Funny, you don’t look Russian
You could spend hours describing how the sitcom Seinfeld avoided using the word “Jewish,” and still not run out of material. Like George Costanza’s last name, the show seemed to want its marble rye and eat it, too: Sure, the gang looks and acts Jewish, but let’s not rub that in viewers’ faces. Pretend there’s a neurotic American ethnicity called “New Yorkish” and leave it at that.
I can understand why a sitcom
seeking a national audience might want to fudge the specific religious or ethnic background of its characters. They don’t call television a mass medium for nothing. The goal is market share, not authenticity. And it’s not just the Jews who get short shrift in the vanilla-izing of the small screen. When was the last time you saw a television program deal in any detail with the folkways of Lutherans, or Baptists, or Sikhs? Besides, they went and called it Seinfeld, so what are we complaining about?
I do wonder when the same impulse to ignore ethnicity makes its way into the daily newspaper. Call it the “Russian immigrant” syndrome, after the dozens of obituaries which describe the deceased’s forebears as “Russian immigrants” while leaving out the obvious information that the family was Jewish.
The rule, a well-intended one, is that a newspaper doesn’t mention a person’s religion unless it’s essential or unavoidable (“Portman, who is Jewish, stars in an Israeli-made movie”) or if the subjects bring it up themselves (“‘I’m Jewish, so I figured I’d end up in Boca anyway,’ Rothman said”). Newspapers are more likely to hear complaints from readers objecting to the fact that a person was identified as Jewish than the other way around. Lobbyist Jack Abramoff has spurred a veritable cottage industry of letter writers demanding to know why reporters “dwell” on his Judaism, asking what his ownership of a kosher deli has to do with the government’s probe of his finances.
I think Abramoff’s ethnicity is fair game for a number of reasons, not the least of which is his propensity to tout his religious background and Jewish philanthropy in interviews. Much of the Abramoff affair is an investigation of the incestuous world of Washington lobbyists, activists, politicians, and philanthropists, and the way in which relationships established within and among those worlds shape policy.
In general, when it comes to religion, I think more is more. The more I know about a subject’s religious and ethnic identity, the more I feel I understand his or her story. And journalists do us no favors when there seems to be a Jewish story waiting to be told, but they are too cautious to tell it.
Take a recent story in The New York Times about the unlikely collaboration between pop singer Neil Diamond and hip-hop producer Rick Rubin. The article explained that the two men in fact “have much in common.” The “transplanted New Yorkers” dropped out of New York University and grew up with dreams of becoming a doctor (Diamond) and lawyer (Rubin).
Nowhere does it mention that both are Jewish.
So, yes, we lose our chance to kvell (if kvelling is something you are bound to do over the men who brought you “Cracklin’ Rosie” and the Beastie Boys). But avoiding their ethnicity also cuts off an intriguing line of inquiry. The Times acknowledges that the two have “played with the ethnic and racial makeup of American music,” but doesn’t ask how the two fit into a long tradition, going back to Berlin and Gershwin, of Jews absorbing — some say exploiting — black musical styles.
Another recent story in the Times also seemed to go out of the way to avoid its subject’s Jewishness. According to a report by Sarah Lyall, fans of the British soccer powerhouse Manchester United are incensed that their storied team has been purchased by a Florida businessman. Lyall acknowledges it is a case of reverse anticolonialism, “as if a Japanese tycoon had suddenly swooped in and bought up the Yankees, using millions of dollars of borrowed money.”
But her description of Man U’s new owner, Malcolm Glazer, left me wondering if there wasn’t something else on the minds of fans who were burning Glazer in effigy and threatening to wave black protest flags at games. According to the Times, various British newspapers have pilloried Glazer for his “personal qualities,” which “extend to rapaciousness, ruthlessness, meanness, megalomania, unflattering facial hair and a propensity, The Daily Mail says, for ‘wearing his trouser waistband ludicrously high.’”
It sounds like a casting call for Shylock. And sure enough, Glazer is the son of a Jewish-Lithuanian immigrant, a fact that goes unmentioned in Lyall’s story (but is noted in many of the British newspaper reports that I have seen). My first thought was, “Thank goodness” — the last thing boycott-happy Britain needs is another reason to hate the Jews.
But then I wondered, had Lyall ignored an obvious subtext to the story (which would have brought new meaning to the phrase “the fans are revolting”)? How soon, I wondered, before some skinheads made explicit what British sportswriters couldn’t bring themselves to say?
So far, as far as I can tell from scouring the Web, Glazer has not become a poster boy for the new anti-Semitism. And even The New York Sun, whose anti-Semitism detector is usually set to “Buchanan,” suggested that the fans’ ire had more to do with anti-Americanism than anything else. After all, a Russian Jew owns the championship Chelsea team, and his purchase met with few protests.
Perhaps Lyall taught us all a lesson in not looking for anti-Semites under every rock, or whatever it is British soccer fans wear on their heads. But given a choice between ignoring someone’s religion and leaving it in, I’d leave it in. Religion may or may not always make the world a better place, but it always makes it a more interesting one.