Play Clip Sammy Davis, Jr. I’ve Got to be Me
Schwab: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: I’m Yael Steiner, and we are here for part two of an episode on what probably could be its own podcast itself, whole multiple seasons of podcasts. Jews in Hollywood, and you know, the Jewish perspective on building Hollywood, influencing Hollywood, Jews performing in Hollywood. Jonathan Schwab has been really, really blowing me away with some complete reframes of things that I thought I knew. And if you didn’t listen to part one, I highly, highly recommend it. You’ll still be able to enjoy part two, but if you really want your mind blown, I’d go with part one first.
Schwab: We’ve been telling the story of Jews in the entertainment industry, which is a story that’s been told many, many times. There are a lot of movies about this story, but with a really important element I think that often gets left out, which is the relations between black Americans and Jewish Americans and how much that’s a huge part of the story of Jews in entertainment and Hollywood. So last week we talked all about Al Jolson, the emergence of cinema, him performing in blackface, which again, if you didn’t listen to that first episode, we go into it a lot, so there’s a lot to unpack there. And we left off teasing the person who we’re gonna talk about today, Sammy Davis Jr., who’s born just two years before The Jazz Singer comes out, Al Jolson’s huge movie. And Sammy Davis Jr. grows up idolizing and imitating Al Jolson.
Yael: And I think one of the topics that we grappled with, maybe not explicitly in the last episode, was: is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, even when it’s done in a way that maybe retrospectively seems disrespectful?
Schwab: Sammy Davis Jr.,
Yael: Yes.
Schwab: right? Really, really, really interesting guy with so much to talk about. Not, I think, I don’t know, the person you would — if I said we’re gonna do a two-part series on Jews in the entertainment industry, Jewish stars of Hollywood, maybe you would have said, okay, yeah, one of these people will be Al Jolson. But Sammy Davis Jr. is the pick for the other one, because I think he does tell us something. His story does tell us something really, really important about the story of Jews in America and the American Jewish story.
Yael: I wish I knew more about him. I have
Schwab: You’re about to learn a whole bunch.
Yael: a very vivid picture of him in my head. I am a big fan of the, you know, Rat Pack vibe, the tuxedos and Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and the Ocean’s Eleven heists. Sound…
Schwab: Have you seen the original Ocean’s Eleven?
Yael: I have.
Schwab: I’ve rewatched — I love movies. I watched a bunch of movies in preparation for this. The first Ocean’s Eleven movie, like, sort of like we talked about last week with The Jazz Singer, really important as an interesting cultural moment, it’s not a good movie.
Yael: No, no, no, the remake.
Schwab: Is like so much more interesting, right? Yeah.
Yael: I think universally is found to be a better movie, but I think obviously we look to the original as having spawned something that has become, I think, a cultural touchstone. The original one that Sammy Davis Jr. is in is not a particularly important movie in the history of cinema otherwise.
Schwab: Yeah. We’re gonna do a spin-off podcast. Jewish History Nerds Film Club, we’ll be watching The Jazz Singer, we’ll be watching both versions of Ocean’s Eleven. The remake, by the way, has a Jewish character in it; the original, no Jewish characters, no Jewish elements at all.
Yael: Let’s go back to Sammy Davis Jr.
Schwab: Yeah. Alright, so Sammy Davis Jr., he’s born in 1925 in Harlem. His story is an interesting sort of mirror of Al Jolson’s story. Sammy Davis Jr.’s father, Sammy Davis Sr., is a performer and teaches Sammy Davis Jr. how to perform from a very young age. So like Al Jolson, who was taught how to sing by his father, Sammy Davis Jr. is taught how to sing and perform by his father. But instead of Al Jolson’s father, a cantor, who wanted his son to sing in the synagogue, Sammy Davis Sr. puts his son on stage, paves the way for his career, celebrated it, enabled it, in a way that maybe wasn’t the most responsible parenting, but was very effective. So from a very young age he’s on stage. In some versions of the story, he is performing as young as three years old and is clearly really talented. As he gets a little bit older and can perform as a young kid, that’s child labor, it’s problematic. His father and the head of this group, Will Mastin, they perform as the Will Mastin Trio — Will Mastin, Sammy Davis Sr., and Sammy Davis Jr. The Will Mastin Trio sometimes pass off the boy, Sammy Davis Jr., as an adult little person. Rather than saying this is a kid, they’re like, no, he’s an adult, you know, with dwarfism. And it’s not a kid, and he, I guess, was talented enough to come off as an adult.
