We need to talk about the unwritten rules of Jewish success in America.
Success came with an unspoken condition: Contribute everywhere, quietly. But over time, that bargain blurred Jewish identity into the background until others began rewriting our story entirely.
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This is a guest essay by Hana Raviyt Schank, a writer and fourth-generation Brooklyn Jew now living in Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.
My husband and I were watching the 1984 comedy/action movie “Top Secret,” when one line had us on the floor laughing.
“Top Secret” stars the extremely not-Jewish Val Kilmer as a rock star caught in a spy ring. A scientist tells Kilmer that an evil plot is set to go down on Sunday.
“Sunday?” replies Kilmer. “That’s Simchas Torah!”
The joke works on many layers, but to really get it, you have to:
Know the Jewish calendar is overflowing with holidays
Be Jewish enough to know there are minor Jewish holidays and major holidays
Be secular enough to not really know what Simchas Torah is about
Be American enough to find it hilarious when Val Kilmer, correctly pronounces “Simchas Torah” — guttural Hebrew chet and all
The (Jewish) directors and screenplay writers of this movie, brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, came of age in America when they could be out as Jews without fear of active reprisal. The restrictions that limited their parents’ lives had eased (poverty, university quotas, restricted towns, companies that didn’t hire Jews, people who asked to see their horns). And, as third-generation Americans, they were assimilated enough — and far enough removed from the religious observance of the shtetl — to poke fun at their Jewishness.
Their movies were filled with Jewish humor and a Jewish way of viewing the world.
When I was a kid, my family had a few movies my father taped on VHS from television (“Fiddler on the Roof,” “Airplane!,” “The Music Man,” “West Side Story,” and “Casablanca”) which we watched on repeat, in the days before cable television, Blockbuster, or Netflix. Each of these movies were written and produced by Jews, seamed with Jewish humor, and occasionally threw a wink and nod to the Jews in the audience.
These movies saw us, if you could read through the lines. In other words, they were unspokenly Jewish.
Is “The Music Man” actually about a New York Jew working out how to assimilate into Marching-Band America? Sure reads that way to me.
“West Side Story,” a musical romp through the conflict between poor White people and poor Puerto Rican immigrants, was first conceived as a conflict between Jews and Catholics. When no one went for that, the four Jews shopping around the musical (Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, and Steven Sondheim) swapped out Jews for Puerto Ricans — and suddenly they had a hit.
Who but a Jewish immigrant would write a song with the lyrics, “I like to be in America / okay by me in America / everything free in America / for a small fee in America”? That is a Jewish perspective, grafted onto Puerto Ricans to make it more palatable for America.
Moving back in time, the erasure of Jews from “Casablanca” reflected American attitudes toward World War II, in that no one in the U.S. wanted to go to war to save a bunch of Jews. In fact, the U.S. had done everything possible to solve their so-called “Jewish Question.” They’d barred Jewish immigration in 1924, after the immigration laws accidentally admitted over 2 million Jews at the turn of the century.
During the Holocaust, the U.S. Third Assistant Secretary of State, famed antisemite Breckinridge Long, instituted quotas and slowed immigration processing, even after receiving verified reports that millions of Polish and German Jews had been exterminated by the Nazis. Ultimately, the U.S. sold Americans on the war as “saving Europe,” no mention of Jews. In keeping with the cultural ethos of the day, “Casablanca” works to gain sympathy from Americans around entering the war, no Jews needed.
Thus, you get a movie about the Holocaust which never mentions the Holocaust, and where the only Nazi concentration camp survivor in the cast is a political prisoner with a “possibly Jewish name.” Toward the end of the movie, an obviously Jewish couple practice their English. Ever the good Jews, the couple is bursting with excitement at the freedom their new home will bring. For them, like my great-grandparents, America is the promised land.
Even as a kid I understood, like many American Jews, that to be Jewish in America was to largely keep your Jewishness under wraps. As my father often said, “Who needs to know? It’s none of their business. Be Jewish, but leave it unsaid.”
Nothing served to hammer this point home as strongly as “Seinfeld,” a TV show written by Jews, starring only Jews, about Jewish life in New York, that goes out of its way to downplay the Jewishness of it all. In some scenes, the character Elaine Benes wears a cross. George Costanza is Italian because no one in America wants to watch a show about four Jews. Kramer has a Jewish last name but is mostly the oddball neighbor.
Some “Seinfeld” episodes included conversations about Christmas, where the unspoken Jewishness is basically the plot. Another episode is about marble rye bread, a Jewish bread sold in kosher bakeries to Jews. When George brings the very Jewish marble rye to his non-Jewish future in-laws, they drink heavily through the meal and don’t serve the bread, so George’s parents take the bread back and hilarity ensues. On “Seinfeld,” the Jewishness always plays as subtext.
