I’m currently working on a book about how Jews have enriched American culture and my life. There are millions of Americans, some of them even anti-Semitic, who are walking around with no idea how deeply they’ve been influenced by Mel Brooks, Mad magazine, Annie Leibovitz, Bennet Cerf, Leonard Bernstein and George S. Kaufman.
Kaufman was a giant in the American theater. He wrote comedies, dramas and political satire. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Of Thee I Sing, which he co-wrote with Morrie Ryskind and Ira Gershwin. He also won the Pulitzer for You Can’t Take It With You, co-written with Moss Hart. Jewish men like Kaufman made modern Broadway. Every Broadway season from 1921 through 1958 had a play written or directed by Kaufman. With Edna Ferber, he wrote The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, and Stage Door; with Howard Teichmann, he wrote The Solid Gold Cadillac, and with Moss Hart, Once in a Lifetime, Merrily We Roll Along, The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take It with You. Brothers George and Ira Gershwin teamed up and wrote the music for 12 shows and four films including Showgirl; Girl Crazy with the songs “Embraceable You” (which made a star of Ginger Rogers) and “I Got Rhythm” (which made a star of Ethyl Merman); Porgy and Bess; and An American in Paris.
Just as Mad changed modern American humor, the Jewish geniuses changed modern American theater. You Can’t Take It With You also changed the course of my brother Michael’s life in 1978. Michael was cast as Martin Vanderhoff in a Georgetown Prep mounting of the play. My brother was a sensitive kid who loved books and the arts. Naturally funny and a great mimic, he memorized entire passages of books he loved like Moby Dick. His acting talent was evident in the Prep Player’s production of Kaufman’s play, so much so that when he died in 2022 the director of the production left this note: “A favorite memory of Michael was his performance as Martin Vanderhoff in our production of You Can't Take It With You at Prep. Michael was a fabulous lead for a wonderful cast. He has gone too soon but his impact resounds over the years.”
The highlight of my brother’s theater work in Washington was winning the Helen Hayes Award for Best Actor in 1988. He won for his role in the play How I Got That Story, staged at the Source Theatre. He was also in an acclaimed production of Julius Caesar. He was an extra in Bonfire of the Vanities and other movies shot in D.C.
His roommate during those years was an actor named David Slavin, who went on to become an author and a career as a voice-over actor. David’s Jewish, and knew the history of Jews on in the theater. He always got a bang out of my love for the comedian Robert Klein, whose 1973 album Child of the 50s I’d memorized. We were in a bar in Georgetown once and I did Klein’s riff about going on The Tonight Show: “They don’t let you say ‘Jew bastard’ on The Tonight Show. You get too many calls from Alabama saying, ‘WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY JEW BASTARD!!!’” Slavin would howl.
As David Denby notes in his book Eminent Jews: “Jews wanted to think, write, play, direct, speak as themselves, for themselves. But they acted as Jews nonetheless. Their relation to Judaism was less formal than emotional and temperamental, and, as they made art, advanced their ideas, they jumped away from elements in Jewish cultural tradition even as they gained strength from it. They were free in ways that Jews had never been free in any society of the past.”
Jews also created the humor that’s now a part of America. “Satire and parody have become endemic in our digital world,” Denby writes. “The spoof, the mash-up, so easy to pull off, is our daily breakfast. But seventy years ago, it was startling… it was produced by habits of quick-wittedness and a refusal to be taken in by anything—temperamental qualities that had (and still have) a high cultural value among American Jews.”
As I wrote about previously in Splice Today, there’s a similarity between the Jews and the Irish Catholic community I grew up in. Large families, humor, language, neurosis, distrust of the establishment—even women with dark hair. This was evident in You Can’t Take It With You, which became a 1938 classic directed by Frank Capra. The story defends family, community and individuality in the face of war and heartless monopolies. Tony Kirby (James Stewart) works at his family’s bank. His father, Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold), has just gotten a deal to build a government-sanctioned munitions factory. There’s a problem: a family in a house where the factory is supposed to go refuses to sell. The patriarch of the house Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) and extended family are eccentric. One daughter spends her time dancing around the house. The two uncles live in the basement and set off fireworks at odd times. Another prints up fliers that make people think he’s a communist. One family habit is to acrobatically fly down the stairs of the big old house on the huge banister. The house is filled with music, joy, fireworks and love.
The conflict happens when Tony falls in love with the bank’s stenographer, Alice (Jean Arthur). Tony doesn’t know that Alice is a member of the Vanderhoff clan. She lived in the house that Tony’s father wants to knock down. In the end, the Vanderhoff’s prevail, even winning over Jimmy Stewart’s stuffy Kirby clan.
The Vanderhoff clan reminded me not only of the crazy Irish-Catholic families I knew growing up—and was a part of—but our Jewish as neighbors as well. Then as now, I felt I had much more in common with people like Norman Mailer and Bette Midler than with someone like Tucker Carlson.
The family in You Can’t Talk It With You is bound by blood and love and can’t be broken by bureaucracy or government. The actor and theater critic Ron Fassler emphasized this when he wrote about how You Can’t Take It With You remains popular today and is always performed somewhere. “One reason for its extraordinary popularity in those days is that it was a much-need salve for the wounds after World War II,” Fassler wrote, “And why not? The play portrays an eccentric family that lives life the way they want to live it. Not selfishly—not at all—but on their own terms. They are kind and considerate. They don’t want to be pushed around and told what to do, that’s all. None more so than Grandpa who never once paid any income tax.”