Blackface History Is Jewish History
University of California religious studies professor Dr. Michael Alexander received a National Jewish Book Award for his book in which he asserts that minstrelsy—the public ridicule and mockery of the Black race—became identified with Jewish entertainers: “Jews performed this kind of minstrelsy in the 1910s and 1920s better and more often than any other group in America. Jewish faces covered in cork were ubiquitous.”
In fact, blackface and a singing style pioneered by Jews known as “coon shouting” were mainstays of Jewish entertainment, with their most popular performers, like Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, George Burns, and Florenz Ziegfeld, using Black-race mockery as a dominant theme. Jewish historian Dr. Jeffrey Melnick says that Jews played “a major role in the manufacture of the racial stereotypes on which American popular culture depended.”
Continue reading “Ed Jewett: Jewish Comedians Pioneered Blackface”
