Everything about Secular Jewish Culture totally explained
Secular Jewish culture embraces several related phenomena; above all, it's the
culture of
secular communities of
Jewish people, but it can also include the cultural contributions of individuals who identify as secular Jews, or even those of religious Jews working in cultural areas not generally considered to be connected to
religion.
The word
secular in
secular Jewish culture, therefore, refers
not to the type of Jew but rather to the type of culture. For example, religiously observant
Orthodox Jews who write literature and music or produce films with non-religious themes are participating in secular Jewish culture, even if they're not secular themselves.
However, the
Jewish people is an
ethnoreligious community rather than solely a religious grouping, while religiously,
Judaism guides its adherents in both practice and belief so that it has been called not only a religion, but also a "way of life". This makes it difficult to draw a clear distinction between the cultural production of members of the Jewish people, and culture that's specifically Jewish. Furthermore, not all individuals or all cultural phenomena can be easily classified as either "secular" or "religious", a distinction native to European Enlightenment thinking and foreign to most of the history of non-European Jews.
Throughout history, in eras and places as diverse as the ancient
Hellenic world, in
Europe before and after the
Age of Enlightenment, in
Islamic Spain and Portugal, in
North Africa and the
Middle East, in
India and
China, and in the contemporary
United States and
Israel, Jewish communities have seen the development of cultural phenomena that are in some sense characteristically Jewish without being at all specifically religious. Some factors in this come from within Judaism, others from the interaction of Jews with others around them, and others from the inner social and cultural dynamics of the community, as opposed to religion itself. This phenomenon has led to considerably different Jewish cultures unique to their own communities, each as authentically Jewish as the next.
Origins of secular Jewish culture
For at least 2,000 years, there hasn't been a unity of Jewish culture. Jews during this period were always geographically dispersed (see
Jewish diaspora), so that by the 19th century the
Ashkenazi Jews were mainly in Europe, especially
Eastern Europe; the
Sephardi Jews were largely spread among various communities in North Africa, Turkey, and various smaller communities in a diverse range of other locations;
Mizrahi Jews were primarily spread around the
Arab world; and other populations of Jews were scattered in such places as
Ethiopia the
Caucasus, and
India. (See
Jewish ethnic divisions.)
Although there was a high degree of communication and traffic between these communities — many Sephardic exiles blended into the Central European Ashkenazi community following the
Spanish Inquisition; many Ashkenazim migrated to the Middle East, giving rise to the characteristic Syrian-Jewish family name "Ashkenazi"; Iraqi-Jewish traders formed a distinct Jewish community in India; and so forth — many of these populations were cut off to some degree from the surrounding cultures by
ghettoization, by
Muslim laws of
dhimma, and other circumstances.
By 1931, shortly before the
Holocaust, 92% of the world's Jewish population was Ashkenazi in origin, including the vast majority of European and of English-speaking Jews. Moreover, secularism as a concept was largely a European idea, and a series of movements in Europe militated for a new, heretofore unheard-of concept called "secular Judaism". For these reasons, much of what is thought of by English-speakers and, to a lesser extent, by non-English-speaking Europeans as "secular Jewish culture" is, in essence, the Jewish culture of Central and Eastern Europe, and its subsequent development in
North America.
Medieval Jewish communities in Eastern Europe continued to display distinct cultural traits over the centuries. Despite the universalist leanings of the
Enlightenment (and its echo within Judaism in the
Haskalah movement), many
Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe continued to see themselves as forming a distinct national group —
" 'am yehudi", from the Biblical Hebrew — but, adapting this idea to European Enlightenment values, they assimilated the concept as that of an ethnic group whose identity didn't depend on religion, which under Enlightenment thinking fell under a separate category.
Constanin Măciucă writes of "a differentiated but not isolated Jewish spirit" permeating the culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews. This was only intensified as the rise of
Romanticism amplified the sense of
national identity across Europe generally. Thus, for example,
Bund members — that is, members of the
General Jewish Labor Union in the late
19th and early
20th centuries — were generally non-religious, and one of the historical leaders of the
Bund was the child of converts to
Christianity, though not a practising or believing Christian himself.
The
Haskalah combined with the
Jewish Emancipation movement under way in Central and Western Europe to create an opportunity for Jews to enter secular society. At the same time,
pogroms in Eastern Europe provoked a surge of migration, in large part to the
United States, where some 2 million Jewish immigrants resettled between 1880 and 1920. During the
1940s, the Holocaust uprooted and destroyed most of the European Jewish population. This, in combination with the
creation of the State of Israel and the consequent
Jewish exodus from Arab lands, resulted in a further geographic shift.
