In “After Minstrelsy: Blacks and Jews in the Decolonizing 1930s,” Susan Gillman begins with the recognition that the legacy of minstrelsy seems still be confined to embarrassment, revulsion, and worse—judging from the public response in February 2019 to Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s “blackface scandal.” None of the media coverage acknowledged the strange mix of envy, fascination, desire, and fear that Eric Lott is so well known for identifying, nor that director Spike Lee has caricatured in his films, notably Bamboozled (2000) and more puzzlingly, BlacKkKlansman, which was on screens that very winter. Gillman explains this disconnect as a consequence of the accepted chronology of minstrelsy, thought to be finished, by the 1920s, having transitioned from stage to screen, the interdisciplinary siloes in which minstrelsy is covered (in performance, music, black and whiteness studies), and more surprisingly, the essentially nationalist history of US blackface entertainment. Gillman proposes instead a literary history that approaches minstrelsy geographically, as an imaginative social space of diasporic identity. As a disruptive corrective, Gillman invites us to look to the entangled histories of Jews and Blacks in the final transition from minstrelsy to vaudeville in the context of 1930s black internationalism. She assembles a text-network of on-screen, post-minstrel variety shows with a range of contemporary writings from Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) to the Federal Writer’s Project, placing them in the context of the black internationalism of that decade, especially two key works, Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935) and C.L.R. James, Black Jacobins (1938). Gillman reads black-Jewish entanglements through the domestic-foreign, local-global cultures of the decolonizing 30s and 40s—and to sketch a possible worlded literary geography of minstrelsy, this most ‘American’ of nineteenth-century forms.
In “Site Work: Jews and the Reinvention of Photography,” Sara Blair criticizes scholars’ recent focus on a signal phenomenon: the preponderance of Jews, so-called people of the book, in the development of photography in twentieth-century America. She explains that recourse to notions of a Jewish “eye” (or sensibility) has failed to account for the mutual implication of Jews, Jewishness, and photographic practice, particularly as the latter evolved in response to the challenges of reflecting on urban modernity and life after assimilation. Her paper, accordingly, stresses the surprising importance to photography’s developing interests of a specific site in which both Jewishness and American modernity were being made and remade: the iconic Lower East Side. Long imagined as a world apart, the Lower East Side embodied the most profound paradoxes of historicity and change; it thus became a proving-ground for the camera’s power to document new urgencies of social experience. In the work of such storied image-makers as Paul Strand, Ben Shahn, Alexander Alland, and Lisette Model, the built landscape and the iconography of its distinctive form, the tenements, became a resource for new stylistics and registers of response, which came in turn define mid-century photographic practice. Focusing on the difference the Lower East Side made to photography’s understanding of its subjects and its powers, Blair brings into view the complex relays between Jews, the site of their collective memory and negotiation of U.S. racial culture, and the uses of photography in twentieth-century America.
Finally, Gordon Hutner, in “From Hollywood to Watts: Budd Schulberg’s Los Angeles,” analyzes Budd Schulberg’s twisted odyssey to the Watts Writers' Workshop and its complex legacy. Known in his own time as the Crown Prince of Hollywood during its Golden Age, Budd Schulberg was the son of an important producer and enjoyed the favor of the most powerful of Hollywood’s Jewish elite. His insider’s knowledge of the industry and its Jewish presence led to his controversial novel, What Makes Sammy Run?(1940), an insider’s look that drew heavily on his experience. Schulberg’s career, however, had earlier taken an important turn during a college-age visit to the Soviet Union, which led to his recruitment in the Communist Party, for which he, in turn, actively recruited figures in the film community. When he ultimately named names to the House of Un-American Activities committee, he suffered the ignominy of being partly responsible for the blacklisting of the Hollywood 10. Although he continued to write for and about Hollywood, he left Los Angeles for the East Coast, but eventually returned and, despite the abiding resentment of his former friends, reclaimed his place as an estimable author and a reliable screenwriter (winning an Academy Award for his screenplay of On the Waterfront). But Hutner’s paper focuses on perhaps the most surprising turn of Schulberg’s career, which followed from the widespread devastation of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Watching the violence on TV, Schulberg drove from his luxurious home in Coldwater Canyon and began offering creative writing classes to interested parties in South Central LA, thus inaugurating the Watts Writers’ Workshop (1965-1973, which played a strong part in the Black Arts Movement.