Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer: The Jewish Story Behind Hollywood’s First Talkie

Jewish History Nerds - Unpacked

This episode of Jewish History Nerds explores the pivotal role Jews played in shaping early Hollywood, focusing on Al Jolson and his groundbreaking

Key takeaways

• Jews were instrumental in building Hollywood, with nearly all major studios founded or led by Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century.

Main topics

• Jewish immigration and integration into American entertainment
• The rise of vaudeville as a gateway for Jewish performers

Notable quotes

"Jews didn't just work in Hollywood. Jews built Hollywood."

Conclusion

The episode reveals how deeply Jewish immigrants shaped Hollywood's foundation, using entertainment as both an escape and a path to

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:02) That's Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. Speaker 1 (0:17) From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I'm Jonathan Schwab. And Speaker 2 (0:25) I'm Yael Steiner. And we are coming to a close of our summer celebrating and studying the United States on the occasion of its 250th anniversary, 250th birthday. And I think today you're going to bring us into the 20th century. If you've enjoyed any of this series, we would love it if you could rate and write us a review. And we would just love for you to share your love of the podcast because we really enjoy getting to prepare these stories for you. And I think thematically that might match with what we're talking about today. Speaker 1 (1:06) So we as two Jews hosting a podcast. Which I don't know if we would call what we do entertainment. Infotainment. I think they call it infotainment. Edutainment. A major story that we haven't yet told in the history of Jews in America is the connection between Jews and the entertainment industry and movies and music, which are a huge, huge part of American culture and are... shaped by Jews in so many ways. We're going to tell this story across two episodes on Jews and entertainment and the entertainment industry, especially focusing on movies and music. A really interesting element of this story that I think people don't expect that's going to play a major role in our two-part telling of this is race and the relations of Jews and African Americans in 20th century and 21st century America. Speaker 2 (2:06) And I don't want to take us too far, feel too early. Does that mean that we are acting on the assumption that Jews are white for Speaker 1 (2:15) these purposes? I will say at the time what we're going to do, which is that the first part of this, today's episode, we will talk about Al Jolson, which that's a name you're probably familiar with. Speaker 2 (2:28) I am. What was his Jewish name? Speaker 1 (2:31) Asa Yoelson. Speaker 2 (2:33) Asa Yowelson. Okay. I knew Al Jolson just couldn't have been his birth name. Yes. Speaker 1 (2:38) No, no, definitely. And then in part two, the episode next week, we're going to talk about Sammy Davis Jr., who is probably also somebody you're familiar with. Who Speaker 2 (2:48) doesn't love the Rat Pack? Speaker 1 (2:49) Jews didn't just work in Hollywood. Jews built Hollywood. And like, I really don't want to underemphasize that point of like the extremely Jewish origins of. Hollywood, which is not to say, this is like, I don't know, for all our anti-Semitic listeners. Speaker 1 (3:10) It's not like there was some organized Jewish plot to make Hollywood and then, I don't know, do something very Jewish with it. But a lot of the people who had a huge role in shaping Hollywood were Jews, were building from their own experiences. In many cases, they were Jewish immigrants. There's a very good reason that there were so many Jews involved in the creation of this, but this was not a bunch of Jews sitting around, you know, and deciding exactly. how things would go because they disagreed with each other very often. Speaker 2 (3:42) There's also a huge difference between creating something or contributing to its origins and being a shadowy cabal behind the scenes trying to influence the way Americans think and consume media. Because also, I don't think people really talked about the consumption of media yet. That was kind of a... burgeoning idea at that time. Because the Speaker 1 (4:06) Jews invented it, right? But that's what I want to say. It was like the people who created Hollywood Studios, yeah, they did influence the way that people consume media because it was a business. It was a business that they built. They built a mass entertainment business that became one of the most profitable areas of the entire American system. Did we talk about the jazz singer yet? So sound that we maybe heard at the top, the