[The Jazz Singer clip plays.]
Jonathan: That’s Al Jolson. That’s Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: And I’m Yael Steiner, and we’re coming to the close of our summer celebrating and studying the United States on the occasion of its 250th birthday. Today I think you’re going to bring us into the 20th century. If you’ve enjoyed any of this series, we’d love it if you could rate us, write a review, and share your love of the podcast, because we really enjoy preparing these stories for you. And I think thematically that might match with what we’re talking about today.
Jonathan: Yes. So, as two Jews hosting a podcast, and I don’t know if we’d call what we do entertainment…
Yael: Infotainment. I think they call it infotainment.
Jonathan: Edutainment. A major story we haven’t yet told in the history of Jews in America is the connection between Jews and the entertainment industry: movies and music, which are a huge part of American culture and were shaped by Jews in so many ways. We’re going to tell this story across two episodes, especially focusing on movies and music. And a really interesting element people don’t expect is the role of race, and the relationship between Jews and African Americans in 20th and 21st century America.
Yael: I don’t want to take us too far afield too early, but does that mean we’re operating on the assumption that Jews are white for these purposes?
Jonathan: I’ll say at the top what we’re going to do. Today we’ll talk about Al Jolson, a name you’re probably familiar with, born Asa Yoelson.
Yael: I am familiar with him. I knew “Al Jolson” couldn’t have been his birth name.
Jonathan: Right. And then in part two, next week, we’ll talk about Sammy Davis Jr., who you’re probably also familiar with.
Yael: Who doesn’t love the Rat Pack?
Jonathan: Jews didn’t just work in Hollywood. Jews built Hollywood. I really don’t want to underemphasize that. And to be clear, for all our antisemitic listeners: it’s not that there was some organized Jewish plot to build Hollywood and then do something Jewish with it. A lot of the people who shaped Hollywood were Jews building from their own experiences, in many cases Jewish immigrants. There’s a very good reason so many Jews were involved, but this wasn’t a bunch of Jews sitting around deciding exactly how things would go, because they disagreed with each other constantly.
Yael: There’s also a huge difference between creating something, or contributing to its origins, and being a shadowy cabal behind the scenes trying to influence how Americans think and consume media. Also, I don’t think people really talked about “consuming media” yet. That was a burgeoning idea at the time.
Jonathan: Well, because the Jews invented it. That’s what I want to say. The people who created the Hollywood studios did influence how people consumed media, because it was a business. They built a mass entertainment business that became one of the most profitable parts of the entire American system.
Yael: Did we talk about The Jazz Singer yet?
Jonathan: So, that sound at the top, The Jazz Singer, is going to be a framing device for the whole episode. What do you know about it?
Yael: Is it the first feature-length talkie?
Jonathan: It is. It’s the first feature-length film with synchronized sound.
Yael: Is Steamboat Willie the first short talkie? Really? See, I thought Walt Disney did it first.
Jonathan: Steamboat Willie comes a year after The Jazz Singer.
Yael: That’s how you know the Jews don’t control Hollywood, because I thought Walt Disney did it first. And, I don’t know if you know this, he wasn’t Jewish.
Jonathan: Very much not Jewish.
Yael: The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length movie with synchronized sound. That’s a pretty big deal.
Jonathan: Almost a hundred years ago. It comes out in 1927. We’ve talked about movies a bunch of times; I love movies and I love film history. So this episode combines my love of film history with my love of Jewish history. Just on the technical achievement: I think synchronized sound is the most important innovation in film history. We later get color, but synchronized sound is more important to the way we watch movies than color is.
Yael: Significantly.
Jonathan: Movies are a huge part of American culture. Even this summer, as we’ve been recording, there’s a massive blockbuster.
Yael: To clarify for everybody, I believe we’re talking about The Odyssey and not the Minions movie.
