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In the millennial era that spawned the website Jewhoo, the magazine Heeb, and the phenomenon of Borat Sagdiyev, a compact disc titled Jewface created by self-described "disaffected Jews"1 who hear the call of their ancestors in crackly 78s of century-old Tin Pan Alley songs like "My Yiddisha Mammy" should come as no surprise. The CD's fifteen songs date from the first quarter of the twentieth century, a peak period (or low ebb, depending on your perspective) in American popular entertainment's trafficking in Jewish, Irish, Italian, German, Chinese, and African American portrayal. The individual songs do not all come as news: a few of them, such as "Cohen Owes Me Ninety Seven Dollars" and "Becky Is Back in the Ballet," have appeared on other historical recording compilations, but Jewface gives them new force as a group whose Jewishness stands in the foreground. We hear them now as the stereotypes--the scheming, argumentative, tightfisted, gold-coveting, mother-loving, suit-tailoring, oy-shouting, parabola-nosed, augmented-second singing stereotypes--have been repossessed and renovated as hip twenty-first century counterculture. It represents a bold and fraught effort whose initial success may be measured by an admiring feature in the New York Times Sunday "Style" section and a grade-A ranking, along with new CDs by the likes of Beck and Tom Waits, on rock critic Robert Christgau's online Consumer Guide.2
If the stereotypes nevertheless cause nausea or dizziness please do not use this product, but, as the album's title suggests, its in-your-face spirit is very much to the point. Presented as the opposite of Jewish self-hatred, the CD's embracing and flaunting of taboo images and subjects--like the pig on the cover of Heeb's recent food issue--aim to be liberating and empowering, especially when compiler Jody Rosen claims in his liner notes that one of the songs, "When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band" (Example 1 shows the refrain), appears to be the source for the six-note melodic incipit that launches the refrain of our nation's most sacred secular hymn.
Example 1.
Refrain of "When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band," words by Bert Fitzgibbon and Jack Drislane, music by Theodore Morse (New York: F. B. Haviland Publishing Co., 1906).
Rosen's observation that young Irving Berlin made "a habit of...