By now, listeners everywhere have formed an opinion on why Michael Jackson sings the most provocative lyrics of his career-and the most pointed ethnic slurs ever to come from the lips of a mainstream pop star-in his long-awaited comeback album, “HIStory, Past, Present and Future, Book I.”
“Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/Kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me,” sings Jackson on the track “They Don’t Care About Us.”
Only Jackson knows whether he was metaphorically speaking out against bigotry (as he insists), brazenly indulging in anti-Semitism (as his critics charge), intentionally stirring up controversy in the name of record sales (as the cynics contend) or pandering for credibility among disillusioned black youth (as some observers assert).
Whatever the reasons, the ensuing dustup has obscured something more important and disturbing: Jackson’s incendiary description of Jews, and the controversy it has ignited, represents only the latest battle in the long, tortuous and apparently unending struggle over the role of Jews in American culture.
It is a tug-of-war that has been waged for nearly a century by non-Jews against Jews, by Jews against other Jews, and, most poignantly, by the individual Jew against himself. Along the way, all of these factions and virtually every branch of the performing arts have produced their own diatribes, broadsides and snipes against Jews and Judaism.
The pity is that after decades of achieving considerable influence in the American entertainment business, Jews find that the attacks against them have intensified.
Certainly long before Jackson had conceived the lyrics to “They Don’t Care About Us,” similar fare had been created by rap performers such as Ice Cube and Public Enemy in the 1980s and ’90s and by filmmakers such as “Fritz the Cat” animator Ralph Bakshi in the ’70s.
Earlier, Jewish moviemakers offered subtler but equally troubling portraits of Jews on screen.
Indeed, the roots of these conflicts date to the origins of popular culture in America, early in this century, when talkies, radio and, eventually, television began bringing popular entertainment into nearly everyone’s life.
Surely it’s no coincidence that the first time any character in a major motion picture spoke from a silver screen, it was a Jew struggling to find a place in a non-Jewish America. As Jakie Rabinowitz, Jewish showman Al Jolson portrayed a young man yearning to be a “Jazz Singer” against the wishes of his Old World father, a cantor.
As the film’s title suggests, Jakie Rabinowitz becomes a jazz singer and rechristens himself Jack Robin, emerging an assimilated Jew just like the Jewish moguls who created Hollywood.
Born dirt-poor to Jewish European immigrants, movie studio czars such as Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers (who produced “The Jazz Singer”) and others had shed their Jewish heritage in search of success and acceptance in Hollywood.
Although excluded from Beverly Hills country clubs and barred from enrolling their children in Los Angeles’ most exclusive schools, the Jews who created the major film studios tried mightily to fit in. If they weren’t admitted to plush country clubs, they would form their own; if there were no prestigious law firms to serve them, they would create some from the ground up.
Unlike Jakie Rabinowitz, whose dreams can come true in the movies, the moguls paid a price for denying their identity: self-hatred.
“The Hollywood Jews’ self-contempt over their Judaism ran so deep that they often talked about themselves in the same terms (as their detractors),” writes Neal Gabler in “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” (Doubleday).
” `Through the years I had heard many of the top-drawer Jewish studio executives lose their tempers at meetings or in card games,’ wrote (Hollywood producer) Dore Schary, recollecting Louis B. Mayer dressing down one of his vassals, `and I was always dismayed when one of the first pejorative terms they used was “kike”-usually “dirty kike.” ‘ “
Gabler adds, “Schary thought it was an attempt by the Jews to assert their superiority over their antagonists by appropriating their language and thus neutralizing it, and to some degree he was probably right. But Jewish anti-Semitism was also a way for Hollywood Jews to assert superiority over (other, less-Americanized Jews).”
With the essential conflicts established on screen, they quickly were echoed in other art forms.
Consider Tin Pan Alley, the raucous, Manhattan cloister of piano pounders, song-pluggers, tunesmiths and other aspiring entertainers of the ’20s and ’30s. In rapid fashion, they transformed themselves from Israel Baline to Irving Berlin, from Jacob Gershovitz to George Gershwin, from Samuel Cohen to Sammy Cahn, and so on, in the process creating the new music that America danced and romanced to.
