Broadway Musicals - Athena

Lyricist Betty Comden (Singin’ in the
Rain, On the Town, Bells Are Ringing)
I think that they were probably a very
emotional people who were very creative,
and a lot of that was stifled where they
came from, the way they lived and were
restricted to shtetls and ghettos. Maybe
the freedom of coming here and reaching
out and using whatever was in them—
suddenly, anything was possible.
Betty Comden and Adolph Green
circa 1945
Professor Stephen Whitfield
(Max Richter Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis
University)
There’s often been the sense that Jews have been uncomfortable in
the societies that they have lived in. There’s always that element at
least—maybe it’s only subjective—of feeling somehow to be a bit of
an outsider, a bit marginalized; at worst, of course, being stigmatized
and persecuted. It probably occurs less in America but it’s not entirely
nonexistent. The fact that Jews have tended to be urban and liberal,
Jews have tended to pursue education compared to most other
Americans, certainly as a proportion—all of that has given Jews often a
sense of feeling a bit different from our neighbors.
And often, for purposes of creativity, there has to be some kind of
tension with the rest of society. Some element of friction—the way
the pearl is formed within the oyster—that allows something really to
happen. Free people who are already fully comfortable in their societies,
already fully at ease in their societies, are not likely to have the same
degree of impetus to want to do something artistically, do something
satirically, do something to satisfy their own curiosity as to why their
neighbors may be a little bit unlike them.
Photofest
Jamie Bernstein (daughter of Leonard Bernstein)
My grandparents, Sam and Jennie Bernstein, were still very much
around during my childhood. I used to love to go and stay in their house
because it was kind of like suburbia, which was a thing that was not
a part of my life at all. I grew up in New York City, and they had this
sort of wonderful, very Jewish suburban neighborhood in Brookline,
Massachusetts, that they were living in. Sam was very religious: he
was fiercely passionate about the Talmud and the Torah, and he was
studying all the time, and I think that was really the thing he cared
about most in the world. He was not particularly passionate about his
business although it was very successful, the Samuel J. Bernstein Hair
Company in Boston. “It’s Bernstein!” was their slogan.
So there was this sensibility in the house of this tremendous, fierce
passion about Judaism. That was the environment that my father grew
up in. He had his bar mitzvah and was pretty learned on his own about
the Torah, and then he was expected to eventually run the Samuel J.
Bernstein Hair Company.
Sam was so proud to be able to offer his eldest son this fabulous
business opportunity, so you can just imagine that it didn’t go well
when my father expressed his desire to be a musician. “A musician? A
klezmer?” Because in the old country, a musician meant being a kind of
homeless guy who would schlep from village to village, shtetl to shtetl,
with his fiddle. He would play a little bit and they’d throw him a few
kopeks, give him a bowl of cabbage gruel, and send him on his way. “You
call this a living?” Sam would have none of it, and the story goes that
Sam refused to pay for my father’s piano lessons, because he didn’t want
to encourage him in that direction.
Then my father had his big overnight success, taking over at the
last minute for Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall, and it was broadcast
nationally on the radio and he became sort of famous overnight. After
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