Defining secular culture among those who practice traditional Judaism is difficult, because the entire culture is, by definition, entwined with religious traditions: the idea of separate ethnic and religious identity is foreign to the Hebrew tradition of an
" 'am yisrael". (This is particularly true for
Orthodox Judaism.)
Gary Tobin, head of the
Institute for Jewish and Community Research, said of traditional Jewish culture:
The dichotomy between religion and culture doesn’t really exist. Every religious attribute is filled with culture; every cultural act filled with religiosity. Synagogues themselves are great centers of Jewish culture. After all, what is life really about? Food, relationships, enrichment hellip; So is Jewish life. So many of our traditions inherently contain aspects of culture. Look at the Passover Seder — it’s essentially great theater. Jewish education and religiosity bereft of culture isn't as interesting.
Yaakov Malkin, Professor of Aesthetics and Rhetoric at
Tel Aviv University and the founder and academic director of
Meitar College for Judaism as Culture(External Link
) in Jerusalem, writes:
Today very many secular Jews take part in Jewish cultural activities, such as celebrating Jewish holidays as historical and nature festivals, imbued with new content and form, or marking life-cycle events such as birth, bar/bat mitzvah, marriage, and mourning in a secular fashion. They come together to study topics pertaining to Jewish culture and its relation to other cultures, in havurot, cultural associations, and secular synagogues, and they participate in public and political action co-ordinated by secular Jewish movements, such as the former movement to free Soviet Jews, and movements to combat pogroms, discrimination, and religious coercion. Jewish secular humanistic education inculcates universal moral values through classic Jewish and world literature and through organizations for social change that aspire to ideals of justice and charity.
Today, in North America, the secular and cultural Jewish movements are divided into three umbrella organizations: the
Society for Humanistic Judaism (SHJ), the
Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations (CSJO), and
Workmen's Circle.
Languages
Literary and theatrical expressions of secular Jewish culture may be in specifically Jewish languages such as
Hebrew,
Yiddish or
Ladino, or it may be in the language of the surrounding cultures, such as
English or
German. Secular literature and theater in Yiddish largely began in the 19th century and was in decline by the middle of the 20th century. The revival of Hebrew beyond its use in the liturgy is largely an early 20th-century phenomenon, and is closely associated with
Zionism. Generally, whether a Jewish community will speak a Jewish or non-Jewish language as its main vehicle of
discourse is dependent on how isolated or assimilated that community is. For example, the Jews in the
shtetls of
Poland and the
Lower East Side of
New York (during the early
20th century) spoke
Yiddish at most times, while assimilated Jews in
Germany during the
19th century or the
United States today would or do speak
German or
English.
Politics and morals
» See main article Jewish political movements.
Even in religious Judaism there's much room for a range of political or moral views; this is only more so for secular Jews. However, even Jewish secular culture is often strongly influenced by moral beliefs deriving from Jewish scripture and tradition. In recent centuries, Jews in Europe and the Americas have traditionally tended towards the
political left, and played key roles in the birth of the
labor movement as well as
socialism. While Diaspora Jews have also been represented in the
conservative side of the political spectrum, even politically conservative Jews have tended to support
pluralism more consistently than many other elements of the
political right. Some scholars attribute this to the fact that Jews are not expected to
proselytize, and as a result don't expect a single world-state, which differs from the beliefs of many religions, such as the
Roman Catholic and
Islamic traditions; rather, since in Jewish theology the religions of most
nations are respected, there was never any perceived reason to convert others. This lack of a universalizing religion is combined with the fact that most Jews live as minorities in their countries, and that no central Jewish religious authority has existed for over 2,000 years.
(See also list of Jews in politics, which illustrates the diversity of Jewish political thought and of the roles Jews have played in politics.)
"Jewish" professions
Typically, Jews were an agricultural people, comprising mostly farmers. In fact, farming provides the source of much Jewish culture today, and was revived during the restoration of
Zionism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, in the
Middle Ages, European laws prevented Jews from owning land and gave them powerful incentive to go into other professions that Europeans were not wiling to do. A major aspect of this was the strong social stigma against lending money and charging interest among the Christian majority, commonly decried as "usury". As a modern system of capital was developing, loans became necessary. As lending money (and more broadly, the modern systems of finance) began to develop, Jews (as non-Catholics, not being bound by the "usury" stigma) were able to gain a foothold by providing these services. As a result, in the modern world, some professions have traditionally been considered particularly "Jewish." These include banking and finance, law, medicine, science, and academia.
See also Court Jew.