Nothing to see here, just regular old Americans scheming about a load of bread that Jews happen to enjoy.
After October 7th, when antisemitism exploded (again) and I got cancelled by my American think tank employer for being the “wrong kind of Jew,” I began to understand the harm unspoken Jewishness had done to American Jews.
Jews in America understood the deal: Perform Americana for everyone, and maybe they won’t notice you’re a Jew. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, it’s not like anyone had to make Anne Frank less Jewish in order to get her story told.
Oh wait — that’s exactly what happened.
For the first 44 years of his life, Anne Frank’s father, an assimilated, secular German Jew, performed Deutschlandlied (“Song of Germany”), a poem that became a popular song which was made for the cause of creating a unified German state, and was adopted in its entirety in 1922 by the Weimar Republic. He also served in the German military during World War I, and knew how to keep his Yiddishkeit (Jewishness) concealed.
After the war, Otto Frank worked tirelessly to bring his daughter’s story to life, as only a grieving parent can. He was already well-versed in the need to make everything less Jewish, including the Holocaust.
Frank removed references to Jewish holidays, any expressions of Jewish faith, and Anne’s descriptions of Germans seizing Jews in Amsterdam. Why were they hiding in an attic? Well, not because they were Jews, that’s for sure. Probably because they just wanted to experience the thrill of attic life, ha.
No surprise, then, that almost 80 years after the diary’s publication, the Governor of Minnesota told an audience that somewhere in the United States, a girl was hiding in an attic from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite the fact that Anne Frank was a German citizen whose circumstances in no way matched those of ICE targets.
By the time “The Diary of Anne Frank” hit Broadway, Anne’s story was about the enduring spark of the human spirit. The Jewish writer who’d championed turning the book into a play was replaced by the two non-Jewish playwrights who also authored “It’s a Wonderful Life” which, from a Jewish perspective, might as well be two hours of the baby Jesus eating a ham steak.
To make sure they hammered home the universalist message, the playwrights added a line that wasn’t in Anne’s diary: “We’re not the only people that’ve had to suffer ... sometimes one race, sometimes another.”
I should have been expecting what came next, but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. In this case, nobody expected the movie “Maestro,” which is a Jewish story about a Jewish man’s struggle to assimilate into American life while also making great music and being gay. The movie was written by and starred Bradley Cooper.
To make himself look more Jewish, Cooper glued a prosthetic nose to his face, because that’s really the main thing about Jews — noses. Entirely absent from this film are the things that actually make a person Jewish: discussion of Jewish topics, observance of Jewish holidays or customs, mentions of refugee parents who fled pogroms in Russia, or even a side note that Jews in Europe were being murdered simply for being Jews.
There’s no mezuzah on Bernstein’s door, and no Shabbat candlesticks on the mantle. This, despite the fact that Bernstein’s first wife was Jewish, and that Judaism was an important part of his music.
Because, today, ahistorical literature and films are “in.” The erasure of Jews from the American tapestry is “in.” You couldn’t make a movie like “Top Secret” today — and if you did, the line about Simchas Torah would surely be cut. In our current era, the only acceptable form of Judaism is the performative tikkun-olam type that centers around Palestinians and erases 3,000 years of Jewish history.
We are only Jews today because our ancestors survived the Romans, the Babylonian exile, the Greeks, the Romans, the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church, Russian pogroms, the Iraqi Farhood, the Nazis, the expulsion of Jews from Muslim lands, and so much more. Our ancestors were willing to face death rather than relinquish indigenous ancestral practices — because they knew that a life without meaning, ritual, and spirituality wasn’t worth living.
I think this article oversimplifies things.
Not everything that wasn’t explicitly Jewish was about Jews “hiding.” Jews are a tiny minority—if you want a movie, a show, or a story to succeed, you make it broader so more people can relate to it. That’s not erasure, that’s reality.
Take Seinfeld. Everybody knew they were Jewish. The humor, the culture, the references—it was all there. But it was universal enough that people in the Midwest connected to it too. That’s why it worked.
Same with actors changing their names or stories being adapted. That wasn’t always about shame or suppression. It was about building something that could reach a wider audience. Every immigrant group has done that in one way or another.
I think sometimes we’re reading too much into it. Yes, there were moments in history where people felt pressure to fit in—but a lot of what you’re describing here is just smart storytelling and basic economics, not some grand effort to erase Jewish identity.
Excellent article. The point that many Jews in American history (if not the world) have put effort into erasing themselves resonates deeply.