The "Yinglish" Music of Mickey Katz

Abstract

THE American-Jewish community has generally kept its Jewish popular culture separate from the American popular culture in which it has participated and which indeed it has helped to shape. Yiddish words and phrases have often crept into the comic strips and radio and television comedy, but Yiddish entertainment has for a long time remained isolated from developments in American popular culture. Yiddish entertainment, as distinguished from serious Yiddish theatre, has largely taken the form of Yiddish-American Revues, produced on New York's Second Avenue, the Yiddish Broadway, with short tours to larger cities west of New York. These revues have been unashamedly sentimental (and corny) operettas dealing with eastern European life, or the experiences of the East-Europe immigrant in the new land and his adjustment to it. Their humor, format, and music have been European; their atmosphere still reflects the turn of the century. The most popular songs from these revues have usually been recorded, giving Jews in the smaller towns a chance to share in this popular culture. In the last decade or so, however, out of the Jewish resorts in the Catskill Mountains near New York has come a new popular culture. Still in musical comedy, revue, or now straight vaudeville form, the new product is modern American in that it selects American hit tunes, comedy acts or situations which are translated into a basic American Yiddish consisting only of the most widely known phrases and words. As such it is comprehensible even to the younger Jews who do not understand Yiddish, and can achieve a comic effect largely because of the incongruity between American material and a more or less