In My Lifetime, Avant-Garde Jews Have Done A 180

From Alan Dershowitz in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

I am a lifelong Democrat. I started campaigning for the party’s local candidates as a teenager in Brooklyn, N.Y., have been a registered Democrat for 67 years, made speeches for John F. Kennedy as a college student, and can count on one hand the number of Republicans I’ve ever supported for any office.

I still disagree strongly with the GOP on abortion, the separation of church and state, immigration, healthcare and taxes, among other things. Yet I’ve decided to bite the bullet and register as a Republican.

. . . I intend to work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate, and I urge those who share my concerns about the increasing influence of radicalism in the Democratic Party to vote, campaign and contribute for continued Republican control of Congress. I will contribute money to Republican candidates, campaign for them, make speeches at Republican events, and urge pro-Israel Americans to change party affiliation or at least vote against Democrats. Until something changes, I will vote Republican for representative, senator and president.

I wish I could designate myself as a “foreign-policy Republican,” but there’s no such option, so I have to go whole hog. By registering as a Republican rather than an independent, maybe I can have some influence on moving some Republican policies toward the center. I have given up on trying to change the Democratic Party. My main goal is to send a message that many traditional Democratic voters can’t accept what it is becoming—a replica of left-wing European parties that are hurting their countries.

This is the Alan Dershowitz who served as an appellate advisor in the 1969-70 Chicago Seven trial and helped the defendants develop a legal strategy of "political theater", disrupting the courtroom to turn the trial into a condemnation of the Vietnam War and the US government. This is the Alan Dershowitz who secured a 1976 reversal of adult film star Harry Reems's obscenity conviction.

Between my sophomore and junior years in high school, my family moved from a white-bread Republican New Jersey suburb to Bethesda, which in contrast was very, very upscale Jewish. My first day in the new high school, two young Jewish ladies took me under their wing as a sort of project, insisting I was a "monolith" and needed a thorough re-education.

They introduced me to subjects like Bob Dylan, Paul Krassner, and Jules Feiffer, and things went on from there. It continued in college, an Ivy, where there were far more Jewish students than there are now. I'd studied German, and I got pretty good at Yiddish.

In other words, I got to know avant-garde Jewish culture of the 1960s pretty well. I lost touch with my high school mentors long ago, but thinking of them now, I wonder what they would say about what the Jewish avant-garde seems to be in the process of becoming.

Let's take another contrast, between the avant-garde Jewish comic Lenny Bruce (no relation) and the current comic Ben Bankas, who makes it plain that he's half-Jewish on his father's side but frequently identifies as Jewish in his monologues. The avant-garde Lenny Bruce of the 1950s and 1960s

eventually appeared on television on the Steve Allen Show and other programs. Yet as his fame grew, so did the edge to his comedy and social commentary, which led to his legal troubles.

Bruce was arrested at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in 1961 for using sexually explicit language. Although he was acquitted, law enforcement agencies put him under greater scrutiny, resulting in drug arrests in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

In a December 4, 1962, performance at the Gates of Horn club in Chicago, Bruce was arrested for and eventually convicted of violating a state obscenity statute. On appeal, he was defended by distinguished First Amendment scholar and law professor Harry Kalven Jr.

. . . Undercover police detectives attended his two 1964 appearances at Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, and they arrested him on obscenity charges after each show. His trial attracted media attention, and artists including Woody Allen and Norman Mailer testified on his behalf. A three-judge panel convicted him of obscenity and sentenced him to serve four months.

After Bruce’s conviction, nightclubs across the country blacklisted him for fear they would face obscenity charges.

It's worth pointing out that at the time, Bruce was defended for in effect being "art", as opposed to his characterization by police as essentially a pornographer. In other words, Bruce wasn't a low class smut merchant, he was a bourgeois artist whose work was intended to appeal, and did appeal, to the bourgeoisie -- nothing low-class about him. Following his death of a drug overdose in 1966, he's nevertheless been celebrated as a martyr for all the right bourgeois reasons, freedom of expression, freedom from religion, civil rights, blah blah blah:

What is certain is that no comedian has proved more culturally significant without moving into TV and films - the means by which the likes of Woody Allen and Adam Sandler achieved wider fame.

The 1974 biopic Lenny, in which Bruce was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, was nominated for six Academy Awards.

There was a further Oscar nomination for the 1998 documentary Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth, narrated by Robert De Niro.

Bruce has inspired or been name-checked in songs by numerous artists including Bob Dylan, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Nico, REM, Steve Earle, Simon and Garfunkel and Genesis.

He is also one of the celebrities immortalised on the cover of the Beatles's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in the distinguished company of Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein and Gandhi.

But let's turn to a similar avant-garde comic of our time, Ben Bankas, one of whose routines is embedded above (language warning). A native of Canada, not long ago, he moved to Austin, TX, but especially when he returns to Canada, great efforts are made to have his venues cancel the engagements. (Of one such organizer, he quipped, "He got my show canceled. I guess he's finished his bucket list. Now he can apply for MAID.")

Bruce's supporters in particular argued that his shows effectively represented bourgeois liberal values; Bruce himself doesn't appear to have represented any particular class identity in his on-stage persona, other than perhaps a timeless gadfly.

Ben Bankas is a very different matter: he represents himself as working class: he wears jeans, with a wrinkled shirt over a prominent belly and a scruffy beard. In his routines, he often holds and sips from a beer can. In effect, he's the non-collegiate worker championed by Mike Rowe, blurting out uncomfortable truths not too different from Lenny Bruce's, but in effect saying Bruce's bourgeois supporters are themselves as hyopcritical as they were in Bruce's time.

But of course, Ben Bankas's audiences are bourgeois themselves. I asked Chrome AI mode, "How much do Ben Bankas tickets cost?" It replied,

Ben Bankas tickets typically start as low as $24.00, with an average price of around $44.29. However, prices vary significantly depending on the city, venue, and seat location. For example, some shows in major markets like New York City can start much higher, between $116 and $169.

That leaves aside parking and drinks at the clubs, not a cheap date by any means. Now that I think of it, I wonder what my avant-garde Jewish-girl mentors would say now about Ben Bankas.

I actually think I'd have a pretty hard time convincing them he's in the same league as Bob Dylan, Paul Krassner, and Jules Feiffer, but I think the case can be made.