Todd Prouzan (27:33)
The New Yorker had about as little to do with my dad's childhood as his beloved White Sox had to do with the World Series. Just as his father had emigrated from Minsk 30 years earlier, my dad mapped his own course out of the old neighborhood. He stayed to get his University of Chicago law degree, then headed east to the Department of Justice. It's fair to say Washington and my mom's family absorbed him more than the other way around. After a D.C. career measured in decades, he led tourist groups in retirement, through the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court. He kept his south side bonafides. He's still White Sox ride or die, but he bonded with my mother's mother on football, a mutually sadistic backgammon feud that played out in our kitchen, and the New Yorker. I don't know when my dad first got interested in it, but My archive includes two copies of almost every coverage from 1971 to 1982. My mom's side was a different type of Jewish bluer blood assimilated for many generations. Recently, my mom sent me a 1951 clipping from the Washington Evening Star announcing the death of her great grandmother, whose own parents had arrived in town from the Schleswig Holstein region sometime around 1832. My great, great great great grandfather on my mom's side, Philip Pizer, had been a haberdasher, and the article suggested that John Wilkes Booth might have been wearing one of Pizer's hats to Ford's Theater on a fateful night in 1865. I texted my mom back. I said I always figured the Jews had a hand in Lincoln's assassination. My parents and so my brother and sister and I, we were liberal Jewish American enough. We had Mel Brooks and Steven Spielberg and for a while anyway, Woody Allen. My parents had Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond. My sister was an early adopter. She had the Beastie Boys. But for me, Jewish rock wasn't really a thing. Even though Billy Joel's album Glass Houses was the first non Beatles cassette I ever asked for, I was terrified of Kiss and its lead singer, Gene Simmons, born Chaim Witz in northern Israel. I didn't like Rush, the prog rock trio from Toronto fronted by the Jewish born Geddy Lee, mostly because I didn't like the kids who liked Rush. One puzzle piece did click into place when I was 10 and heard Blitzkrieg Bop thundering out of someone's very loud stereo. Something about the faux British yelp of Joey Ramone or Jeffrey Hyman to his mother made the air feel different. I could sense I was hearing a code getting cracked. But one code I never did crack, I still haven't, is how to be Jewish. My dad had grown up observant until at some point he wasn't. And because my mom never had been, our household Jewish on paper was fully secular, untethered to faith until third grade. Jeff and I even attended an Episcopalian school with morning chapel and the Lord's Prayer and an elaborate Christmas pageant. Like much of the conversation that went on and didn't go on in our house, these magazine covers were more subtext than text. They did their talking without words. I can see precious little in this collection about being Jewish, and the more I studied these covers, the more I could see that absence from my upbringing. Our podcast bookmarks, our Netflix cues, our Spotify playlists, everything we listen to and read and watch embodies the way we see ourselves. The magazines around our house were the Instagram profiles of the day, curated feeds reflecting to any visitor and to ourselves the lives we wanted to live. It doesn't take a psychologist to see that the New Yorker's imagery, its covers and ads, depicted the world my grandparents wanted to live in, the people they wanted to be. I don't remember how old I was when I finally figured out Eustace Tilly himself was a man not an old lady. More than anyone else in my life, Eustace looked like my grandmother. But every publication has to strike some balance of emphasis and erasure. If the New Yorker of the early decades had tried for full and accurate representation, it would have been a magazine about everything. Which is to say, a magazine about nothing. John Updike was, of course, no stranger to the New Yorker's wealthy white world. But even as he saw the magazine reflecting and lampooning its genteel audience, he also chose to see what the magazine studiously avoided in 1989 he the population of the covers becomes one class, the prospering middle class, and one color white. A number of the covers would certainly be considered unprintably racist now. Yet there is something racist too, about the virtually absolute post war disappearance of black people from New Yorker covers. Since Updike wrote those words, the magazine's covers have done an about face from that whitewash. Apart