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Jeffrey Knapp
The Jazz Singer is the archetypal narrative of secularization in American film (fig. 1). Yet recent criticism has largely ignored the question of secularization and concentrated on the movie’s treatment of assimilation instead. To a certain extent, The Jazz Singer encourages its viewers to substitute one issue for the other; as the title card reads, “Jakie Rabinowitz had become Jack Robin—the cantor’s son, a jazz singer,” as if the process of secularization were no different from the process of assimilation. But Jakie’s twin choices of an Anglo-Saxon name and a secular career are parallel, not identical, modifications of the life his father had hoped Jakie would lead. And neither choice amounts to the more drastic form of self-change that film scholars have usually said Jakie embraces: conversion. By relegating secularization to the status of an assimilationist subplot in The Jazz Singer, assimilating secularization to assimilation, recent criticism not only misjudges the relative importance of both issues in the film, it also simplifies them both, as problems in the film and as concerns in modern U.S. culture generally. Jeffrey Knapp is professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing a companion volume to his previous book, Shakespeare’s Tribe, entitled Shakespeare Only. Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number 2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
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