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Jewface: “Yiddish” Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley

New Books Network

Mon Mar 16 2026

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Jewface: “Yiddish” Dialect Songs of Tin Pan Alley
Date: March 16, 2026
Guests: Eddie Portnoy (YIVO Senior Researcher & Curator), Jody Rosen (New York Times Magazine, author), with performance by actors including Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson. Moderated by Alana Newhouse (Tablet Magazine).

Overview

This episode dives into the controversial yet fascinating history of "Jewface"—a genre of Yiddish dialect songs and comedic routines from Tin Pan Alley and vaudeville that satirized Jewish immigrant life. Hosted at the YIVO Institute, the conversation is wide-ranging: charting the emergence and popularity of these songs, their self-deprecating humor, complex resonance across generations, and their role in the Americanization and self-perception of Jewish immigrants. The episode includes live musical performances of original Jewface material not staged for nearly a century, followed by a deep-dive discussion with leading scholars and cultural critics.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Historical Context and Definition of "Jewface"

Vaudeville and Ethnic Stereotypes (08:20):
- Eddie Portnoy explains, "A hundred years ago, popular entertainment was based largely on ethnic stereotypes...the stage Jew...was like most ethnic stage performers, not only a bumbling fool, but also a cheapskate, a swindler and a cheat."
- Initially created by non-Jews to satirize the influx of Jewish immigrants, these routines ("Jewface") were soon adopted—and enjoyed—by Jews themselves, drawing on a tradition of self-satire.
Self-Deprecating Humor and Satire (08:20-10:00):
- Jewish performers repurposed the anti-Semitic comedy into a form of self-awareness, linking it to long-standing traditions in Yiddish literature: "Bitter self satire was a cornerstone of 19th century Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment literature..."
- The routines allowed for a degree of emotional distancing and even pride, as contemporary Jews could view the exaggerated stage "greenhorn" as unlike themselves.
Controversy within the Jewish Community (09:30):
- Not all Jews were comfortable with Jewface. The Central Conference of American Rabbis publicly condemned such stage performances in 1909, but found that by then, "the phenomenon had become an almost entirely Jewish affair."
Distinctiveness and Legacy (13:00):
- The stage Jew as a comic trope largely disappeared from mainstream culture by the 1920s, but Yiddish-inflected routines continued in American entertainment for decades.

2. Live Performances and Song Analysis

Excerpts Performed (15:21–34:47):
- Songs and sketches such as "Cohen Owes Me $97" (Irving Berlin), "Cohen on the Telephone," "Nathan, Nathan, What Are You Waiting For?" and others (some in Yiddish) are performed.
- These pieces illustrate recurring tropes: language mistakes, romantic and financial anxieties, assimilation struggles, and affectionate mockery of immigrant life.
Quote (Performers):
- “It's a funny thing, every time I listen to that song, I think, okay, she's engaged to a guy named Nathan and it's going on for years. They're not getting married. There might be a musical in that.” —Allen Lewis Rickman (25:35)

3. Thematic Discussion: Assimilation, Identity, and Resonance

Songs as a Mirror of Assimilation (35:37, 39:49):
- Jody Rosen: “In these songs, whether they're mangling the English language...we find Jews, greenhorn...attempting to do archetypal American things...to become, quote, unquote, real Americans...”
- Eddie Portnoy elaborates, "The Jewish viewers were able to create a distance between these ridiculous stage Jew characters and their own Jewish reality, which was not nearly as extreme or absurd."
The Complexity and Enduring Appeal (42:00, 42:45):
- Alana Newhouse raises how Jewface humor still resonates today, even for assimilated Jews, asking, “Is it because it feels like it’s part of a larger tradition that people feel connected to…or did it flip?”
- Jody Rosen: “There’s a...straight line from this tradition...to Woody Allen, to Seinfeld, to Larry David. So this is not a tradition that’s dead…A lot of these jokes are just funny. They kill, right?”
Musical Structure as Metaphor (45:18):
- Songs "smuggle Yiddishkeit into mainstream popular culture." Often “verses use traditional Jewish musical tropes...Then...songs always move into major keys, into an American chorus. There’s kind of an assimilation...in every one of these songs.” —Jody Rosen

