Love Letter to God's Elect

But it doesn't matter much. There is a moment in Too Jewish, Too! when Hoffman delves into the metaphysical and spends a few seconds describing the process by which immigrant Jews internalized the American dream. He might view those moments as throwaways — they certainly glide by with no more ceremony than is afforded any other point Hoffman makes in the show — but to this cultureless fourth-generation American mutt, missing most of Hoffman's Yiddish jokes and not quite hip to the traditions lovingly roasted in the songs he's excavated from vaudeville's lost canon, it located the show in a place that even a clueless outsider could understand and respond to.

Jews, said Hoffman (or so he seemed to say), responded to the American experiment not by naturalizing themselves fully or by ghettoizing themselves and avoiding cross-cultural pollination, like the Muslims of London or the Hindus of Paris. Rather, he said, they took the American prospect and made it an intrinsic part of "their Jewishness." I'd never thought about anything in those exact terms before, but it made sense the moment Hoffman slurred into a rewritten version of "Tennessee" Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons" (in which the singer owes his soul not to the "company store" but to "the delicatessen"). This was not Russian music, Spanish music, Turkish music, or Eastern music. This was quintessentially American music and part of a strain of American folk culture that is no less valid than any other for having received its genesis on Second Avenue rather than in a bayou.

Watching those hundreds of heads nodding, hundreds of hands clapping, and hundreds of mouths laughing and singing the words of songs I never knew existed, I thought, Shit! Why not me? Why don't I have this? Which isn't to say there's anything weird about this notion or about anything in Too Jewish, Too! What's weird is that this is a vision of America that not everybody can claim a version of. And what's wonderful about Hoffman's show is that it kind of makes you think you could claim a version, if only you were willing to make it.