Banking and finance
» See also List of Jewish American businesspeople
In most of Europe up until the late 18th century, and in some places to an even later date, Jews were prohibited by Roman Catholic governments (and others) from owning land. On the other hand, the Church, because of a number of Bible verses forbidding
usury, declared that charging any
interest was against the divine law, and this prevented any mercantile use of
capital by pious Christians. As the
Canon law didn't apply to Jews, they were not liable to the ecclesiastical punishments which were placed upon
usurers by the
popes. Christian rulers gradually saw the advantage of having a class of men like the Jews who could supply capital for their use without being liable to
excommunication, and the money trade of western Europe by this means fell into the hands of the Jews. However, in almost every instance where large amounts were acquired by Jews through banking transactions the property thus acquired fell either during their life or upon their death into the hands of the king. This happened to
Aaron of Lincoln in
England,
Ezmel de Ablitas in
Navarre, Heliot de Vesoul in
Provence,
Benveniste de Porta in
Aragon, etc. It was for this reason indeed that the kings supported the Jews, and even objected to their becoming Christians, because in that case they couldn't have forced from them money won by usury. Thus both in England and in
France the kings demanded to be compensated for every Jew converted. The result was the stereotypical Jewish role as bankers and merchants.
Medicine, science, and academia
Also, the strong Jewish tradition of religious scholarship often left Jews well prepared for secular scholarship, although in some times and places this was countered by Jews being banned from studying at
universities, or admitted only in limited numbers (see
Jewish quota). In medieval and early modern times, Jews were disproportionately represented among court physicians. Even into recent times Jews were little represented in the land-holding classes, but far better represented in academia, the learned professions, finance and commerce. The strong representation of Jews in science and academia is represented in the fact that at least 167 Jews and persons of
half-Jewish ancestry have been awarded the
Nobel Prize, accounting for 22% of all individual recipients worldwide between 1901 and 2004. In addition, of
TIME magazine's 100 most influential people of the 20th century, fourteen persons listed are either of Jewish ancestry or have converted to Judaism.
Literary and artistic culture
In some places where there have been relatively high concentrations of Jews, distinct secular Jewish subcultures have arisen. For example, ethnic Jews formed an enormous proportion of the literary and artistic life of
Vienna,
Austria at the end of the 19th century, or of
New York City 50 years later (and
Los Angeles in the mid-late 20th century), and for the most part these were not particularly religious people. In general, however, Jewish artistic culture in various periods reflected the culture in which they lived.
Literature
» See main articles Yiddish literature, Ladino literature, Hebrew literature, Jewish American literature, English Jewish literature. Also see Jews in literature and journalism.
Jewish authors have both created a unique Jewish literature and contributed to the national literatures of many of the countries in which they live. Though not strictly secular, the Yiddish works of authors like
Sholem Aleichem (whose collected works amounted to 28 volumes) and
Isaac Bashevis Singer (winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize), form their own canon, focusing on the Jewish experience in both Eastern Europe, and in America. In the United States, Jewish writers like
Philip Roth,
Saul Bellow, and many others are considered among the greatest American authors, and incorporate a distinctly secular Jewish view into many of their works. The poetry of
Allen Ginsberg often touches on Jewish themes (notably the early autobiographical works such as
Howl and
Kaddish). Other famous Jewish authors that made contributions to world literature include
Heinrich Heine, German poet,
Isaac Babel, Russian author, and
Franz Kafka, of Prague.
In "Modern Judaism An Oxford Guide,"
Yaakov Malkin, Professor of Aesthetics and Rhetoric at
Tel Aviv University and the founder and academic director of
Meitar College for Judaism as Culture in Jerusalem, writes:
Secular Jewish culture embraces literary works that have stood the test of time as sources of aesthetic pleasure and ideas shared by Jews and non-Jews, works that live on beyond the immediate socio-cultural context within which they were created. They include the writings of such Jewish authors as Sholem Aleichem, Itzik Manger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, S.Y. Agnon, Isaac Babel, Martin Buber, Isaiah Berlin, Haim Nahman Bialik, Yehuda Amichai, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman. It boasts masterpieces that have had a considerable influence on all of western culture, Jewish culture included - works such as those of Heinrich Heine, Gustav Mahler, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Chagall, Jacob Epstein, Ben Shahn, Amedeo Modigliani, Franz Kafka, Max Reinhardt (Goldman), Ernst Lubitsch, and Woody Allen.