jazz singer, which will be... A framing device for this entire episode. Yeah. What were you going to say? What do you know about it? Is it Speaker 2 (4:37) the first feature-length Speaker 1 (4:39) talkie? It is. It's the first feature-length film with synchronized sound. Steamboat Willie, Speaker 2 (4:47) the first, like, short talkie? Steamboat Willie? Speaker 1 (4:50) A year after The Jazz Singer. Speaker 2 (4:53) Really? Yep. See, you know, that's how you know the Jews don't control Hollywood. Walt Disney. Because I thought Walt Disney did it first. Nope. I don't know if you know this. He wasn't Jewish. He's Speaker 1 (5:05) not Speaker 2 (5:05) Jewish. Speaker 1 (5:05) He's, yeah. Speaker 2 (5:06) The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length movie with synchronized sound. That is a pretty big deal. Almost 100 years ago. Speaker 1 (5:13) Comes out in 1927. We've talked about movies a bunch of times. I love movies. And I really love film history. So this whole episode is a chance for me to really nerd out because it's combining my love of film history and my love of Jewish history. And now we're talking about... Jewish history in film. So like really nerding out about the entire thing just for a second on like the technical achievement of synchronized sound because the jazz singer comes out in 1927, which is almost 100 years ago. I think it's the most important innovation in film history. Like there is like, okay, yeah, we later get color, but synchronized sound is more important for the way we watch movies than color. Significantly. I think stress this enough, movies are a huge, huge part of American culture. This summer, as we've been recording this episode, there is a massive blockbuster movie. To Speaker 2 (6:07) clarify for everybody, I believe we're talking about The Odyssey. Speaker 1 (6:10) We're talking about The Odyssey. And not the Minions Speaker 2 (6:12) movie. Speaker 1 (6:13) A hundred years before this modern Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey version, movies started at the turn of the 20th century, in the early 1900s. they were not a big industry and they were not a respectable thing. Like this was seen as a diversion for like working class or what at the time was just openly called low class people. You could see them in theaters called Nickelodeons because you could pay a nickel to get in, which is, oh, if you're never sure whether something is considered like high art or, you know, low entertainment, if the price is in the description, it's probably not high art. One Speaker 2 (6:50) dollar pizza. Speaker 1 (6:52) Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:52) Was it really just considered vaudeville on a screen? Right. Like it wasn't opera. It wasn't theater. Speaker 1 (7:02) Yes. Right. Vaudeville are these like traveling variety acts, which are diversions. Right now, there's a whole class of people in the late 19th, early 20th century of people who are laborers, who are working in cities. Speaker 1 (7:19) have some income and really need, I don't know, something to distract them from the very difficult circumstances often of their lives in cities. So there's all sorts of entertainment like vaudeville, which is basically, I don't know, the circus with less overhead, right? Like just like you rent out a theater. It's Speaker 2 (7:37) like sketch comedy. Speaker 1 (7:38) Yeah, comedy, right? Like variety shows, singing, dancing. Speaker 1 (7:44) comedy, not stand-up comedy the way we would recognize it today, right? But like acrobatics, maybe. Right, slapstick, right? Like vaudeville. And they would have these traveling acts and just whoever could. And... Like we've talked about a number of times, starting in the 1880s, a lot of Jews immigrate to America. Those Jews find it very difficult to get into most areas of work, right? Like they cannot, they're barred either explicitly or implicitly from many, many different types of work. So they can work in a factory as a laborer, maybe. They can... selling of small wares. It's called peddling, basically. But one of the areas that they seemingly can get into is vaudeville performance. Because if you're taking a show on the road to stop in 10 cities in 10 days, and you just want an interesting performer who's going to connect with audiences, and you don't really care that much about the origins of who is performing, just do they have it? Do they have what it takes to be on stage? And Speaker 2 (8:53) they're not Speaker 1 (8:53) staying Speaker 2 (8:53) in town. So the audiences are not invested in who they are. Right. Speaker 1 (8:58) I know. So, like, I mean, as as we joked about and has becomes still a major thing in Hollywood, the name on the playbill needs to be, you know, generically