Jewface

[Christiern]

I was searching Amazon for some blues releases when this popped up as a "people also bought" item. Looks very offensive to me (at least the producers acknowledge that aspect). There is undoubtedly some historical value to this kind of material, but does that make it less insulting? Is this exploitation or exposé? Allen?

Edited July 1, 2008 by Christiern

[DukeCity]

Article here in the NYT from '06 gives a little background/context to this project. The comparison to Minstrelsy is inevitable, and brings up a similar mixture of reactions. At once interesting/fascinating and inescapably repulsive as a piece of cultural history. The fact that the music was originally produced and performed at least in part by Jews, and this project being researched and produced by Jews, only adds layers of mixed feelings for me.

Love ‘Springtime for Hitler’? Then Here’s the CD for You

By ALEX WILLIAMS Published: October 29, 2006 SACHA BARON COHEN, meet Irving Berlin.

Skip to next paragraph Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Hip musicologist Courtney Holt, a founder of a label of odd Jewish-theme music.

FUNNY THEN The sheet music of a 1922 self-parodying song, partly by Eddie Cantor, on the new album. This mammy’s “cabin door is in a Bronx tenement.”

Jokes that compare Jews to cockroaches have left some viewers of Mr. Cohen’s farcical new film, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

But probably few of those shocked by the movie realize that long before Mr. Cohen shed his Ali G persona for Borat’s ill-fitting suit — in fact, long before the 1929 stock market crash — Berlin, the songwriter behind “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” was reeling off satirical songs about Jews that might seem dodgy on the “Borat” soundtrack. One such Berlin number, “Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars,” from 1916, concerns a businessman on his deathbed who cannot stop fretting over his unrepaid i.o.u.’s.

This song and others by long-dead Tin Pan Alley songwriters are featured on a new compact disc, “Jewface,” which is aimed not at the History Channel crowd, but at a hipper audience. The album, to be released Nov. 14, contains 16 songs salvaged from wax cylinder recordings and scratchy 78s, from a century-old genre that is essentially Jewish minstrelsy. Often known as Jewish dialect music, it was performed in vaudeville houses by singers in hooked putty noses, oversize derbies and tattered overcoats. Highly popular, if controversial, in its day, it has been largely lost to history — perhaps justifiably.

“It’s like <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/adolf_hitler/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Adolf Hitler.">Hitler’s playlist, but it’s not, because it was actually Fanny Brice’s playlist,” said Jody Rosen, 37, a music critic for the online magazine Slate, who has spent more than a decade researching the genre. (Brice was the Ziegfeld-era singer and comedian played by Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl.”) “It’s a more complicated and nuanced vision of Jewish history than what you absorb at Hebrew school.”

In spring 2005, Mr. Rosen, who is the author of “White Christmas: The Story of an American Song” (Scribner, 2002) and has also contributed articles to The New York Times, joined forces with Courtney Holt, a former Interscope Records executive, who now runs MTV digital operations; David Katznelson, a former Warner Records executive; and Josh Kun, an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. They turned a shared obsession into “Jewface,” an album they hope will turn the MySpace generation on to a form of music that offended many even in their great-grandparents’ day.

“Jewface” is the fourth album released on Reboot Stereophonic, a nonprofit record label devoted to unearthing odd Jewish-theme pop recordings from earlier eras, which Mr. Holt, Mr. Kun and Mr. Katznelson founded a couple of years ago. The CD will soon be available at record chains like Virgin, as well as on Amazon.com and iTunes.

Coarse, yes. Consider the very title “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band,” from 1906. The four collaborators acknowledge that these playful vaudeville ditties could function as hate speech in the wrong context, and they carry particular power in a politicized climate where newspaper cartoons can cause riots, and Mel Gibson has risked his career with a drunken outburst.

But to the project’s partners — music professionals typically associated with the likes of the Beastie Boys (for whom Mr. Holt produced a music video) and the Flaming Lips (whom Mr. Katznelson signed at Warner), not Eddie Cantor — this forgotten genre serves as a window into American Jewish heritage for people just like them: young secular Jews weaned on kitschy pop culture, abrasive rock and irony, as much as on the Torah.

