Scholars look under every rock but one
Jewish studies scholars aren’t squeamish.
You want to talk Betty Boop? I mean really get into the Jewish social and cultural historical significance of that animated little hotsy totsy? You can do it. And its been done.
Same for Milton Berle and Barbie dolls. And that goes double for wild man Mickey Katz. Allan Sherman, too (courtesy of yours truly).
This is what has made Jewish cultural studies interesting. It has taken that Jewish parlor game, Guess Who’s Jewish? and given it some weight, some thought, figured out a way to look at the manifold contributions of Jews and think about them as unconscious — and unintended even unwanted — expressions of a Jewish culture, history, angle on life.
But it seems that when Jewish Studies pulled up its truck at the American culture counter and started packing everything for a Jewish audit Seymour Krim got left on the sidewalk. And he was yelling.
I didn’t hear him either. I found Krim’s work in 1993 and didn’t see how Jewish it was until 2007 (at this rate I have time for two more discoveries). He wrote about Jews when he wrote about the poet Milton Klonsky, when he wrote about the New York intellectuals, blacks, jazz, Mario Puzo, Jimmy Breslin, Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. He had Jews on the brain, as we said as kids.
I covered this territory a little in this article for Zeek. But I finally got to dealing with all of it in Missing a Beat. Jewish Studies departments should give Krim a look. Hey, there’s a Saul Bellow connection. Vivian Gornick called him the “Jewish Joan Didion.” Irving Malin loved Krim’s “brilliant, energetic prose rhythms.” And there’s this fact to consider: He’s been sitting on the sidewalk with his thumb out for 50 years.
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