Blogs: Boroson's Anecdotage
Jewish Trivia
How Many Famous Jewish Composers Can You Name?
Milton Babbitt
Leonard Bernstein
Irving Berlin
Marc Blitzstein
Ernest Bloch
Max Brod
Irving Caesar
Sammy Cahn
Leonard Cohen
Betty Comden
Aaron Copland
Sigmund Romberg
Neil Diamond
Howard Dietz
George Gershwin
Vernon Duke (Vladimir Dukelsky)
Karl Goldmark
Fritz Kreisler*
Burt Bacharach
Harold Arlen
Paul Dukas
Morton Gould
Fromental Halevy
Gus Kahn
Erich Korngold
Alan Jay Lerner
Federick Loewe
Gustav Mahler
Felix Mendelssohn
Fanny Mendelssohn
Meyerbeer
Darius Milhaud
Alex North
Jacques Offenbach
Paul Simon
Bob Dylen
Philip Reich
Steve Glass
Arnold Schoenberg
Andre Previn
Anton Rubenstein
Oscar Straus
Kurt Weill
Richard Rodgers (father changed name from Abrahams)
*“Amy Biancolli’s recent biography Fritz Kreisler: Love’s Sorrow, Love’s Joy (Amadeus Press, Portland Oregon, 1998) contains an extensive discussion of Kreisler’s Jewish background, which he never acknowledged and which his wife adamantly denied (see Chapter 8: “Kreisler the Catholic, Kreisler the Jew”). Biancolli cites a 1992 interview by David Sackson of Franz Rupp, Fritz Kreisler’s piano accompanist in the 1930s. Rupp states that he once asked Kreisler’s brother, the cellist Hugo Kreisler, about the Kreislers’ Jewish background, to which Hugo responded simply, “I’m a Jew, but my brother, I don’t know.” According to Biancolli, Kreisler’s father, Salomon Severin Kreisler (also called Samuel Severin Kreisler), a physician and amateur violinist from Krakow, was almost certainly Jewish. Fritz’s mother, Anna, was a Roman Catholic, and probably an “Aryan.” According to Louis Lochner’s 1950 biography Fritz Kreisler, Kreisler was reared as a Roman Catholic. However, according to unpublished parts of the manuscript uncovered by Biancolli in the Library of Congress, he was baptized only at the age of twelve. The bottom line seems to be that Kreisler was at least half-Jewish and his reticence on the subject primarily an attempt to placate his highly anti-Semitic wife Harriet. (“Fritz hasn’t a drop of Jewish blood in his veins!” she is said to have vehemently responded to an inquiry from Leopold Godowsky. Godowsky retorted: “He must be very anemic.’’)
—JINFO.ORG
Excerpt from Il Trovatore
Marlon Brando on Jews in Hollywood
From: Marlon Brando (with Robert Lindsey), Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, New York: Random House (1994), page 79:
Hollywood was always a Jewish community; it was started by Jews and to this day is run largely by Jews. But for a long time it was venomously anti-Semitic in a perverse way, especially before the war, when Jewish performers had to disguise their Jewishness if they wanted a job. These actors were frightened, and understandably so. When I was breaking into acting, I constantly heard about agents submitting an actor or actress for a part, taking them to the theater for a reading and afterward hearing the producer say, “Terrific. Thank you very much. We’ll call you.”
After the actor was gone, the agent would ask, “Well, Al, what did you think?”
“Great,” the producer would say, “He was terrific, but he’s too Jewish.”
If you “looked Jewish,” you didn’t get a part and couldn’t make a living. You had to look like Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Paul Muni or Paulette Goddard and change your name. They were Jews, but didn’t “look Jewish” and employed the camouflage of non-Jewish names. Hence Julius Garfinkle became John Garfield, Marion Levy became Paulette Goddard, Emmanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson and Muni Weisenfreund became Paul Muni.
(Note: Paulette Goddard, born Marion Levy, was the daughter of a Jewish man and an Episcopalian woman.)
Gershwin’s ‘Gefiltefish Orchestration’
Virgil Thompson was a well-known composer and music critic during the 1930s.
“…he could rarely resist ethnic stereotypes when writing about his more successful Jewish rivals. ‘At best it is a piquant but highly unsavory stirring-up-together of Israel, Africa, and the Gaelic isles,’ he said of Porgy and Bess. He decried
‘the impurity of his musical sources’ and in a frank twitch of anti-Semitism, Gershwin’s
‘gefiltefish orchestration.’ … As he had done with the work of Aaron Copland a few years earlier, Thomson could not resist highlighting the real or imagined Hebraic sources of Gershwin’s music.”
Morris Dickstein, “Dancing in the Dark,” 2009
Gotta Dance!
From the Memoirs of an American POW
In his memoir about being a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II, “Cigarettes for Bread” (2007), Paul W. Church writes (p. 5)
that a German officer “was trying to find out what materiel the Allies had and what amounts, but was not very successful, as evidenced by his frame of mind…. I was interviewed along with a Jewish boy, and he asked this lad how many tanks we had at the front in his sector. ‘Tanks?’ was the response. ‘Why, I don’t know that we have any.’
“‘Oh, come,’ said our interrogator, ‘when was the last time you saw a tank?’
“‘Well let’s see (deep thought), I remember seeing one in Naples.’ That was six months past. At this the Jerry almost had apoplexy and he said, ‘Do you know what we do with people of your race?’
“The boy paled a bit, but looked at the Nazi steadily and said, ‘I am also an American soldier.’ That was enough. We were dismissed altogether.”
+++
p. 18
In Munich, many prisoners were wearing striped prison garb.
“These puzzled us for a while until we found out that they were Germans who refused to fight. Many of them were Jews and these were treated worst of all.
“When Munich finally fell to the Allies months later, I was overjoyed to hear that these men rebelled and had been instrumental in helping the overthrow from within.”
‘Death to all juice’
Fred Nagel’s wacko letter (June 10) accusing Israel of all sorts of crimes put me in mind of a photograph I saw in the New York Times of June 12, page A16.
It shows an Arab terrorist holding up a sign: DEATH TO ALL JUICE.
Full of blind hatred. And ignorance.
Warren Boroson
Woodstock
