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MARCH 16• 2023 | 7

less than the essential statement 
of American Jewish tension 
between them and us, culturally 
speaking; between affection for 
the mainstream and alienation 
from it.
” 
Dauber is professor of Jewish 
literature and American stud-
ies at Columbia University, 
whose previous books include 
Jewish Comedy and American 
Comics: A History. Mel Brooks: 
Disobedient Jew is part of the 
Jewish Lives series of brief inter-
pretative biographies from Yale 
University Press. 
Dauber and I spoke about 
why America fell for a self- 
described “spectacular Jew” 
from Brooklyn. Here are the 
highlights.

ONE ON ONE WITH 
THE AUTHOR
JTA: History of the World, Part 
II came out March 6. History of 
the World, Part I may not be in 
the top tier of Brooks films, but 
it seems to touch on so many 
aspects of his career that you 
trace in your book: the parody of 
classic movie forms, the musical 
comedy, injecting Jews into every 
aspect of human civilization and 
the anything-for-a-laugh sensi-
bility.
Dauber: I agree. There’s the 
one thing that really brings 
it home, and it’s probably the 
most famous or infamous 
scene from the film. That’s the 
Spanish Inquisition scene. You 
have Brooks sort of probing 
the limits of bad taste. He had 
done that most famously in The 
Producers with its Nazi kickline, 
but here he takes the same idea 
— that one of the ways that you 
attack antisemitism is through 
ridicule — and turns the per-
secution of the Jews into a big 
musical number. It’s his love of 
music and dance. But the thing 
that’s almost the most interest-
ing about this is that he takes 
on the role of the Torquemada 

character.
JTA: As his henchman sing and 
dance and the Jews face torture, 
the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the 
Catholic friar who tormented the 
Jews.
Dauber: That’s right. And 
what’s the crime that he accuses 
the Jews of? “Don’t be bor-
ing! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the 
worst thing that you can be. It’s 
his way of saying, “If I have a 
religion, you know, it is show 
business.
”
JTA: His fascination with 
showbiz seems inseparable from 
his Jewishness, as if being a show-
biz Jew is a denomination in its 
own right.
Dauber: One of my favorite 
lines of his is when he marries 
[actress] Anne Bancroft, who, 
of course, is not Jewish. And he 
says, “She doesn’t have to con-
vert: She’s a star.
” If you’re a star, 
if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind 
of in your own firmament faith-
wise, and so it’s OK. Showbiz is 
this faith. But it is very Jewish, 
because show business is a way 
to acceptance. It’s a way that 
America can love him as a Jew, 
as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the 
outer boroughs who can grow 
up to marry Anne Bancroft. 
JTA: You write early on that 
“Mel Brooks, more than any 
other single figure, symbolizes 
the Jewish perspective on and 
contribution to American mass 
entertainment.
” Can you expand 
on that? 

Dauber: Jews understand 
that there’s a path to success 
and that being embraced by a 
culture means learning about it, 
immersing yourself in it, being 
so deeply involved in it that 
you understand it and master 
it. But simultaneously, you’re 
doing that as a kind of outsider. 
You’re always not quite in it, 
even though you’re of it in some 
deep way. 
In some ways, it’s the apo-
theosis of what Brooks does, 
which is being a parodist. In 
order to be the kind of parodist 
that Mel Brooks is, you have 
to be acutely attuned to every 
aspect of the cultural medium 
that you’re parodying. You have 
to know it inside and outside 
and backwards and forwards. 
And Brooks certainly does, but 
at the same time you have to be 
able to sort of step outside of it 
and say, you know, “Well, I’m 
watching a Western, but come 
on, what’s going on with these 
guys? Like why doesn’t anyone 
ever, you know, pass gas after 
eating so many beans?” 
JTA: You have this great 
phrase, that to be an American 
Jew is to be part of the “loyal 
opposition.
”
Dauber: That’s right. Brooks 
at his best is always kind of pok-
ing and prodding at convention, 
but loyally. He’s not like the 
countercultural figures of his 
day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really 
within the system but is poking 

at the system as well.
JTA: You wrote in that vein 
about his 1963 short film, The 
Critic, which won him an Oscar. 
Brooks plays an old Jewish man 
making fun of an art film.
Dauber: On one hand, he’s 
doing it in the voice of one 
of his older Jewish relatives, 
the Jewish generation with 
an Eastern European accent, 
to make fun of these kinds 
of intellectuals. He’s trying 
to channel the everyman’s 
response to high art. “What 
is this I’m watching? I don’t 
understand this at all.
” On the 
other hand, Brooks is much 
more intellectual than he’s often 
given credit for.
JTA: For me, the paradox of 
Brooks’ career is conveyed in a 
phrase that appears a couple of 
times in the book: “too Jewish.
” 
The irony is that the more he 
leaned into his Jewishness, the 
more successful he got, starting 
with the 2000 Year Old Man 
character, in which he channels 
Yiddish dialect in a series of wild-
ly successful comedy albums with 
his friend Carl Reiner. How do 
you explain America’s embrace of 
these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pic-
tures of the late 1960s-1970s 
track with America’s embrace 
of Jewishness. You have The 
Graduate, which came out at 
around the same time as The 
Producers, and which showed 
that someone like Dustin 
Hoffman can be a leading 
man. It doesn’t have to be a 
Robert Redford. You have Allan 
Sherman and all these popular 
Jewish comedians. You have 
Fiddler on the Roof becoming 
one of Broadway’s biggest hits. 
That gives Brooks license to 
kind of jump in with both feet. 

Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor at large 

of the New York Jewish Week and 

Managing Editor for Ideas for the JTA. 

Read more of this interview at JTA.org.

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Jeremy Dauber is the author of Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew.