Jonathan: We’re talking about The Odyssey. So a hundred years before this modern Christopher Nolan version, movies started at the turn of the 20th century, in the early 1900s. They weren’t a big industry and they weren’t respectable. This was seen as a diversion for working-class, or what at the time was openly called “low-class,” people. You’d see them in theaters called Nickelodeons, because you paid a nickel to get in. If you’re ever unsure whether something is high art or low entertainment: if the price is in the name, it’s probably not high art.
Yael: One-dollar pizza.
Jonathan: Right.
Yael: Was it really just considered vaudeville on a screen? It wasn’t opera, it wasn’t theater.
Jonathan: Right. Vaudeville is these traveling variety acts, diversions. There’s a whole class of people in the late 19th and early 20th century, laborers working in cities who have some income and really need something to distract them from the difficult circumstances of their lives. So there’s all sorts of entertainment like vaudeville, which is basically the circus with less overhead. You just rent out a theater.
Yael: It’s like sketch comedy.
Jonathan: Right, variety shows, singing, dancing, comedy. Not stand-up the way we’d recognize it today, but acrobatics.
Yael: Slapstick.
Jonathan: Slapstick. And starting in the 1880s, a lot of Jews immigrate to America. Those Jews find it very difficult to get into most areas of work; they’re barred, explicitly or implicitly, from many types of work. They can work in a factory, or sell small wares, peddling. But one area they can get into is vaudeville. Because if you’re taking a show to ten cities in ten days, you just want a performer who connects with audiences. You don’t care much about their origins, just, do they have it? And they’re not staying in town.
Yael: And they’re not staying in town, so audiences aren’t invested in who they are.
Jonathan: Right. As we’ve joked about, and it’s still a major thing in Hollywood, the name on the playbill needs to be generically American. So Jews are constantly changing their names to something appealing for the playbill. But they’re not kept out of this industry the way they are in others.
Yael: Is the vaudeville community separate from the Yiddish theater community, or do those converge?
Jonathan: There’s Yiddish theater, performed in Yiddish for people who understand it. But for many aspiring Jewish actors, you want to move up from Yiddish theater to the major leagues, the real show. You’ll have to leave behind elements of your Jewish identity, but that’s where the real money and the real fame are.
Yael: Right.
Jonathan: Then Thomas Edison and a bunch of other people figure out how to capture a performance and play it back, which is mind-blowing if you’ve never seen it.
Yael: Magic. Literal magic.
Jonathan: Right. So this starts as vaudeville on a screen. You capture what people want to see, and now you don’t have to bring all the actors somewhere. You film it once and play it at a theater many times, and make a lot of money selling tickets.
Yael: It’s not as though the first feature-length film with sound was a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet.
Jonathan: Right. What they were advertising wasn’t the spoken dialogue. That’s a big deal, but the real draw was capturing the songs, which is what people wanted to hear. My hot take is that movie musicals tend not to be the best movies. The most compelling movies are not musicals.
Yael: There was a golden age of movie musicals. And what’s interesting is that one of the best movie musicals ever, from that era, is actually about the transition from silent movies to sound.
Jonathan: You’re talking about Singin’ in the Rain. It’s so good.
Yael: So Hollywood itself has acknowledged how important this transition was.
Jonathan: Hollywood loves telling its own story. Although in Singin’ in the Rain there’s very little Jewishness in the version Hollywood tells about itself, which is interesting, because the actual story was so Jewish.
Yael: Okay.
Jonathan: So there’s a whole bunch of Jews, a lot of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, who realize early on the huge potential of movies. They don’t come to it from the artistic or technical side. They come from other areas of business. When Hollywood is basically built, there are eight major studios, the “Big Five” and the “Little Three,” and almost all of them are started or run by Jews. A quick list: Paramount, run by Adolph Zukor, who’s from Hungary and started out in the fur business. MGM, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Goldwyn was a Jew and Mayer was a Jew; Samuel Goldwyn was born Samuel Gelbfisz in Poland. Warner Brothers: all four brothers were Jewish; their original family name in Poland was something very Polish and Jewish that I’m going to butcher. Twentieth Century Fox was a merger; William Fox’s name was Fuchs, and he was from Hungary. So Jewish. And it’s the same story in interestingly different versions: Jewish immigrant, obviously talented, bright, driven, realizes this is a chance to do something. And they each find different ways to succeed.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan: Paramount sees the value of block-booking theaters. Warner Brothers focuses on signing stars to contracts for multiple movies. They’re all finding different ways to get really good at making movies, and they start making more and more elaborate ones.