Yael: This is P.T. Barnum stuff, who’s also someone I thought about in the last episode. But so he’s obviously extremely talented.
Schwab: He’s extremely talented, and the way we talked about Al Jolson last week, he has it. He just comes on stage and there is something enchanting about him. He just puts all of himself into his performances. He says this many times — he has multiple autobiographies that he wrote — but he says he learned that from watching Al Jolson. Al Jolson put it all out on stage, did not hold back, you can feel the energy coming off of him. Sammy Davis Jr. imitates that and I think does it even better, is able to get up and just fully be himself on stage and capture and enchant people in a way that’s very, very rare.
Yael: And so how does he find initial success beyond his local area?
Schwab: So he’s going around, he’s performing locally, he’s traveling with his dad and with Will Mastin, who he refers to as his uncle, but is just his father’s business partner. And they get bigger and bigger, but they’re still a traveling show. They’re not yet a huge deal. He’s mildly successful. Like we talked about with Al Jolson, he hadn’t yet fully broken out. When World War Two breaks out, Sammy Davis Jr. goes into the army, and — this is really interesting — he is in one of the first integrated units in the army. So the American military in World War Two was segregated except for some very, very rare exceptions. We’ve been talking about Hollywood and its idealized representation of America on film. There’s a whole fascinating rabbit hole you could go down of a lot of Hollywood movies made during and about World War Two, which very frequently portray integrated units, even though that was not reality at the time for most units. Sammy Davis Jr. is in one of the only integrated units in the army and faces a lot of racism. And he talks and writes about this — that it was the first time he experienced racism. Which is like, how was it the first time he experienced racism? He’d been traveling all over the country, staying in colored-only hotels — that’s the term that was used — but he said his dad and Will Mastin always just explained, this is where we’re put up, this is the better hotel. They shielded
Yael: He was shielded. He was shielded from it.
Schwab: shielded him from so much racism, which is so interesting because he was traveling all over the place, but really did not have to understand or confront racism, but does have to when he’s serving in World War Two. And he gets in a lot of fights. He says his nose is broken at least twice. And he says in one place that he broke as many noses as his own was broken. It’s a little bit hard to imagine, because he obviously had a fighting spirit and a real energy to him, but he’s a very, very small guy, even as an adult.
Yael: He’s slight. Is he short? I don’t view him as short.
Schwab: He’s short and slim. Yeah. If you’ve seen it, they do a good job of making it clear, but he’s actually quite short. He’s like five feet and a couple of inches. He’s quite small. He later becomes part of the Rat Pack, as we’ve been talking about. And there’s a lot, even when he gets accepted as part of that group, there’s still a lot of racist joking at his expense. And there was a whole bit that one of them would sometimes do where they would pick him up on stage and say, I thank you to the NAACP for this award for my championing of black people — but they would pick him up as if he was a trophy, because the joke was that he’s barely bigger than an Oscar statuette.
Yael: Interesting.
Schwab: And small enough that he can be picked up on stage by another guy, because he’s pretty small.
Yael: A lot there.
Schwab: Yeah, right? Oh my gosh. But so he is in this integrated unit, experiences racism. One of the officers at some point notes — he’s just singing in the barracks, doing something — one of the officers is like, why are you not doing… like your contribution to the war should be in an entertainment unit, that’s where you’d be better suited. And he does that, and he says he realizes that his talent could be his weapon, that he’s not gonna win over — which is very interesting — like his battleground in World War Two was not just against the Nazis, but also against racism. And he said, I’m not gonna win over the racists by fighting with them, but by being on stage, I can. And he puts all of himself into that. So that comes to be his role, and he does a ton of performing throughout the war. Comes back from it, and then his career really takes off. Post World War Two, as Las Vegas is emerging and the entertainment business is getting even bigger, he’s a big part of that and really rockets to the top of the entertainment world. And is right up there with Frank Sinatra, with Dean Martin, very, very close, part of the Rat Pack, that group of performers who become really big and are very closely tied to Las Vegas. And he is seen as a real member of the group — he’s the only person of color in the group, but he’s fully accepted as part of the group, with, again, the racist jokes at his expense. He leans into the self-deprecating stuff a lot. He makes a lot of jokes at his own expense, a lot of jokes about black people. He’s part of it. He’s not cringing when they do that trophy bit. And we can’t know for sure — did he have no choice? — but he certainly seems to be embracing it as part of his own entertainment identity.