4. Comparison to Other Ethnic Parody (Blackface, Irish, Italian)

On Ethnic Parody in American Entertainment (44:46, 62:22):
- Jewface is contextualized against Blackface minstrelsy—more widely ridiculed and violently racist, but both performed by both insiders and outsiders to the ethnicity depicted.
- “Blackface minstrelsy was the more popular version of this kind of ethnic comedy...but Jews—like Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Eddie Cantor—were often the ones performing both Blackface and Jewface acts.” —Jody Rosen

5. Legacy in Modern Comedy

Influence on Later Generations (63:14, 64:54):
- Discussion of Marx Brothers, Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Larry David, Mel Brooks, etc. “You can draw a straight line from this tradition...to Woody Allen, Seinfeld, to Larry David.”
- On “Jewface” tropes: “The Yiddish accent became this really...central trope in American comedy. You can still find remnants of this...like the mother from The Big Bang Theory speaks with a Yiddish accent.” —Eddie Portnoy (55:04)

6. Nostalgia and Transformation Over Time

Evolving Sentiments (75:29, 76:25):
- Eddie Portnoy: “The Jewface material...expresses a look to the future and what's more, a Jewish future...real Yiddish material often has a tendency toward nostalgia, but I think this material is much more in the present.”
- Jody Rosen: “For the next generation of Jews...now they're able to even look back on the very place...not as fodder for a lampoon, but nostalgically. But that's a little bit later than the period we're talking about here.”

Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

On discomfort with the term “Jewface”:
“A lot of people sort of bridle at that term. I don't blame you. I did as well...And then the more I thought about it...that's exactly what YIVO has to do. YIVO has to present things that startle you, that provoke you, that cause you to think twice.” —Intro (04:10)
Describing the assimilation process:
“It helps him. It works in the process of his assimilation. It’s something that’s useful to him or her. On the other hand ...these songs smuggle Yiddishkeit into mainstream popular culture.” —Jody Rosen (45:18)
On lasting cultural impact:
“You can draw a straight line from this tradition straight through to...Woody Allen to Seinfeld to Larry David. So this is not a tradition that’s dead.” —Jody Rosen (42:45)
On the musical crossover:
“The verses are Jewish. Musically, the choruses are American. So I think...for a Jew who wanted to distance himself...there was that going on. And there was also the thrill that we all get...when you turn on the TV and there’s a Jewish joke.” —Jody Rosen (47:20)
On nostalgia:
“The Jew based material...expresses a look to the future and what’s more, a Jewish future...the real Yiddish material often has a tendency toward nostalgia, but I think this material is much more in the present.” —Eddie Portnoy (75:29)
On Blackface and its relation to Jewface:
“Blackface minstrelsy was the very much more popular version of this kind of ethnic comedy.” —Jody Rosen (62:30) “Jews were so dominant...there were Jewish Irish comedians too. But...there’s a very interesting book...called Blackface, White Noise...about the dynamics of blackface performance by Jewish immigrants.” —Jody Rosen (68:00)

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

00:01–08:20: Opening, YIVO context, historicizing Jewface, introduction to Eddie Portnoy.
08:20–13:00: Portnoy’s scholarly overview: stage Jew, origins, complexities, audience dynamics.
15:21–34:47: Live musical performances of classic routines and songs.
34:47–35:37: Start of panel discussion — Alana Newhouse, Jody Rosen, Eddie Portnoy.
35:37–39:49: Rosen on song messaging: themes and transmission.
39:49–45:18: Audience emotional dynamics, assimilation, resonance today.
45:18–47:20: Musical structure, cultural embedding of Yiddishkeit.
62:22–66:03: Blackface discussion and audience Q&A on cultural legacy.
75:16–78:22: Panelists reflect on nostalgia and how humor's meaning has shifted over time.

Conclusion

This episode is a vibrant, intellectually rich exploration of how "Jewface" songs were not simply offensive relics, but played a complex role in Jewish-American culture—helping assimilate, lampoon, and preserve immigrant experiences. The panel and performers unpack both the problematic aspects and the enduring, even cherished, resonance these routines have had across generations, in music, comedy, and cultural identity.

Recommended for: Anyone interested in Jewish history, American popular culture, the roots of modern comedy, or the ongoing dialogue between ethnic identity and assimilation.

