Jody Rosen of Slate.com explores Jewish vaudeville and Sacha Baron Cohen’s (Borat) unique place in it’s continued relevance. She particularly focuses on “Throw The Jews Down The Well,” a song that appeared on Cohen’s Ali G Show:
The cultural dynamics of Sacha Baron Cohen’s song and Irving Berlin’s “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars” (1915) are vastly different—the difference is 90 years of Jewish history. “Cohen” and its ilk were assimilationist anthems: The Jews who embraced caricatures of blundering greenhorns were asserting their sophistication, laughing at the comic hebe to prove that they had passed out of their own awkward greenhorn phase. The songs were love letters to the New World, designed to cleanse all who got the joke of the Old World taint. A decade after “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars,” Berlin and a new generation of Jewish tunesmiths had moved on to crafting elegant love songs for all-American crooners. (Berlin, of course, would become the specialist in post-ethnic musical Americana: “God Bless America,” “Easter Parade,” “White Christmas.”) The next time Jewish dialect music surfaced in the pop mainstream was on Broadway, when a new generation began to sentimentalize, of all things, the deprivations and piety of the Pale of Settlement. What was the Fiddler on the Roof score if not a collection of “Hebrew” dialect tunes?
Viewed against this backdrop, “Throw the Jew Down the Well” looks like nothing less than the angriest and most extraordinary piece of Jewish-themed music that has ever bubbled to the surface of American popular culture. It’s a dialect song sung not in the voice of the greenhorn, or the assimilated Jewish-American smoothie, or the saintly shtetl-dweller, but by the Old World tormentor. And, Borat’s performance of the song insists, in the face of nearly a century of Jewish pop-cultural passing and ventriloquism, that the Jews never did assimilate after all, that the lynch mob is waiting just over the hill—or downing brews beneath Stetsons at the local watering hole—waiting to “grab him by his horns” and hurl him down. It’s classic Jewish paranoia, of the kind voiced darkly in the privacy of Jewish homes, and in the lyrics of another famous novelty song, Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” (1965): “Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics/ And the Catholics hate the Protestants/ And the Hindus hate the Moslems/ And everybody hates the Jews.” You want to dismiss it out of hand, but Borat’s song isn’t just a comedy number—it’s an exposé. Watch those bar patrons singing along and you can’t help but wonder: In my country is there problem?
Anti-Semitism and hatred for Jews is as strong as ever!