from its logo, which is virtually unchanged since he designed it and hand lettered it 100 years ago, Ray Irvin himself might not recognize his own magazine today. That shift started in the early 1990s when incoming editor Tina Brown and art editor Francoise Mouly updated the New Yorker with heat and spice, steering its visuals in explicitly topical, provocative, often news making directions. Brown made her intentions clear from the start. The COVID of her first issue, October 5, 1992, featured Edward Sorrell's illustration of a prim Central park carriage driver in top and tails warily eyeing the pink mohawked punk customer slouching in his backseat. Art Spiegelman, author of Maus and Mooly's Husband, soon made a notorious debut with his 1993 Valentine's Day cover depicting a Hasid and a black woman sharing a romantic kiss. Spiegelman's image featured possibly the first unambiguously Jewish person ever to grace the magazine's cover. It charmed some New Yorkers and offended others. Spiegelman had a gift for pissing people off. His 1999 cover responding to the NYPD's brutal murder of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed 23 year old Ghanaian student in the Bronx, sparked police protests, a fitting response for a metropolis personified in the 1990s by its wild eyed mayor, Rudy Giuliani, whose default setting was always calibrated to sputtering spittle fleck rage. Today, it's rare for a magazine cover to drive the news or to capture and express our nation's grief the way Spiegelman and Muli did in 2001 with their haunting black on black Portrait of the Twin Towers. But these New Yorker covers really did do those things. Looking at thousands of covers at once accelerates and compresses the gradual shift from Ross's timeless melody to David Remnick's Daily Bread. Since Remnick took the editorial reins From Brown in 1998, he's only turned up the news dial. But before Brown, many of the magazine's cover illustrators erased parts of themselves. Abe Birnbaum painted still lifes in heavy brushstrokes. William Steig sketched an odd barbershop quartet Americana. And Saul Steinberg was a head trip. These Jewish artists styles were distinct and personal, but they weren't autobiographical and they weren't clearly Jewish. Was I imagining this erasure? I called my old friend and colleague Steve Heller for a gut check. Steve, who's co chair emeritus of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts, might know more about graphic design and its intersection with Jewish culture than anyone alive. He saw the same thing I did, he said. The publishing ilk of New York in the 1920s and 30s were not embracing Jewish culture. The New Yorker filtered any New York Jewishness out of the covers. With so much antisemitism in the US in the 30s, before and during the war, it wasn't really a plus for circulation to admit to any kind of Jewish culture. That was vaudeville, steve said. You know, the dirty stuff. Okay, no surprise there. But there was something I did not ask Steve about, something I noticed more and more as I went spelunking through these thousands of covers. After decades of erasure, a change started bubbling up in the 1970s and 1980s, right when I was growing up, emerging slowly and subtly, like a photograph developing in a dark room tray. The characters on the covers and in the cartoons and the scenarios and environments they lived in, they were all starting to look a little more liberal, a little more Upper west side, a little more Jewish. Robert Mankoff, Arnie Levin, Roz Chast. Their covers were droll, they were neurotic, they were New Yorkery, they weren't explicitly Jewish. But as the magazine was taking baby steps into Jewish humor, one artist may have tipped the scales. Ever since I was a kid, one of my favorite New Yorker artists has been Edward Coren, whose happy, hairy, giant schnozed monsters seemed to send up the emerging enclave of bougie Manhattan hippies. And as I paged through 32 of his covers from 1971 to 2022, I realized his characters might have been the first to look more like the New Yorker's readers. Than the snooty socialites of previous decades. I wondered if Corrin, consciously or not, had been easing the magazine into this new New York, if he was building a bridge between the first half century and the next. Coren died in 2023, at 87. I couldn't ask him about my premise, but his daughter Sasha, recently told me what she thought her father's artistic intentions may have been. She said although he was entirely secular, he was unmistakably a Jewish New Yorker in his sense of humor, of course, but also in his appearance and the cadences of his speech, which was peppered with Yiddish words. And he would never deny his roots. Sasha went on, he was surely aware that