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Transcript

A (0:01)

Welcome to the New Books Network. Good evening everyone. This is a very, very special evening. I think you're going to enjoy this presentation. And if you haven't enjoyed the exhibit that is in the Constantino Gallery to the right of the lobby and down the hall as you go out of this theater, you will certainly enjoy doing that after the presentation here. It's a very special evening. Everything that Eddie Portnoy does here is very special. I'm delighted to see his family here. And Eddie, who is curating one wonderful exhibit after another for us, is the really force behind this exhibition in the Konstantiner Jew Face, which a lot of people sort of bridle at that term. I don't blame you. I did as well when Eddie first presented it to me. And then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, yes, that's exactly what Yivo has to do. Yivo has to present things that startle you, that provoke you, that cause you to think twice about what's going on in the world. And indeed, that's exactly what our archives do. They do it in terms of 18th century Jewish Talmudic law. They do it with respect to the rights and the privileges of women in pre revolutionary France. They do it with respect to the liquor trade. They do it with respect to. To Jewish non Jewish interaction in Poland and the Pale of Settlement. Exploring our archives is a window onto a world that will at every turn cause you to think twice about who you are as a Jew. How you got to these shores, what it means to have been the and to be the product of your parents and your grandparents and your great grandparents experience in a world that you can only vaguely recollect, vaguely have a sense of. And when you do come to have a sense of that world, you will find it teeming with the most astonishing facts about who we are as a people. And Jewface is just one of those. How it got to be called Jew face, how it developed into vaudeville, and the enormous enthusiasm that it elicited among the Jewish masses here in New York City is a great story. All I can say is that my grandfather's favorite tune, which he transmitted somehow or other to myself, goes like this. Yeche bin ein alt in bock von old Kentucky. To leave you me ain't got no luck. And my father always assured me that my grandfather, who was something of a homegrown wizard, had invented this. I now realize that it came straight out of one of those incredible Jew face vaudeville acts. And it shows how these things are implanted in us and we do not know what these things are. And that's the brilliance I think, of this exhibit. We have on the table, outside on the development table, a number of brochures. I wish to draw your attention to them. In particular, those of you who have not yet learned of the extraordinary YIVO undertaking called the Yivo Vilna Collections Digitization Project, which involves the preserving, the processing and the digitizing of all of YIVO's pre war holdings, both those that remain in Vilnius, Lithuania and those that are today in New York City, to digitize all of these materials and create a single unified database. Those of you who do not already know about this project and care about who we are as a people and how we transmit our knowledge of ourselves to another generation, I beg you to pick up that brochure and see what it is that the YIVO Institute is doing. Yitzhaka Rad said, this project is essential for the future of the Jewish Jewish people because it will restore our past to ourselves. And part of what it will restore are things like this extraordinary exhibit that you see in the Konstantino Gallery. YIVO is doing more than that as well. We have full slate of programs that are presided over by Helena Gindy. Where is Helena? Helena Gindi, who is our program director and I wish to thank her for working with Eddie to put on tonight's program. Before I introduce Eddie, however, I want to call your attention to one of those programs in particular. On December 2nd, Wednesday, and unfortunately I will be in London and not able to be present for it. Judith Bergson presents Cantorial Music from the YIVO Archives. YIVO invited Judith into its archives to work with its cantorial collection because our archives are vast. It includes music, it includes visual art, it includes photographs, it includes film, it includes manuscripts, it includes medical records, it includes the Ganzige Schichte. And we invited Judith to come and perform music from our archives along with a premiere of her original work inspired by the collections. Judith is indeed an extraordinary museum. Any one of you who is a musician will have heard of the Kronos Quartet of which she is a principal part. She will perform with her ensemble which includes Grammy winning musician Frank London and Clique Sherry, who performs a very rare style of Irish fiddling. And if you think that's out of place here, I suggest you go and look at the Jewface exhibit. For more information, see the insides of our programs or visit yivo.org second if you like what you see here tonight, I invite you to become a member. I invite you to become a supporter. Moral support is welcome. Financial support is also welcome. We rely on you. We rely on the goodwill of people. We rely on our staff to put on exceptional events like this. And now it's my pleasure to introduce Eddie. I have a whole paragraph here, but he said to throw that out. It was just too verbose and simply go with Eddie Portnoy is a specialist in Jewish Popular culture with graduate degrees from Columbia and jts. He serves as EVO Senior Researcher and Exhibit Curator or something like that. Thank you very much.

