Chai Noon
'Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West' by Jonathan L. Friedman
Jews and westerns? In his humorously titled Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West, Jonathan L. Friedmann treads carefully in marking his boundaries. As he admits, “if a movie becomes Jewish by virtue of a Jew working on it in some capacity, then nearly every Hollywood film (and television show) would qualify.”
Chai Noon can serve as a compact history of the western genre. Gilbert Anderson, born Max Aronson, starred in the first fully formed western, The Great Train Robbery (1903), giving “no hint of his Jewish identity.” The Great Train Robbery was shot in New Jersey by Thomas Edison’s company. By decades end, westerns were being made in California and in the 1910s, the Los Angeles suburb called Hollywood became the movie industry’s hub and the studio system rapidly coalesced, largely around immigrant Jews from other trades who saw movies as their ladder to the American Dream.
But already in The Great Train Robbery, Aronson-Anderson “was in a sense the ultimate fulfillment of the Hollywood moguls’ dream: the non-Jewish Jew,” Friedmann writes. Most of the moguls hid their heritage, some even became Episcopalian to better fit the WASP ideal. They knew bigotry first-hand in the Old World and recognized that they hadn’t escaped antisemitism by immigrating to America. Powerful organizations in the U.S. cast wary eyes on the growing number and influence of the Jews. Better lay low, play safe, avoid obvious Jewish characters and scenarios even as Jews took lead roles in production and screenwriting.
In early cinema, Jews occasionally appeared in westerns as a comedic foil, the fish-out-of-water peddler who falls in with the goyish cowpokes, but by the 1930s even those depictions were muted. Through the ‘60s “suggestions of Jewishness were coded, subtextual, and few and far between,” Friedmann writes. Flipping the channel to television, he finds that ‘60s TV westerns sometimes included a token Jewish character or family, portrayed sympathetically, sometimes rescued from persecution by the show’s friendly Gentile protagonists. This was likely the broadcast networks’ muffled response to the civil rights movement.
Friedmann is clear that all westerns, even the revisionist anti-westerns of Sam Peckinpah, are guilty of “presentism” by projecting contemporary attitudes backward on a history far more complicated than any two-hour feature can handle. Jews were present in the historical Old West, as were Blacks and Hispanics, but for many years their presence on screen was erased or marginalized. With that in mind, perhaps the greatest Jewish western—and certainly the funniest—was Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974). Cowritten with Richard Pryor, Blazing Saddles tore apart the genre’s anachronistic conventions, spoofing the westerns from all directions. No wonder John Wayne turned down the chance to appear in the film.
Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West is published by University of Wisconsin Press.