Yael: And I don’t know if our younger listeners realize this.
Jonathan: Back in the day, you’d watch a movie in something called a “theater.” Not your phone.
Yael: Well, not even that. It’s the volume of movies that came out each week. We’re used to this insane volume of content now because of unlimited streaming. But in the early years of Hollywood, tens of movies were coming out all the time, because there was no television. There was nothing to do at home besides read or listen to the radio, both very valid pursuits. But the way people now go to the movies once in a while…
Jonathan: Right, going to the movies is an experience now.
Yael: When my grandfather was a kid in the 1930s, people went to the movies several times a week. That’s also how they got their news, on newsreels, at the movies. I don’t know if younger people realize how normal it was, certainly in big cities, to go several times a week, even if you weren’t wealthy or elite. It was a very common activity.
Jonathan: Thank you for bringing that up. I was going to come to it later, but let’s discuss it now. I want to argue, and I’m not the only one who’s made this point, that the entire movie industry, and the place movies have had in American culture for the last 120 years, is almost a religion. It has many elements of one. If you saw a movie in an AMC theater between 2020 and 2025, there was this promo before the film.
Yael: They still show it.
Jonathan: The Nicole Kidman one.
Yael: They showed it last week when I saw The Odyssey, and people clapped.
Jonathan: What she’s describing is a spiritual experience. We come to this place to be moved, to be together with other people and witness something. She’s describing movie theaters as synagogues, as churches. It’s a religious, spiritual experience: we revere the important figures, there are texts, there are rituals, there are things we do. And it’s a uniquely American thing. Movies are popular all over the world, but only Americans have movies as a form of religion.
Yael: And if you look at the old movie houses, they’re built like temples, many in an Egyptian temple style. There was a great miniseries on Paramount+ a few years ago that I think escaped a lot of people’s attention, called The Offer. It was about the making of The Godfather, which, despite being one of the most successful and acclaimed films of all time, almost didn’t get made, many times. The studio didn’t want Al Pacino; all sorts of obstacles. The executive who helped get it made was a legendary studio executive named Robert Evans. There’s a scene that stays with me, where he’s talking to the producer and describes growing up going to shul with his father. He uses the word “shul” specifically. And he describes how he became invested in movies. He was a kid in the ’30s, and one Shabbos he snuck away to see Errol Flynn in Robin Hood in a movie palace. And he says: I saw that screen, and from that moment on, that was my shul.
Jonathan: And that’s echoed so many times. That comparison is a major, overt plot point in The Jazz Singer. They could have been more subtle about it. But yes, movies have this religious appeal. And one claim I want to make is that this is a very Jewish idea, a very Jewish American story of something else taking the place of your religion, because Christians don’t have to do that. The Jazz Singer is about the tension between being a religious Jew and going into show business. Christians don’t have to choose between those things in America.
Yael: Most types of Christians. Mainstream Christians.
Jonathan: Right. It’s not a compelling narrative we’re familiar with.
Yael: Right. And there isn’t anything prescribed by Christianity that would keep you out of show business, the way one could conceive of Jewish law and culture being restrictive that way.
Jonathan: Right. And American culture doesn’t say, “If you’re a religious Christian, you can’t do this.” Whereas that’s still largely an idea about Jews, and certainly was a huge idea about Jews as they came to America in greater numbers and became more part of the culture. That’s very much Al Jolson’s story, and the story The Jazz Singer tells. So let me give you Al Jolson’s biography, because, we’ll get to why, his legacy isn’t as widely celebrated today, even though he was the biggest star of his day. That’s not a fringe opinion: he was the highest-paid, most in-demand performer of his time.
