ONLY IN AMERICA

An exploration of Al Jolson, blackface, and Jewish migrants’ transformative role in American culture.

Today, Al Jolson (1886-1950) is famous mainly as the star of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length synchronized-sound film. More specifically, he’s famous for singing its showstopper, “My Mammy,” in blackface, a performance that would be unthinkable today. But in his heyday, Jolson was the best-paid entertainer on Broadway (earning $5,000 weekly at one point). In Bernstein's thoughtful account, the author of Out of the Blue (2003), China 1945 (2014), and other works, doesn’t diminish blackface’s offensiveness, but he strives to give it some meaningful context in terms of Jolson’s life and Jewish American entertainers more generally. “In enlightened, post-civil-rights-movement America,” Bernstein writes, “blackface has come to be like the swastika and the N-word, banned from public spaces. But at the time that Jolson adopted it, it was taken for granted; it was a sort of stock image, a cliché.” Born in a Lithuanian shtetl as Asa Yoelson, Jolson arrived in America hungry to assimilate and was performing onstage by the time he was 12. At the start of the 20th century, Jolson was part of a wave of Jewish Americans leading an incursion into American culture, playing leadership roles in theaters and film. It’s often forgotten that The Jazz Singer, based on a short story and play by Samson Raphaelson, was inspired by Jolson’s own story: a young Jewish cantor torn between the allure of Broadway spotlights and the demands of his family’s faith. Within that plot, Bernstein finds a rich allegory not just for Jolson’s life but for the experience of Jews in America “who came nearly to dominate American popular culture, remaking themselves and remaking the country in the process.” It’s not a full-dress Jolson bio, but some elements—particularly his abusiveness toward women—are glossed over.

A revealing study of a pioneering if problematic entertainer.