Feast on this: Jews in blackface. Seriously.

On Sunday I went to the Feast of Jewish Learning, which is my favorite event of the year.

The event invites dozens of scholars, educators, rabbis and artists to teach classes to hundreds of young adult Jews from across the Bay Area. Those in attendance could choose from 10 classes during each of the 3 sessions.

I began my afternoon going to a sacred yoga class, then listened to a lecture/discussion about Jewish spirituality. My final selection of the day: "Hidden in Plain Sight: The Troubling History of Jews in Blackface," taught by UC Davis prof Ari Y. Kelman.

This shocking, and surprising, title drew me to the class. How could it possibly be true? I wondered.

Perhaps you, dear reader, are already aware of this history. I was not. So since it's new to me, I'm sharing it here.

In the 1920s, three Jewish actors/comedians raged in popularity -- Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor.

All performed in blackface.

"We like to talk about this photo," Kelman said, pointing to a slide of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King Jr. marching together in Selma, "but the history of blacks and Jews begins long before this, and is much more complicated."

Heschel (right) and King in Selma

That complicated reality begins before 1927, but that's where our class picked it up. That's the year Warner Bros. released its first "talking picture" film, "The Jazz Singer." I had never seen it (nor the Neil Diamond version from 1980), but was surprised by how totally Jewish the film is. I mean, it's about a guy who comes from a long line of cantors and wants to be a jazz singer; on his debut opening night, he instead must sing Kol Nidre at his synagogue, to pacify his father, who is dying.

Anti-semitism was surely prevelant during this time in America. And the studios, including Warner Bros., were owned and operated by Jews. Al Jolson was also Jewish. And yet the movie is unapologetically Jewish. So much so that the phrase "kol nidre" is not even translated on the screen when it pops up!

That there were so many Jewish eyes/hands/minds involved in a film where a Jewish man acted in blackface in a major motion picture seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans is interesting and troubling to me. Why?

Al Jolson in "The Jazz Singer"

"It's hard to know exactly why," Kelman said.

He said in interviews and biographies, Hawkins and Cantor said it wasn't their idea to dress in blackface, that when their managers suggested it, they went with it. After all, a it wasn't outside the realm of reality. Many performers in theaters and clubs had performed in blackface in the past. But in the late 20s/early 30s, Kelman said, most minstral or blackface performers had dropped the practice. Yet a few Jewish performers remained in the movies and on stage in blackface.

One researcher, Michael Rogin, who wrote "Blackface White Noise: Jewish immmigrants in the Hollywood melting pot," argued that Jews were only too eager to dress up in blackface because doing so made them more white, more American, less ethnic, less different.

"But his book is horrifying and misleading in so many ways, and his argument gets picked up everywhere," Kelman said. "It’s historically so inaccurate."

While researching the topic, Kelman looked to see if Yiddish theater reflected this American trend of performers in blackface. After all, Yiddish theater served 1 million people a week in New York in the 20s and 30s, and greatly borrowed (some would say stole) from American theater.

He could find only one instance of a blackface performance in Yiddish theater. And the actress wasn't mocking blacks. She was mocking Eddie Cantor's blackface performance.

Rogin's book doesn't so much as glance at Yiddish theater. But Kelman says you can't look at popular American Jewish culture in the teens and '20s without looking at Yiddish theater.

"It's total absence suggests blackface didn't have nearly the resonance that Michael Rogin suggests it did," Kelman said. "Otherwise, you would have found it everywhere."

He showed us a clip from "The Jazz Singer," and a clip from "Whoopie," where Eddie Cantor dons black face to mock the white people trying to prevent the romance between a white woman and a Native American man.

"To our eyes today, those performances seem obviously and egregiously racist," Kelman said. "But understanding racism in a historical context, we can't just see the blackface and automatically say, 'That's racist.'"

I think Kelman's argument is fascinating and certainly has merit. Still, there's nonetheless something disturbing and uncomfortable knowing that Jews -- long sufferers of anti-Semitism, pogroms, etc. -- frequently and willingly donned a racist get-up.

And that those performances are preserved on film.

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