[This essay was published on the jbooks website as part of the series "Secular Culture & Ideas," sponsored by the Posen Foundation]

Jewish, Secular, and Popular
By TED MERWIN

When was secular Jewish culture born in the United States? The short answer: later than most people think. While the seeds of secular Jewish culture were sown on the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the 20th century, Yiddish culture, in addition to being sealed off from the rest of American society, was essentially backward-looking. Built on nostalgia for the Old Country and its ways, it never freed itself from its European past.

Only in the period between the two world wars, when Jews began to join the mainstream of American society, could a viable, vigorous, non-religious Judaism finally begin to flower. When Jews became, in the words of historian Deborah Dash Moore, “at home in America,” could they be proudly Jewish and proudly American at the same time. The children of Jewish immigrants, in flight from their parents’ religion and traditional ways, sought to meld their American-ness and their Jewishness, to re-invent what it meant to be Jewish by shedding many of the stereotypes that had made Jews seem unfit for full participation in American society.

They did so, largely, through popular culture. Through English-language comic strips, popular song, vaudeville, theater and film—Jews remade their image in American society, and in so doing changed the ways in which they saw themselves as well. In other words, Jews developed a secular identity both in and through Jewish culture, through the very process of dramatizing their detachment from religious orthodoxy.

Not incidentally, the representations and images of Jews in popular entertainment reflected the patterns of New York Jewish life. In the 1920s, Jews made up more than a quarter of the overall population of New York City, and New York Jews still comprised about half of all the Jews in America. With the burst of prosperity that followed the First World War, they were also highly mobile, and their very social and economic mobility mirrored the flexibility of eye- and body-movement that was the hallmark of so many Jewish celebrities including Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker.

Their movement was threefold: Jews moved out of the Lower East Side, and into the newer Jewish neighborhoods in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. They moved from the lower class into the lower middle class. And they moved away, in conceptual terms, from religious observance—no longer attending synagogue on a regular basis, keeping kosher, or even celebrating many Jewish festivals. A national audience followed these seismic shifts in Jewish life; they became essential themes of much of the popular culture of the day.

Yet even as Jews increased their visibility and developed non-religious forms of attachment to their heritage, they still lived mainly in the company of other Jews. In their memoirs of growing up in the Bronx and Brooklyn respectively, Kate Simon and Alfred Kazin both recall that they and their friends looked forward to going to the movies every Saturday. Saturday was set apart as a day of joy and recreation, and even as an occasion for group cohesion, but no longer in a religious sense.

The cinema (in addition, one must add, to the delicatessen) had indeed replaced the synagogue as the locus of Jewish life. As Kazin remembered, “On my right hand the ‘Stadium’ movie house—the sanctuary every Saturday afternoon of my childhood, the great dark place of all my dream life. On my left the little wooden synagogue… That poor worn synagogue could never in my affections compete with that movie house, whose very lounge looked and smelled to me like an Oriental temple.” At a time when Jews were still freeing themselves from exotic, “Oriental” associations, it was the world of silent film that took on mythic, larger-than-life dimensions in the popular imagination.

But in addition to consuming popular culture with their popcorn and soda, Jews also helped to create it. By the early years of the 20th century, historians have estimated, close to half of the entertainment business in New York was already in Jewish hands. Nevertheless, Jews were depicted on stage and screen in this early period as fiendish, money-hungry, clumsy villains. It was only in the 1920s that a large cadre of Jewish producers, actors, writers, and directors could begin to alter the portrayals of their own group, making them lifelike and sympathetic.

Dozens of Broadway plays and Hollywood films focused on Jewish families as they worked out—or failed to work out—conflicts between the generations, faced issues over intermarriage and relations with other ethnic groups, and explored the cost of ambition and personal success in pulling the individual away from the community.
Some of these plays and films incorporated Jewish ritual and references to Jewish religion, but the mezuzah was likely to be on the wrong side of the doorpost and the food not quite kosher. Religion was seen as outdated; the future lay with a Jewishness that could adapt itself to the times, creating new bonds between Jews not based on the performance of Jewish ritual.

Furthermore, the barriers between Jews and non-Jews were perceived as increasingly permeable. As Jews became more secular, non-Jews became more attracted to aspects of Jewish culture that now, freed from their religious baggage, seemed more available and accessible. The appetite of non-Jews for Jewish culture strengthened it, helping to support everything from Jewish food to Jewish film.

The changing depiction of Jewish life on stage and screen reinforced the movement of the Jewish audience in its growing embrace of secularization. We often take our cues from popular culture in terms of how to act and even how to think. The message that Jews received from popular culture was that the freedom and opportunity offered by America was one that left it to the individual to define his or her identity.

It has been often remarked that religious commitment tends to wane as an individual prospers economically. As Jews embarked on their legendary rise in America, most continued to define themselves in secular terms, by virtue of an ethnic identity rooted in culture rather than religion.  By the mid-20th century, a new generation of Jewish performers had taken center stage (or center screen)—Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, to name just a few—all of whom continued in the footsteps of the Jewish entertainers of the 1920s, who had shown the country that you could celebrate and satirize your roots at the same time, and through this process of self-reflection, create a whole new form of Jewish identity.