There was a fun diversion this week on the podcast Unholy (always excellent, hosted by Yonit Levy of Israel’s Channel 12 and The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland), as the hosts noted Jewish American Heritage Month and pondered whom they personally would annoint as their favourite Jewish Americans. Their lists included, among others, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, Billy Crystal, Woody Allen with the expected reservations, Mandy Patinkin, Larry David and, if Canadians are allowed, Leonard Cohen (Freeland); Betty Friedan, Hedy Lamar (Levy) and Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

First thing to say — no mention of the very many Jews who created that most Jewish and most American of art forms, the musical? If the likes of Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Marvin Hamlisch, Jerry Herman (who even wrote a musical named Milk And Honey, including the song “Shalom”!), Jule Styne, Kurt Weill, Irving Berlin, Kander and Ebb, Stephen Sondheim and perhaps above all, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock (authors of the defining Jewish Broadway show, and if you don’t know to which I’m referring, you may have to question your own Jewishness) — if all of these and more aren’t among the defining Jewish Americans, then I won’t even bother to go on to list the Hollywood composers who forged the sound of America itself. Nor the Jewish cartoonists who created the superheroes that gave us “truth, justice and the American way” and all of that. Nor the film directors (ahem, Steven Spielberg) who taught Americans to look up and out, and then inwards.

But there should be more to this conversation than that.........

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