Yael: And I think a lot of that cuts both ways. When you said that he has this realization in the army that the way that he is going to make inroads with white people is by entertaining them — you know, the pen is mightier than the sword. But it also puts you in a position where you are performing on command for people and you are there to be their entertainment. They might value your contribution, but your contribution is as a performing…
Schwab: You’re on stage, right. Which I think is part also of the complicated, very difficult history of blackface, which is that black people are here as a type of entertainment or performance, and that was a path to acceptance. We talked about this in part one, but Jews who were excluded from many other industries found a path to acceptance and some sort of assimilation in the entertainment industry, because that was available as a thing. And a similar sort of thing here. And it’s interesting because you said, would you say the pen is mightier than the sword — it’s fascinating because another one of the exceptional, interesting things about Sammy Davis Jr. is that because he’s performing and traveling with his father as a young kid, he does not have any formal education. On his own, he reads a ton and chooses to read really interesting things, and there’s an alternate version of his life where maybe he becomes an academic, a thinker. He was reading deeply, he has a lot of really interesting things to say about a lot of topics.
Yael: And is that self-education, reading a wide variety of things, what leads him to explore Judaism? Or is that a personal encounter that inspires that?
Schwab: So — this is such a great question, right? Because then, if you’re not familiar with the story, he converts to Judaism later, very publicly, and this becomes a big part of
Yael: at the height of his fame.
Schwab: at the height of his fame, he converts to Judaism, which is a decision that a lot of people were kind of perplexed by. And I think there’s a lot to talk about about the place that conversion to Judaism has in American culture, because he was not the only famous person converting to Judaism at the time. Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism. But Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism because — you know this?
Yael: she was marrying a Jew.
Schwab: She was marrying Arthur Miller. Sammy Davis Jr. did not convert to Judaism — and I think people who are only glancingly familiar with the story might think it was because he was marrying a Jew or something like that. No, not at all. He does marry, and it’s a big part of his story, he does marry a white woman, but that white woman has to convert to Judaism for him, because he had
Yael: fascinating.
Schwab: converted to Judaism. So this is a really interesting — he tells several different versions of what it is that led him to Judaism. And I think in understanding who he is as a person — did Sammy Davis Jr. ever stop performing? So in telling the story, I think he tells it in a way that’s a really, really interesting story. And there’s several different versions of it. And it’s hard to say which is the true, authentic version. They are all really interesting, compelling stories. So I’ll tell a couple different versions, and again, these are things he says in interviews. He writes two autobiographies. The two autobiographies give conflicting accounts of the origins of this. There are some similarities in the way he tells it, but a lot of it seems to be centered around or have to do with this car accident he gets into. So it’s 1954.
Yael: Did he grow up religious as a Christian or in the church? Okay.
Schwab: I think not particularly connected. They go to church somehow, but I don’t think his conversion to Judaism
Yael: not deeply connected.
Schwab: right, was like, I’m now rejecting this strong Christian heritage I grew up with.
Yael: So he’s in a car accident.
Schwab: In 1954, he’s really, really popular. He’s driving from, I think, Las Vegas to Los Angeles, and the car ahead of him very suddenly stops, and his car runs into it. And this is sort of really graphic, but cars had no safety features at the time. There were no seatbelts or airbags in his car. And rather than having an airbag, in the steering wheel there was some sort of ornamental spike on the center of the steering wheel. And Sammy Davis Jr. loses an eye in this accident, but miraculously survives the accident. He has a couple of broken bones, but it was not immediately clear that he would be okay. He recovers, other than needing a glass eye, quite well from this accident. Again, multiple versions of the story around this. One version: one of his friends, the entertainer Eddie Cantor, whose birth name is not Eddie Cantor, had given him as a good luck charm a mezuzah, which is commonly hung on the door of Jewish homes, but this was a smaller version that was in a necklace or something like that. And Sammy Davis Jr., already before the accident, ascribed a lot of importance to this mezuzah. One version he tells is that he wore this mezuzah all the time, never forgot to wear it. The night he got in his accident, as he was driving, he was thinking about how he left it in his hotel in Las Vegas. And the story there is that whatever protection it offered him was not there that night when he got into the accident.
Yael: It’s like an ArtScroll biography story.