Yael: I don’t think I knew that. I knew he was a big star, but I wouldn’t have guessed he was the highest-paid or most in-demand.
Jonathan: We’ll get to why. There’s a complicated part of his story. He’s born in Lithuania, in Seredžius, around 1885 or 1886. He doesn’t know his exact birthday. He’s born Asa Yoelson. His father has the idea that he can go to America and then bring his family over, which he does after a couple of years. So Asa comes to America in the early 1890s, a little kid who doesn’t even recognize his father because he hasn’t seen him in years. His father takes the family to Washington, D.C., where the father, Moshe Yoelson, has a job as a cantor and rabbi. Moshe trains several of his children, including Asa and his brother Hirsch, who later goes by Harry, in singing, in what I’d call an openly abusive way. He had extreme practices, like putting things under their tongues so they’d articulate properly. But they become very well trained, with the idea that Asa will become a cantor in a synagogue.
In what’s become a trope, partly because it was a popular story from his own life, he doesn’t want to sing in the synagogue. He and Hirsch go out and perform on the street for money, eventually breaking into the vaudeville circuit. At that point he changes his name to Al Jolson, which sounds a lot more American and white than Asa Yoelson. He’s mildly successful, gets a bunch of vaudeville gigs, and at one point makes an interesting decision: to do part of his act in blackface.
Yael: I was going to ask about this earlier. So he starts performing in blackface.
Jonathan: He starts performing in blackface, singing songs that come from an African American context, performing as a blackface minstrel archetype, which I want to be super clear is a deeply derogatory one. Blackface, finally, and it took too long, will now get you cancelled. But it has a very long history. Al Jolson didn’t invent it; it was widely practiced for a very long time, and it means acting in a certain archetype. There’s a lot to say about blackface, more than we have time for, and some really good histories of it. It’s more complicated than people realize, and, as we’ll talk about next week, there were even Black performers who performed in blackface. But Al Jolson becomes really popular performing part of his act, sometimes all of it, in blackface, singing songs that emerge from an African American context. Very famously, one of his big songs is “Mammy,” where he sings about his “Mammy from Alabammy.” He’s not from Alabama. He’s from Lithuania.
Yael: He has a Mamma.
Jonathan: Okay, I skipped a detail. His mom dies about a year after they come to America. He’s still very young. He goes to boarding school, cared for by his very strict father, who does not want him to leave the religious community for a performance career. He doesn’t talk about his mother’s death, but it clearly had a major impact on his life.
Yael: Right.
Jonathan: And it’s a huge part of his story. He becomes really successful, the most desired star on Broadway. And part of what made him great is that it wasn’t just singing. If you see old clips of him, or him in The Jazz Singer, he’s extremely expressive, this great face, eyes, lips. He makes a whole performance of it, moving while he sings in a way that really captures your attention. He has it. That’s what makes him big.
At some point his story becomes well-known enough that a play is written about his life. That play is later turned into a movie, and he’s cast to star as the character based on his own life, though he wasn’t the first person cast. They had someone else, then messed that guy over and gave Al Jolson the part. The movie differs slightly from his real life. I’ll finish his biography and then we’ll talk about the movie. It’s a huge deal because of synchronized sound, and because he’s the biggest star on Broadway. When he’s in a Broadway show, he’s billed as “the world’s greatest entertainer.” And now, if you’re in Chicago or Cincinnati or Idaho, where he’s not touring…
Yael: Peoria.
Jonathan: …now you can see Al Jolson perform and hear him sing while you watch. That must have been mind-blowing at the time.
Yael: It’s like when the Eras Tour came to movie theaters.
Jonathan: A bit, though you couldn’t even get tickets to that. Remember when the first Avatar came out and people said you had to see it just because you’d never seen anything like it?
Yael: I remember it being a huge deal, and then never feeling compelled to watch it again.
Jonathan: Right. It’s not on any list of the greatest movies in American history. It’s on lists of the most important movies in film history, but…
Yael: Right. Important.
