Jewish Humor in American Popular Culture Joseph Dorinson Foreword by Joseph Boskin Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-9482-8Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-2056-5photos, notes, bibliography, indexsoftcover (6 x 9) 2015 Buy From McFarland Books Or Buy On Amazon Price: $40.00 About the BookJewish humor, with its rational skepticism and cutting social criticism, permeates American popular culture. Scholars of humor—from Sigmund Freud to Woody Allen—have studied the essence of the Jewish joke, at once a defense mechanism against a… Read More »Kvetching and Shpritzing
When Walter O’Malley—author Pete Hamill’s choice for the third most evil man in history—pulled the Dodgers out of Brooklyn with the bibulous Horace Stoneham in tow, this baseball tycoon drove a dagger deep into our city’s heart. Our borough minus the Dodgers is like Romeo bereft of Juliet, corned beef on white bread, Abbott less Costello, and Steve Lawrence sans Edye Gorme. As the poet wrote: “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Who, besides a brainless Supreme Court, argued that baseball was a sport, not a business?
Since 1957, despite the resurgence of Yankee power and the birth of the Mets, there has been a void in New York, New York. That vacuum, which Mother Nature abhors, will be filled when HBO Productions in conjunction with major league baseball airs a documentary film, Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush. This wonderful voyage back in time to our “Glory Days” (the title and the subject of an excellent exhibit that once “played” at the Museum of the City of New York as well) under the aegis of executive producers, Ross Greenburg and Rich Bernstein with able assistance from Brian Hyland, Amani Martin, Ezra Edelman, and Caroline Waterlow evokes another time and a revered place in New York City, no, American history.
Narrated by Liev Schreiber, currently starring in Donovan, this engrossing film opens with a splendid view of Brooklyn’s Great Bridge, which couples art and technology in high fidelity. The camera eye fixes on Manhattan; then retreats into Brooklyn, where the film’s principal narrative charts the heroic odyssey of Jack Roosevelt Robinson and his pilgrim’s progress into mainstream America by way of Brooklyn. Fortified with “talking head” testimony from Dodger teammates Duke Snider, Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine, Clem Labine, and Ralph Branca and enriched by the recollections of Rachel Robinson, his beautiful, articulate, and courageous wife, the film features amazing footage of this “American Samurai,” re: David Halberstam, in action. Before Jackie’s advent into major league baseball, black athletes projected either brute force: Jack Johnson and Joe Louis or gifted clowns like the Harlem Globetrotters. Black stereotypes pervaded film, radio, and graphic arts.
Our house, the Bible teaches, is one of many mansions. Frank Sinatra whose 100th birthday we celebrate this Saturday, December 12, 2015 began his great ascent to the room at the top in 1935 when he broke into show business on Major Bowes’s Amateur Hour. His rise, over Judy Garland’s rainbow, personifies the American Dream. His achievements have earned this self-styled saloon singer a permanent perch among the icons in our pantheon. Most studies of Sinatra, however, pay little attention to his politics; hence this effort to shed some light on a neglected but important subject.
Sinatra’s political education started at home in Hoboken, New Jersey where his mother, Dolly Graventi Sinatra functioned as a ward-heeler. In return for favors extended to recent immigrants who flocked to Hudson County, she garnered votes for the Democratic machine. Realizing that politics is the art of accommodation, Dolly filled a vacuum that our Founding Fathers and their progressive children in rigid deference to their waspish values had created. Thus, when semi-literate indigent newcomers needed coal to heat their cold-water flats, turkeys to feed their hungry children at Thanksgiving or jobs for family survival they turned to the urban bosses. High-minded sentiment and lofty sermons on rugged individualism, moral responsibility and civic duty did not suffice. Following in the wake of Irish politicians, Dolly Sinatra was always there: to help as well as to reap rewards. She got her husband Marty a job in the local fire department and opened a saloon during the era of prohibition. And in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, she bought a four-story house.
by Joe Dorinson In song, Bob Dylan declared: “The times–they are [were] a-changing.” Joe Louis fell out of favor in the 1960s, a turbulent period of jangling discord and generational conflict. Images collided in this decade: love beads, miniskirts, Beatlemania, bombing in Birmingham, marching to Selma, setting sun in Alabama; rising sun in Japan. Out of these cultural collisions came a hero who was both black and beautiful: Cassius Clay.… Read More »Muhammad Ali
By Joe Dorinson The recent death of civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg as reported in the New York Times (Obit, Oct. 13, 2016) recalls the once close, though later frayed link between American Jews and African-Americans in the common quest for social justice. After our successful second induction ceremony into the BJHI Hall of Fame, attention must be paid to this one-time Brooklyn resident for posthumous induction for his exemplary… Read More »Samuel Leibowitz: A Mentsch for All Seasons
By Joe Dorinson Contact with Henry Foner, an outstanding union leader, political activist, and talented musician, resulted from my bid to honor Jackie Robinson with a major conference at LIU Brooklyn, then my home away from home for thirty years. With a modest budget, I tried to get a galaxy of baseball luminaries, journalists, writers, broadcasters, historians, students, and fans to attend. Someone—I forget who—suggested that I contact Henry Foner.… Read More »In Remembrance of Henry Foner
Reviewed by Joseph Dorinson, Professor, Department of History, Long Island University Brooklyn 19 April 2018 Charley Rosen’s book, The Chosen Game: A Jewish Basketball History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017) is a welcome addition to sport literature. It begins with a quotation from an African-American former pro player in 2014: “The Jews were the first ethnic group to embrace basketball, and it’s still a Jewish game.” Running with this salient theme,… Read More »The Chosen Game
Jackie Robinson Revisited The Jackie Robinson saga, biographer Jules Tygiel insisted before his untimely death in 2008, was comparable to an Easter/Passover service that invites public recollection every year. We must never forget what our country once represented and what it became thanks to the heroic life of Jack Roosevelt Robinson. Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway defined a hero as one who demonstrates “grace under pressure.” Our concept of heroism with… Read More »Jackie Robinson Revisited
Joe’s Corner – Jews & Comedy Joe’s Corner – Jews and Comedy Historian Sarina Roffe interviews Joseph Dorinson about Jews in comedy and their shared Brooklyn roots.
