“Jewish Blackface” or “Forgive my chiming in on the Matisyahu overload"

Matisyahu, the latest musical media-darling, has been written about too many times to list. The numerous reviews and interviews follow a pattern; they rarely focus on the music itself--the stress is most often on his intriguing image as a ‘hasidic reggae star’, or nice Jewish boy who thinks he can make it in a primarily black genre. Obviously the journalists’ instincts will lead them to emphasize the most compelling and unusual aspects of the subject at hand, but their lack of historical perspective on both Jewish musicians and their role in the popularization of black music is misleading.

Jews have long been the face of black music in America. Before there was reggae, there was jazz, and from ragtime composers Irvin Berlin, and George Gershwin to bandleaders Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Harry James, the jazz stage has long featured Jewish artists. In fact, these bandleaders played a prominent role in the amicable presentation of ‘black music’, as jazz was known in its early days, to a mostly white American audience. Benny Goodman was the very first to lead an inter-racial bandstand. Stan Getz, Herbie Mann, Herb Alpert brought Brazilian rhythms and Salsa to the musical culture of the early 1900’s. Because of their precarious social status as whites yet still minorities, these Jewish musicians were the perfect conduit to bring music of an otherwise ‘objectionable’ nature to a mainstream audience. Coming from a clean-cut white Jew, black music did not seem as offensive. Jazz was undeniably born of African-American soul and has its roots in African and Latin traditions; however, it was transfused to the American public in many ways through Jewish composers and bandleaders.

In 1920 Henry Ford published an essay titled “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music,” where he first maligns jazz with a memorable description,

“the moron music which they habitually hum and sing and shout day and night… musical slush… monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of calf love… camouflaged by a few feverish notes and admitted in homes where the thing itself, unaided by scanned music, would be stamped out in horror.” (my high school teachers used similar words for all non-jewish music)

He then comes to the predictable conclusion that since jazz is responsible for all that is malevolent and immoral in society, the Jews were entirely responsible for it. Ford’s repugnant opinions rarely coincided with reality, but as illustration, they do give an idea of the impressive Jewish presence in the jazz world.

In later years, many more Jewish musicians rose to the forefront of the grenre and were stylistically indistinguishably from their African American or white counterparts. Some prominent Jewish names in bebop and cool jazz: trumpeter Red Rodney and Shorty Rogers, and tenor saxophonist Al Cohn. With the wane of anti-Semitism and jazz having become not only acceptable but high-brow, these men concerned themselves with the contemporary jazz scene, not their Jewishness. However, it can’t be diminished that going on stage in early the 20^th century with the name Benny Goodman alone was as overtly Jewish as Matisyahu’s modern day Yiddish crying, tzitzith flying antics.

The 1927 film The Jazz Singer provides a strange example of a Jewish musician’s struggle to straddle the Jewish and pop worlds, and the conflict of assimilating into a genre dominated by African-Americans. It portrays a rabbi’s son who wears blackface to sing jazz on Broadway. The dramatic conflict is very straightforward: the young singer finally lands a starring role in a show, alas opening night is on Yom Kippur eve. In true Hollywood style, the plot resolution comes fairly easy for the struggling Jew and the first show is pushed off so he can sing Kol Nidrei for his father. But the real legacy of the movie is the image of a Jew wearing blackface to succeed in show business.

This notion of Jews imitating black culture is very loaded. Michael Rogin wrote a book on this phenomenon, “Blackface, White Noise.” He says that the practice was a way to assimilate into white America. Early 20^th century nativist sentiment placed Jews on the ‘other’ side of the racial divide. According to Rogin, wearing blackface was an attempt by Jews to separate themselves from the subjugated and discriminated against groups (mostly Blacks, although Catholics and Irish were also prime targets of nativism). In short, Jews imitated African-Americans to accentuate their whiteness. On the surface, it made some sense—both groups share a history of persecution, subjugation, and dislocation. Much of the same rhetoric is repeated today, i.e. Matisyahu’s Judaism is no imposter to Rastafarian culture because both cultures share mystical roots, etc… But today’s audience needs no explanation for cross-cultural and interracial creative expression. In fact, the boundaries are so far broken down that it is difficult for an artist to maintain any distinctive markers or preserve their cultural influence.

At the moment, Matisyahu’s career is perched on the divide between individuality and mainstream appeal. The journalists covering him are as eager to see him succeed as they are to see him fail in the most public way—either would provide fodder for their work. Which way he goes, more black or more Jewish, might very well be the defining move. If he knew he was standing in a long line of Jewish musicians who were faced with a very similar struggle, perhaps the decision would not be so hard. If the media would know that his struggle is not as exceptional or impossible to overcome as they portray, then perhaps the results of his decision would be less damaging and his longevity would finally be considered seriously.