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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.