Masked man: Al Jolson and the politics of performance
Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer" (IMDB)A third-season episode of the television show “Mad Men,” titled “My Old Kentucky Home,” finds Don Draper and the crew from Sterling Cooper at a Kentucky Derby party. But it’s not the racing horses that get the crowd cheering. On bended knee, office rogue Roger Sterling serenades his young girlfriend with the titular song—but in blackface.
“There was a lot of controversy in the writers’ room,” the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, later admitted. “We have a very diverse crew, and everyone understood what was happening, that it was a period piece, and it was not pleasurable for anyone.” It was also, Weiner added, “so clear that we were criticizing it.” The episode now airs only after a content warning, and has been removed from some streaming services entirely.
Into this maelstrom steps the author and journalist Richard Bernstein, author of many books, mainly about China and Asia, reflecting the decades he spent as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and Time. Which means that Bernstein—now 80 years old—is not necessarily the first person you’d expect to tackle the vexing and painful tradition of minstrelsy, which has become one of the more crowded corners of academia’s “cultural studies” universe.
But Only in America is not a book solely about blackface, nor should it be. It is a short study of an extraordinary entertainer (born Asa Yoelson in Lithuania in 1886) and a profoundly important movie—and not just because “The Jazz Singer” is recognized as the “first talkie.”
From the early 1910s to the late 1940s, Bernstein writes, “there was nobody…bigger than Al Jolson.” He “was part of a cohort of entertainers whose roots were in the Russian Empire and who came nearly to dominate American popular culture, remaking themselves and remaking the country in the process. It’s hard to imagine anything like that happening any place but [the United States].”
This veers awfully close to American exceptionalism, even triumphalism. But Bernstein has an important story to tell—so long as you don’t expect him to resolve any of the larger questions “The Jazz Singer” raises about racism and show business, immigration and assimilation.
The Yoelsons came to the United States in April 1894, settling in Washington, D.C. Young Jolson’s rabbi father prepared him to be the latest in a long family line of cantors—a synagogue’s vocal leader in song and prayer. By the age of 10, though, he and his brother favored Stephen Foster pop tunes and were already performing on the streets “between Congress and the White House,” Bernstein writes, adding: “The very fact that [the Jolson brothers] had turned their cantorial training into music like this was a sign of the speed of the Americanization of these two immigrant boys.”
This is also about when Jolson’s beloved mother died. So before even becoming a teenager, Jolson had experienced many of the traumas and conflicts that would inform his most famous role.
Bernstein’s most insightful passages explore the evolution of “The Jazz Singer” from a short story, titled “Day of Atonement,” to a stage musical, then to a movie idea developed by a fledgling studio owned by the Wonskolaser brothers—better known as the Warners.
Though officially recognized as a “talkie,” only a few total minutes of “The Jazz Singer” actually feature synchronized sound and image. Nevertheless, the 1927 film revolutionized show biz while also assuming a prominent place in America’s endlessly troubled history of race and entertainment. All of which has made it easy to forget that, whatever else “The Jazz Singer” is, it’s an emotional portrait of faith and family, modernity and tradition. In that way, the film is not unlike Jolson’s entire life, which, to Berstein, “is the American immigration story at its best, the escape from a place where a rise to fame and fortune like his would have been impossible to a place where such a rise is what the country considered special about itself.”
One problem, of course, is that swaths of “the country” no longer think about the “immigration story” in this relatively benign way, especially given the more combustible elements present in “The Jazz Singer,” including race, religion and the broader social context of the film’s release. Dozens of lynchings were still reported annually in the United States in the mid-1920s, which continued to fuel the Great Migration away from the Jim Crow South—which in turn fueled new kinds of Northern ethnic-racial conflict, about which Bernstein has little to say.
Even a short book with a narrow focus could have found a bit of room for, say, Jolson’s aborted collaborations with “Birth of a Nation” director D. W. Griffith, who has his own prominent place in the history of race and pop culture, or Jolson’s 1924 support for Calvin Coolidge, even after the president signed the most restrictive immigration bill in U.S. history, one supported by rabid antisemites in both political parties.
