They're Coming to America

"In The Jewish Americans, Carl Reiner, who comments on Jewish Americans in show business, is unfailingly charming. He reports that the Queen of England, given his and Mel Brooks's 2000 Year 0ld Man comedy album by Cary Grant, said that she much enjoyed it, causing Reiner to remark that Jewish comedy had really arrived if the Queen, 'the biggest shikse in the world,' enjoys it. (Shikse is Yiddish for gentile woman.) The playwright Tony Kushner is predictably left-wing in his views, and hence provides no surprises. The intelligence of the writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin shines through whenever she is on camera. The cartoonist Jules Feiffer is very smart on the connection between Jews and radical politics in America, and is perhaps most impressive when, with much sympathy, he explains why, during the Depression, so many Jewish radicals joined the American Communist party, then caps this off by saying, 'and they were wrong.' Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the Supreme Court, lends a touch of gravity to the proceedings, and is especially good on the subject of Louis Brandeis, the first Jew to be appointed to the Supreme Court, who said that 'the highest Jewish ideals are essentially American.'"

In Humanities, Joseph Epstein reviews the documentary The Jewish Americans.