Yiddishkayt in the Vernacular

Nowhere has the struggle between the perception of the vernacular artist and of the "high" artist been more intense than in the Jewish world, and for interesting and important reasons. The craving of educated and sometimes wealthy outsiders to be accepted by authorities was a significant trope throughout Diaspora Judaism. Even in the United States, Jewish immigrants, particularly from Germany, strove to enter upper-class social circles by buying their way into important cultural institutions.

 

Superman from 1942: taking on Nazism.For these Jews, popular culture not only cheapened the artist but held back progress towards assimilation. Insofar as popular culture was associated with the lower classes, wealthy Jews also were concerned that vernacular art confirmed anti-Semitic stereotypes.

 

Given the urge to assimilate so evident from Jewish contributions to high culture, what do we make of the fact that Jewish immigrants supplied more talent in virtually every corner of popular entertainment than any other single immigrant group?

 

The argument is often made that other avenues of commerce were not open to Jews, and that they thus turned to the vernacular. This has some validity, especially for would-be moviemakers. Yet the same was true for Italian-Americans, who likewise aspired to succeed in popular entertainment but did not fare as well as their Jewish peers (African Americans shared these aspirations but faced a different sort of discrimination than immigrants).

 

What perhaps distinguished the Jewish contribution to popular culture was their paradoxical desire to assimilate and to deliver a message that bore a Jewish imprint. Jews wanted to make movies and art that would have mass appeal, but they wanted to do so without losing their identity as sources of social transformation and more subtly, as proud JewishAmericans. Did they want Yiddiskhayt translated into another language and culture? We don't know. Many did, others did unconsciously.

 

The Comic Torah:
Aaron Freeman and Sharon Rosenzweig

Popular screen writers and artists wanted to help create a different, better, America that was accepting of Jews, not merely a place where Jews could be successful. This was especially true in the medium I love best, comics. Comics also have the capacity to incorporate political critique in a medium devoted primarily to entertainment. Comics were expected to ridicule the bigshots infavor of the kid throwing the snowball to knock off a top hat.

 

While Art Spiegelman has argued that among the first generations of daily comics stars, Jews were scarce, there were fromthe beginning odd Yiddish comic strips whose weirdness and sheer creativity must have spurred other Jewish artists to the genre. In any case, as Spiegelman notes, by the time comic books became a business, Jews had rushed to the foreof the art. Men like Albert Kanter (the founder of Classsics), Mad's Harvey Kurtzman and William M. Gaines, however, were ardent Jewish liberals. There is a reason that the bad guys a pre-World War Two Superman (mild white-collar professional Clark Kent) fights are so often corporate fat cats gone bad.

 

Raw The tie between a left-leaning politics, Jewish zeitgeist, and vernacular art was even more prominent in the work of the Ash Can artists, the muralists of the 1930s,and later the underground comix artists, who found much of interest of in popular cultural expression and often mixed it into their art.

 

It's true that this potent mix of politics, Jewishness and popular art seemed to fizzlein the wake of the Holocaust and the McCarthy era, when a toxic mix of assimiliationism and Zionist nationalism crept to the fore of Jewish cultural consciousness. Today's most exciting Jewish artists, however, are finally returning to their immigrant roots, reasserting both yiddishkayt and political independence through the vernacular.

I think about Art Spiegelman squaring off against Rudy Giuliani, beloved to neoconservatives, I think about the artistst of World War 3 Illustrated (including Peter Kuper, beloved artist of Mad Magazine), I think about Sharon Rudahl of the graphic biography of Isadora Duncan, I think of Miriam Libicki, who does a web comic about a young woman (herself) in the Israel IDF, and a Holocaust suvivor, Miriam Katin, who has done a genius work reconstructinga childhood like hers. These are my kind of comics, capable of delivering a message without hitting anyone over the head--not embarrassed about popular culture or about Jewishness.

Images: Comic Torah by Aaron Freeman and Sharon Rosenzweig.