American. So Jews are constantly changing their names so that they are appealing ones to appear on the playbill. But they're not kept out of this industry in any way the way that they are in a lot of other industries. Speaker 2 (9:23) Is the vaudeville community separate from the Yiddish theater community? Do those things kind of converge? Speaker 1 (9:30) Yes, there's Yiddish theater for people who, which is performed in Yiddish for people who understand it. But for many of the actors, for many of the aspiring Jews, you want to move up from the Yiddish theater to like, you know, the major leagues, the real show. You'll need to leave behind elements of your Jewish identity. That's where the real money is and the real fame is. Thomas Edison and a bunch of other people figure out ways to capture this and play it back, which is mind-blowing. Magic. Literal magic. Yeah. You're right that this starts out as vaudeville on a screen, right? You're just, okay, capture, because that's what people want to see, these vaudeville shows, and now you don't have to bring all the actors somewhere. You just have to find a way to... to film it, and then you can play this at a theater, and you can play it many, many times, and you can make a lot of money selling tickets to people seeing those performances. Speaker 2 (10:30) It's not as though the first feature-length film with sound was a production of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Speaker 1 (10:40) Right. The first synchronized sound, really what they were advertising, was not the spoken dialogue. It's a big deal that there's spoken dialogue, but it's to capture the songs, which people want to hear my hot take. Like, they tend not to be the best movies. I think the most compelling movies are not movie musicals. There Speaker 2 (10:58) was a golden age of movie musicals. And what's really interesting is that what I would contend is one of the best ever movie musicals from that era is actually about the transition from silent Speaker 1 (11:12) movies to sound. You're talking about Singing in the Rain. Speaker 2 (11:16) Yes. Speaker 1 (11:16) Oh, it's so good. Yes. Speaker 2 (11:18) So this is all, like, Hollywood itself has acknowledged how important this is. Speaker 1 (11:23) Yeah. Yeah. Although, Singing in the Rain and the way they tell that, that the story of the transition into sound, there's very little Jewishness in the version that Hollywood tells about its own story, which is interesting because the actual story was so Jewish. Okay. Okay. So there's a whole bunch of different. Jews, a lot of them immigrants from Eastern Europe, who all realize early on the huge potential for movies. And they don't come to it from the artistic side or the technical side. They come to it from other areas of business. So when Hollywood is basically built, there are eight major studios, what's called at the time the Big Five and the Little Three, almost all of those. are started by or run by Jews. Just a quick list. Paramount, run by Adolf Zucker, who's from Hungary, who started out in the fur business. MGM, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Goldwyn was a Jew and Mayer was a Jew. Right? Like, from Russia, Samuel Goldwyn was born. Samuel Gelbfish in Poland. Warner Brothers. All four of the Warner Brothers were Jewish, obviously. They're... Original name, when they were in Poland, was not Warner. It's something very Polish and Jewish that I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of. 20th Century Fox, which was a merger of two different studios. William Fox, his name was Fuchs, and he's from Hungary. Like, all of them. So, so Jewish. And, like, really interestingly, different versions of the same story. Like, Jewish immigrant. Obviously really talented, really bright, very driven, realizes, okay, this is a chance to do something. And then they all have different, all of these different studios have different ways of becoming really successful in movie. They're not all doing the exact same thing. Some like Paramount sees the value of like block booking theaters and Warner Brothers, I think, focuses on signing the... The stars took contracts that would have them do multiple movies. They're all finding different ways to become really, really good at making movies, which is what they do. And they start making these more and more elaborate movies. And Speaker 2 (13:45) I don't think, I don't know if our younger listeners realize this. Speaker 1 (13:50) Movies, back in the day, you would watch a movie in something called a theater, not your phone. Speaker 2 (13:56) Well, not even that. It's the volume of number of movies that would come out in theaters each week. We are now used to this insane volume of content because we have unlimited streaming and all