On Jewish Characters in American Television Series

 In my previous post, A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing, I discussed the Jewish Standard, an award-winning weekly periodical serving northern New Jersey and Rockland County, New York, and shared with you the piece they published on Amazing Ourselves to Death, based on an interview with me conducted by the paper's editor, Joanne Palmer.

The interview ranged across some very interesting territory, and as a result, Joanne invited me to write an occasional op-ed piece for the paper, and I was quite happy to agree. And since one of my areas of interest is media and popular culture, I decided to use the the awarding-winning AMC cable television series Mad Men as a jumping off point for getting into a pet peeve of mine, concerning Jewish stereotypes. 

I should add that the focus is on Jewish males because that's what I am, and of course there are stereotypes of Jewish women as well. But it hits me on a personal level when I see a stereotype of a group I belong to and say to myself, I'm nothing like that. And what really brought it all home for me was the similarities and the differences between Mad Men and another series about an advertising agency that included a Jewish character in a secondary role, The Crazy Ones. That was the foundation on which the rest of this essay is built.

The op-ed piece was published on May 16, under the title of Advertisements for Ourselves, with the subtitle, "Jews in Mad Men and Beyond" (and I am identified as a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in the Bronx, and president of Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia). I should add that at the time I started writing the piece, we were only into the first couple of episodes from the first half of the final season of Mad Men, and I actually had to rewrite and add a bit after I  had competed it and sent it over to editor, due to a major plot development involving the series' Jewish character.

Anyway, here's how the piece begins:

Mad Men is back.

Don Draper

The AMC series created by Jewish writer, producer, and director Matthew Weiner has returned for its final season, having taken us through that most transformative of decades, the 1960s. And while the main character, Don Draper, isn’t Jewish, there is something hauntingly familiar about the story of a man who adopts a different name and identity to hide his true background, and then works his way up from poverty to a comfortable middle-class existence. Reflecting the experience common to all European immigrants during the first half of the 20th century, Draper personifies the belief that in America it is possible to shape and fashion your own individual identity, to recreate yourself in your own desired image.

In some ways he seems to echo the Jewish-American novelist Norman Mailer, who was known for his media savvy and penchant for self-promotion. In fact, he called his 1959 anthology of short pieces Advertisements for Myself.

Speaking of advertisements, in case you're interested in the book, here's a quick way to get a hold of it:

Returning now to the article:

The message of commercial advertising, taken as a whole, is that we can become whoever and whatever we want to be simply by buying the right products. And the title of the series is a pun based on the fact that New York City-based advertising firms all used to be located on Madison Avenue. Much like Hollywood, it was an industry in which Jews were quite prominent. In fact, Thomas Cahill included advertising in his celebratory book, The Gifts of the Jews, a remark that generated some criticism among reviewers.

And once again, for your convenience, in case you're interested:

And back again to the opinion piece:

Michael Ginsberg

But Mad Men avoids this association. Draper and his partners are WASPs, and it’s not until season five that they hire a Jewish copywriter, Michael Ginsberg. Much like the famous beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Michael is quite talented and creative, although his gifts are not given the respect that they deserve by Draper and his partners. There even are instances where he is used simply as a token Jew—for example in an attempt to secure an account from Manischewitz. Still, the character is given a compelling background—he was born in a concentration camp. And like Draper, Ginsberg tries to disguise his origins. His ethnicity, however, makes it impossible for him to construct an entirely new identity as Draper did.

HAL Reading Their Lips from 2001

In the most recent episode, “The Runaways,” Ginsberg again parallels Draper in suffering a nervous breakdown, but in much more extreme fashion. He succumbs to paranoid delusions and engages in self-mutilation; the catalyst for his action was the agency’s addition of a mainframe computer. The episode includes an homage to the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the homicidal computer HAL reads the lips of the two astronauts he is supposed to be aiding, thereby learning of their decision to shut him down.

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001

Presumably Ginsberg had recently seen this movie, which was released on New Year’s Day 1968. It is worth noting that 2001 is considered one of the greatest films ever made, and its director, Stanley Kubrick, one of the most important film directors of all time. Kubrick was one of many prominent Jewish-Americans who grew up in the Bronx during the early and mid-20th century, and the strong distrust of authority evident in his films would have struck a resonant chord with any child of the Holocaust. Moreover, the Nazis, being meticulous record keepers, were quite fond of the technological forerunner of the computer, tabulating machines of the sort produced by IBM, the company that became the pre-eminent computer manufacturer of the postwar era. (It often has been noted that moving each letter of IBM back one step in the alphabet yields HAL, the name of the computer).

