From Mad Magazine to Matisyahu: How Jews Made American Culture Great

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    In 2024 it’s not enough to just defend Jewish people from the onslaught of violence and antisemitism they are experiencing. As Americans we need to love the Jewish people for what they have contributed to our country. 

    America would not be America without the Jewish people.

     That’s the thesis of a short book I am working on.  From Mad Magazine to Matisyahu: How Jews Made American Culture Great is about the way Jewish culture has enriched the life of America. The book is being published by Bombardier Books and its CEO Adam Bellow. Bellow’s father was Saul Bellow, one of the greatest and most honored writers of the 20th Century.

    Adam is also my longtime editor and friend. He is Jewish an I am not. The idea for the book came about when I was telling Adam how much I love the American things that Jewish people created. Mad magazine. Marvel Comics. Philip Glass. Steven Spielberg. Adam suggested a book explaining my appreciation for these things. I protested: I’m Catholic, an outsider! Adam thought that actually helps the project – that an outsider can sometimes see things insiders cannot.

    The writer Milan Kundera once observed that there are things in a culture that you appreciate and honor, and then there are things in your culture that you adore. In America we honor and venerate our Constitution, the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence. Yet it is often the contemporary culture that we live in that we adore – the movies, music, and novels that speak to our souls. Kundera and particularly ardent in his love of the Jewish culture of Czechoslovakia and Central Europe. He once 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.”

    I am an Irish-Catholic journalist who has covered popular culture for decades, so my focus will be on culture. Yes, there will be large sections on the Jewish contributions to science and medicine and civil rights. Yet I have found that the place where a lot of people deeply adore their country and her culture is in popular culture and the arts – music, literature, photography, comic books. I also will celebrate Jewish people as beautiful, something that cuts against centuries-old stereotypes.

    Here’s an example of a Jewish creation that changed America. Mad magazine was published by William Gaines, who was born in Brooklyn in 1922. From 1956 to 1985 it was edited by Al Feldstein, also from Brooklyn. Jewish humor was in the lifeblood of Mad, from the language to the men who drew and wrote the issues. The filmmaker Woody Allen. (In 2015, the Writers Guild voted Annie Hall the funniest screenplay of the past 100 years.) Without Mad there would be no Jon Stewart, No Saturday Night Live, no South Park.

    Without American Jews, Marvel Comics would never exist. The Marvel Universe began in early 1961, the forward-looking dawn of Kennedy’s New Frontier. It was that year that comic book writer Stan Lee was given permission by his publisher Martin Goodman, who was envious of rival DC Comics’ successful Justice League comic, to create a comic with a team of superheroes. Lee and genius co-creator Jack Kirby (both men were Jewish veterans of World War II) came up with The Fantastic Four, a family who develop superpowers when their spaceship is blasted with gamma rays. Lee was a brilliant writer and the imagination ofKirby’s art remains staggering. Kirby was also one of the funniest artists of the 20th century. His exaggerations and comic blasts were not just cool, they were often slapstick. Even in the sea of a world-threatening battle he could come up with sight gags or put the characters in situations that were delightfully slapstick. Reed Richards, Susan and Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm argued and got irritated with each other, but their lives were also filled with humor, love, and a passionate desire to defend American ideals and freedom.

    Another Jewish influence is literary. I grew up in a household that venerated writers like James Joyce and William Butler Yeats. The problem for me as a teenager was, some of their work, particularly Joyce, was out of my reach. My father told me that there was an American writer whose work was as good as Joyce but who was more accessible. His name was Saul Bellow. I also, like many American teenagers, was profoundly affected by The Catcher in the Rye, whose author J.D. Salinger was half Jewish.    

    It was also around this time that I discovered punk rock. The early punk scene was filled with Jewish artists: Iggy Pop, Sylvian Mizrahi and Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls, Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, often referred to as the “Godfather of Punk,” Jews were at the forefront of punk rock’s evolution.  Punk rock is a subgenre of rock ‘n’ roll, which began as a crude form of self-expression and rebellion against overly-produced, profit-driven music in the 60s. Before punk became mainstream, the word “punk” literally meant outcast. The genre has branched into different avenues, and goes beyond rigid classification. 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.” 

    The project will also address the political impact Jewish people have had on America. They were a central part of the fight for civil rights in the 20th century. They have made incredible contributions to science and medicine. Juxtaposing these lofty, civilization-forming contributions with the earthier, more personal experiences I had in love, literature and music is a powerful argument in favor of the essential part Jewish people and culture have played in America and in my life.

    It’s time for the outsiders to defend our Jewish brothers and sisters.