‘Abie the Fishman’ embodies ‘Diasporas’ at conference | Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle

‘Abie the Fishman’ embodies ‘Diasporas’ at conference

“Abie the Fishman” was a Jewish archetype in American humor, a fictional, Czechoslovakian immigrant fish peddler who most famously appeared in the 1930 Marx Brothers movie “Animal Crackers.”

          But this figure proved an appropriate embodiment of a theme explored at a University of Wisconsin-Madison academic conference this past month.

          The Conney Project on Jewish Arts hosted its annual conference April 9-12 at UW-Madison. With support from the Mosse Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, the project provides a forum for education and study of Jewish contributions to the arts.

          This year’s conference, organized by Prof. Douglas Rosenberg, addressed the subject of “Diasporas.” Presentations, lectures and artistic performances explored Jewish nomadism and ways such experiences have shaped Jewish identities.

          Prof. Josh Kun of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism delivered the keynote address about Abie the Fishman to an audience of 50. Kun studies the cultural connections among popular music, globalization, and Jewish musical history.

          And Kun viewed Abie’s changing incarnations throughout the 20th century as reflecting Jewish identity in Jewish-American performers.

          Abie was the stereotype of the Jew as the permanent immigrant outsider — a metaphorical birthmark Jews could never quite shake off as they assimilated into American life.

 
Punished for hiding

          Some entertainers concealed their Jewishness. Unfortunately, Kun said, hiding was confirmation of another stereotype.

          “This was also the very trait which anti-Semitism mixed part of its central attack: The Jews are tricky. They could be lurking anywhere. Don’t trust appearances,” Kun said. “Anti-Semitism likes it both ways.”

          Kun noted American Jews were, at mid-century, punished for hiding their Jewishness. Several Jewish entertainers were targeted in the 1940s and 50s by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

          According to Kun, the leading member of the committee, Rep. John Rankin (D-Miss., 1882-1960), turned the inquiries into anti-Semitic investigations. Rankin made it a point to reveal Jewish actors by disclosing their original Jewish-sounding names.

          However, Hollywood Jews were suspect not because of their Judaism per se, but rather their trickery in attempting to hide it.

          “The goal of the blacklist was not to out Jewish entertainers as Jews — they knew they were Jews — but to punish them for being mimics,” Kun said. “To be a good American, the blacklist insisted, was to stop acting, stop vanishing. Be the real you and rat out any other actors.”

          The strategy Jewish performers had traditionally used in vaudeville was to adopt the dress of Abie the Fishman himself — or rather, dress in “Jew-face” — beard and dirty black hat included.

          “It was a comic disguise that had become de rigueur for Jewish entertainers in the early 20th century,” Kun said. “The baggy pants, the oversize derby, mispronunciations, wild gesticulations” were used by “performers like David Warfield, Joe Welch, and Julian Rose.”

          Paradoxically Kun said, adopting caricatures of Jewishness allowed Jews to perform openly as Jews. To the non-Jewish public, Jews were not really acting if they looked like Abie. Adopting Abie’s appearance allowed Jews to vanish behind a caricature of Jewishness, another form of concealment.

          By the 1930s, Abie had faded as the mask Jews wore in their hopes to assimilate. “If it was no longer OK for Jews to wear the Abie mask, what was once seen as an antidote to anti-Semitism was after the [Second World War] seen as anti-Semitism,” he said.

          Kun ended by speaking of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan’s destruction of his Jewishness, when he buried his upbringing as Robert Allen Zimmerman of Minnesota.

          According to Kun, Dylan’s evasion was not a concealment of the birthmark of Jewishness. Rather, Dylan rejected and symbolically killed it, evident in his mangled version of “‘Hava Nagila,’ the Jewish theme song of all theme songs.”

          “On the one hand, the song is foreign, [Dylan] can’t pronounce it, it is not his,” Kun said. “Yet, Bob Dylan winks at us. It is his, he just chooses to not perform it as it should be performed. The chorus is strained, tortuous, and stuttered because Dylan knew who he was and who he was pretending to be, which [makes] ‘Talkin’ Hava Nagila Blues’ a song about not singing ‘Hava Nagila,’ a performance about the refusal to perform.

          “[Dylan] shows us Abie by not showing us Abie. A musical reminder that even his birthmark is a mask.”

          Other conference highlights included a performance by the Yiddish punk rock band, the RAKHMONES; and a staged production of “If the Whole Body Dies: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide,” written by Robert Skloot, UW professor emeritus of theater and Jewish studies. Dance choreographer Judith Ingber led a Jewish choreographers and performers workshop.

          The coupling of academicians and artists helped create what conference speakers routinely referred to as a “practice-theory” model of idea sharing, where ideas flowed between performance and scholarly analysis.

          Bennet Goldstein is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a master’s degree in the history of science, and is currently a Madison-based freelance writer.