Monday, March 14, 2011

A place for us

There are many icons of Western theater and drama that have a clear but disguised Jewish theme. The central theme of "West Side Story" was "There's a place for us," a place for the white American boy and the Puerto Rican girl to escape the group hatred of the big City. Leonard Bernstein and Stephan Sondheim could conceive of this concept of a "better place," where freedom and justice prevail, because they were Diaspora Jews. Another example is "Porgy and Bess" by George Gershwin, when Porgy sings "I'm on my way to a heavenly land..." he is reflecting the drama of Diaspora Jews trying to find a place of acceptance among the other nations.
This theme of Jews from the nineteenth century onwards, as they became successful in American life, regarding the US, and particularly California as the new promised land, was attested to by Kirk Douglas (Issur Danielovitch) in his autobiography "The rag-man's son," in which he literally went from rags to riches. In his oeuvre Kirk Douglas was associated with two movies that he himself had personal identification with, "Paths of glory" (1957) and "Spartacus" (1960) both of which had themes of social justice. There are many other examples of Jews who were thoroughly American, yet retained the characteristic Jewish spark of social justice, of trying to make their own society into a "better place."

It was not purely chance that Benny Goodman, "the King of swing," a Jewish boy from Chicago, had the first integrated band in the US, when he included Teddy Wilson (1936) and Lionel Hampton (1939) in his line-up. There are so many examples that I refer the reader to "An empire of their own: how the Jews invented Hollywood," by Neal Gabler.

All the above shows that in "inventing"' their own place in America, it is no wonder that American Jews are somewhat divorced from the history and struggle for Israel, and that the current generation of American Jews are largely indifferent to our continuing struggle to make a better place for ourselves in the sun.

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