B (8:20)

Thank you Jonathan, and also thank you Helena and Jessica and everyone at YIVO who helped organize this. So what, what is this Jew face about? A hundred years ago, popular popular entertainment was based largely on ethnic stereotypes, the best known of them being blackfaced minstrels. What is less well known that virtually every ethnic group, Irish, Italian Jews, Indians and Chinese, among others, was bitterly mocked on the stages of vaudeville. Exploiting crude stereotypes for alleged comic effect, these performances were accepted at the time as a standard form of entertainment. If it's not already obvious, this material is considered extremely offensive by today's standards. The stage Jew, as the Jewish variant was then known as was like most ethnic stage performers, not only a bumbling fool, but also a cheapskate, a swindler and a cheat. With his big fake nose, his fake beard, black hat and thick Yiddish accent, he was essentially the Jewish variant of the blackface minstrel created initially by gentile performers to mock the large numbers of Jewish immigrants that began arriving in large numbers during the 1880s. By the early 20th century, Jews themselves began to perform these bits, and in a surprise twist, Jewish audiences liked it. But self deprecating humor was already a stock in trade among Jews. Bitter self satire was a cornerstone of 19th century Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment literature. With Yiddish writers like Yitzhak Yoel Netsky and Mendela Mohar Svorim taking Jewish life to task in brutally comic ways. So for Jewish performers to have reappropriated what was a type of anti Semitic comedy perhaps shouldn't be so surprising. Many a Jewish joke has run exactly the same course as a historical phenomenon. One of the compelling matters is how Jewish immigrants and their progeny both enjoyed Jufe's performances and used them as a way to distance themselves from the way they perceived earlier incarnations of their immigrant selves. Yes, they may have been immigrants, they may have spoken with Yiddish accents, but they were never as ridiculous as the characters they saw on stage. As a result of this distance between the stage Jew and Jewish reality, many of the immigrant generation were able to enjoy these comic portrayals. But of course, not everyone saw it that way. Some Jews found these performances absolutely appalling. In 1909, the Central Conference of American Rabbis passed a resolution at their annual conference decrying the existence of the stage Jew and setting out plans to protest it. After a few years of failed interventions with theater owners and managers, the organization discovered that the phenomenon had become an almost entirely Jewish affair. The theater owners, the managers, the agents, the songwriters and the performers were all Jewish. Even the audiences were mostly Jewish. And the stage dialogue sometimes had so much Yiddish that only Jews could possibly understand it. In the end, there really wasn't much they could do. Now, not only did this type of comic performer exist in vaudeville, but there's a variant that also existed in Yiddish theater. There were numerous Yiddish routines that made fun of greenhorns or recently arrived immigrants and their foibles and fumbles with the English language. One of the better known characters, a man named Getzel, featured a recently arrived immigrant engaging different aspects of American culture. In one of these bits, and their are dozens and dozens of them. Getzel describes how much he loves cantorial music. And after hearing about a great cantor in the Bronx, in the Bronx named Yankel, he sets out to see him after getting out of the subway. Genzel is duly impressed when he finds out that Cantor Yankel is so famous that he has his own gigantic shul named after him called Yankel Stadium. So not only. Not only did the Jews mock their predicaments in English, they did so in Yiddish as well. Now, as the window on what one can and cannot mock in popular culture continues to close, we understand that most of these century old comedy routines are long past their sell dates, but they nonetheless serve as a valuable marker of aspects of culture that have disappeared and how society's reception of such comic material has changed. Though the stage Jew began to disappear in the 1920s, Yiddish inflected routines remained a mainstay of American comedy through the end of the 20th century and represent a remaining vestige of vaudevillian ethnic performance now. And all of you are extremely lucky. You're about to have the experience of hearing material that hasn't been performed in about 100 years. It may be a hundred years before they perform it again, but it'll be a really unique experience. Now I want to give my most profound thanks to Jody Rosen, who loaned part of his collection for the exhibit and for participating here tonight. I'd like to thank Alex Brandwein for doing a marvelous job in designing the exhibit. And I will now introduce the performers. YELENA schmulensen, the I have to say that our performers this evening are are all very, very accomplished and they have very long bios, and I've really shortened them to an extreme degree. I'm a bit embarrassed about it, but Yelen Schmulensen's credits include the Coen Brothers films A Serious man and, among many others, the TV shows Boardwalk Empire and Orange Is the New Black. Alan Lewis Rickman is an actor, director and writer who can also be seen in A Serious man and Boardwalk Empire and who, among many, many other things, has directed the Pirates of Penzance in Yiddish. Steve Stirner has written music for and accompanied over 300 silent films at venues such as Film Forum, MoMA, Lincoln Center, BAM and the Thalia Theater. Veteran New York City pianist, he's also performed off Broadway and on television. I thank them all profusely. Now, please do not leave the theater after the performance. We will have a brief discussion afterward with Jody Rosen, whose materials most of these materials belong to. Jody is the New York Times Sunday Magazine critic at large and the author of White Story of an American Song. The discussion will be moderated by Alana Newhouse, the editor in chief of Tablet magazine, and following that, there will be a reception outside the auditorium. Now, without further ado, here is Jew face.