Schwab: He also tells another version where he wore it all the time and that’s why he survived — he feels he would have been killed in the accident had it not been for the protection of the mezuzah, which made him only lose his eye. And he was still wearing it somehow — this is the way he tells it — somehow it was still inexplicably on his neck when he’s pulled out of the wreckage of his car. And he’s like, wow, it’s obviously deeply connected to him. A different symbol that also seems big in some of his stories is that he had some sort of pendant or coin that had a Star of David symbol on it. The Star of David, really important symbol — we did a whole episode about that. And again, there’s different versions of this story, but someone gives it to him when he’s in the hospital recovering, and he holds onto it so tightly while he’s recovering, or maybe while he was having some surgery, that the mark of the Star of David was imprinted in his skin and you could see it even after he had taken it out of his hand, which is a really interesting story.
Yael: It’s like the radioactive spider that, you know, starts…
Schwab: Interesting. It also — the idea of a mark being visible on your hand is like a…
Yael: Stigmata.
Schwab: that sounds like the stigmata. In another version of that same story, someone gives him this — maybe it’s a pendant, maybe it’s a coin — but it has two sides to it. One side has the Star of David and the other side has a cross. And these are the stories that he tells. And he’s flipping it
Yael: fascinating.
Schwab: over, flipping over this coin and looking at the two sides of it. I guess that’s a very striking visual metaphor for him thinking about these two flip sides of an identity and choosing between them. So all of these different versions — that’s the story he tells of some sort of initial thing that drew him to thinking about it. But then it’s not on a whim; it’s a long journey that he takes. He also tells a different version, which I think is most appealing to us on this podcast, that he was staying at his friend’s house and sees a book on the shelf called A History of the Jews and picks the book off the shelf and reads it — he stays up the whole night reading the entire thing. And in this book about Jewish history, he sees himself. He’s like, wow, what an interesting, compelling narrative, and I see so much of myself and, importantly, the African American experience in the stories of the Jews and how resilient they are at facing persecution and their own redemption that they bring about for themselves, and the stories of how they have survived so many centuries — because whatever book he was reading obviously was a very lachrymose conception of Jewish history.
Yael: I was going to ask if it was Graetz.
Schwab: It was not Heinrich Graetz’s nineteen-volume history of the Jews. So even if there was an initial object that gave him some sort of spiritual moment, the way he talks about it a lot later, it’s this very studied approach and similarities that he saw between his own experience — again, as an African American who didn’t know about racism until he goes to World War Two, but then certainly was quite aware of all of the racism directed his way as one of the most famous, popular men in America. He saw similarities and saw redeeming things about the Jewish story so much that it drew him to convert. And again, this is not like a Las Vegas version of a conversion where I decide to be Jewish and the next day I am. This is an idea he thinks about for years. He approaches a rabbi in Los Angeles, a Reform rabbi, who — as is the case when people usually say they want to convert to Judaism — discourages him multiple times, and Sammy Davis Jr. insists and really wants to become Jewish. And we don’t actually know at what point he officially converts. He starts talking about it more and more, and it’s unclear at what point exactly he officially converts. But he’s talking more and more about his interest in Judaism, and then talks more about identifying as a Jew himself, and then I think it’s just accepted: yeah, Sammy Davis Jr. converted to Judaism and he’s Jewish now.
Yael: And is that something that impacts his career in any way?
Schwab: So there was already a lot of racism and discrimination that he faced, and now he’s layering on another element to that. And this is what’s interesting — and then later another huge thing is that he dates a white woman, he dates movie star Kim Novak and faces a lot of racism for that. He very hurriedly gets married to a black woman — it seems pretty likely, sort of at the urging of a lot of the entertainment bosses and possibly the organized crime elements that are also involved with the Rat Pack, that there’s a lot of insistence: look, this is too transgressive, a black man cannot be dating, cannot be married to a white woman, you need to marry a black woman. He marries this black woman; their marriage does not last a very long time. But that brings a lot of heat to him, and then he becomes Jewish, which — already, if you’re the type of person who hates Sammy Davis Jr., you only hate him more now.
Yael: right.
Schwab: I think he’s not totally accepted by all parts of the Jewish community either. There are plenty of Jews who are very accepting of him and think this is really excellent. There are also some Jews who have racist views or look askance at someone from Hollywood who’s trying to convert to Judaism, whose prejudices prevent them from being accepting and instead
Yael: Right.
Schwab: being judgmental of Sammy Davis Jr., who’s an interesting, complicated guy. The place of Sammy Davis Jr. — where do we understand him in Jewish identity? I think it’s interesting. As I often do, I was talking about my preparation for this podcast to my kids, and one of them said, I know about him from a book about Jews. And I was like, whoa, what book about Jews? And she’s like, I was at my friend’s house and they had a book called Jews of Color and he’s in it. And I was like, yeah, that sounds right. Just like the “ten amazing Jewish biographies” probably is not gonna include Sammy Davis Jr., but a book on Jews of color is gonna include Sammy Davis Jr.