portrayals of the culture of Upper Westsiders of the 70s-90s contain some aspect of secular Jewish culture. But I think he portrayed it because that's what he saw and heard. Those people, sights and turns of phrase are what interested or delighted or amused him. Shortly after our exchange, Sasha sent me an appreciation that ran in New York Jewish Week just after her father's death, and the essay's author, Andrew Silo Carroll, had noticed the same thing I had. He wrote, many of Coren's characters seemed Jewish, even if he didn't say so, and Coren seemed never to have said so. So Edward Coren really may have been that critical catalyst at the exact moment in the New Yorker's history when the Jewish culture that amused him first rhymed with what amused its editors. My conversation with Sasha Coren made me realize something else. Just as the New Yorker was gently leaning into a more Jewish direction, my family was doing pretty much the same thing. My mom had started volunteering at the local Jewish community center where she made lifelong friends, and we all started spending more time there after school and on weekends, getting exposure to Jewish culture in a very low pressure setting. I could see the exposure was rubbing off on my parents too, as they tried a little non committally to jumpstart a menorah lighting tradition. In retrospect, we may have reached our fork in the road on a long forgotten Sunday afternoon when I was about 10, my parents had led us around the JCC while Hebrew school was in session. That could have been the start of a new chapter, a true embrace of Judaism. But then my parents made a grave strategic error. They asked us a question they never should have asked. Did we want to go to Hebrew school? Let me get a little rabbinical here and answer that question with a question. What 10 year old kid in their right mind leaps at the chance to go to even more school on the weekend. My parents didn't press the issue. The moment passed, and that was pretty much that. We would remain in our liminal space of secular ambiguity, putting up a Christmas tree once a year and maybe lighting menorah candles, too, if we remembered to do it. Did my family break from Jewish tradition by design, by distraction, or by neglect? The answer sits somewhere in the middle of that Venn diagram of ambiguity, right there with my name. I've programmed myself over the years to spell Prouzan on first reference, and whenever someone asks me what Prouzan is, I explain, it used to have a ski at the end. My dad and uncle each dropped the suffix. I'd never fully understood what they were trying to accomplish. My dad's explanation that he was trying to make his name easier for others never satisfied me. He recently told me he wonders now whether changing his name had hurt his father. I wish he'd asked. But in an era of prevailing, unmasked, microaggressive antisemitism, an era maybe a little like our own that ski might have been a professional liability. Introducing a little ethnic ambiguity just enough might have made him more employable. And the result does have its charms. Once, when I was a young editor at Chicago magazine, I called up Studs Terkel, who was then 84, to set up an interview, and he sassed me. Present, eh? Sounds like a pharmaceutical. The other editors in our open floor office swiveled their heads as I barked with laughter. My own name's similarity to Prozac had somehow never crossed my mind. And then Turkle quickly said, I'm just horsing around with you. I fell hopelessly in love. My mom's side made no such feint at camouflage. Now I'm not going to tell you her maiden name for the same reason I'm not telling you the name of my first pet or my high school mascot or my first concert. Okay, fine. Duran Duran at the Capitol Center, Landover, Maryland, 1984 the point is, my mom's family name was not just plainly Jewish, but, I have to assume, for a while during her childhood, wincingly problematic. I'm glad my grandparents didn't change it, though. They must have felt pressure to use it discreetly. Once, in the 50s, they went to a fancy party at a notoriously anti Semitic country club. I won't name it because it still exists, but when they arrived, a greeter advised them not to use their surname. They walked out. I learned pretty early on, through some unspoken cues, that the ski that had once been in my family name was also an inheritance that needed some protection. Not a secret exactly, but maybe not fully safe to bust out in front of complete strangers either. Not even in our deeply Jewish suburb, not even 40 years ago, and I'm sad to say maybe not even now, was the golden age of the New Yorker cover the era when I was growing up, when the magazine and I were both learning vaguely to be