E (35:37)

Okay, well, maybe I'll. You know what, Maybe I'll give a little backstory about how I came to this genre, because this is. This is, I think, gets at the question you're asking in kind of a backdoor way. So very long ago, when I was a young man, sort of younger, I was doing graduate work and I was very interested in American popular culture of this period of the kind of late 19th century, early 20th century period. And I actually was in the British Library in London, England, and looking at old sheet music, and I came across a song which I think was from 1940, 14, called I Want to Be an Oi Oi Oyviator. This was a song from the period. There were a lot of novelty songs about aviation, about airplanes and dirigibles and such. Because this was a novelty at the time. A lot of the popular songs in this period were about new technology, dance crazes, very topical music about issues in the news, stuff like that. But anyway, this really took me aback. This was clearly a Jewish themed song about aviation. And the storyline of the song was that a Jew tried and failed spectacularly to fly an airplane. That kind of in miniature is what the themes of many of these songs are. Because what we see in these songs, whether they're mangling the English language or they're sort of trying and failing to navigate romantic travails or trying to do often in the songs they trying to. We find Jews, greenhorn, as Eddie said, Jewish immigrants attempting to do kind of archetypal American things, whether it's fly an airplane, playing a baseball game, be a cowboy, be an Indian. So to get back to your question, Alana, what these songs are songs which, as Eddie said, kind of gently and not so gently mock the efforts of immigrant Jews to assimilate and to. And to become, quote, unquote, real Americans at a time, of course, when. When that was very Much the drama that was taking place in the country, especially in immigrant enclaves like on the Lower east side here in New York. And you know, interestingly, much of the popular culture of the period was being produced by immigrants themselves or second generation, you know, children of immigrants. And it revolved around these themes. And what really drew me to this particular genre, got me really interested in it is of course that Jews are, are known. It's, it's well known that, that Jews were dominant figures in Tin Pan Alley, in vaudeville and popular entertainment. That Jew, that the, the psalm business in particular, in both its kind of business and creative spheres was dominated by Jews, by Jewish kind of popular psalm moguls, the owners of, of sheet music concerns, of publishing houses, and of course the great. So many of the great songwriters like Irving Berlin were Jews who were themselves immigrants like Berlin or children of immigrants like for instance, the Gershwins. But here was a genre which would. We not only had kind of Jews making American music, but Jews making American music whose theme was in various ways Jewish life.

E (42:45)

Well, you know, Jews like Jewish jokes, okay? And in fact, not just. It's not only Jews who like Jewish jokes. Gentiles like Jewish jokes. We know this because so much for American popular culture for the last century plus is comprised of Jewish jokes, right? So there's a. You can draw a straight line from this tradition straight through to. Well, certainly you can draw it to Hitler on the roof if I Was a Rich Man. What is that? That's a Jew faced song of a sort, right? And you can certainly draw the character of the kind of, you know, Jewish schlemiel straight through from vaudeville to Woody Allen to Seinfeld to Larry David. So this is not a tradition that's dead. I think one of the reasons, you know, and, and I mean, the other thing I'd step back and say is that, you know, a lot of these jokes are just funny. They kill, right? So if, like, if a joke is a joke, if it's a good joke, it's. It manages to resonate a century on. But to go back to what Eddie was saying, I think one way to look at the complexity of these songs and the way they were working. Yes, as Eddie said, the context of this is American popular culture at the time, where everybody's being made fun of very coarsely and very roughly. There's kind of like a hazing that's happening in American popular theater in particular, which was really the centerpiece of pop culture at this time. And the center and the. And also the big venue for popular song. And, you know, so you've got songs about Irishmen that are. That are in dire. Like songs, as Eddie said, about, quote, waps that are in, you know, Italian theme songs. And right on down the line, you name an ethnicity, they're made fun of. There's a big tradition of rub songs, okay. About people, bumpkins, that is people from the country coming to the big city and Pratt falling in various ways. And of course, the most popular and ubiquitous form of this were the blackface, quote, unquote, coon songs at the time. Which is really a very complicated question and also is really at the root of all of American popular music then.