Yael: Well, we’re including him.
Schwab: Right. And we’re including him, which I think — that’s the right take on Jewish identity.
Yael: Let’s pat ourselves on the back.
Schwab: Well, no, because —
Yael: But yeah, why are we choosing him? Why are we choosing him and not Eddie Cantor?
Schwab: Right, because — first of all, because Eddie Cantor’s talked about, but also because I do think that is a part of telling the Jewish American story: not saying, and now for our miniseries on Jews of color. No, Jews of color are Jews. Jewish American Jews of color are American Jews. We’re gonna talk about American Jews, we should talk about American Jews.
Yael: of which one of them is a successful entertainer named Sammy Davis Jr. who happens to have this
Schwab: And another was a successful entertainer named Al Jolson.
Yael: Right, and Sammy Davis Jr. happens to have this more unusual path to Judaism. And I think, Jews of color also — and I don’t think we’ve really talked too much about Jews by choice, and so
Schwab: Converts, yeah.
Yael: he represents two different communities that at the end of the day really just fall under the rubric of Jews, because again, Jews are Jews.
Schwab: Exactly.
Yael: And so, okay, so he converts, he takes it quite seriously. It also sounds like he’s an autodidact, taking it all in.
Schwab: Yeah. He talks about reading the Talmud, and he probably really did — probably not in the original, but he probably did actually read the Talmud, as opposed to all the people on Twitter now who are like, I read the Talmud. He was probably actually really engaging with Jewish texts.
Yael: And with his involvement with the Rat Pack — the way that they talk about him being sort of their token black member, with the NAACP trophy and whatnot — do they integrate the Jewish change into their act?
Schwab: Sometimes. I think it’s not as much, although Sammy Davis Jr. makes jokes about this. There’s too many layers to it. What doesn’t get talked about as much is that his father is black, Sammy Davis Jr. is black, and his mother is Puerto Rican, an immigrant from Puerto Rico. So he has this line that he would use sometimes in his shows — like we talked about with Al Jolson, when Sammy Davis Jr. would perform, he would sing, but in between the singing he would have these comedic bits — and he would say, I’m black and Puerto Rican and Jewish, so when I move into a neighborhood, everyone moves out. There’s so much to unpack there of American racist stereotypes and how he somehow was at the center of all of them. But his conversion, in addition to what it means for him, I think it’s really interesting to look at what it means for the place of Jews in America. He’s not the first person ever to convert to Judaism in America. But the fact that it wasn’t for a marriage, for anything like that — and this is at the height of his popularity and career, this really popular entertainer converts to Judaism — I think says something about the status that Judaism has achieved in America, that this is a cosmopolitan, acceptable religion, you can convert to Judaism, which is so interesting to think about. In contrast to a lot of the people we talked about last week — all the Jewish immigrants of the late 1800s, early 1900s, people like Al Jolson who changed their names, people like all those movie studio heads from Hungary and Poland and Russia who all changed their names to generic Jack Warner types, almost all of whom, interestingly, if they were originally married to Jewish women, divorced their wives and married non-Jewish women — and then in the 1950s Sammy Davis Jr. converts to Judaism, and a white woman that he marries, who’s Swedish actually, converts to Judaism to marry him. And Judaism now isn’t something, an identity to escape from, it’s a destination.
Yael: Is the woman he marries Kim Novak, or is it someone else?
Schwab: It’s May Britt. I don’t know how to pronounce her — the “Britt” is very confusing, it’s a Swedish pronunciation.
Yael: Don’t know her.
Yael: Okay, so she’s Scandinavian.
Schwab: She’s Scandinavian, right. So she’s white, but she’s not American. He
Yael: interesting.
Schwab: has this whole trip to Europe and he sees that racism manifests in different ways in Europe.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: even if he’s not accepted as a black person. It’s not the same as what he experiences in America.
Yael: It’s not the same. The way a black man is perceived in America is a very specific casting of a black man in that role that is different in Europe.
Schwab: Right. So he says he contemplates staying in Europe for that, but then realizes that he was never at home there, and that he needed to come back and continue the fight that he was fighting in America. Because the World War Two battle for him doesn’t end. He’s still fighting it up on stage, fighting racism.
Yael: So he does view himself as a civil rights activist warrior.
