Anti-Semitism and WASPs

This episode contains references to racially offensive song lyrics.

New York City was extraordinarily quiet this past week... I pause to let the deafening absurdity of that sentence resound through your living room. New York City was extraordinarily quiet this past week – what does the man mean? 

I admit that at first hearing it sounds as awful and banal – the Oxford dictionary says the proper pronunciation is 'bane-al' – all right then, as 'bane-al' as that other journalistic cliché, 'the eyes of the world this week were on...' Yet I'm reporting nothing but the literal truth. It's a truth so obvious and yet these days not one that you shout out loud. It must be delicately handled. 

It wouldn't have been so 30,40 years ago, in fact I remember the New Yorker, the magazine, making the point boldly which I'm making with so many flounces and hesitations. The New Yorker ran a full page cartoon, it must have been I think in the Thirties, it showed Times Square – which is the symbolic New York equivalent of Piccadilly Circus – Times Square with the triangular New York Times building standing at the point where Broadway and Seventh Avenue shoot off their separate ways like the legs of a compass. 

That's really all there was to the cartoon – there were no people in it. Of course there has never been a time, day or night, war or peace, sunshine or blizzard, when Times Square was entirely denuded of human beings. But in the drawing, there was not a living soul and the caption said simply, 'Yom Kippur' – a simple idea and true. But however true, I doubt very much that the New Yorker would print it today. If they did, there'd be letters to the Times, a stream of pickets outside the New Yorker offices, an angry feature on night-time television and apologies all round. 

I just remember now, and I've just looked it up, that I talked about this new delicacy, or a new timidity, that crept into New York life and I'm shocked to see that it's been 28 years since I first mentioned the subject in a Letter From America and if anyone is still in the dark about the subject, let me come right out and say it is acute sensitiveness to national or religious origins, what we now call 'ethnic' origins. 

I mentioned it then in connection with the death of a famous American comedian, Willie Howard, and the point was that you could no more avoid talking about Willie Howard as a Jewish comedian and you could have talked about Harry Lauder and avoided mentioning that he came from Scotland. I was put on to this subject when I saw in the papers, and learned for the first time, that Willie Howard's real name was not Willie Howard. It was Willie Levkowitz. 

Born and grown to fame as a very funny man at a time when the American theatre, the vaudeville theatre especially, abounded with comedians who were frankly and joyfully Jewish or Irish or Italian or German or, as they call them in New York, Dutch – that is Deutsche – comedians. They were billed as such. An old-time vaudeville show was a racial free-for-all and to a new immigrant, the American vaudeville theatre was a place to get together with all the other immigrants, all barriers down, and stew in the broth of each other's failings and oddities. 

I noticed at the time that to have such an institution as the old vaudeville theatre, you have to start with the unspoken conviction that different countries have different and laughable peculiarities and the enjoyment of these peculiarities by a typically polyglot New York or Chicago or Pittsburgh audience could be taken for granted as late as the Second World War. 

Yet even four years later, in 1949, I noticed that there had been a subtle, yet radical change. There was, I remember, a precious talent, a man named Lou Holtz who told stories mostly about his friend Sam Lapidus. Holtz's whole repertoire was about different sorts of New York Jews and he kept them apart, or had them collide in many a funny story told in the separate accents of Brooklyn, the Bronx, the Lower East side, the Upper West side. And when television came in, Lou Holtz was one of the first talents to be exposed on it. And then a sad, a sinister thing happened. He got first a dribble, then a flood of letters protesting that he was anti-Semitic. Luckily he'd saved his money and he retired in comfort and disgust. 

Before I go on, I can hear somebody asking the sensible question, 'If Willie Howard flourished in the day of the accepted, what I've called racial, free-for-all, why did he change his name from Levkowitz?' It's a good question. Well, the answer is a riddle wrapped in an irony. Outside the vaudeville houses and the comic strips, there was no such racial free-for-all. New York’s politics might be run mainly by an astute alliance of Jews and Irish Catholics but New York's social tone was set by the WASPs – by White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants – and social tone controlled such things as the opera, as the sale and renting of property, as the careful preservation ('zoning' was the delicate word they used) of certain areas of the town as high class. 

