The Explosion of Pop Culture
Jews created for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences as mass culture and its technologies grew exponentially, incentivizing the largest possible audiences.
A Global Development
The explosive development of what we can call modern mass culture, popular culture, or commercial culture was a global development between the years 1880 and 1918. This was a development in which numerous persons of Jewish descent played what can be called only a disproportionate role, at least in Western Europe, the United States, and later, parts of the Arab world.
By popular or mass culture, we mean culture created not in service of any particular idea (though it could brim with ideas in practice) but for an ever-growing market for entertainment, for new experiences in an age of technological wonders like film, for the pleasures of song and dance, for titillation, for distraction from hard work and hard circumstances. Such culture has existed as long as there have been potential consumers, of course, but economic, sociological, and technological factors peculiar to the 1880–1918 era made it the watershed to our own age of mass culture: an era that saw a vast expansion in the sheer amount and range of consumer entertainment, both in old forms like print culture and in the defining new forms of the era like radio, records, and film.
Where Does Pop Culture Fit into an Anthology of Jewish Culture?
Here, as with “high culture” created by Jews but directed toward larger communities, the question of which instances of mass culture created, curated, or consumed by Jews belong in a library of Jewish culture turns out to be complex. To begin with, we should remember that much popular culture, and particularly the emerging genres of film and recorded music, demanded collaborative production involving several or even many “authors,” and this itself complicates any attribution no matter how we wish to define “Jewish culture.” But even leaving such matters aside, the universe of popular or mass culture poses questions of definition for the Posen Library similar to those that mark the universe of high culture created by acculturated Jews participating in larger metropolitan cultural and linguistic spheres.
Some popular culture created by people of Jewish background during these decades was manifestly intended and shaped for specifically Jewish audiences; this is definitionally true of work created for mass consumption in Yiddish, Ladino, or Judeo-Arabic. But numerous Jewish individuals also participated in creating the entertainment culture that flowed from theaters, studios, and factories in America, Germany, France and points east to entertain burgeoning global audiences hungry to experience moving pictures in the streets and records at home or, as was common from Salonika to Jaffa to Baghdad, on a coffeehouse gramophone.
Much of what these Jewish cultural producers created cannot be related to matters Jewish, however defined, in any straightforward way—not least because, with every technological leap in our era, there were yet more very good commercial reasons to aim products at the broadest audiences possible. Thus, the Jewish individuals who in many ways founded Hollywood were not striving to create “Jewish culture” or reach particularly Jewish audiences. On the contrary, keen to reach every possible American and indeed global viewer, they shaped the production of their studios accordingly.
Asking Jewish Questions within a Broader View
That said, as with high culture created by and for European, American, or Arabic cultural milieus by people who happened to be Jewish and for whom Jewishness meant many different things, there was plenty of room in the burgeoning world of popular culture for Jewish questions to “swim up,” whether in the work itself in some relation to authorial intention, or in the way the work was received and appropriated by audiences. And as with the case of high culture born within the framework of acculturation and cultural integration, we proceed both by seeking instances of popular culture that spoke to or about Jewish questions and by seeking to capture in some social-historical sense the sheer range of open-ended creativity in which Jews in this era, more than any previously, suddenly found themselves involved.