Schwab: Yeah, and it’s really complicated, and his legacy is really complicated. So let’s talk about politics and civil rights. He idolizes Martin Luther King Jr., very involved with the civil rights movement. In his interview with Mike Wallace. And he talks about what place black people have and what they need to do and what action they need to take and how they will become accepted. Clearly something he’s thinking about a lot and incorporating in some ways, not necessarily up on stage. He’s not giving a speech like Martin Luther King Jr., but very much sees himself as part of that.
Yael: That’s also an interesting framing, because why is it that black people need to do something to become accepted? Why isn’t it that the hegemonic white society needs to do something to open its doors? That’s not how
Schwab: Sure, I totally agree, but that’s not — yeah.
Yael: things work. Okay, so he had a relationship with Martin Luther King?
Schwab: Yeah. And he’s devastated when Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. And then, interestingly — this is a vast oversimplification, and there’s a lot there, you could do a whole podcast on this — but a lot of the people in the civil rights movement move in a more radical direction following King’s assassination. There’s the debate about how far things should go; Martin Luther King Jr. represented a moderating version of it, and with his assassination there are people who move in a more radical direction. Sammy Davis Jr. does the opposite. He does not want to go down the Malcolm X pathway, and moves in more of a conservative direction in terms of his politics.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: But also there are important elements of his own experiences with this. So Sammy Davis Jr. campaigns with and very publicly supports John F. Kennedy when Kennedy is running in 1960 against Richard Nixon. That’s very identifiable to us now — entertainers getting up and performing for a candidate and getting young people especially excited about voting — but it was sort of a hallmark and an interesting invention of JFK’s campaign. And Sammy Davis Jr. was part of that. So this is in the 1960 election. Sammy Davis Jr. is dating this Swedish woman, May Britt, and he’s asked by the JFK campaign, please don’t get married before the election, because that would make things really complicated for us among racists in the South. They’re not ready yet for a black man and a white woman to get married, and for you as someone who’s been publicly supportive, publicly campaigning for JFK, we would have to distance ourselves from you. It’s too complicated. And he does it. He pushes off his wedding date until after the election so as not to create that problem. Which, like, wow, right?
Schwab: So Sammy Davis Jr. campaigns for JFK, who is the civil rights candidate, if there is one, in that election, pushes off his own wedding date until after the election so that it doesn’t change the election, and is supposed to perform at the inauguration along with Sinatra. But he pushes his wedding off until after the election, JFK wins, Sammy Davis Jr. gets married, and he’s disinvited from the inauguration. And that was
Yael: Not surprised.
Schwab: and that was deeply wounding, I think, to him. He felt so hurt by that.
Yael: Used.
Schwab: Used, rejected, whatever. In 1972, you know who Sammy Davis Jr. campaigns for? Richard Nixon.
Yael: Wow.
Schwab: He publicly supports Richard Nixon, embraces him on stage, is a huge Nixon supporter eight years later
Yael: fascinating.
Schwab: in that campaign. And embraces him on stage — which people find really interesting, because JFK did not embrace him, JFK kept his distance. Maybe part of it is that a lot has changed in eight years, maybe part of it is that Nixon saw an opportunity, part of it is Sammy Davis Jr.’s own views changed over time. But that’s a big shift.
Yael: Really an interesting way for the cookie to crumble, for all those pieces to come together.
Schwab: And part of it is, was it a “sticking it to them,” or was it that this is a false promise of acceptance? Whereas Nixon — and it’s not a question of his civil rights record — Nixon embraces him on stage, while JFK disinvited him from the inauguration and kept his distance in all of these ways. Also so interesting to think about with the way a lot of people see modern politics today, just an expectation that people from a certain community are supposed to vote for one party or the other, which a little bit robs those people of any sort of agency and decision-making power for themselves. I don’t know.
Yael: Right. Yeah, like there’s a character on The West Wing where there
Schwab: Haven’t mentioned The West Wing in a while.
Yael: is a gay Republican. I don’t know if he’s a congressman or a congressional candidate, and
Schwab: Yes, right, he’s a congressman, because Josh Lyman says to him, you’re a gay congressman —
Yael: Josh can’t understand how he could be a Republican. And he says to him, you’re the one who’s pigeonholing me. I’m a Republican because I believe in small government. Me being gay does not have to be the defining characteristic of everything about me. And it just goes to show you the West Wing was living in a fantasy land. But okay, so Sammy Davis.
Schwab: Also probably a big believer in small government, Sammy Davis Jr., who — this is not — I think he has the record for the person who owed the most money to the IRS.
Yael: So unlike Al Jolson, he didn’t want to pay more than his fair share.