Theatre
Yiddish theatre
The
Ukrainian Jew
Abraham Goldfaden founded the first professional
Yiddish-language theatre troupe in
Iaşi,
Romania in 1876. The next year, his troupe achieved enormous success in
Bucharest. Within a decade, Goldfaden and others brought Yiddish theater to
Ukraine,
Russia,
Poland,
Germany,
New York City, and other cities with significant
Ashkenazic populations. Between 1890 and 1940, over a dozen Yiddish theatre groups existed in New York City alone, performing original
plays,
musicals, and Yiddish translations of theatrical works and
opera. Perhaps the most famous of Yiddish-language plays is
The Dybbuk (1919) by
S. Ansky.
Yiddish theater in New York in the early 20th Century rivalled English-language theater in quantity and often surpassed it in quality. A 1925
New York Times article remarks, "…Yiddish theater… is now a stable American institution and no longer dependent on immigration from Eastern Europe. People who can neither speak nor write Yiddish attend Yiddish stage performances and pay
Broadway prices on
Second Avenue." This article also mentions other aspects of a New York Jewish cultural life "in full flower" at that time, among them the fact that the extensive New York Yiddish-language press of the time included seven daily newspapers.
In fact, however, the next generation of American Jews spoke mainly English to the exclusion of Yiddish; they brought the artistic energy of Yiddish theater into the American theatrical mainstream, but usually in a less specifically Jewish form.
Yiddish theater, most notably
Moscow State Jewish Theater directed by
Solomon Mikhoels, also played a prominent role in the arts scene of the
Soviet Union until Stalin's 1948 reversal in government policy toward the Jews.
(See Rootless cosmopolitan, Night of the Murdered Poets)
Mentorship
Yiddish theatre fed into the mainstream of American stage and film acting: the
method acting of
Konstantin Stanislavski found its way to America through
Jacob Adler; Adler's daughter
Stella and son
Luther were instrumental in the
Group Theatre, two of whose three founders were also Jews. The list of Stella Adler's and Group Theatre founder
Lee Strasberg's students, mostly Gentiles, reads like a
Who's Who of American acting:
Marlon Brando,
Jill Clayburgh,
James Dean,
Robert DeNiro,
Paul Newman,
Jack Nicholson,
Al Pacino, and
Eva Marie Saint, to name just a few. Similarly, what Jewish composer
John Kander calls an "interesting phenomenon that
Broadway musical composers like
Jerome Kern,
George Gershwin and
Marc Blitzstein are
predominantly Jewish" comes from "the tradition established from New York's Yiddish theater."
American English-language theatre
» See also List of Jewish American musicals writers, List of Jewish Americans in theatre, List of Jewish American playwrights.
Not only have "
Jewish composers and lyricists always dominated
Broadway musicals" in
New York City, but they were instrumental in the creation and development of
genre of
musical theatre and earlier forms of theatrical entertainment, as well as contributing to non-musical theatre in the United States. According to
University of Toronto English professor Andrea Most,
Almost all the American musicals in the 20th century were written by Jews and... the most compelling reason for this is that the musical offers a lot of strategies for exploring and performing new identities theatrically… the musical theater exists because of the unique historical situation of the Jews who created it"
Brandeis University Professor Stephen J. Whitfield has commented that "More so than behind the screen, the talent behind the stage was for over half a century virtually the monopoly of one ethnic group. That is... [a] feature which locates Broadway at the center of Jewish culture".
New York University Professor Laurence Maslon says that "There would be no American musical without Jews… Their influence is corollary to the influence of black musicians on jazz; there were as many Jews involved in the form". Other writers, such as Jerome Caryn, have noted that musical theatre and other forms of American entertainment are uniquely indebted to the contributions of Jewish-Americans, since "there might not have been a modern Broadway without the "Asiatic horde" of
comedians, gossip columnists,
songwriters, and singers that grew out of the
ghetto, whether it was on the
Lower East Side,
Harlem (a Jewish ghetto before it was a black one),
Newark, or
Washington, DC." Likewise, in the analysis of Aaron Kula, director of The Klezmer Company,
"…the Jewish experience has always been best expressed by music, and Broadway has always been an integral part of the Jewish-American experience… The difference is that one can expand the definition of "Jewish Broadway" to include an interdisciplinary roadway with a wide range of artistic activities packed onto one avenue--theatre, opera, symphony, ballet, publishing companies, choirs, synagogues and more. This vibrant landscape reflects the life, times and creative output of the Jewish-American artist".
