Jews and the Jazz Age

April 12 2024

After troubled relationships with two successive managers, Louis Armstrong convinced Joseph Glaser, a Jewish nightclub owner, to do the job. Their partnership, according to Larry Tye, was a happy one that made both men rich. Something similar can be said of Duke Ellington and his own Jewish manager, Irving Mills. Tye goes on to consider Jews’ role in jazz:

It was no surprise that Mills, Glaser, and so many other managers of Black jazzmen were not just white but also Jewish. Jews always played a big role in jazz, as performers like Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, club owners like Frank Schiffman at the Apollo and Max Gordon at the Village Vanguard, gangster benefactors like Dutch Schultz and Meyer Lansky, along with a legion of producers, bookers, and critics. Jews, like Blacks, had limited opportunities in white-shoe fields like advertising, publishing, and broadcasting. Such barriers are what made the equally rebellious field of comic books so attractive to Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and Batman inventors Bob Kane and Bill Finger, all Jewish and all aware they were getting in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing and super-profitable field that white American businessmen foolishly wanted no part of.

Read more at Tablet

More about: American Jewish History, Black-Jewish relations, Jazz, Popular music

The Intifada Has Been Globalized

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.

Read more at Spectator

More about: anti-Semitsm, Gaza War 2023, Terrorism