Schwab: Yeah, right. Unlike Al Jolson, who was like, I want to make sure that my income tax was paid enough. Sammy Davis Jr.’s finances were a mess, and he openly acknowledged this. He says, I grew up with very, very little and just did not know how to responsibly spend my money. And people who would spend time with him were like, it’s crazy — he’s very, very generous, and also just really irresponsible with the tremendous amounts of money that he was able to have. He’d spend it on himself, on other people. He partied hard, he got a lot of gifts for people, got a lot of gifts for himself, and apparently owed a lot in back taxes.
Yael: I mean, the Las Vegas crew, not necessarily known for being on the up and up with the IRS.
Schwab: Yeah, right. That’s not — yeah.
Yael: Okay, so he converts. He campaigns with JFK in ’60. He campaigns with Nixon in ’72. So there’s some sort of political change there. I mean, he’s also, I guess, aging. Maybe his popularity has peaked. But does he
Schwab: Yeah, you’re right.
Yael: make Judaism a part of his public persona?
Schwab: Yes and no. He never hides from it. I think it was a deeply held part of his identity, and he didn’t play it as a joke. He didn’t play it as
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: a public performance or something. He didn’t hide from it in any way. It was an important part of who he was, but he didn’t totally change who he was, which I think is
Yael: which is also —
Schwab: yeah.
Yael: I was gonna say, a nice resolution of the Jazz Singer plot, which is that you can
Schwab: Exactly.
Yael: be Jewish and not outside the bounds of mainstream American culture, but you also can be Jewish at home. You can be a Jew internally and that doesn’t necessarily impact your externals. I think that goes back to the whole Reform Judaism conversation. But it’s, I’m a Jew, this is a deeply held belief of mine, and yet nothing has changed about the way that I am here to entertain you.
Schwab: Right. And in this interview he does with Mike Wallace, Mike Wallace asks him about his Judaism, and he talks about it a little bit, and Mike Wallace, the interviewer, is like, and do you go to temple? And Sammy Davis Jr. is like, I tell you, when I’m on the road I try to find a local temple, the truth is I don’t go as much as I should — which is such an authentic Jewish answer, right? That’s the
Yael: The most Jewish answer.
Schwab: most Jewish answer. I always want to go and then I’m not able to make it, whatever. That’s right.
Yael: If it was performative, he would go.
Schwab: He would say — or he would be like, I don’t have to go in order to feel Jewish. But “I don’t go as much as I should” is the most Jewish answer to that question.
Yael: Honestly, that’s what I tell people when they ask me where I go to shul.
Schwab: “I don’t go as much as I should.” Yeah, that’s the real Jewish answer. And then when we talk about politics, there’s also a really interesting element — and again, we could do an entire episode or a series on this — the place of Jews in the civil rights movement. What place does Sammy Davis Jr. have participating in the civil rights movement as a black person, but also as a Jew? There were Jews who — Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma very famously. So did Sammy Davis Jr. But if I asked you what place Jews had in the civil rights movement, you probably wouldn’t think, and Sammy Davis Jr. very famously participated. It’s because he later embraces Nixon.
Yael: Right. Well, I think it’s because we talk about it as, we are a community supporting a community that isn’t wholly ours. But for Sammy Davis Jr. it is a community that’s wholly his.
Schwab: Yes, for Sammy Davis Jr., he’s in both communities.
Yael: Right.
Schwab: And that’s what makes him so fascinating and so interesting to think about — these two communities that had this political coalition that maybe is overemphasized. There are some historians who say this is a mythologizing of it, the black-Jewish alliance, which has now shattered, was never as fully a coalition as we’re now imagining it. But whatever it is — for Sammy Davis Jr., he’s not coming at it from one or the other side of it. The connections between black and Jewish identity he felt were his own identity.
Yael: And also, according to some sources — and some sources being him, because his story is a little inconsistent — one of the things that was his calling card to Judaism was seeing the sameness between those two communities.
Schwab: Yeah. He talked about that a lot. And I think it’s saying something interesting. The way he thought of it is like a redemptive story — the Jewish story is a redemptive story. There are people who say he’s saying that’s a model for African Americans, but I don’t think he was saying that’s a model for African Americans. He’s saying, that’s the story that I feel. I feel that I have lived a redemptive story, and I want to be part of this people that tells that story also. He died in 1990 of cancer — I think it was throat cancer. He smoked throughout his entire life; the famous image of him is with a cigarette all the time. But even at the very end of his life, when he was really sick — there was a big concert in his honor, and if you can find the video, he looks quite sickly at that point — he shocked everyone by getting up and tap dancing. And you can see even right before his death just how unbelievably talented he was.