E (45:18)

Well, this was more of an in joke. An in joke, an in group form of entertainment, which made it slightly less complicated. But one of the things that I think is interesting about these songs, as Eddie said, it's a way for the audience. There is a distancing effect. Okay. It's sort of. For an audience member can sit there. It's maybe a young Jewish immigrant who's well on his way to assimilating. Maybe his parents actually only speak Yiddish still, or their English is very bad. But he can say, I'm not that Jew up on the stage that's being made Fun of I'm an American, I'm a modern new guy. So in that sense, it helps him. It works in the process of his assimilation. It's something that's useful to him or her. On the other hand, I think there's something even more complicated which is going on here, which is that these songs smuggle Yiddishkeit into mainstream popular culture. Right. So a lot of the songs, if you notice these songs, the verses use traditional Jewish musical tropes, okay? Minor chords, minor key melodies, even specific musical phrases that come straight out of Jewish liturgical music or Yiddish folk song. Jewish audiences recognize those and may have had an illicit thrill in being at a theater on the Bowery or on 14th street and hearing a Jewish song being played for an audience that wasn't just Jews, there were Jews and others. And then on the other hand, the psalms do an interesting thing musically, which is they always move into major keys, into an American song in the verse, in the choruses. So there's kind of an assimilation, a miniature assimilation that takes place even within every one of these songs because they're quite standardized. The verses are Jewish. Musically, the choruses are American. So I think that Jews could. On the one hand, for a Jew who wanted to distance himself from the buffoonish Jew faced performer, there was that going on. And there was also the thrill that we all get, right. If you're a Jewish person and you turn on the TV and there's a Jewish joke on a nightly sitcom, you know, you get a. You get a special little frisson, right? Because you're hearing something.

E (50:38)

Don't answer. No, I mean, I mean, look, there was a lot of. We shouldn't minimize the pain that was behind. That's behind this material. Right. It was a difficult time to be an immigrant, to be a minority in this country. The country was, you know, it was. The culture was very much I mean, the larger context, the context of the melting pot was this very. What was perceived broadly across the culture as an urgent need to turn these immigrants into Amer, into Americans and to remove the ethnic taint. This was, you know, felt by the majority, very strongly by the majority culture and on the part of the immigrants themselves. Now I, you know, a lot of kind of festive, fun popular culture came out of this and stuff, especially now that we can look back with and maybe and be distanced from the pain of it. But it was difficult. Draconian anti immigration legislation was passed, of course, in the 1920s. So what we're looking at is a snapshot of a very particular period before this very explicitly ethnic pantomime pastiche stuff went underground for various reasons, both because people began to realize that this was very offensive and would not fly, and also because it, and this speaks to what Eddie was talking about, about the way this pop culture worked in the process of assimilation. It kind of went underground because it was no longer useful to the audiences themselves. The Jews themselves were too busy trying to be American Jewish suburbanites to really want to flaunt their ethnicity or the, you know, to, to remember the. It's only when we get to Fiddler on the Roof, right, When we're like three generations removed, when there's suddenly this sentimentalization of the immigrant experience and even of the shtetl, right? So we can go back and have these songs which romanticize shtetlife, right? At this time, there was nobody romanticizing shtetlife. It was something to be ashamed of and run away from. I mean, and the ways, if you look at the course of Jewish popular culture, it kind of went underground and emerged in very, in very specific venues. It leached out of the mainstream culture. So at the time, at the time, these Jew faced songs were popular roughly between 1890 and the end of the First World War, or maybe up till the early 1920s, it was in popular theater on Broadway. You could see this stuff. After that, all the pop songs were 32 bars on the theme I love you. These songs disappeared, right? Everyone was just writing Someone to watch over me. Or suddenly Irving Berlin wasn't writing Cohen owes me $97. He was writing Blue Skies, right? And. But in places like the cruise ship circuit and the Catskills, you have acts like Mickey Cats, right, Who was doing Yiddish yinglish pastiche very much in this tradition. But that was for Jewish audiences in walled off Jewish enclaves where like, you didn't have to worry about the goyim. It was your own thing. I don't know, I'm just rambling, right? Somebody interrupt me.