“We’re all kind of disaffected American Jews, who aren’t particularly religious, don’t really practice and don’t really lead very Jewish lives at all,” said Mr. Kun, 35. “Digging up these recordings was really about figuring out who we were in this world.”

Many of these lost recordings spent nearly a century buried under dust on wax cylinders, the canister-shape phonograph records that predated discs. To contemporary ears the songs are camp, much like a previous Reboot Stereophonic release, “God Is a Moog” — a 1968 rock-opera reinterpretation of the traditional Jewish Sabbath service, performed on Moog synthesizer by the electronic-music pioneer Gershon Kingsley.

But they also fit with a growing tendency among Jews of Generations X and Y to embrace, and even have fun with, stereotypes that might have made their parents squirm. It is the same impetus behind Heeb magazine, an irreverent publication about Jewish culture, and the proliferation of hipster Hanukkah parties in Manhattan each December, when fashionable young clubgoers bat around inflatable dreidels as house music blares.

The “Jewface” tracks may soon find their way onto the dance floor. Adam Dorn, a Manhattan musician and producer who records under the name Mocean Worker and has worked with Bono and Elvis Costello, recently cut a trancy remix of “Under the Matzos Tree,” a 1907 song performed by Ada Jones, complete with blips and beeps and a thudding drum machine laid over lyrics like “Listen to your Abie, baby, Abie, come out in the moonlight with me.”

“I just said, let’s take this woman who would probably be 116 now and give her a backbeat,” explained Mr. Dorn, 35.

But even the original versions of the old tunes rock, in their way.

“There’s an ethereal quality” to the music, said Mr. Katznelson, 37. “It teleports you to another time. It’s almost psychedelic.”

Mr. Holt pointed out that such dialect music was usually performed by Jews and was popular among Jewish as well as non-Jewish audiences when it was released. For many immigrants, laughing at even newer arrivals from the Old World was a way to make themselves feel more at home in their adopted country.

But even after a century, the music carries the potential to shock. “My Yiddisha Mammy,” a 1922 riff on Al Jolson’s “Mammy,” written by Eddie Cantor and others, may offend contemporary Jews and African-Americans equally with lyrics like these:

I’ve got a mammy,

But she don’t come from Alabammy.

Her heart is filled with love and real sentiment,

Her cabin door is in a Bronx tenement.

The “Jewface” project, however, does have historical as well as musical value, said Jeffrey Magee, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“This album is a big step in repossessing this stuff that has been muted for a century,” said Dr. Magee, who explained that this music was generally ignored, except in academic works, by earlier generations of American Jews, who were trying to assimilate and wanted to run from painful stereotypes, not explore them. (Other groups, like the Irish and Italians, had their own vaudeville self-parodies.)

“Some generations had to come and go,” Dr. Magee said, “before younger people could listen with fresh ears, say: ‘Hey, let’s listen to this. It’s not us, but it’s our predecessors.’ ”

Many Jews in the vaudeville era ran from this music. In 1909, Mr. Rosen writes in the album liner notes, a prominent Reform rabbi said that such Hebrew comedy was “the cause of greater prejudice against the Jews as a class than all other causes combined,” and that same year it was denounced by the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

Kenneth Jacobsen, the deputy national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that a project like this “gets very complicated.” It is on the one hand comedy, and that it was usually performed by Jews softens its impact. Still, he said, “our experience in this kind of thing is that inevitably somebody will probably use this for not such good purposes.”

Mr. Rosen discovered the genre in the mid-’90s, while working on a master’s degree in Jewish history at University College London. One day, while doing research at the British Library, he ran across the sheet music for a song called “I Want to Be an Oy, Oy, Oyviator” — a comedy song about a Jewish aviator. Digging deeper, he found sheet music for hundreds of such songs, usually decorated with insulting caricatures of Jews as Shylocks, nebbishy immigrant greenhorns or schlemiels (like Levi, the Jewish wrangler in “I’m a Yiddisher Cowboy,” from 1908, who falls for an Indian maiden, then runs afoul of her father, the Chief).

