Then, there was the Jewish audience, whose appetite for Hebrew comedy was voracious. The irony was noted by a rabbi, writing in 1909 in Houston’s Jewish Herald newspaper: “If we could only induce our theater-loving co-religionists to boycott those houses in which their brethren are held up to ridicule, the obnoxious stage Jew would soon become a thing of the past. Unfortunately there is a class of Jew which actively encourages this infamy, and all protests by societies will be of no avail as long as Jews may still be found who actually enjoy seeing their people held up to ridicule.” An editorial published the following year in the American Israelite echoed the sentiment: “In the ultimate analysis, the Jews themselves are responsible for the caricaturing stage Jew. . . . There are very few of the theaters that could exist were it not for the Jews.”
Jewface, in other words, was a different kind of minstrelsy: it was coarse ethnic caricature that functioned as ethnic in-group amusement. Why did Jews embrace entertainment that slandered them? For one thing, Hebrew comedy performed a nifty undercover operation. The Yiddish cadences that performers used in vaudeville bits, the snatches of cantorial music that composers smuggled into dialect song parodies—for Jewish audiences, these interpolations offered a frisson, the thrill of watching a parochial tribal thing become a mainstream pop thing. Yiddishkeit rode the night train into American culture.
But the deeper appeal of Jewface lay in the historical moment that produced it. In a discussion of Jewish humor, the folklore scholar Dan Ben-Amos argues that dialect jokes are a “form of verbal instrument which functions in the very process of assimilation and integration into the new society.” This insight applies to turn-of-the-century Jewface. To revel in comedy routines that mocked newcomers was to assert your distance from the immigrant experience—to assume the subject position of an American, scoffing at the Old World other. If you laughed at the misadventures of Abie and Sadie Cohen, it meant that you weren’t them.
As the years passed, melting-pot-era anxieties faded. Yet Jewface never vanished. It has percolated through pop culture for decades, providing a kind of running commentary on Jewish assimilation and alienation—cheeky midrash on changing identity. Jewface was kept alive, through the mid-century, by standup comics and novelty-song specialists in Borscht Belt resorts and on the Jewish cruise-ship circuit, communal safe spaces where the food was kosher and the punch lines were Yinglish. It surfaced, in altered form, in “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964), whose nostalgic vision of shtetl life spoke to American Jews grieving the world that was destroyed in the Holocaust. What is “If I Were a Rich Man” if not a flipped and remixed Jewface dialect song?
