Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot [Hardcover]

Michael Rogin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1996

The tangled connections that have bound Jews to African Americans in popular culture and liberal politics are at the heart of Michael Rogin's arresting and unnerving book. Looking at films from Birth of a Nation to Forrest Gump, Rogin explores blackface in Hollywood films as an aperture to broader issues: the nature of "white" identity in America, the role of race in transforming immigrants into "Americans," the common experiences of Jews and African Americans that made Jews key supporters in the fight for racial equality, and the social importance of popular culture. Rogin's forcefully argued study challenges us to confront the harsh truths behind the popularity of racial masquerade.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As part of the interest in stereotypical depictions of African Americans after Reconstruction, there have been a number of books on the powerful tradition of blackface minstrelsy. But it didn't just inform popular stage and film representations of blacks, says UC?Berkeley political scientist Rogin (Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology). In a story with some similarities to that told in Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish became White, Rogin says blackface also served to "Americanize" or whiten immigrant Jewish blackface performers during a time of heavy domestic anti-Semitism. By donning blackface, immigrant Jewish performers could distance themselves from perceptions of ethnicity and position themselves as "more white" or "American" in a racist culture that viewed "whiteness" as the presumed goal of assimilation. Rogin documents the history of whites performing as blacks, from Queen Anne through Al Jolson. With chilling, bracing directness, he chronicles American culture's "contaminated" foundations in slavery and racism. He also observes that Jewish moguls in 1930s Hollywood evaded the subject of American anti-Semitism by "eliminating Jews from the screen." (At the time, Jews could play blacks, but they could not play themselves.) This is a complicated but revealing book which will be most profitably enjoyed by readers well-versed in the sometimes arcane historical celluloid material being discussed.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Scholars easily chastise blackface performances in early movies as examples of racist caricature. Political scientist Rogin, however, affords another view of this theatrical technique that derived from the antebellum minstrel show and reached its nadir in Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915). He is particularly interested in how and why Jewish immigrants borrowed this racial masquerade and incorporated it into stories about their identity and assimilation in America. He examines Al Jolson's Old World father^-New World son saga, The Jazz Singer (1927), as a primary example of such incorporation. Rogin shows that the New Deal, World War II, and the civil-rights movement brought an end to movie blackface, but that blackface vestiges unintentionally remained, even in such progressive films as Body and Soul (1947) and Home of the Brave (1949). Rogin's historical research is thorough enough to make many of his fervent political views about his subject credible, and although he occasionally bogs down in critical theory, his analysis is a model of cinema studies at their most intriguing. Aaron Cohen

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1St Edition edition (June 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520204077
• ISBN-13: 978-0520204072
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,460,815 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FASCINATING AND INVIGORATING SCHOLARSHIP, August 27, 2001

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This review is from: Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Paperback)

This is one of the five best non-fiction books I have ever read! It is superior to anything Rogin has written previously, magnificent as some of his earlier scholarship has been. I reccommend this book for film buffs, as well as anyone interested in learning how this country's history of racism has affected mass culture and how that has shaped our own understanding of what it means to be an American. Read and learn. This is cultural studies at its best.