Fascinated, Mr. Rosen set off on a quest to track down actual recordings of this music. He trolled dusty junk shops, record-collector conventions and, inevitably, eBay, looking for wax cylinders, which cost $10 to more than $100, and 78s. His search, he said, “took roughly 10 years on and off.”

Mr. Kun heard Mr. Rosen speak about the genre at the Experience Music Project conference in Seattle last year. Within weeks, they said, they were planning an album.

Mr. Kun recalled: “I would get e-mails at 6 in the morning: ‘Hey, have you ever heard of this guy?’ I remember one night he found the personal stationery of one of these old vaudeville performers, and it was as if he had found a brick of gold in the pyramids.”

While the collaborators hardly expect “Jewface” to become a commercial smash, their industry savvy does increase the chances that the music will be heard.

Mr. Holt, who worked on the iPod deal between U2 and Apple while at Interscope, is trying to organize a concert and eventually an album, with established rock and folk acts doing covers of the old songs. He’s making calls, he said. So far no one is getting back to him.

“It’s a hard sell,” Mr. Holt acknowledged last week over a Scotch at SoHo House, the private club in downtown Manhattan, declining to name the acts he has been in touch with about the concert. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, there’s this lost Jewish music, recorded by Jews, making fun of Jews for non-Jews to be able to enjoy, in order to assimilate!’ That’s not a great elevator pitch.”

Even family members can be skeptical. Mr. Rosen said his in-laws were taken aback. But to him, Jewish dialect music played a role similar to that which gangsta rap plays among African-Americans today. Vulgar and, to some, culturally debasing, it nevertheless managed to smuggle a subculture’s distinct idiom into mainstream popular culture, while creating jobs for entertainers, managers, theater owners and music publishing houses from the same culture.

“To some extent, people like to see themselves represented,” Mr. Rosen said, “even if they are badly represented.”

[Christiern]

Thanks for posting this. Very interesting and illuminating. I think self-parody is a universal thing, but sometimes it is taken beyond the max.

[AllenLowe]

interesting relase, and I know Jody a little bit - only problem is over-use of noise reduction and a certain amount of the tell-tale "glub glub" underwater sound - otherwise recommended -

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

This worries me, as much as seeing "Birth of a nation" several decades ago. I can see there's a historical and academic justification. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it's really better to let this stuff get buried until some historians come round and find it a thousand years later.

MG

[AllenLowe]

personally I love it - put my own minstrel tune on my recent CD as well - anybody who takes it seriously is going to believe that stuff regardless -

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

personally I love it - put my own minstrel tune on my recent CD as well - anybody who takes it seriously is going to believe that stuff regardless -

Yes - I see the parallel with "Birth of a nation" wasn't quite apt - that was MEANT to be taken seriously.

I still FEEL unhappy about this.

MG

[seeline]

I'm with you on this one, MG - there's loads of music in the same vein that's about Irishmen, Italians, etc. from that era... and I'd be happier if it was all forgotten.

OTOH, there's some wonderful material out there, via The Yiddish Radio Project and organizations like YIVO.

[BruceH]

The term "heavenly hebe" sure gives one pause.

[seeline]

The term "heavenly hebe" sure gives one pause.

Yes, it does.

Henry Sapoznik (who produced the Yiddish Radio project shows for NPR) also did this comp, which was released in 2002 -

Complete track list here.

I wish this release would get the attention that's being given to the Reboot disc... the comp he did for the YRP is also very nice (includes some commercials and spoken-word material) -

[AllenLowe]

you need to listen to it before you judge it - it's very interesting stuff, IMHO -

[BruceH]

I'd love to listen to it. And I'm not judging...just pausing.

[seeline]

Yes, but.... the cover ("Heavenly Hebe," etc.) is a mess. I have no problem with "zany zaftig maidele" or "the leading Yiddish warblers," but ... if someone did a "coon songs" comp. with a cover akin to the Reboot disc, I'd be reacting in pretty much the same way as I am to this one. (Cover photo, etc.)