Jonathan: And part of that, as we’ll say more, is how really Jewish The Jazz Singer is, in a way that maybe non-Jewish Americans don’t identify with.
Yael: I imagine that for many people, especially outside the Northeast corridor, it was an introduction to Jewish life. Even if they knew Jews, the Jews they knew probably weren’t nearly as steeped in Jewish life as this story was.
Jonathan: Right. To give a small indication, and then I’ll finish his life and come back to a synopsis, several scenes of The Jazz Singer take place in a synagogue, with the singing of Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur.
Yael: Those are the parts I’ve seen.
Jonathan: So the average viewer in Peoria is not familiar with that scene. Anyway, he’s huge after this movie. He goes on to a number of other films, including one later that’s openly about his life, called The Al Jolson Story. He continues, problematically, to do blackface as a major part of his performance. He has a recurring character, Gus, that he plays in multiple movies. I think that’s part of why he’s not celebrated or talked about much today: this wasn’t a small, incidental thing he did once or twice. It was a big part of his career. But he’s still big in the 1940s. When World War II breaks out, he’s almost 60, so he’s not serving in the army.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan: But he’s the first entertainer to sign up to go overseas and entertain troops in what becomes the USO. He traveled nonstop all over the world to entertain American troops during the war. For years, that’s all he did.
Yael: That’s awesome.
Jonathan: Really incredible. He contracts malaria in Central America at one point, almost dies, and has to have surgery. They take out one of his lungs and several ribs. He comes back and is still a star in his sixties. When America enters the Korean War, he’s ready to do it again, but it wasn’t as much of a thing anymore. He starts calling people and they tell him the USO has basically disbanded, that there isn’t really money to send entertainers overseas for the troops.
Yael: Right.
Jonathan: So he pays his own way to Korea and arranges his own shows. When he gets off the plane, he’s interviewed and says something like: every year I check my income tax returns to make sure I’m paying enough, because I want to make sure I’m giving enough to support the troops and the American military. It came from a deep patriotism. I’m assuming it grew out of all the opportunities America gave him. He’s in his sixties, and in Korea he does something like 42 shows in two weeks.
Yael: Wow.
Jonathan: He comes back and is dead within a week of returning, of a heart attack. He’d been complaining about indigestion. And everyone realized, he had one lung, because the other had been removed, and he’d driven himself to exhaustion performing nonstop for the troops in Korea. His personal life was bad. He married and divorced a series of women, adopted a number of kids across those marriages, but it was very messy. He was a huge womanizer and not kind to women at all.
Yael: Beyond The Jazz Singer, what remnants of his Judaism filtered into his showbiz career?
Jonathan: When he’s becoming big, he distances himself as much as possible from anything Jewish. Then, once he’s famous enough, little bits start coming back. Sometimes his characters throw in a Yiddish joke. In his vaudeville days he did a lot of what we’d now call crowd work. While singing and performing, he’d kibitz, relate to the crowd. If there were a lot of Jews in the audience, he’d play to them, “bagel” them, as we’d say now. But he was very much “Al Jolson.” After The Jazz Singer, which I think is a pivotal moment, because he’s being accepted for his Jewish origin, it comes out more and more. But it’s not something he talks about a lot; he wouldn’t say it’s a major part of his identity, even though obviously it’s a huge part of who he is.
Yael: Right.
Jonathan: So, The Jazz Singer. The plot of this movie he’s cast in, which is sort of the story of his own life: the character is Jakie Rabinowitz. His father is the cantor and wants him to sing in the synagogue, but from a young age Jakie wants to sing popular music, jazz. He performs in saloons; his father finds out and says, if you ever do this again, I’ll whip you. And there’s a whipping scene, off-screen. The boy says he’ll run away and leave his father behind, and he does. He changes his name to Jack Robin, and the father says, “I have no son anymore,” because he’s abandoned his faith and his people. The mother is a really important character. I love how she’s introduced with the title cards. Her name is Sarah Rabinowitz, and it says something like, “God made her a woman, and love made her a mother.” I’m just thinking: Al Jolson, obviously your mother’s death was so impactful, and you’re playing this out in so many ways. So the idealized, fictionalized mother always accepts him and wants him to come back, and is sort of okay with him leaving his Judaism behind, a contrast to the father, who says there’s no son named Jack Robin.
