Dear Michael Rogin,

I remember watching The Jazz Singer in my younger years, and I can’t believe I overlooked the critical analysis you raised in your article. I wanted to say that after reading your article on The Jewish Jazz Singer, I was quite pleased with how you examined the blackface, jazz, and talking pictures in relation to the Jewish identity. I was able to draw parallels from your article to my own book Playing Indian. As you may or may not know, I studied the ways in which American society appropriated Indian symbols from dressing up as Indians in the Boston Tea Party to hippies who have similarly appropriated Native American dress and symbols in order to establish a firm identity for the nation, separated from its less desired Old World identity.

I was quite fascinated by the way you understood the dual identity of Jack Robin, who used blackface to juggle the assimilation and acculturation of his Jewish identity through his father, Cantor Rabinowitz. I find it interesting that you examine blackface through the individual identity. Could blackface also be used to redefine a national identity the way that playing Indian has for the United States?

In my own research, white Americans, the hegemonic forces of society, utilized Indian images and pretended to be Indian in order to establish an identity. There is a clear power imbalance between whites and Indians. In The Jazz Singer, though there are more similarities between the Jewish Rabinowitz and the black, the power imbalance is still there. As a means of assimilation, the Jews, themselves marginalized in status, sought mobility by aligning themselves with the “most segregated” in society. Though blackface replaced the Jew, you say it also replaced the black. Thus, I must agree that in covering the faces of themselves, the Jewish adoption of blackface has in turn further maintained the status quo and continued marginalization of blacks, for they not only have no real presence in the film, they are being misrepresented by individuals who are exploiting their image.

I wanted to conclude this letter by thanking you for your informative article. It forced me to examine the similarities between the marginalization of blacks and Indians through misrepresentation and appropriation of stereotyped aspects of their image. Perhaps, you can share your thoughts on how you feel about my own book Playing Indian, particularly whether you too see the similarities between the objectification of Indians in advancing the American image and the use of blackface in providing a path to assimilation for Jews. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Philip Deloria

Questions:

1) In Deloria’s Playing Indian, the theme of appropriating and exploiting Indian culture and ideas of what Indian means is brought to the forefront. What do you think of Stanford’s own act of “playing Indian” back when the Stanford mascot used to be the Stanford Indian? How might that affect the way in which Stanford created a university identity?

2) Rogin discusses the idea of Jewish people adopting blackface to help them assimilate into American culture. Yet, at the same time, they are assuming the identity of blacks, a similarly marginalized group in America. How does this idea of Jews adopting blackface to assimilate compare to the idea of Jews passing as white as represented in The Gentleman’s Agreement? Why was it necessary to show blackface in film for the upward mobility of Jews whereas in Elia Kazan’s film, upward mobility happened through passing as white?