Jerry Lewis Was the Quintessential American Jew.
'Jerry Lewis, who died Sunday at 91, was not a man often overlooked, or pigeonholed. But in reckoning with his legacy, there is often one surprising omission. He’s rarely featured in discussions of the pantheon of mid-20th century Jewish comedy. Possibly this was because of his overwhelming popularity, tending to remove the necessity for any qualifying adjective. Looking at pictures of the crowds flocking to catch a glimpse of him and his partner, Dean Martin, at their hotels, you’d think you were witnessing Beatlemania. Only Martin and Lewis were 10 years earlier.
It certainly had something to do with his comedy itself, which was rarely, if ever, identifiably Jewish in the manner of Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen. But Mr. Lewis’s most successful work was, in its own way, a fundamental part of the great story of Jewish comedy in America — a story that also functions as a microcosm of American Jewish life writ large. It was a metaphor for the successes, and the anxieties, of a generation of postwar American Jews of the 1950s: busily engaged, often extraordinarily successful, and trying to prove they were no different than everyone else. They wanted to believe they were the same, and yet their creative success, paradoxically, was borne of the tension that their very real difference created.
The comedian’s two most accomplished successes are cases in point. The Martin and Lewis partnership worked (spectacularly) in the way most comic duos do: the juxtaposition of opposites. Mr. Martin was the suave, elegant straight man; Mr. Lewis was manic and kinetic. As far as Mr. Lewis got, maybe a part of him couldn’t help but feel that he got there because there was a Mr. Martin to show who he wasn’t — and, in fact, couldn’t be.
Maybe Mr. Lewis’s aspiration to Mr. Martin’s genteel gentility — while at the same time realizing and fearing that the very reason people adored him was because of his shtick — was part of the tension that eventually broke up the team. Not that there weren’t many other reasons, and the insecurity certainly flowed both ways, but this aspect wasn’t particularly subtle. It’s certainly significant, for example, that one of Mr. Lewis’s post-Martin and Lewis efforts ventured directly into Mr. Martin’s territory, recording an album of standards called “Jerry Lewis Just Sings.” But this tension took on a much wider significance when, a few years later, Mr. Lewis re-addressed his yearnings in his comedic masterpiece, a movie that, without a single rabbi anywhere, has almost as much to say about American Jewish life — and particularly the hopes for and anxieties about fitting in and making it — than any other movie of the period.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/opinion/jerry-lewis-was-the-quintessential-american-jew.html?
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