Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Allies of a Different Sort \\ 209
"Black" questions, which for them epitomized the colonized state of world politics
and culture. Yiddish-speaking communists, the most stolidly working class
(and often recently immigrated) section of American Jewry, developed a unique
interest in what they took to be the folkishness that they, fellow sufferers of capitalism,
could share. Both these sections of Jews, it is fair to say, felt the sting of
anti-Semitism, and believed that only world revolution offered a solution to either
group. Paradoxically, as the rise of fascism pushed early revolution off the map
and the Popular Front took hold, the institutional cover of the New Deal allowed
a far wider participation in public affairs and a popular culture which at times
urged a drastic shift in race relations.
Themes explored for relatively small and politically committed working class
audiences in the early 1930s gained tens of thousands of watchers and listeners
(albeit with moderated political rhetoric) in Federal Theater productions a few
years later. At the Left end of the theatrical spectrum, rising Jewish playwrights
such as George Sklar staged provocative interracial dramas, notably Sklar's highly
acclaimed Stevedore (co-written with Paul Peters). In film, Bernard Vorhaus cowrote
Way Down South (1939) with Langston Hughes and Clarence Muse, and a
decade later Ben Maddows wrote the script for the anti-racist classic Intruder in the
Dust. Significantly, these powerful productions were among the nation's earliest
productions which did not feature African American actors in minstrel-show
archetypes. 3/1 At another end, nightclub impresario Max Gordon opened the
famed Village Vanguard in 1935 with a mixture of progressive-minded Black
singers and left-wing Jewish stand-up comedy such as Leadbelly, Josh White, and
Jack Gilford. Many of these same performers also worked at Cafe Society, Barney
Josephson's after hours club well-known for breaking down racial barriers, paying
employees union wages, lampooning the bourgeoisie, raising money for Popular
Front causes, and being on J. Edgar Hoover's hit list. (Barney's brother Leon, incidentally,
was a leading member of the Communist Party.) 35
The Federal Theater folded as Congressional investigating committees accused
it of being a Communist front and the New Deal wound to a close. But much of
the talent that had gathered there reappeared in a handful of interracial films and
theatrical productions during the 1940s—50s, once scattered "Negro" parts
became an accepted element of Broadway and Hollywood. The musical side, from
nightclubs to concerts to children's summer camps, had been fixed in the wild,
left-wing, Jewish enthusiasm for the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, "From
Spirituals to Swing." Progressive Jewish impresarios at all levels made Black performers
de rigeur, the more so if occasional songs could be sung in Yiddish as well
(as by Paul Robeson, the all-time headline performer).
After Pearl Harbor
In a larger sense, the impress of Popular Front culture remained the most basic
outline of an imagined interracial American society. When leading Yiddish ped-