While Michael Ginsberg is a minor character on Mad Men, he remains a major example of Jewish stereotypes. He is clever and funny, but also awkward and often inappropriate in social situations, and otherwise nervous and neurotic. (In his case, his neurosis intensified into psychosis.) It was probably the influence of all of those immensely popular Woody Allen movies of the ‘60s, but for a long time it seemed as if any Jewish-American male character who appeared on a TV sitcom or dramatic series was cut from the same cloth: whiny, nervous, short, unattractive, not handy or athletic, smart and intellectual, but not exactly leadership material. After all, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy may have been Jewish, but Captain James Tiberius Kirk was just another WASP, and his first officer, Mr. Spock, was an alien from the planet Vulcan—albeit one who incorporated some Jewish influences. While the Enterprise was populated with a veritable melting pot of crew members, there never seemed to be a Shapiro or Levine out there on the final frontier.

Gabe Kotter

Josh Lyman

Of course there have been exceptions, like Gabe Kotter on Welcome Back, Kotter, Barney Miller on Barney Miller, Jerry Seinfeld on Seinfeld, and Josh Lyman on The West Wing, but these characters’ ethnicity—and especially their religion—was rarely mentioned or acknowledged.

Barney Miller

Jerry Seinfeld

Speaking of Barney Miller, you might want to check out my previous post on that series, A Sitcom to Remember, in case you missed it. The subject of stereotypes comes up in the course of a wide-ranging interview with me on that series from the 70s.

Miles Silverberg

At the same time, the Jewish identities of stereotypical characters, such as Miles Silverberg on Murphy Brown, Joel Fleischman on Northern Exposure, and Ross Geller on Friends, were continually on display, and very much an integral part of their characters.

Joel Fleischman

Ross Geller

This fall, a new sitcom was introduced, a vehicle for Robin Williams, called The Crazy Ones. Clearly inspired by Mad Men, the series is set in a Chicago-based advertising firm and features several Jewish actors, including Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame), Amanda Setton, Brad Garrett, and James Wolk. What is remarkable about Wolk’s character, a copy writer named Zach Cropper, is that he is extremely confident, likeable (he is the favorite of the agency head, Robin Williams’ character Simon Roberts), handsome (he is a veritable ladies’ man), and maybe a little bit shallow, although certainly a talented and innovative professional. And he is Jewish. In fact, in an episode called “Zach Mitzvah,” it turns out that he once was a very successful bar mitzvah DJ, and he reprises that role in order to please a client.

The Crazy Ones (left to right: Gellar, Williams, Garrett, Setton, & Wolk)

Not only does the Cropper character counter the typical stereotype of the Jewish male, but another character, art director Andrew Keanelly, embodies many of those stereotypical attributes. He is intelligent—but also insecure, awkward, and jealous of the favor shown to Zach. You might expect his character to be Jewish—but he is identified as not Jewish.

For this reason, I believe that The Crazy Ones merits our respect and recognition. Unfortunately, however, the series failed to catch on with television audiences and garner the kinds of ratings its creators had hoped for, and so CBS has cancelled it. And truth be told, it’s no Mad Men. But as far as Jewish characters go, Zach Cropper has been altogether refreshing. Series creator David E. Kelley has a track record of creating interesting and unique Jewish characters in programs such as Picket Fences, Chicago Hope, The Practice, Boston Public, and now The Crazy Ones. For that he deserves our kudos.

And that is where the column ends. As an opinion piece, it is meant to provoke further thought and discussion on the topic, not to close it off. 

Stereotypes are a tricky subject, and this is an area where general semantics makes a major contribution, in reminding us that any generalization, about any group or category, is bound to be selective and subjective, more a projection of the individuals invoking the stereotype than a reflection of those being stereotyped. Stereotypes are a by-product of the process of abstracting, a process that takes us away from concrete reality, and in this case a focus on the individual person. 

While we do need to be able to make generalizations, we have to remember to ground them in factual evidence, to keep them open to testing and to continue to test them over time. Popular culture makes use of stereotypes because they are easier than trying to create unique characters and convey them to audiences, and because audiences recognize stereotypical characters without much effort. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to eliminate them entirely from our popular narratives, so if they are being used, they need to be used in a careful, thoughtful manner. 