Also, I think "From Avenue A to the Great White Way" is a better bet, based on the material alone - 1 disc with European/early Yiddish theatre stuff, 1 disc with American material (Yiddish and English lyrics).

There are some stereotypical lyrics there, but nobody's trading on offensive caricatures or worse... (in packaging, title, etc.).

Edit: FWIW, I'm a gentile.

Mr. Rosen said his in-laws were taken aback. But to him, Jewish dialect music played a role similar to that which gangsta rap plays among African-Americans today. Vulgar and, to some, culturally debasing, it nevertheless managed to smuggle a subculture’s distinct idiom into mainstream popular culture, while creating jobs for entertainers, managers, theater owners and music publishing houses from the same culture.

Which is also true of prewar Germany and anti-semitic cabaret (etc.) material, but does that legitimize it?!

Edited July 1, 2008 by seeline

[AllenLowe]

"Which is also true of prewar Germany and anti-semitic cabaret (etc.) material, but does that legitimize it?"

you're completely missing the point - it's much different when the group itself is doing the performing - to use a tired cliche, there's the whole idea of signifying, but beyond that it involves taking control of the message - unless you are equating rappers with the Aryan nation -

[AllenLowe]

and by the way, the Producers is probably the funniest movie ever made - once again, it involves the oppressed group taking control of the message -

[AllenLowe]

for example, though I've cut back here due to popular demand, I love Hitler jokes -

[seeline]

No, I'm not missing the point, I'm making one of my own. I understand that some Jewish people will find these old stereotypes to be amusing when they're the ones calling the shots, but a lot of others will never be comfortable with it... Just as a lot of black people hate the n-word.

Anyhow, Henry Sapoznik (Yiddish Radio Project, with its onsite Yid-O-Matic translator) is also Jewish... and he's *not* playing around with loaded stereotypes.

I get queasy when Sacha Baron Cohen is up to his "Throw the Jew Down the Well" act as Borat, too - seems like the people who need to get the point don't, you know? But that's a whole 'nother topic.

Edited to add: *all* of the early vaudeville (etc.) songs and routines that trade on ethnic stereotypes are what they are - a product of their time. That doesn't mean anyone has to like them! Like I said in an earlier post, I think the world would be just fine if a lot of those recordings, pieces of sheet music, etc. disappeared forever... though hopefully, they will serve as reminders of how not to think and act toward other people.

(Just my opinion - no intentions of getting on a soapbox, though I guess I did... )

Edited July 2, 2008 by seeline

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

and by the way, the Producers is probably the funniest movie ever made - once again, it involves the oppressed group taking control of the message -

I do agree with you there, Allen and, like a lot of what you say on historical fronts, it makes a lot of sense. But I wonder to what extent, in either case (ie gangsta rap or Jewish jokes), the oppressed group were REALLY taking control of the message. I think that most of it is accepting the role assigned. I know little about Jewish music, but there are periods in the early development of Rap, and most other kinds of black music I feel, that the singers/musicians/audiences really did take control of the message but they were soon stamped out by the industry and only those who accepted the lesser role got a look in.

So I'm still suspicious.

MG

[Big Beat Steve]

"Which is also true of prewar Germany and anti-semitic cabaret (etc.) material, but does that legitimize it?"

you're completely missing the point - it's much different when the group itself is doing the performing - to use a tired cliche, there's the whole idea of signifying, but beyond that it involves taking control of the message - unless you are equating rappers with the Aryan nation -

Being German, and certainly NOT anti-semitic in any way, I agree. Even for us non-Jewish "onlookers", Salcia Landmann's collections of Yiddish jokes made BY the jews about themselves are instructive lecture beyond the purely humoristic aspect and help to provide better understanding.

Up to a point, I can understand those who feel offended by this release but am intrigued enough from a historical point to maybe try to get it trough Amazon too - might make a nice complement to the "Good For What Ails You" minstrelsy compilation that should be arriving here shortly.

