The Jews of prime time
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Jews of prime time
(The Brandeis series in American Jewish history, culture, and life)
Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England, c2003
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [243]-262) and index
Contents of Works
- Introduction: on being "too Jewish" in "this weird loop"
- Learning to be "more American", the Goldbergs
- "Write Yiddish, cast British", from Dick van Dyke to Mrs. G
- Prime-time intermarriage I, Bridget loves Bernie
- The dramas-Thirtysomething and Northern exposure
- Intermarriage II (Shiksa goddesses transforming Jewish guys): Anything but love, Flying blind, Mad about you, Brooklyn Bridge, and more
- Intermarriage III (some Jewish women get Gentile guys), Rhoda, The nanny, Dharma & Greg, Friends, Will & Grace
- A "too-Jewish", not-Jewish-enough Jew for the '90s, Seinfeld
- Looping back, breaking ground, and calculating loss, 100 Centre Street, The education of Max Bickford, State of Grace
Description and Table of Contents
Description
How did it happen that in a time when networks were run by Jewish men, and many television shows were written by Jewish writers, there were so few identifiably Jewish characters on television? In his provocative book, David Zurawik marshalls compelling evidence to suggest that, during television's first thirty-five years, its primarily Jewish power brokers actively suppressed Jewish characters and Jewish themes from appearing on the small screen.
Beginning his investigation in the early days of television with Gertrude Berg and The Goldbergs, Zurawik, an award-winning journalist, shows how the Jewish founders of the three major networks-William S. Paley (CBS), David Sarnoff (NBC), and Leonard Goldenson (ABC)-dictated the kinds of shows Americans would watch from the late 1940s until they sold their broadcast empires in the mid-1980s. Under the auspices of these incredibly powerful men, the television industry either distorted or eliminated entirely images of Jews from prime time at the very moment when television came to hold center stage in mainstream American life. In fact, creating a cookie-cutter image of American life was so important to the top Jewish executives that they fabricated a brief, which circulated among the networks and became legendary in the industry. It claimed that CBS had"research" that indicated Americans were not interested in seeing Jews (or divorced people, people from New York, and men with mustaches) on the small screen. Zurawik convincingly argues that Paley and the others were ambivalent about their own Jewishness, and fearful, in the post-Holocaust, pro-assimilation, red-baiting 1950s, that their shows not appear "too Jewish." The ironic result: with few exceptions, shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver came to represent American family life, while Jewish identity was presented as something that had to be obscured or hidden away.
Only when the moguls sold their interest in the networks and moved on did things begin to change in a sustained way. Serious shows with leading Jewish characters began to appear in series like thirtysomething and Northern Exposure, which dealt with issues of tolerance, intermarriage, and assimilation. But in many of the programs that followed, particularly the sitcoms of the 1990s, Jewish men and especially Jewish women fell into stereotypical roles that Zurawik describes as"nebbishy boyfriends lusting after non-Jewish women" or "Jewish-American princesses and smothering mothers." And, although Jewish characters are now plentiful on television, many are very nominally Jewish, or Jewish in name only. Despite the best efforts of the successors of Paley, Sarnoff, and Goldenson, the culture of Jewish self-consciousness and censorship lives on in network television today.
Based on more than one hundred interviews gathered over ten years with network executives, producers, and actors, Zurawik's book gives voice to these insiders-who reveal, for the first time, how and why the depiction of Jews on television has followed such a strange, unpredictable course.
by "Nielsen BookData"