New Perspectives on Jews and the New York Entertainment Business

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

New York’s entertainment industry has long been a space of active Jewish participation. As recent scholarship has shown, Jews constituted an outsized per capita presence in New York’s early twentieth century sheet music publishing and continued to operate many of the agencies and institutions responsible for music’s transmission, dissemination, and promotion across genres (see Whitfield 2013, Barzel 2015, Karp 2018). Building on these extant studies, this panel presents three new examples of Jewish involvement in New York’s entertainment business, with the objective of understanding how participant’s financial considerations, the diversity of roles they occupied, their connections to one another, and their Jewish heritage impacted their business pursuits. Collectively, we find that striving towards economic mobility and financial stability in this urban metropolis continue to animate and motivate much of the logic behind Jewish activity in the New York entertainment business.
Paper 1 employs research in archives, the press, and in memoirs to tell a new story about a city-wide network of Jewish immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century, whose varied businesses proffered goods and services that served the management and audiences of local opera houses. Paper 2 examines notable Broadway musicals in the second half of the twentieth century to show how this uniquely American art form has historically functioned as a site of commercial hybridity, in which the gradual financial success of Jews in show business made it possible for Jews to bring significant moments in Jewish cultural history to life on the stage. Paper 3 draws on ethnographic research in New York’s contemporary Israeli Jazz scene to illustrate how it operates as a mutual aid community, dependent on a larger ecosystem of economic and social support. Together, these three papers gesture to the larger ways in which the entertainment business provides an arena for the intersection of Jewish identity, history, and culture.

Sub Unit

• Jews, Film, and the Arts

Chair

• Jessica Roda, Georgetown University

Individual Presentations

• “For Evening and Opera Occasions”: Jewish Production and Consumption of Goods and Services for the New York Opera Business, 1880-1940 - Samantha Cooper

• “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway…”: Musical Theatre, Jewish Artists, and Narratives of Jewish Cultural History - Barrie Gelles

• Not Just Falafel Jazz: Transience and Precarity in the Israeli Jazz Community in New York City - Rebecca Zola, Columbia University

Respondent

• Ezekiel Levine

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 04