NEW YORK, NY.- Inviting visitors into an arcade-like setting of multimedia installations enhanced by posters, vintage photographs, and memorabilia, The Jewish Museum will present the innovative new exhibition Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting from Friday, February 21 through Sunday, September 14, 2003. Covering a hundred years of American experience, from the silent-movie era to Seinfeld, the exhibition explores the varied avenues of Jewish participation in the entertainment media—as audience members, entrepreneurs, creators, and icons—while revealing a multitude of changing attitudes toward Jewish culture and popular culture alike.
The exhibition is sponsored by HSBC Bank USA, with support from other generous funders.
Within a sequence of specially built environments, which evoke settings such as early 20th century nickelodeons and a 1950s living room, visitors will encounter 18 remarkable video and audio presentations. Composed of excerpts from more than 80 films, radio programs, and television shows, these presentations will encourage museum goers to reflect upon—and participate in—a public discussion that has now been ongoing for a century, about American Jews and how they have made, responded to, and been perceived in the entertainment media.
Artifacts such as movie posters, fan magazines, and vintage radios bring life to the themed environments that frame each multimedia presentation. Along the way, “star shrines,” some of them created by contemporary artists, examine how fans have responded to the Jewishness (real or imagined) of celebrities.
“Our exhibition examines a wide range of the public’s attitudes toward American Jews and our nation’s media culture, as those attitudes have evolved over the past century. It does so in a way that we hope visitors will find to be involving, exciting, and entertaining in itself” said Joan Rosenbaum, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of The Jewish Museum.
Rather than presenting a continuous, comprehensive account of its subject, Entertaining America instead examines ten different focal points, which have been chosen for their richness and evocative power.
The exhibition’s selective, chronological environments invite visitors to experience:
the first encounter of immigrants with moviegoing, in the storefront nickelodeons of the early 20th century;
the many versions of The Jazz Singer (including the landmark 1927 "talkie") as a recurring American Jewish myth, focused on show business as both a challenge to tradition and a route to self-realization;
Yiddish film and radio of the 1930s and 40s as American Jewish "alternative media" (as compared to mainstream film and broadcasting);
the rise of Hollywood, and the figure of the "mogul" as an occasion of pride for some and anti-Semitic propaganda for others;
the religious broadcast series The Eternal Light (produced by The Jewish Theological Seminary and NBC beginning in the 1940s) as an effort to link Judaism with ideals of Americanism;
the popular series The Goldbergs as a remarkable artifact of radio and the early days of television, and the brainchild of an important woman in American broadcasting, Gertrude Berg;
the blacklisting of individuals in the entertainment industry during the early years of the Cold War as a moment of crisis, when discussions of American Jews and entertainment were linked with public debates about Communism and un-Americanism;
Your Show of Shows as a pioneering television variety comedy series of the 1950s, whose writing staff (which included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon) came to be celebrated a generation later as a fount of American Jewish comedic talent;
the role of the entertainment media in helping shape the American public’s understanding of the Holocaust;
and Seinfeld as the leading contemporary example of how television currently serves as a vehicle for Jewish self-portraiture.
As visitors pass through these settings, they also encounter a series of "star shrines" - including installations created by artists Ben Katchor, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Rhonda Lieberman, and filmmaker Mark Rappaport - which evoke a sense of the public’s fascination with the Jewishness of icons such as Fanny Brice, Betty Boop, the Marx Brothers, John Garfield, Marilyn Monroe, and Barbra Streisand.
The video and audio pieces that are at the heart of each installation have been created out of excerpts from 46 films, 31 television programs, and 9 radio shows. (Many of the television and radio excerpts are drawn from The Jewish Museum’s own National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting.) Also on view are vintage photographs, photo reproductions, posters and flyers, books and magazines, a selection of sheet music and playbills, and artifacts such as Gertrude Berg’s Emmy awards, Marilyn Monroe’s mezzuzah, and promotional materials from El Al Israel Airlines’ Exodus tour (inspired by the 1960 film starring Paul Newman). Selected links to 6 Web sites are also included.
Museum Co-Publishes Catalogue with Princeton University Press
In conjunction with the exhibition, The Jewish Museum and Princeton University Press are co-publishing a lavishly illustrated, 336-page book titled Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting. Edited by the exhibition’s guest curators J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, who have themselves made major contributions to the text, the book also includes essays by eleven other scholars noted in the fields of media, culture, and history.
Bringing together original analyses and primary texts, the book examines both the dynamic relationship between Jews and the entertainment industry and the steady stream of richly varied voices that have commented on this relationship - in fan magazines and literary fiction, by religious and political leaders, as well as by journalists, historians, and Jews in the entertainment business themselves. Featuring duotone reproductions of photographs, graphics, memorabilia, and other documentary materials, the book will sell for $35 (softcover) and $49.95 (hardcover) at The Jewish Museum’s Cooper Shop and at bookstores everywhere.