Yael: This story is now a trope, but this was the beginning of that trope, at least on a wide scale.
Jonathan: Yes. And again, this wasn’t a small film people are rediscovering. This was the biggest movie in America. The father sings Kol Nidre in shul on Yom Kippur, saying, in effect, “Where is my son?” And he answers himself: “I have no son anymore.”
Yael: And people being like, “We shouldn’t do business with Jews because they annul their vows,” because of Kol Nidre. That started perpetuating that stereotype.
Jonathan: Right. So in the movie, Jack Robin hits it big, finally gets noticed.
Yael: It’s a good stage name.
Jonathan: Right, it’s Al Jolson, but “Jack Robin,” great.
Yael: Yeah, it’s free.
Jonathan: He hits it big, gets an opportunity, does better and better. There’s a love interest, a woman named Mary Dale. He writes to his mom about her, and there’s a great scene where the mom has a friend, not the dad, read her the note, because the assumption is she can’t read English. She hears “Mary Dale,” says “oy vey,” and uses a derogatory term for a non-Jewish woman.
Yael: That we’re not going to say out loud.
Jonathan: And the friend says, “You never know, Mary Dale could be Jewish, like my neighbor Ruth Levinson, who on stage goes by Rose something. It could just be a stage name.” She’s not. But it’s very funny to me that that’s a scene in the movie. Anyway, Jack Robin gets the opportunity to perform on Broadway in New York, so he can go home and see his parents again. He comes home and plays and sings for his mom, a really important moment. He’s playing the piano and singing, his father walks in, sees him, and says “Stop!” with a Yiddish accent. And the synchronized sound stops, because the old-world Jewish figure is putting a stop to it.
Yael: Sucks the air out of the room.
Jonathan: Yeah. Again, I think one weakness of the movie is that it’s a little too overt. It basically has him say, Popeye-style, “It’s not that I don’t have a religion anymore, it’s that jazz is my religion now.”
Yael: I wonder if it read that way at the time, though. We’re so used to this storyline. Maybe it didn’t feel as on-the-nose then. I don’t know, is saying “on the nose” antisemitic?
Jonathan: It sounds right. So his show is supposed to open on Yom Kippur night, which many people say is the most fictionalized part, because no big show would open in New York on Yom Kippur. So much of the New York audience is Jewish; you wouldn’t open then. It’s just not a good business decision.
Yael: Right, half the critics wouldn’t be there.
Jonathan: Right. And he’s the only Jew in the show, which also isn’t realistic. Then his father gets sick, and the father’s dying wish is that Jack take his place, as the sixth generation of cantors in their family, and sing Kol Nidre in the synagogue. So he has to choose: sing in the synagogue, or go on stage. He says, “I go on stage, that’s my religion now. You have your texts, but we have a saying too: the show must go on. Even though my father is dying, I need to get up on stage.” But then, spoilers, he decides to honor his father’s dying wish. He abandons the show, misses his opportunity, and sings Kol Nidre in synagogue. The play version ends there, very dramatically. The Hollywood version adds an ending: the producer of the show comes and sees him singing Kol Nidre and thinks, he’s even more talented than I thought, we need to give him another chance. The movie ends with his big Broadway break, singing “Mammy” to his mother in the crowd, in full blackface.
Yael: That’s weird.
Jonathan: And the father says to the mother, “We have our son back.” After saying “I have no son,” he says, “We have our son back,” and then the son goes and performs in blackface on Broadway.
Yael: Because he annulled his vow. That’s a weird ending.
Jonathan: It’s not a good ending, that’s what people say. Critics call it the Hollywood-ification: rather than tell a genuinely moving story, it has a happy ending where he gets to have it all, while exploiting Black people.
