I’m currently working on a book about how Jews created a lot of modern American popular culture. I also drew the link between Jewish and Irish experiences in America. Jews and the Irish were outsiders, often with large families and a gift for writing and language. They distrusted authority. Even as a Catholic I feel more comfortable at a Jewish Shabbat than an evangelical revival meeting.
Growing up in an Irish-Catholic house in Maryland that loved James Joyce, Yeats and Edna O’Brien, I also loved Jewish writers and artists—because I knew how the Jews in law and publishing who’d helped Irish writers were censored. A prime example was James Joyce. His modernist masterwork Ulysses was banned in all English-speaking countries since its publication in 1922. Even its defenders noticed the books “Rabelaisian” moments, with literary historian Paul Vanderham writing that the obscenity in Ulysses “is more than a Victorian fantasy.”
As the scholar Brett Gary notes in an essay in the book Forged in America: How Irish-Jewish Encounters Shaped a Nation, it was two Jewish New York City lawyers, Morris Ernst and Alexander Lindey, who "planned the battle to free Ulysses from the clutches of the censors, making the story of Joyce’s protagonist Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner of Irish and Jewish parentage, available for all the world to read.” In August 1931, two years before they’d finally bring the book to trial in a federal courtroom in New York City, Lindey reminded his senior partner Ernst of the stakes of their campaign: “I still feel very keenly that this would be the grandest obscenity case in the history of law and literature, and I am ready to do anything in the world to get it started.”
Gary explains that “Ernst and Lindey’s defense of Ulysses needs to be situated in the context of their larger pursuit of what Ernst called ‘rational sex laws,’ and their campaign against what Ernst would describe as the ‘necessity for hypocrisy and circumlocution in literature.’”
I first read Ulysses—or parts of it—in 1986. I was having a love affair with a Jewish woman I’ll call Hannah. One thing I loved about her, along with her curly black hair and great figure, was that she understood my disillusionment with religion and wasn’t judgmental. Back in those Footloose days it was common to rail against the moron Christian preachers on late-night TV asking for money and preaching about the Lord. Yet my disillusionment also ran the other way, to the Jesuits and the figures in the Catholic Church captured by liberalism. My father took the family to Ireland twice in the 1980s. It was all the Irish things—pubs, Guinness, literature, singing and dancing.
As Paul Elie explores sin his excellent book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, religion—and the “crypto-religious”—were in the air. U2 was huge.
Hannah, being Jewish, was a welcome respite from all this. She was outside of my normal social circle. She didn’t know Joyce but did know Philip Glass, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow. She was funny and comfortable about sex. Hannah was like Leopold Bloom seeing Dublin form the perspective of an outsider. One night we went to see one of my favorite bands at the time, That Petrol Emotion. They were an Irish group with an American singer and a lot of their songs had to do with the volatility of religion on Northern Ireland. The climax was always the incredible “Creeping to the Cross”:
With some shame and sham
And some blame and glam
With some shame and sham
And some blame and glam
Tiptoeing west
With blindfolds on
Tiptoeing west
With blindfolds on
And I'd rather be the devil than go
Creeping to the cross
Another Jew crucial to getting Ulysses published was Bennett Cerf. In the new book Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, author Gayle Feldman tells the story of Cerf, the man who founded Random House. Feldman makes the case that the Jews who entered publishing in America in the 20th century loved the United States and the bedrock ideas of Western philosophy, and in passing that love onto the culture made America a more prosperous and strong country.
In 1933, Cerf won United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, and became the first in the United States to publish James Joyce's unabridged Ulysses. Cerf was part of what Feldman calls “an unofficial New York club," the Jewish “book boys” (and one girl, Blanche Knopf). This included Simon and Schuster, Knopf, Harold Guinzburg, co-founder of the Literary Guild and Viking Press, and Harry Scherman and Robert Haas, who established the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC). “Although many wanted to fit in,” Feldman notes, “they also wanted to be noticed.
Feldman adds that “the prejudice [Jewish publishers] encountered was a given, running the gamut from insidious to ugly to shocking and worse.” It even came from authors they published. Author Ford Maddox Ford declared, “I don’t like Jews,” but he went on to admit that “the arts flourish in New York largely because of its Jewish population… The only people I have found [there]—and I have not found them anywhere else… who really loved books… were Jews—and the only people who subsidized young writers during their early non-lucrative years.”