Jewish. There's no doubt Edward Coren and Saul Steinberg left their mark on me, but I think the golden age might be right now. This is no longer Eustace Tilly's magazine perched high above us. The New Yorker lives with us in our world, and any issue that introduces itself each week through Kadir Nelson's Heart stopping Black American Portraits, or Christoph Niemann's playful metaphors, or Chris Ware's meticulous architectural drama, or Roz Chast's Eternal Anxiety is already an issue worth saving. A year ago last January, my dad texted me. He said this week's New Yorker cover should be a keeper. He was talking about Barry Blitz latest insult of Donald Trump goose stepping across the page, back when the idea of a vengeful Trump returning from his rightful place in obscurity still seemed absurd, an unwanted sequel to the worst slasher movie ever made. I was so grateful to get this text because it meant my dad was okay. He'd slipped a few days earlier while loading groceries and landed behind his car, smacking the back of his head on the parking lot asphalt. He's taken his share of spills before and since, but when my mom came back to the trunk and found him KO'd, she'd assume the worst. Unbelievably, though, I was on the phone with him a couple hours later, after an ambulance ride and a check of his vitals. He was sheepish and shaken, but in good spirits. He was lucky. I've been lucky, too. Lucky that this was only the first time his mortality had seemed so immediate, so scary. And here he was five days later, enjoying Barry Blitz New Yorker cover enough to tell me about it. And that was a small good thing I could file away for safekeeping. Here's another small good thing. I'm old enough that the books on my shelf are turning up on my kid's syllabus. When I Learned my daughter's 12th grade English class would be reading the God of Small Things, I couldn't resist showing her my copy, a first edition signed to me by its author, Arundhati Roy. A few years ago, after her class had read Art Spiegelman's Maus. My son, who was 10, found my copy and asked to read it. I handed him both volumes and discreetly emailed a heads up to his teacher. I know this is a comic book, I told him, but it's not funny and it might upset you, and we're going to have to talk about it. Now he's 13, and he's told me he might be ready to read it again. Most parents try to pass along our favorite qualities and stop the cycles of anything we didn't want to pass down. And as I've tried to transfer the right traits and stop the others, I'm realizing I may not have said enough. Maybe I've overcorrected. Maybe I've taken too much care not to impose my special interests onto my kids. My books, my music, my movies, my own writing. Or, come to think of it, the New Yorker. I've never wanted my kids to think of anything I love as a school assignment. They've noticed a few of my passions, like the books on my shelf. And they do hear Jewish rock, because sometimes when we're driving and I can't decide what I want to listen to, I put on Yola Tango. But I'm proud to see these two blaze their own trails. New Yorker issues don't stack up in piles around our house, but now I hang on to the covers. What does faith look like for us? My wife grew up Catholic, more serious about her faith as a child than I'd ever been. That makes our kids half Jewish but fully secular. They're curious in ways we couldn't have planned and wouldn't have expected. Our son keeps the King James version on his shelf, and we know he didn't pick that up from either of us. My own parents got more serious about Judaism once their kids were out of the house. Sometimes I have regrets that I didn't grow up with it, especially around the high holidays. But I love the traditions we've handed down too, like that most secular of symbols, the Christmas tree. Maybe your family did the same thing mine did. Or does it right now, shunting aside that old time religion for newer faiths to bond over new worlds to explore together. Maybe faith in your household doesn't look like the New Yorker. Maybe it looks like the Patriots or the Lakers. Maybe it's Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Springsteen, Prince. Maybe it's Harry Potter, Broadway, Minecraft, Disney World. Maybe it's design. There was a moment early on in my life as a dad when my parents gifted our family a menorah. I wasn't sure what to do with that, and my parents were puzzled that I was puzzled. But Judaism was something we hadn't talked about, or not directly, or not enough. I might have seized that moment to lead my own family in lighting the menorah, but I wouldn't have been passing that tradition down. I would have needed to learn it myself. And to learn it myself, I'd need to go back and begin at the beginning.
