Mad magazine. Marvel Comics. Steven Spielberg. Philip Glass. Rolling Stone. Annie Leibovitz. Saul Bellow. Superman. Bob Dylan.
These are all Jewish people or institutions. Taken together, and there are a lot more examples, it’s clear that Jewish people have had a titanic influence on American culture. This is something that should be more celebrated in America as the world suffers a new rise in antisemitism.
America wouldn’t be America without Jewish people. In a review of the book Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, writer Leslye Friedberg puts it well: “What defines American Jewish culture is the pervasiveness of a Jewish ‘sensibility’ that permeates the arts, humanities, and education to name a few of the most significant areas. That sensibility, in many ways, has defined not only American Jewish culture, but American culture overall in the 20th century — from Broadway, to film and TV, to newspapers and comics, to liberal reforms in education. This Jewish sensibility, as I’m calling it, defines culture in America, almost as if by osmosis.”
It’s true. I am an Irish Catholic journalist, yet from my birth in 1964 and for six decades, my life has been surrounded by and enriched by Jewish artists and creations. My love of America would not be as ardent were it not for the Jewish influence. Even as I was being raised Catholic, Jewish artists and thinkers formed a kind of alternate schooling.
It started with Mad magazine, a Jewish creation that changed both me and America. Mad was published by William Gaines, who was born in Brooklyn in 1922. From 1956 to 1985, it was edited by Al Feldstein, also from Brooklyn. Jewish humor was in the lifeblood of Mad, from the language to the men who drew and wrote the issues. Without Mad, there would be no Jon Stewart, no Saturday Night Live, and no South Park.
Without Jews, Marvel Comics would not exist. The Marvel Universe began in early 1961, the forward-looking dawn of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Stan Lee and co-creator Jack Kirby were both Jewish veterans of World War II. Superman is also a Jewish creation. He was dreamt up by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two young Jewish men. Superman is featured in a new exhibit highlighting the history of Jewish comic books and graphic novels at the Capital Jewish Museum.
My father worked for National Geographic, but an alternative to the work of the magazine’s great photographers, I grew up reading Rolling Stone magazine — founded by Jann Wenner, a Jew — and admiring the work of photographer Annie Leibovitz. We venerated writers like James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, but some of their work when I was younger, particularly Joyce, was out of my reach. My father told me that there was an American writer whose work was as good as Joyce’s but who was more accessible: Saul Bellow. Bellow’s son Adam is my friend and book editor.
Even the punk rock I listened to in college owes a lot to Judaism. The early punk scene was filled with Jewish artists: Sylvain Mizrahi and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls and Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, often referred to as the “Godfather of Punk.” Jews were at the forefront of punk rock’s evolution. Steven Lee Beeber, author of The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, wrote that “punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging, always being divided, being in and out, good and bad, part and apart.”
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The writer Milan Kundera was ardent in his love of the Jewish culture of Czechoslovakia and Central Europe. He noted that Sigmund Freud, classical composer Gustav Mahler, and writer Franz Kafka were all Central European Jews: “Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home,” Kundera wrote, “lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the 20th century were the principle cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe: They were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its spiritual unity.” This is why Kundera writes he loves “the Jewish heritage and cling[s] to it with as much passion and nostalgia as though it were my own.”
What is true of Europe is true in America. You can’t be antisemitic and love the United States.