At any rate, music such as this (from the 10s and 20s) must be seen in the context of the times and judged accordingly. Just cutting out and "deleting" any past history that will not suit the currently dominating tastes und trends at any point in time amounts to falsifying history as a whole, making it impossible to learn from history (wherever needed). Where would you start? Where would you end?

Edited July 2, 2008 by Big Beat Steve

[king ubu]

Allen has a good and valid point here indeed. You can still feel uncomfortable about it, but many of these significants have been turned by the signified groups themselves into terms of other meanings. It's about having power over symbols and signs and signifying words. And hence about taking power and re-define ones own identiy or re-use, adapt, take possession of the word(s) and include them in how ones own identity is defined by the group in question. A very powerful issue... I bet reading some Judith Butler and similar stuff would help (or wait... possibly not, unless you really feel like working with her texts... and of course her writings are ex cathedra no matter what else she pretends... all rather compilcated).

Not sure I can really add anything to this thread, just wanted to point out that I did some studying on this subject a little while ago, and that indeed Allen's point is valid AND important (as far as social developments and shifting cultural identities are concerned).

[king ubu]

and of course once I hit the "add reply" button the fitting word comes to mind: "appropriation", that's what it's about, power of definition - in the end it's about self-empowerment by appropriation - or some such...

[AllenLowe]

"I feel, that the singers/musicians/audiences really did take control of the message but they were soon stamped out by the industry and only those who accepted the lesser role got a look in."

a lot of truth to this - sadly inevitable, but just part of the way the industry works - still, does not de-legitamize the original impulse behind the work -

[medjuck]

It seems to me that most of these stereotypes are now archaic which takes the sting out. What are the new offensive Jewish stereotypes?

[seeline]

and by the way, the Producers is probably the funniest movie ever made - once again, it involves the oppressed group taking control of the message -

I do agree with you there, Allen and, like a lot of what you say on historical fronts, it makes a lot of sense. But I wonder to what extent, in either case (ie gangsta rap or Jewish jokes), the oppressed group were REALLY taking control of the message. I think that most of it is accepting the role assigned. I know little about Jewish music, but there are periods in the early development of Rap, and most other kinds of black music I feel, that the singers/musicians/audiences really did take control of the message but they were soon stamped out by the industry and only those who accepted the lesser role got a look in.

So I'm still suspicious.

MG

Like you, I agree on Mel Brooks and The Producers... and I know that you're coming from an "inside" POV re. Jewish jokes and so on.

But the larger problem (or one of them) may lie in the way - at least partly - we in the US seem to accept a lot of things as givens, like intentionally cruel "humor." (Again, Sacha Baron Cohen comes to mind, though I realize he's from the UK.)

Just my personal take on it... nothing definitive.

Edit: Oh, as for the old stereotypes supposedly being dead, I've heard plenty of them, and some of my friends and their parents have had plenty directed right at them, so... I realize this is 3d-hand info. at best, but I do think it's worth some consideration.

Edited July 2, 2008 by seeline

[AllenLowe]

I posted this a while back; it's my latter day Jewish minstrel song - from my last CD:

In the Old Stetl (Where I was Born)

Down where the Cossacks scream

Shiksas bathing in the village stream

oy, life is just a Jew-boy’s dream

in the old stetl where I was born

children playing in the Russian air

the moil smiles because business is good everywhere

trying to circumcise that old grey mare,

in the old stetl where I was born

Taxman comes, I smile and say

“what do you have for me today?”

He says, “Every Jew is gonna have to pay and pay”

I just laugh and dance away…

So I go home and count my money

Cash is the Jew’s milk and honey

Smiling gold teeth, for life is sunny

In the old stetl where I was born

Here some news, a Bolshevik war?

Hey, that’s what the goyim are for.

I’m stayin’ here to read my book

in Bialystock, by the babbling brook -

Shabbas dovening, the cantor sighs,

Shiksa sweethearts with milky white thighs

The czar decrees, another Jew dies

In the old stelt where I was born

Still, you won’t find a single complaint

Is you is, or mamala, or is you ain’t?

Nobody's perfect and no Jew’s a saint

in the old stetl where I was born