Michael Alexander (4) (1970–)

In Jazz Age Jews (2001), Michael Alexander presents three case studies to support his thesis that Jewish immigrants early in the 20th century embraced an ‘outsider’ status even as they assimilated to American culture. Through the experiences of gambling boss Arnold Rothstein, law professor Felix Frankfurter (who represented Sacco and Vanzetti in court), and entertainer Al Jolson, Jews found confirmation of both their unique communal identity and their Americanness by identifying with marginalized groups—ethnic gangsters, anarchists, and blacks. The section on Jolson suggests a prominent role for Jews in shaping public perceptions of Negro cultural arts, and jazz in particular.

The tendency of Jews to identify with marginal groups (to the extent that we agree with such a broad-brush generalization) may help explain in part Mezz Mezzrow’s fascination with black musicians. In Really the Blues (1946), Mezzrow writes of his middle-class background and his experience of anti-Semitism and exclusion. He marvels at the high-spirited perseverance and creativity of blacks in the face of routine hostility and mistreatment, and adopts the mannerisms and language and music of blacks for his own identity.

In his section on Al Jolson, Alexander argues that a revived minstrelsy and the Jewish songwriters of Tin Pan Alley helped bring Negro culture into the public eye. Jolson borrowed the blackface costume and repertoire from the minstrel tradition and transplanted them to vaudeville and Broadway. Jewish songwriters produced ‘coon songs’ and imitation ragtime, and, claims Alexander, Jews in America understood these depictions of blackness as an exercise in cultural fluidity and a mutual longing for freedom. Alexander provides scant evidence for such cross-racial sympathies and identification, so we’ll have to take his word for it.

More problematic is Alexander’s assertion that Jewish depictions of blackness paved the way for white audiences’ acceptance of ragtime, jazz and blues. Popular tastes are easily tricked; Jolson and his ‘mammy’ songs played on the worst kind of ignorant stereotypes, and Irving Berlin’s ragtime was a pale imitation. W.C. Handy and Clarence Williams were already playing and publishing around the time that “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” became popular, and white audiences in Chicago and New York had access to numerous proto-jazz bands. James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke provided histories of black music featuring actual black musicians, and the New York concert by Paul Whiteman (“The King of Jazz”) performing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” in 1924—hailed at the time as the pinnacle of jazz—sparked a backlash against ‘fake jazz’ and launched the careers of a raft-load of commentators who looked to New Orleans for the real thing. Maybe there were Jewish immigrants fooled by Al Jolson’s performance in “The Jazz Singer” (1927), but surely there were others who preferred Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson (or dozens of others), and understood the difference.… (mais)