Yael: And that [essential — unclear in source] performer was always inside of him. You can’t kill that.
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Did people in his life prior to his conversion have an issue with it? Did it create strains with his family?
Schwab: It created plenty. He had some issues with his own family. It’s interesting to think about — you could make a great PhD dissertation or book comparing these two men we’ve been talking about, Sammy Davis Jr. and Al Jolson, and especially the way they related to their fathers. Al Jolson departed from his father in every way, and his father was deeply unhappy with him. Sammy Davis Jr. lived exactly the life — well, maybe not the converting-to-Judaism part — but his career taking off is exactly what his father wanted for him. And leaving his father behind, outgrowing his father’s shadow, was complicated for him. Even once he was super, super popular, he was still performing as a member of the Will Mastin Trio, way past the point where, no, you’re Sammy Davis, you’re your own thing,
Yael: when he should have been.
Schwab: you know? He said it was really hard for him — he owes so much to his father, but he needed to move beyond his father and Will Mastin at some point. It was not always the simplest relationship, because I imagine that’s a little bit hard, to have your son outgrow you by that much.
Yael: Is there any time period after he converts until his death where he moves away from Judaism? Or is it kind of a constant
Schwab: He’s a complicated guy, and I don’t want to — he parties hard, he doesn’t go to temple as much as he should, but he never
Yael: But none of that is inconsistent with being Jewish.
Schwab: Right, he doesn’t — there’s no point where he’s like, I no longer identify as a Jew. From his conversion,
Yael: Okay, it’s not like he…
Schwab: right. And again, there’s some Jewish skepticism, maybe with racist undertones or overtones, not accepting of it. But by the mainstream Jewish establishment, he is accepted — he was [B’nai B’rith? — “Abraith” garbled in source] Man of the Year in 1965. He’s seen —
Schwab: We don’t have time to get into all of it, but he’s also very fascinated by Israel. He makes a trip to Israel. And do you know what Israeli figure he loved? Which makes a lot of sense.
Yael: I have no idea.
Schwab: Moshe Dayan. He loved Moshe Dayan. Moshe Dayan always wore an eye patch. Sammy Davis Jr. wore a glass eye. He wore an eye patch during his brief recovery, but then — I think, like so many things in his life, the image says so much about who he is and what he’s trying to be. His first concert back from his months of recuperation, he comes on stage wearing a rhinestone-studded eye patch. And he performs very slowly at first, and it seems like, okay, he really doesn’t have it anymore, and then the act gets more energy and gets bigger and bigger and the crowd is brought to its feet, and as the culminating moment of the performance he takes off the eye patch — and he has a glass eye, but if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t think that much about it. He takes off his eye patch, because he can appear whole, I guess. He’s performing —
Yael: Performing makes him whole.
Schwab: something. I love that. But Moshe Dayan, who wears an eye patch for his whole life, is an interesting figure to Sammy Davis Jr., who does not like wearing an eye patch.
Yael: Would this be an inappropriate time to make a reference to our Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean episode?
Schwab: A callback to one of our first episodes of this season, yeah.
Yael: I just want to say, I have the utmost respect for people with eye patches and glass eyes. I have a dear friend with a glass eye. I am the granddaughter of an amputee. I don’t mock people’s bodies easily or at all. I just thought it was a good way to bring us back to the beginning of the season, when we talked about the Jews who, after this two-faced year of 1492 that Emma Lazarus described, were
Schwab: That two-faced year. Yeah.
Yael: both expelled from Spain but propelled to the new world.
Schwab: Yeah. I think, again, to pat ourselves on the back a little bit, but also just to reflect on what’s been a really enjoyable summer for me doing this — in telling the story of Jews in America, there are a lot of different origin stories and paths. There are crypto-Jews who are then able to rediscover or rekindle their Jewish identity once they’re here in America. There are Jews who come and flee persecution. There are Jews like all those movie studio bosses who leave Eastern Europe in the 1880s. There are Jews who are here and help other Jews. There are Jews who contribute to the birth of America as a nation. There are Jews who come here and change and adapt the religion to a uniquely American form. There are Jews who come here and retain strong traditions that they’ve carried with them for a really long time. There are Jews who leave behind a Jewish identity to become American, whatever that means. And there are Americans who come from other sorts of origins and take on Jewish identity. And all of those are Jews.
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Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Yael Steiner, and by me, Jonathan Schwab.
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