Yael: Well, that’s what I was going to say. Forget “having it all,” I could understand the commodification. What’s the point of ending with his success in blackface? What role does race play in this story?
Jonathan: It’s not explained at all why he does it. There’s a big pivotal scene in the dressing room where he’s getting ready and has a whole dialogue about this conflict while putting on the makeup for blackface. I made my kids watch this movie with me to prep for the episode, and they were like, “What is he doing?” And I said, honestly, that’s really weird, but common enough that viewers at the time would totally understand. He’s having this dialogue while putting on the burnt cork, blackening the skin of his face and hands, and the movie doesn’t have to explain it, because it was so well known. This is blackface, which the film doesn’t even need to introduce. The portrayal of Jews in American film, in all film, is a really interesting subject; there are people whose entire academic expertise is this. The early studios very rarely portrayed Jews, which is part of why The Jazz Singer is so interesting: it tells a very Jewish story and shows Jews to an audience that wasn’t always familiar with them.
Yael: And America ate it up. They loved it. It was a huge hit.
Jonathan: A huge hit. On the blackface: a scholar named Michael Rogin wrote a book, Blackface, White Noise, about Al Jolson and Jewish immigrants and blackface. His central thesis is that putting on blackface is how Jewish immigrant performers became white, by obscuring their own identity and, the way he puts it, by exploiting another race, they became part of a white American tradition.
Yael: Right. Okay.
Jonathan: There’s a lot there. Another scholar, Charles Musser, complicates this. He points out that yes, blackface is very bad, very exploitative, with a long and problematic history, and, not that this makes it okay, but everyone was doing it at the time. Al Jolson wasn’t the only one; he didn’t invent it. Yes, there was criticism of it, but it was widely done, and, as I said, there were even Black performers who did blackface.
Yael: It also reminds me of the Trefa Banquet, in a sense, maybe serving shellfish wasn’t a statement after all. It was just something everybody did; it wasn’t meant as an affront to your Judaism. And Al Jolson wasn’t doing blackface to make a political statement. It was just a popular form of entertainment at the time, and he was partaking of it.
Jonathan: Right. The story he tells about the origin is that a Black artist he worked with suggested it, that audiences would love his act if he did blackface. Is that a sanitized version he’s telling? Who’s to say. But the other thing Musser points out is that Al Jolson and others like him actually created a lot of opportunity for Black art. Jolson famously collaborated with, and was very accepting of, African American performers. And Musser argues that blackface was also a way to mainstream Black culture and make it acceptable in America, that somehow it was more acceptable to white audiences to hear this kind of performance from a white person in blackface than from a Black person. What that did was make jazz, and songs like “Mammy,” really popular, and in a very complicated way it enabled a lot of acceptance of Black entertainment culture.
We’ll talk about this even more, it’s why we need a whole part two, because these two communities, Jews in America and African Americans, saw a lot in each other, even though we don’t usually think of them interacting. The stories of the Hebrew Bible were very popular among enslaved people, who saw the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt as really important. “Go Down Moses” becomes an important spiritual, still popular in the early 1900s among African Americans, and Al Jolson performs it in blackface. There are so many layers here: a Jew dressing as a Black person, singing a Black song that’s about a Jewish story and Black identification with it. There’s a lot of rich connection here.
Yael: I was going to say there’s a PhD dissertation in this, but it sounds like it’s already been written multiple times.
Jonathan: Multiple, with different takes. You could do a dissertation, or you could do two episodes on Jews and Blacks in American entertainment.
Yael: I like that. That’s how I’m getting my doctoral degree.
Jonathan: Charles Musser also points out that Al Jolson was tremendously popular among white people, and even more popular among Black people. The blackface performance wasn’t considered offensive to the Black audiences who loved it.
Yael: Right.
Jonathan: Now, we’d see it and walk out. That wasn’t the case at the time, even for the Black audiences who ate it up.
