not only Cosell’s perspective on his own life but also themes that are common to the children of what social historians describe as the “second wave” of immigrants to the United States. Cosell’s mode of writing about his childhood is invariably nostalgic, but it reveals an individual who was extremely conscious of his own past and its relationship to dramatic historical transformations: the trans-Atlantic immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Jews fleeing persecution in Europe; the gradual assimilation and acceptance of “white” ethnic groups such as 1 Poor, Jewish, and from Brooklyn 11 po o r , j e wi s h, an d from b rook ly n Jews, Irish, and Italians; the rise of a mass media consumer society; the disintegration of urban European-ethnic communities; and the great migration of African Americans to cities and neighborhoods like the Brooklyn of Cosell’s youth. While Cosell almost never mentioned his ethnicity while on the air as a sports broadcaster, his Jewish identity is central to his published memoirs and to a narrative tension that he presents consistently. Cosell ’s Jewishness was not about the practice of religion. Although his autobiographical writings frequently reflect on his Jewish background, he almost never mentions any religious ritual, learning, or belief, except to point out that he never had a bar mitzvah. In one of the few oral history interviews conducted with Cosell, he speaks slightly more extensively about the role of religion in his life, but only with impatience and an air of dismissal. Yet being Jewish is clearly something that was important to Cosell. It was about neighborhood boundaries; about being the target of bullying by Irish Catholic street thugs; about limitations placed on expectations for his own life by his parents; about a street culture of kosher foods, stickball games, and gossip; about belonging to a people who were the target of international prejudice and genocide; and about something in his own speech and style that audiences could clearly identify, and that could be used against him and his career. In Cosell, he first mentions his Jewish identity to explain his characteristic ambition. Noting that he is often asked about his “drive,” he writes: “Surely a lot of my drive stems from the way I grew up—in Brooklyn, during the Depression, Jewish, fighting a group of Studs Lonigans and running away from them, to get to school safely; to get home safely. That was part of life then.”4 Here we can see a core tension in the way he represents his being Jewish. On the one hand, he identifies it as the motivation for his later success. Yet on the other hand, there is very little that is positive in the way Cosell addresses his Jewishness. It is a hardship like the Great Depression, and a source of stigma and humiliation. This tension is not unique to Cosell. It is a common theme in the experiences of Jewish writers, actors, comedians , journalists, and television personalities who, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, became central figures in American culture in a way that Jews had never been...

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