Conference Agenda

The songs of Irving Berlin have ingrained themselves in the Great American Songbook as exemplars of the country’s sound and spirit. Berlin’s journey from a Russian Jewish immigrant living in poverty to one of the nation’s most treasured and successful songwriters has been well-documented and incorporated into his legacy. An intensely private man, Berlin divulged little in his lifetime about how he perceived his personal identity throughout this shift, yet his biographers and other related scholars promote the narrative that he deliberately cast away his Jewish identity in favor of that of the general American.

Often cited to support this narrative is a group of purportedly antisemitic songs penned by Berlin at the start of his career. In accordance with the humor of vaudeville theater, popular on American stages in the early twentieth century, much of Berlin's early work featured caricatures of various ethnicities that displayed negative stereotypes. As a portion of those caricatures were Jewish, his biographers concluded that Berlin's derogatory portrayals of his ethnic group indicated his disdain for his cultural background. But a deeper reading of Berlin's lyrics suggests that, within the songs' formulaic boundaries, Berlin repurposed Jewish stereotypes to communicate emic knowledge and kinship.

My paper argues for a reframing of Berlin's Jewish novelty songs in the scholarly consciousness from crude ephemera to historical or even autobiographical documents that illuminate a young Berlin's multifaceted involvement in both the Jewish tenements and entertainment industry of early twentieth-century New York. I first compare and contrast Berlin's lyrical and musical portrayals of different ethnic caricatures, dissecting his communicated parameters of their behaviors and abilities. I then examine how his lyrics align with accounts of lived Jewish experiences and sentiments expressed in the writings of Berlin and those closest to him. My paper concludes that Berlin's Jewish novelty songs possess more depth and significance than previously represented in his biographical literature; specifically, that these songs not only allowed Berlin to write about his experiences during a pivotal period of his life but also to uplift and empathize with the community of Jewish immigrants to which he belonged.