Long after I first came to this country, as late I should guess as the 1940s, you could see in abundance beautifully painted signs outside blocks of flats and houses for rent and after some such announcement as '4 & 5 Room Apartments For Rent – Enquire Within or Phone Trebling & Sanderson, agents' there would be printed in bold letters the single word 'Restricted.' The word 'restricted' had only one meaning. It meant 'no Jews need apply' and none did. 

Anti-Semitism was not proclaimed from the housetops but it was accepted, not least by Jews, as a fact of life that had to be put up with. Today no real estate agent would dare advertise on a sign or in a newspaper the word 'restricted.' If he did, he'd be hauled up if not on New York's Fair Employment Act which was passed in the late 1940s, then certainly on the Supreme Court's landmark decision of 1954 on the necessity of integration for, although that decision was handed down on behalf of a little black girl who had to walk a mile to a segregated school, it has since provoked a rush of laws forbidding discrimination of any sort on account of sex, race or religion. 

But way back in the dark days of the word 'restricted', it was the general and uncomfortable understanding of the whole country, not merely New York, that a name which was conspicuously Jewish or otherwise immigrant was too much of a social burden for an entertainer, especially, to bear. And even in Hollywood, or I should say in Hollywood more than anywhere in the old days and into the, possibly the last decade, Jewish producers were the first to sign up a promising actor and actress and promptly rechristen them with a WASP name. I could go on to the end of this talk reciting all the famous movie stars whose real names were 'bleached' into Anglo-Saxon. And not only Jewish names but the names of anyone who was plainly the offspring of a Central European family. 

In other words, the irony lies in the fact that when anti-Semitism was most flagrant and practised by the reigning WASPs, Jews could earn a rich living being funny as Jews in their own neighbourhoods, but if they wanted national acceptance, they changed their name and dropped their Jewish material. And today when anti-Semitism is legally prohibited and socially disreputable among all but a tiny, inbred and contemptible county sort of society, today Jews can no longer rollick on stage or in print about the foibles and fun of their race. Of course the jokes are still there but they're circulated enthusiastically among Jews themselves in private and furtively among gentiles. 

This new restraint or self-censorship works, I ought to say, for all the ethnic groups. There's been, for instance, in the past year or two a whole repertory of Polish jokes and (there are) I suppose other nations, other victims, the point of which is always the implication that Poles are abysmally stupid. But these jokes lead an underground life. You tell them at your peril in a bar in Pittsburgh or down in the potato country at the end of Long Island where I live and where, for several years, the champion of my golf club was one Steve Dabrowski, where the village grocer is Mr Riscow, the plumber Mr Stepnowski – Polish Catholics, all. 

Well, I leave it to the sociologists, professional or armchair, to explain why the new touchiness set in, exactly when the anti-Semitic barriers were crumbling. The more liberal we became about assuming the social equality of all Americans, the more tender became the susceptibilities of every ethnic group. As an old jazz man, I noticed that the lyrics of a lot of famous songs were being changed for public performance. Jerome Kern's noble hero in 'Showboat' used to sing, 'The niggers all work on the Mississippi, the niggers all work while white folks play' but then, and now, he sings, 'Some folk work on the Mississippi, while some folk play.' And Basin Street is no longer the place where 'the dark and the white folks meet' but the place where all the 'elite' meet. 

This seemed silly and trivial at the time but just how far it was going didn't strike me until my daughter applied for a part in her school play. She didn't expect to get very far but she got the main part. The school was about 95 per cent Jewish and the play was 'The Merchant of Venice'. Plainly the school decided it would be offensive to have a Jewish girl play Shylock, but someone named Cooke was just right. 

Well, as I said at the beginning and in spite of the fact that New York must have many thousands of Jews who are non-practising in a religious sense, there are after all two million Jews in this city and for the week of meditation and prayer and up to the Day of Atonement, I should guess that most of them, maybe for the only time in the year, go to the synagogue and much of the time they don't flaunt their disbelief on the streets.

And, for the rest of us, the splendid music comes pouring in over the radio and from the synagogues and while there are fewer Jewish jokes on the radio or on the stage, there are no buildings in New York defaced by the short, steely word 'restricted.' 

And it doesn't seem too much of a price to pay for a new convention of public decency.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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