In the 19th and early 20th centuries the European
operetta, a precursor the musical, often featured the work of Jewish composers such as
Paul Abraham,
Leo Ascher,
Edmund Eysler,
Leo Fall,
Bruno Granichstaedten,
Jacques Offenbach,
Emmerich Kalman,
Sigmund Romberg,
Oscar Straus and
Rudolf Friml; the latter four eventually moved to the United States and produced their works on the New York stage. One of the
librettists for
Bizet's
Carmen (not an operetta proper but rather a work of the earlier
opera comique form) was the Jewish
Ludovic Halévy, niece of composer
Fromental Halévy (Bizet himself wasn't Jewish but he married the elder Halevy's daughter, many have suspected that he was the descendant of Jewish converts to Christianity, and others have noticed Jewish-sounding intervals in his music.) The Viennese librettist Victor Leon summarized the connection of Jewish composers and writers with the form of operetta: "The audience for operetta wants to laugh beneath tears—and that's exactly what Jews have been doing for the last two thousand years since the destruction of Jerusalem". Another factor in the evolution of musical theatre was
vaudeville, and during the early 20th century the form was explored and expanded by Jewish comedians and actors such as
Jack Benny,
Fanny Brice,
Eddie Cantor,
The Marx Brothers,
Anna Held,
Al Jolson,
Molly Picon,
Sophie Tucker and
Ed Wynn. During the period when Broadway was monopolized by
revues and similar entertainments, Jewish producer
Florenz Ziegfeld dominated the theatrical scene with his
Follies.
By 1910 Jews (the vast majority of them immigrants from
Eastern Europe) already composed a quarter of the population of
New York City, and almost immediately Jewish artists and intellectuals began to show their influence on the cultural life of that city, and through time, the country as a whole. Likewise, while the modern musical can best be described as a fusion of operetta, earlier American entertainment and
African-American culture and music, as well as Jewish culture and music, the actual authors of the first "book musicals" were the Jewish
Jerome Kern,
Oscar Hammerstein II,
George and
Ira Gershwin,
George S. Kaufman and
Morrie Ryskind. From that time until the 1980s a vast majority of successful musical theatre composers, lyricists, and book-writers were Jewish (a notable exception is the Protestant
Cole Porter, who acknowledged that the reason he was so successful on Broadway was that he wrote what he called "Jewish music").
Rodgers and Hammerstein,
Frank Loesser,
Lerner and Loewe,
Stephen Sondheim,
Leonard Bernstein,
Stephen Schwartz,
Kander and Ebb and dozens of others during the
"Golden Age" of musical theatre were Jewish. Since the
Tony Award for Best Original Score was instituted in 1947, approximately 70% of nominated scores and 60% of winning scores were by Jewish composers. Of successful British and French musical writers both in the
West End and Broadway,
Claude-Michel Schönberg and
Lionel Bart are Jewish, among others.
One explanation of the affinity of Jewish composers and playwrights to the musical is that "traditional
Jewish religious music was most often led by a single singer, a
cantor while
Christians emphasize choral singing."
Many of these writers used the musical to explore issues relating to assimilation, the acceptance of the outsider in society, the racial situation in the United States, the overcoming of obstacles through perseverance, and other topics pertinent to Jewish Americans and Western Jews in general, often using subtle and disguised stories to get this point across. For example, Kern, Rodgers, Hammerstein, the Gershwins,
Harold Arlen and
Yip Harburg wrote musicals and operas aiming to normalize societal toleration of minorities and urging racial harmony; these works included
Show Boat,
Porgy and Bess,
Finian's Rainbow,
South Pacific and the
The King and I. Towards the end of Golden Age, writers also began to openly and overtly tackle Jewish subjects and issues, such as
Fiddler on the Roof and
Rags; Bart's
Blitz! also tackles relations between Jews and Gentiles.
Jason Robert Brown and
Alfred Uhry's
Parade is a sensitive exploration of both
anti-Semitism and historical American
racism. The original concept that became
West Side Story was set in the
Lower East Side during Easter-Passover celebrations; the rival gangs were to be Jewish and
Italian Catholic.
The ranks of prominent Jewish producers, directors, designers and performers include
Boris Aronson,
David Belasco,
Joel Grey, the Minskoff family,
Zero Mostel,
Joseph Papp,
Mandy Patinkin, the Nederlander family,
Harold Prince,
Max Reinhardt,
Jerome Robbins, the
Shubert family and
Julie Taymor. Jewish playwrights have also contributed to non-musical drama and theatre, both Broadway and regional.
Edna Ferber,
Moss Hart,
Lillian Hellman,
Arthur Miller and
Neil Simon are only some of the prominent Jewish playwrights in American theatrical history. Approximately 21% of the plays and musicals that have won the
Pulitzer Prize for Drama were written and composed by Jewish Americans.
