The Jazz Singer Analysis

Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer opened in 1927 to critical acclaim and widespread popular acclamation. The film is focused on young, Jewish Jakie Rabinowitz, who defies his devoutly religious family in order to pursue a career on stage as a jazz singer. Significantly, this film features copious uses of blackface, which is not only narratively but thematically central to the message of the film—the necessary rebellion of modernity against tradition, of New World dynamism against Old World stagnation. In terms of race, the film depicts a significant amount of hybridity, or assimilation, on Jack Robin’s part, and that assimilation is characterized by the transference of his own Jewishness to the melting pot of American culture. However, while little …show more content…
Notwithstanding the alternative ending of the play, it is significant that Jack Robin earns the forgiveness of his father, sings the Kol Nidre at his synagogue, and reconciles his ethnic and religious background with his secular future on Broadway. This interpretation, however, is not at odds with Rogin’s theory—that the lack of anti-Semitism on screen, and framing the film as a generational conflict is a form of encouraging assimilation. Musser’s reading, his assertion that the choice is not between Christianity and Judaism, but between tradition and modernity is based on the reading of the film as a tale of upwards mobility and aspirational achievement. Yet that form of achievement is rooted, fundamentally, in what Rogin refers to as the ‘fragmenting of the Jewish community’. In other words, systemic prejudices that were faced by Jews in this period of time—evidenced by the anti-immigration legislation and the famous Numerus clausus—were domesticated in this film, and reduced into a father/son conflict. Ultimately, the story of Jack Robin parallels that of Al Jolson, and The Jazz Singer is ‘the story of the men who made Hollywood.’ The men who made Hollywood, according to Neal Gabler, the men who built all eight major studios were all immigrant Jews who Americanized themselves in order to achieve upward mobility. Jack Robin’s problems stem not from any kind of systemic prejudice against Jewishness, and neither does it lie in the fact that he has to change his name in order to take the stage—his issues lie with his father’s strict religion. According to Rogin, this removes the blame from gentile America to the strict sensibilities of those who refuse to become more accommodating. The Jew, essentially, is a ‘pariah’, not a citizen, and the first generation American must cast off the chains of the Old World in order to embrace the new. This