Yael: Right. And that speaks to a lot of the problems we have today with imposing a 2026 racial analysis on things from the past, because there’s so much nuance. The fact that a white Jewish performer in blackface was an extremely popular act for Black communities is anathema to what someone would tell you today.
Jonathan: The biggest star in America. If you saw this picture now, you’d say, “Cancel that guy.”
Yael: But we have to acknowledge that was the reality at the time.
Jonathan: There were people at the time who said this is exploitative, this is bad. And yes, and it’s not the same. 1927 is not 2026. Two points I want to leave you with, plus a tease for next week. First, this is sort of a tinfoil-hat theory. You mentioned Steamboat Willie at the beginning. Walt Disney sees The Jazz Singer when it comes out in 1927 and thinks, we can make synchronized-sound cartoons, and those could be really popular too. He doesn’t have his own studio yet. He’s an artist, in a legal battle over a character he created, a rabbit he no longer has the rights to, so he needs a new character.
Yael: Mortimer.
Jonathan: Mortimer Mouse. And he makes a synchronized-sound cartoon of this mouse doing mischievous things on a steamboat, playing music. Later there’s a very explicit Mickey Mouse parody of The Jazz Singer that combines its plot with another Al Jolson movie; this Mickey Mouse short is called The Jazz Fool. The Walt Disney Company very much does not want this to be the case, but the argument goes: if you look at the posters of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, promoted with him in full blackface, but with the lips left white, wearing white gloves, and you realize that’s the same moment Mickey Mouse is created, it’s very hard to unsee that Mickey Mouse is really similar to, and perhaps an imitation of, Al Jolson’s blackface character.
Yael: Are you telling me Mickey Mouse is a white character in blackface?
Jonathan: A Jewish character. But if you try to get the Walt Disney Company to confirm this, this is where we get into conspiracy-theory territory…
Yael: My mind is blown right now.
Jonathan: I’m not saying it’s definitely the case, and I think it’s impossible to prove, because if it were true, Disney wouldn’t want you to know. But if you look at those two images side by side…
Yael: I also can’t stop seeing it now, because, steamboat, riverboats…
Jonathan: It’s very hard to unsee.
Yael: Song of the South. Huck Finn.
Jonathan: Also, let’s talk about Steamboat Willie and Disney. Now Disney has that clip of Mickey whistling at the helm before all of their movies.
Yael: At the helm, yeah. It’s going into the public domain.
Jonathan: Right, putting it at the start of all their movies is partly an attempt to retain the copyright on the character, since it’s been 95 years or so. But another important note: whistling was a huge part of Al Jolson’s act. He whistles in The Jazz Singer. Whistling was a big part of his performance, and he was very good at it. And Mickey Mouse whistles at multiple points in Steamboat Willie. That one whistling scene now at the beginning of most Disney movies is the only song he whistles that isn’t an appropriated Black song. The rest are all appropriated Black songs.
Yael: Interesting. Okay, so there’s a whole racial, there’s not only a melting pot of immigrants and former slaves and people, there is a…
Jonathan: Right. The melting pot isn’t just two different peoples going in and becoming one. Within people themselves, identities are getting remixed and complicated.
Yael: It’s a whole melting pot of different racial stereotypes coming together.
Yael: What’s interesting to me is that Al Jolson makes it big by leaving behind his Jewish identity, and then makes it bigger by monetizing the story of leaving behind his Jewish identity.
Jonathan: Yeah. So, the tease I’ll leave you with, and then we have a whole second episode: The Jazz Singer comes out in 1927. Two years earlier, in 1925, a Black baby is born in Harlem. Named after his father, Sammy Davis Jr., he grows up, is taught by his dad to sing and perform, and comes up on the vaudeville-type circuit. Before he makes it really big, one of his idols, whom he bases his performance on, is Al Jolson, and one of his earliest big hits is an Al Jolson imitation. And then this Black kid, who grows up imitating a Jewish guy doing blackface, converts to Judaism later in his life.
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Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Yael Steiner, and by me, Jonathan Schwab.
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