European theatre
From their
Emancipation to
World War II, Jews were very active and sometimes even dominant in certain forms of
European theatre, and after the
Holocaust many Jews continued to that cultural form. For example, in pre-Nazi Germany, where
Nietzsche asked "What good actor of today isn't Jewish?", acting, directing and writing positions were often filled by Jews; controversial psychologist
Kevin B. MacDonald has reported that in
Berlin 80% of
theatrical directors were Jewish and 75% of plays produced were by Jewish playwrights. "In Imperial Berlin, Jewish artists could be found in the forefront of the performing arts, from high drama to more popular forms like
cabaret and
revue, and eventually
film. Jewish audiences patronized innovative theater, regardless of whether they approved of what they saw." The British historian
Paul Johnson, commenting on Jewish contributions to European culture at the
fin de siècle, writes that
The area where Jewish influence was strongest was the theatre, especially in Berlin. Playwrights like Carl Sternheim, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Toller, Erwin Piscator, Walter Hasenclever, Ferenc Molnar and Carl Zuckmayer, and influential producers like Max Reinhardt, appeared at times to dominate the stage, which tended to be modishly left-wing, pro-republican, experimental and sexually daring. But it was certainly not revolutionary, and it was cosmopolitan rather than Jewish.
Jews also made similar, if not as massive, contributions to theatre and drama in Austria, Britain, France, and Russia (in the national languages of those countries). Jews in Vienna, Paris and German cities found
cabaret both a popular and effective means of expression, as German cabaret in the
Weimar Republic "was mostly a Jewish art form". The involvement of Jews in Central European theatre was halted during the rise of the Nazis and the purging of Jews from cultural posts, though many emigrated to
Western Europe or the
United States and continued working there.
Hebrew and Israeli theatre
The earliest known
Hebrew language drama was written around
1550 by a
Jewish-Italian writer from
Mantua. A few works were written by
rabbis and
Kabbalists in 17th century
Amsterdam, where Jews were relatively free from persecution and had both flourishing religious and secular Jewish cultures. All of these early Hebrew plays were about Biblical or mystical subjects, often in the form of
Talmudic
parables. During the post-Emancipation period in 19th century Europe, many Jews translated great
European plays such as those by
Shakespeare,
Molière and
Schiller, giving the characters Jewish names and transplanting the plot and setting to within a Jewish context.
Modern Hebrew theatre and drama, however, began with the development of
Modern Hebrew in Europe (the first Hebrew theatrical
professional performance was in
Moscow in
1918) and was "closely linked with the Jewish national renaissance movement of the twentieth century. The historical awareness and the sense of primacy which accompanied the Hebrew theatre in its early years dictated the course of its artistic and aesthetic development". These traditions were soon transplanted to
Israel. Playwrights such as
Natan Alterman,
Hayyim Nahman Bialik,
Leah Goldberg,
Ephraim Kishon,
Hanoch Levin,
Aharon Megged,
Moshe Shamir,
Avraham Shlonsky,
Yehoshua Sobol and
A. B. Yehoshua have written Hebrew-language plays. Themes that are obviously common in these works are the
Holocaust, the
Arab-Israeli conflict, the meaning of Jewishness, and contemporary secular-religious tensions within Jewish Israel. The most well-known Hebrew theatre company and Israel's national theatre is the
Habima (meaning "the stage" in Hebrew), which was formed in 1913 in
Lithuania, and re-established in 1917 in
Russia; another prominent Israeli theatre company is the
Cameri Theatre, which is "is Israel's first and leading repertory theatre".
Film
In the era when Yiddish theatre was still a major force in the world of theatre, over 100 films were made in Yiddish. Many are now lost. Prominent films included
Shulamith (1931), the first Yiddish musical on film
His Wife's Lover (1931),
A Daughter of Her People (1932), the anti-Nazi film
The Wandering Jew (1933),
The Yiddish King Lear (1934),
Shir Hashirim (1935), the biggest Yiddish film hit of all time
Yidl Mitn Fidl (1936),
Where Is My Child? (1937),
Green Fields (1937),
Dybuk (1937),
The Singing Blacksmith (1938),
Tevye (1939),
Mirele Efros (1939),
Lang ist der Weg (1948), and
God, Man and Devil (1950).
The roster of Jewish entrepreneurs in the English-language American film industry is legendary:
Samuel Goldwyn,
Louis B. Mayer,
the Warner Brothers,
David O. Selznick,
Marcus Loew, and
Adolph Zukor, to name just a few, and continuing into recent times with such industry giants as super-agent
Michael Ovitz,
Michael Eisner,
Lew Wasserman,
Jeffrey Katzenberg,
Steven Spielberg,
Stanley Kubrick, and
David Geffen. However, few of these brought a specifically Jewish sensibility either to the art of film or, with the sometime exception of Spielberg, to their choice of subject matter. A much more specifically Jewish sensibility can be seen in the films of the
Marx Brothers,
Mel Brooks, or
Woody Allen; other examples of specifically Jewish films from the Hollywood film industry are the
Barbra Streisand vehicle
Yentl (1983), or
John Frankenheimer's The Fixer (1968).