Bernstein leans heavily upon earlier works by Michael Freedland, Robert Oberfirst and Jolson’s principal biographer, Herbert G. Goldman, who suggested that when the “nervous, monotoned, self-conscious” Jolson used blackface, he became an “impudent and joyous harlequin.” Blackface was so widespread at the time, Bernstein adds, that Jolson “wasn’t so much losing his inhibitions as he was copying everybody else.”
More recent scholarship, of course, views such entertainers in a much more negative light. Blackface—especially within immigrant communities—further dehumanized African Americans, while allowing European peasants to “become white.” Bernstein engages such writers, especially in academia, and even takes a swing at nuance, writing that “The Jazz Singer” includes a scene in which “a white girl in her sequined dancer’s costume, and an imitation Black man [look] at each other lovingly, perhaps the first explicit suggestion of interracial love in American film history, even if the Black looking character is not a Black man but a Jew looking affectionately at a shiksa.”
Then there’s the 1930 movie “Big Boy,” in which “Jolson’s blackface character…save[s] the white girl from a villainous white man,” thus inverting “the standard iconic racial offense [of a] Black man’s sexual desire for a white woman.”
That is certainly one way to look at all this. Many folks—understandably—will continue to see things very differently. And thus, the wide gulf between popular and academic historical narratives remains its own unsettling problem. Politicians who shape school curricula and budgets are forced to choose among contesting sides, while journalists and pundits in search of historical context remain unclear if Ellis Island immigrants should be considered part of America’s dominant or of its marginalized culture.
The grandchildren of Russian serfs and American slaves did, after all, have a few things in common. (One of Jolson’s first paid showbiz gigs was in the cast of Israel Zangwill’s “Children of the Ghetto.”) And for all of the bygone, sepia-toned trappings of “The Jazz Singer,” a number of 21st-century performers from Ramy Youssef to Ali Wong owe a debt to Jolson, whether they know it or not.
Neither Jolson nor blackface disappeared after “The Jazz Singer.” There was young Judy Garland in the 1930s, and Bing Crosby in the 1940s. In her 2022 book Undoing the Knots: Five Generations of American Catholic Anti-Blackness,the theologian Maureen H. O’Connell analyzed a “significant Catholic dimension of minstrelsy” at 1950s Philadelphia parish fundraisers.
Then came the Civil Rights movement and new iterations of satirical blackface—from a 1975 episode of “All in the Family” to Spike Lee’s 2000 film “Bamboozled” to Robert Downey Jr.’s surreal turn in 2008’s “Tropic Thunder.” Ann Powers’s recent biography of Joni Mitchell had to confront the singer’s 1977 album “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and the folk singer’s perplexing public appearances “in character.” Then there’s the full-blown mishegoss that is “The Jazz Singer” remake in 1980 starring Neil Diamond.
Ideally, Bernstein’s book—and the 1927 movie—could be taken as valuable opportunities to examine the wide array of ever-shifting questions raised by these diverse performances. Too often, though, controversy itself seems to be the only point of such debates—about blackface, or brownface, or yellowface or “Jewface,” a term that arose after Bradley Cooper donned a prosthetic nose for the 2023 film “Maestro.” Sides are chosen, cancellations declared, and we move on to the next controversy, rarely pausing to consider that whatever might seem enlightened or unenlightened right now may not look that way five or 50 years from now. And we also overlook more subtle, powerful moments, like those in the aforementioned “Mad Men” episode.
After singing, Roger Sterling kisses his girlfriend—staining her face black. Don Draper simply frowns, perhaps embarrassed for, or ashamed of, his pal. Don then knocks a few drinks back with a stranger, sharing details of his impoverished upbringing. Is the great Don Draper embarrassed for, or ashamed of, his own humble past? Is he suggesting he might actually be an ally of the marginalized? Or is Don’s own frowning face also stained—with complicity? By Roger’s terrible performance? By the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers?
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