E (56:10)

Yeah, I definitely think it's that. And it's also, I think just in terms of like. And Eddie can speak to this way more than I can because I'm just like a hack journalist. And he's actually a. He's a professor with a PhD and all that. But he's not. But, but, but it's like, you know, it's kind of. There's. There's this. It's sort of transgressive vaguely to be into this material. A lot of Eddie's career, of course, is filling in the gaps in Jewish historic historiography because there's been a somewhat sanitized picture of, you know, kind of heroic, triumphalist picture of Jewish history that has been handed down. I can no tell you that my own attraction to this material was because this stuff wasn't. I didn't hear about this material. You know what I mean? I, of course, knew about other Irving Berlin songs, but I really didn't know that much about Cohen owes me $97, et cetera. And by the way, Berlin was a prolific writer of this material. Perhaps the most prolific, certainly the most prolific, well known songwriter who did this stuff. But other songwriters whose names or at least whose songs you may know did this. And it's interesting how many great illustrious Jewish performers of this period worked in this did Jewface stuff. And maybe some even got their start that way. Al Jolson as a child performer on Vaudeville. Al Jolson and his brother did a Jew Faced two Act. They were both young kids who did Jewish dialect performances. A little bit like the wonderful performances we saw up here, you know, including not just the songs, but the dialogues. Also, Sophie Tucker performed this. You can see an inset photo of her on the. On one of the sheet music covers out there. Fanny Brice famously did this stuff, as I'm sure some of you know, and really got her start doing this. And the list goes on. And one of the things that most interested me, and here's a very neat way that this stuff sort of haunts American pop music and popular culture to this day, and you could say Jewish music. One of the things that I discovered when I started looking at this sheet music was there's a song out there. One of the most offensive sheet music covers you'll see out there is for a song called When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band. Okay, so this is about a Jewish, kind of John Philip Sousa type bandleader, right, who. He doesn't need a conductor's baton because his nose is so big. So he uses the schnoz as a baton.

F (71:12)

Janet Klein does it. And I think there's no recording of it up till hers, but she found the sheet music great. So it's got both the Hawaiian music craze and it's great. It's the whole thing about, you know, Izzy leaves Becky and goes down the Honolulu way, you know, Honolulu Fey. But the two things I wanted to kind of ask you to comment on, first of all, somebody was talking about Sid Caesar over here. And as you probably know, even before your show of shows, there was a show that had a direct through line from not exactly the Borschbolt, but a very sophisticated Jewish and somewhat Yiddish summer camp, Camp Tameman. So Max Liebman was the producer at Camp Tamemen. Then he was hired to be the producer of the Admiralty Review on TV or whatever, which was that, you know, which had Sid Caesar and Imogene and everything. So that was like an interesting through line. But. But on the other hand you had in that very early, late 40s TV into 50s. At first you had this very small network that really was around New York and just a few cities. And it was a big deal to even have a network at all. Like, literally to connect cities. But they were cities. They had large Jewish populations. So a show with Molly Goldberg seems kind of of like how the early, you know, sound films. Isn't it weird that, you know, the first American sound film is so much a Jewish story, you know. But then again, apparently there was pushback because, like, the dumont network, which kind of went out of business, but was one of the big four for a while. Apparently once they got more into places beyond the major cities, there was a pushback where people didn't welcome this sort of alien ethnic humor they didn't really get, or they felt like it was too much an in joke that they weren't in on. So. So there's even like a Variety headline. I just read this in the book about Jumont. But there was a headline in Variety that said something like, you know, it was the opposite. It was like the opposite of Hicks, Nick Sticks, pick.