Jewish
film composers have also written scores to a large amount of the great films of the
20th century. Among the most prolific have been
Elmer Bernstein,
Danny Elfman,
Elliot Goldenthal,
Jerry Goldsmith,
Bernard Herrmann,
Alan Menken,
Alfred Newman,
Lalo Schifrin, the
Sherman Brothers,
Howard Shore,
Max Steiner, and
Dimitri Tiomkin.
Another notable Jewish music composer for entertainment media, specifically television, is the award winning
Stewart Levin.
Radio and television
The first radio chains, the
Radio Corporation of America and the
Columbia Broadcasting System, were created by the
Jewish-American David Sarnoff and
William S. Paley, respectively. These Jewish innovators were also among the first producers of
televisions, both black-and-white and
color. Among the Jewish immigrant communities of America there was also a thriving
Yiddish language radio, with its "golden age" from the
1930s to the
1950s.
Although there's little specifically Jewish television in the United States (
National Jewish Television, largely religious, broadcasts only three hours a week), Jews have been involved in American television from its earliest days. From
Sid Caesar and
Milton Berle to
Joan Rivers,
Gilda Radner, and
Andy Kaufman to
Billy Crystal to
Jerry Seinfeld, Jewish stand-up comedians have been icons of American television. Other Jews that held a prominent role in early radio and television were
Eddie Cantor,
Al Jolson,
Jack Benny,
Walter Winchell and
David Susskind. In the analysis of
Paul Johnson,
The Broadway musical, radio and TV were all examples of a fundamental principle in Jewish diaspora history: Jews opening up a completely new field in business and culture, a tabula rasa on which to set their mark, before other interests had a chance to take possession, erect guild or professional fortifications and deny them entry.
One of the first televised
situation comedies,
The Goldbergs was set in a specifically Jewish milieu in
the Bronx. While the overt Jewish milieu of
The Goldbergs was unusual for an American television series—one of the few other examples being
Brooklyn Bridge (1991–1993). Jews have also played an enormous role among the creators and writers of television comedies:
Woody Allen,
Mel Brooks,
Selma Diamond,
Larry Gelbart,
Carl Reiner, and
Neil Simon all wrote for Sid Caesar; Reiner's son
Rob Reiner worked with
Norman Lear on
All in the Family (which often engaged
anti-semitism and other issues of
prejudice);
Larry David and
Jerry Seinfeld created the hit sitcom
Seinfeld,
Lorne Michaels,
Al Franken,
Rosie Shuster, and
Alan Zweibel of
Saturday Night Live breathed new life into the
variety show in the 1970s.
Music
Jewish musical contributions also tend to reflect the cultures of the countries in which Jews live, the most notable examples being
classical and
popular music in the
United States and
Europe.
(See: Jews in Classical Music and Jews in Mainstream and Jazz). Some music, however, is unique to particular Jewish communities, such as
Israeli music,
Israeli Folk music,
Klezmer,
Sephardic and Ladino music, and
Mizrahi music.
Dance
Deriving from Biblical traditions, Jewish dance has long been used by Jews as a medium for the expression of joy and other communal emotions. Each
Jewish diasporic community developed its own dance traditions for wedding celebrations and other distinguished events. For
Ashkenazi Jews in
Eastern Europe, for example, dances, whose names corresponded to the different forms of
klezmer music that were played, were an obvious staple of the wedding ceremony of the
shtetl. Jewish dances both were influenced by surrounding
Gentile traditions and Jewish sources preserved over time. "Nevertheless the Jews practiced a corporeal expressive language that was highly differentiated from that of the non-Jewish peoples of their neighborhood, mainly through motions of the hands and arms, with more intricate legwork by the younger men." In general, however, in most religiously traditional communities, members of the opposite sex dancing together or dancing at times other than at these events was frowned upon.
Humor
Jewish humor is the long tradition of humor in Judaism dating back to the
Torah and the
Midrash, but generally refers to the more recent stream of verbal, self-deprecating and often anecdotal humor originating in Eastern Europe and which took root in the
United States over the last hundred years. Beginning with
vaudeville, and continuing through radio, stand-up, film, and television, a significant number of American comedians have been Jewish.
Visual arts
» See also List of Jews in the visual arts.