So pervasive was their influence, in fact, that Cole Porter, one of the few non-Jews in the pantheon of classic American songwriters, bristled with a bit of anti-Semitism of his own, in songs such as “My Heart Belongs To Daddy.” As the heroine croons of her rich and powerful sugar daddy, she repeatedly slips into a moaning, minor-key chant (“da-da-dah, da-da-dah, da-da-dah”) that represents a most thinly veiled parody of Jewish cantorial singing.
Porter went so far as to tell songwriter Richard Rodgers that all one had to do to create hit songs was to “write Jewish tunes,” to which “Rodgers’ immediate response was to laugh at what he assumed was a joke, but he was soon convinced that Cole was in earnest,” writes Charles Schwartz in “Cole Porter: A Biography” (Dial Press).
Even in comedy, another field in which Jews came to dominate in this century (Milton Berle, George Burns, George Jessel, the Marx Brothers), elements of anti-Semitism surfaced, though here it was of the self-directed kind.
Certainly the self-hating Jewish comic is a fixture of American show business, dating to Groucho Marx, who often quipped, “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me.” In “Empire,” Gabler states that Marx referred specifically to the opulent Hillcrest Country Club, which the Jewish movie moguls had created in Los Angeles when they couldn’t get in anywhere else.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the ’90s: As Jews in show business became more comfortable with who they were, as the self-loathing slowly began to slip away, the entertainment world’s expressions of anti-Semitism became more strident.
The ironic turnabout probably can be traced to the 1940s, when the Holocaust in Europe gave Americans in general, and show business in particular, a new compassion for what it meant to be a Jew in the 20th Century. Now Hollywood would begin lifting the veil on anti-Semitism, exploring the subject head-on in films such as “Crossfire” (1947) and the Academy Award-winning “Gentleman’s Agreement” (1947).
In broader terms, Hollywood would embrace both the tragic and the heroic facets of recent Jewish history in films such as “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1959), “Exodus” (1960), “Cast a Giant Shadow” (1966) and others.
As the post-’60s era unfolded, being a Jew in show business became something worth celebrating, as comedian Jackie Mason discovered with his sensational comeback in the 1980s; as younger comics such as Jerry Seinfeld and Richard Lewis proved on their TV sitcoms (“Seinfeld” and “Anything But Love,” respectively); and as Steven Spielberg showed in 1993 with his harrowing, multi-Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List.”
The tragic irony is that precisely as Judaism and Jewish culture were being honored anew, anti-Semitism in show business was becoming increasingly pronounced. The demeaning portraits of religious Jews in some of Ralph Bakshi’s animated films, such as “Fritz the Cat,” in the 1970s raised the curtain on slurs yet to come.
Certainly the gangsta rap of the late 1980s and ’90s represented a remarkable flowering of boldly anti-Semitic lyrics. In “No Vaseline” (1991), for instance, Ice Cube raps: “ya can’t be the nigger-for-life crew/with a white Jew tellin’ ya what to do.”
All of which brings us to Michael Jackson, who has broken new ground as the first major pop star to invoke in his music the same term that Jews of the ’20s and ’30s used to malign themselves, “kike.”
What could have prompted Jackson to do it?
“It has something to do with black-Jewish relations, and with black relations to American society, particularly in the last few years,” says author Gabler, speaking from his home on the East Coast. “One of the things we’re seeing in gangsta rap is what Michael Jackson’s song is all about, and that is black rage.
“There’s a great deal of black rage out there, and it’s directed not only against Jews but against all groups.”
The flareup occurred, however, because Jackson’s rage was directed not against all groups but, rather, solely against Jews.
Of course, it’s essential to note that Jews have not suffered alone at the hands of American pop culture.
Ugly and stereotypical portraits of many ethnic groups similarly span the century, from demeaning portraits of blacks in vintage movies (“Gone With the Wind”) and TV shows (“Amos ‘n’ Andy”) to the more recent, although more subtle portrayal of Arabs in Disney’s “Aladdin” (1992), for which the studio eventually rewrote offensive lyrics.
But in this media-saturated age, expressions of anti-Semitism and racism are more vividly, more widely and more pervasively disseminated than ever.
Michael Jackson may be in the hot seat now, having agreed to rewrite the offending lyrics for subsequent pressings of his new album, but you can bet it won’t be long before someone else picks up where Jackson’s tune left off. It remains to be seen whether it will be a rapper or a mainstream icon.
But the next time anti-Semitism bursts onto the pop charts, at least one listener will be humming an old Sammy Cahn classic, “(It Seems to Me) I’ve Heard that Song Before.”
