Success Story

By Frank Trippett

What do Benjamin Kubelsky, Israel Iskowitz and Nathan Birnbaum have in common? Ditto Julius Garfinkle, Issur Danielovich and Bernard Schwartz? Also Laszlo Lowenstein, Jill Oppenheim, Muni Weisenfreund and Betty Joan Perske?

There are at least three answers. They all are (or were) celebrated performers. All won fame using pseudonyms: namely, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and George Burns; John Garfield, Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis; and Peter Lorre, Jill St. John, Paul Muni and Lauren Bacall. Most important, all are dramatic examples of the way many Jews have dissembled as a way of evading anti-Jewish sentiments while at large in gentile America.

"No one was more careful to expunge his or her Jewishness than Jews who were in the public eye," declares Charles E. Silberman in this examination of the past, present and potential futures of American Jews--one of the most thorough journalistic surveys of American Jewish life ever published. Actors who wound up in Hollywood got camouflage names whether they wanted them or not. While pioneer moviemakers like Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer and Adolph Zukor retained Jewish-sounding names, they were "determined to avoid any hint of Jewishness in the films they created." Some notables avoided this identification so assiduously they seemed downright anti-Semitic. Walter Lippmann did so, refusing to become a member of (or even give a lecture to) any Jewish organization; and this Goliath among U.S. commentators chose never to write a single word about the Holocaust.

Motives for dissimulation took on many shadings, but the essential intent was to minimize friction during passage through an often abrasive society. To be nice, by some gentile measure, was more than a question of etiquette. It was a "sacred canon," Silberman says. Service to that canon became, in the words of Sociologist John Murray Cuddihy, "the ordeal of civility." Of all the problems faced by Jews since their earliest days in America--and Silberman covers most of them--the endless struggle over identity seems most fraught with anguish. Early arrivals in the new country found a society more tolerant than it was to become after the Civil War. Flagrant anti-Semitism of the sort familiar to 20th century Americans was born (or at least blurted forth) in Saratoga, N.Y., in 1877, when fashionable Hotel Manager Henry Hilton turned away Investment Banker Joseph Seligman and publicly announced: "No Israelites shall be permitted in the future."

Silberman argues that the anti-Semitism in the U.S. is merely residual. He examines the past and present opportunities in business, law, academe, journalism, politics and art. Upshot: today's American Jew is about 2 1/2 times as likely to wind up in Who's Who as the population at large.

Silberman, once a member of FORTUNE magazine's board of editors, relies heavily on dry demographic studies. Here and there he lapses into an inherently biased generalization. Jews advanced in law when society needed legal talent to deal with unions and tax codes--"skills that the 'white-shoe' lawyers did not possess but that Jews had in abundance." All Jews? Soon afterward, he relates, came a time when "the all-WASP firms found themselves falling behind on what had become a very fast track." All all-WASP firms? Only all-WASP firms? Given the heft of the book, readers may feel finally that no fact is omitted. Still, when he notes that Henry Morgenthau Jr. became the first Jewish Secretary of the Treasury, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he should have mentioned another early Jewish success. Judah P. Benjamin, a two-term U.S. Senator from Louisiana, served successively as Attorney General, Secretary of War and Secretary of State in the Confederate Cabinet. Indeed, he was called "the brains of the Confederacy."

Such omissions can easily be corrected in a revised edition. For A Certain People is likely to become a standard text in its field. Silberman addresses his book to both Jews and non-Jews, and it deserves to be read by all. --By Frank Trippett