It started with a conversation about Mad magazine. I was talking to my book editor, Adam Bellow, about how much I loved Mad. The monthly had shaped me as a kid in the 1970s as much as my family and the schools I went to. I particularly loved the Jewishness of Mad.
“You should write a book about that,” Adam said.
I laughed. A book about the Jewishness of Mad would be great. The problem is that I’m Catholic. Adam and I then talked about other Jewish pop culture that shaped my soul: Philip Glass, Steven Spielberg, Annie Leibovitz, Jack Kirby, punk rock, Broadway, Hollywood, Saul Bellow, etc.
“You need to write this book,” Adam said. “When you talk about these Jewish cultural things there’s love in your voice. It’s not overly intellectual. Also, the fact you’re not Jewish would make it even more interesting. You’re an outsider. Start with Mad but make it about all of Jewish American culture.”
I told Adam I wanted to take some time and think about it—and do some research. The first concern was making sure I was respecting Jewish people. They have brilliant scholars and writers and academics who know this stuff. Who the hell am I?
I started by going deeper into the history of Mad. It was clear that there would be no Jon Stewart or South Park without Mad. Founding editor and chief writer Harvey Kurtzman, artists Will Elder, Al Jaffee, John Severin, and writer-artist Al Feldstein (who succeeded Kurtzman as editor in April 1956) were friends from New York’s High School of Music and Art. Mad was published by William Gaines, who was born in Brooklyn in 1922, and from 1956 to 1985 it was edited by Al Feldstein, also from Brooklyn.
Jewish humor was everywhere in Mad. The editors created a word, “furshlugginer,” which came from the Yiddish “shlogan” (to hit). I was delighted every month when the People’s Drug Store in Maryland had the new issue, the cover always including the bemused “What, Me Worry?” face of mascot Alfred E. Neuman. Inside was the work of Jaffee (the “ridiculous fold-in”), “Spy vs. Spy,” Don Martin, takedowns of dumb advertisements, Mort Drucker, Sergio Aragones, and writers such as Dave Berg, Antonio Prohías, Paul Coker Jr., Jack Rickard, Don Edwing, Dick DeBartolo, Stan Hart and Lou Silverstone. Richard Corliss once wrote that Mad was “the intellectual equivalent to the screams Elvis Presley elicited from pubescent girls. Connecting with the Mad zeitgeist meant plugging into the world of culture—because, first and foremost, Mad was the medium that kidded the media.”
Despite my comfort with Mad, I still felt uncertain. I talked to my literary agent, who’s Jewish, about my concerns. My agent is a gruff, funny, no-bullshit guy who doesn’t waste time getting to the point. He hollered at me because I blew an interview and I told him he was acting like an ape. “You never forget that my friend,” he growled. “I am a killer ape—and I do not work for bananas.”
“Listen here,” he added, “if any Jew gives you grief for wanting to celebrate Jews in America and how you adore the art and culture they created, that person is an asshole.” He then offered to email me a note that would inoculate me from criticism.
I got more comfortable. I wrote about Julian Mazor, a Jewish short story writer for The New Yorker who changed my life. I remembered reading Saul Bellow, Adam's father. The early punk scene was filled with Jewish artists: Sylvian Mizrahi and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, who was often referred to as the “Godfather of Punk.” Joey Ramone, Jewish frontman of the Ramones, once said: “To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying, ‘This is who I am.’” One journalist said that “punk reflects the Jewish diaspora struggle between assimilation and retaining traditionalism.”
Steve Lee Bebeer, author of The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, wrote that “punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging, always being divided, being in and out, good and bad, part and apart.”
I also learned that when I approached Jewish scholars and writers, they were happy and eager to help, providing research, articles, ideas and history. They also helped me appreciate the deadly seriousness of anti-Semitism, even when it occurs on a supposedly safe place like a university campus. I was telling one Jewish friend about how my book will hopefully lead people to appreciate how Jews have enriched America. “Yes,” he said. “Also it hopefully will make them not want to shove us into ovens again.”
Perhaps the most tricky area would be celebrating Jewish female beauty, from Gal Gadot to Barbra Streisand. In a powerful paper published in the Critical Gender Studies Journal, Liliane Steiner, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University of Israel, wrote about how Jewish women were so starved in the Holocaust that observers thought they were men. They were robbed of their femininity: “This startling depiction of the Jewish feminine body portrays the torture and torments that Jewish women were forced to endure at the hands of the Nazis and their perpetrators. Femininity and Jewish identity have been both assaulted and marred, leaving no external traces or physical traits to allude to a familiar physical past.”
It's fine to celebrate female Jewish sexiness and beauty, but it’s necessary to be aware of how that humanity was robbed—and still is.
The writer Milan Kundera was particularly ardent in his love of the Jewish culture of his home of Czechoslovakia and Central Europe. He noted that Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, and Franz Kafka were all Central European Jews: “Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted above national quarrels, the Jews in the 20th century were the principle cosmopolitan, integrating element in Central Europe: they were its intellectual cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its spiritual unity.” This is why Kundera loves “the Jewish heritage and cling[s] to it with as much passion and nostalgia as though it were my own.”