Compared to music or theater, there's less of a specifically Jewish tradition in the
visual arts. The most likely and accepted reason is that, as has been previously shown with Jewish music and literature, before
Emancipation Jewish culture was dominated by religious tradition. As most
Rabbinical authorities believed that the
Second Commandment prohibited much visual art that would qualify as "graven images", Jewish artists were relatively rare until they lived in assimilated European communities beginning in the late 18th century. It should be noted however, that despite fears by early religious communities of art being used for idolatrous purposes, Jewish
sacred art is recorded in the
Tanakh and extends throughout Jewish
Antiquity and the
Middle Ages. The
Tabernacle and the two
Temples in Jerusalem form the first known examples of "Jewish art". During the first centuries of the
Common Era, Jewish religious art also was created in regions surrounding the
Mediterranean such as
Syria and
Greece, including
frescoes on the walls of
synagogues, as well as the Jewish
catacombs in
Rome.
Middle Age Rabbinical and
Kabbalistic literature also contain textual and graphic art. However, in the
ghettos of Europe it was even illegal for Jews to create art. Johnson again summarizes this sudden change from small amount of participation of Jews in visual art (as in many other arts) to a large entry of them into this branch of European cultural life:
Again, the arrival of the Jewish artist was a strange phenomenon. It is true that, over the centuries, there had been many animals (though few humans) in Jewish art: lions on Torah curtains, owls on Judaic coins, animals on the Capernaum capitals, birds on the rim of the fountain-basis in the fifth-century Naro synagogue in Tunis; there were carved animals, too, on timber synagogues in eastern Europe - indeed the Jewish wood-carver was the prototype of the modern Jewish plastic artist. A book of Yiddish folk-ornament, printed at Vitebsk in 1920, was similar to Chagall's own bestiary. But the resistance of pious Jews to portraying the living image was still strong at the beginning of the twentieth century.
There were few Jewish
secular artists in Europe prior to the
Emancipation that spread throughout Europe with the Napoleonic conquests. There were exceptions, and
Salomon Adler was a prominent portrait painter in eighteenth century
Milan. The delay in participation in the visual arts parallels the lack of Jewish participation in European classical music until the nineteenth century, and which was progressively overcome with the rise of
Modernism in the 20th century. There were many Jewish artists in the
19th century, but Jewish artistic activity boomed during the end of
World War I. According to Nadine Nieszawer, "Until 1905, Jews were always plunged into their books but from the first Russian Revolution, they became emancipated, committed themselves in politics and became artists. A real Jewish cultural rebirth". Individual Jews figured in the modern artistic movements of Europe—
Art Deco (
Tamara de Lempicka),
Bauhaus (
Mordecai Ardon,
László Moholy-Nagy),
Constructivism (
Boris Aronson,
El Lissitzky),
Cubism (
Nathan Altman,
Jacques Lipchitz,
Louis Marcoussis,
Max Weber,
Ossip Zadkine Many
Russian Jews were prominent in the art of
scenic design, particularly the aforementioned Chagall and Aronson, as well as the revolutionary
Léon Bakst, who like the other two also painted. One
Mexican Jewish artist was
Pedro Friedeberg; it was once thought the
Frida Kahlo's father was Jewish, but historians have determined that he was not.
Gustav Klimt wasn't Jewish, but nearly all of his patrons and several of his models were. Among major artists Chagall may be the most specifically Jewish in his themes. But as art fades into
graphic design, Jewish names and themes become more prominent:
Leonard Baskin,
Al Hirschfeld,
Ben Shahn,
Art Spiegelman and
Saul Steinberg. And in the
Golden and
Silver ages of American comic books, the Jewish role was overwhelming:
Joe Shuster and
Jerry Siegel, creators of
Superman, were Jewish, as were
Bob Kane (
né Robert Cohen),
Will Eisner,
Martin Goodman,
Joe Simon,
Jack Kirby, and
Stan Lee of
Marvel Comics; and
William Gaines and
Harvey Kurtzman, founders of
Mad, to name only a small sample. Many of those involved in the later ages of comics are also Jewish, such as
Julius Schwartz,
Jenette Kahn,
Len Wein,
Peter David,
Neil Gaiman, and
Brian Michael Bendis.
Food
Jewish
cooking combines the food of many cultures in which Jews have traveled, including Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Spanish, German and Eastern European styles of cooking, all influenced by the need for food to be
kosher. Thus, "Jewish" foods like
hummus,
stuffed cabbage, and
blintzes all come from various other cultures. The amalgam of these foods, plus uniquely Jewish contributions like
bagels,
tzimmis,
cholent,
gefilte fish and
matzah balls, make up Jewish cuisine.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Secular Jewish Culture'.
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