We need to keep in mind that every stereotype is, indeed, an advertisement for some portion of humanity, and therefore, an advertisement for all of humanity.

Purge the Merge! Part 2

So, in my previous Purge the Merge! post, I commented on the negative impact of the merger/takeover of TimeWarner Cable and Comcast, and as if that was not enough, then came the proposed acquisition of DirecTV by AT&T. And this time, the request for a comment came from the E-Commerce Times, and here was my response:

The proposed acquisition of DirectTV by AT&T comes on the heels of the proposed purchase of TimeWarner Cable by Comcast, and both moves represent a consolidation of the telecommunications industry that favors corporations, not consumers. While there might be some gains in efficiency of service from the mergers, they give the companies more power, more control over pricing and over the content they provide.

The loss of competition, even indirect competition, in any industry is bad news for consumers, and for citizens. It is true that the differences between cable, satellite, and phone service have all but dissolved, and because of the historic bias of these services, telephone companies have fallen behind cable companies in providing content, that is, television programming and other forms of entertainment. Acquiring the second largest Satellite TV company would help AT&T catch up as a content distributor, but at the cost of consumer choice regarding which services they might obtain.

The most troublesome issue in all this is the continued assault on net neutrality, and consolidation of the telecommunications industry can only the strengthen the hand of the corporations that are trying to undermine the founding principles of the internet as a public service, choke off services, channels, and sites that they do not have a financial agreement with or do not care for, and give special fast service to those that they favor, either economically or politically.

The FCC is the only government agency empowered to regulate the telecommunications industry, and during Reagan's presidency it was stripped of much of its powers, and has never quite recovered, but it still has the potential to slow down or maybe even stop these acquisitions. 

Now, let's take a look at the actual article that was published, entitled AT&T May Be Suiting Up to Battle Comcast, by Erika Morphy, dated May 13th. The article begins with this highlighted paragraph:

If AT&T were to acquire DirecTV, it would be bad news for consumers, said Entrevo Managing Director Topher Morrison, author of Collaboration Economy. "The advantages are almost all for AT&T, and very few for the customers. They will bill this as their ability to provide better service and wider selection, but that's just a fancy way of saying they will charge the consumer more."

It then begins in earnest with the following explanation:

AT&T has been negotiating to buy DirecTV for close to US$50 billion, based on reports that surfaced Monday. The deal, which has not been confirmed by the companies, could close within a few weeks.

The current option on the table, according to anonymous sources, would be largely a stock trade but it would include some cash, with AT&T offering in the low- to mid-$90s per share for DirecTV. That would be roughly a 20 percent premium over its current stock price, and it would value the company at close to $48 billion.

Some sources have put the reported offer at $100 per share, but also have noted that the amount of the offer and other terms related to the deal could well change.

The merger would be the largest in the telecom sector in years, and if it were to go through, it would significantly realign the players in the industry, placing AT&T in an optimal position to compete against Comcast, which currently is trying to get its own $42 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable past regulators.

Now, how about a colorful metaphor from a reputable academic source (but no, not me):

"Think of it as Gorgon upscaling to meet Godzilla, otherwise known as 'Comcast,'" said Rich Hanley, associate professor and director of the graduate journalism program at Quinnipiac University.

"The DirecTV acquisition would give AT&T a steady revenue stream and more customers to upsell other services to present a suite of entertainment and broadband offerings that can help in its battle with Comcast," he told the E-Commerce Times.

The regulator issues could take a while to work through, he added, "so don't expect anything new any time soon."

Not a very critical view, maybe even a little sympathetic to AT&T. Indeed, at this point a new heading appears, "A Regulatory Obstacle Course," and here we see a glimmer of hope for the situation:

AT&T certainly can expect just as rigorous an examination from the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission as Comcast is receiving.

Regulators will be seeking to ensure that an AT&T-DirecTV combination won't increase prices or lead to restricted options for consumers, Marc Price, CTO for the Americas at Openet, told the E-Commerce Times.

Some reasons regulators might be more likely to favorably view this merger include the emerging competition for video content from Amazon, Apple and Netflix, as well as the prospect of nationwide services from Comcast, he said. "Competition will ensure choice and competitive pricing."

In fact, one reason AT&T likely is pursuing this idea -- a reason that could become a talking point as it negotiates with regulators -- is that if it wants to be competitive, AT&T will need a nationwide video delivery service to complement U-Verse, Price pointed out.

"DirecTV's satellite service provides this capability," he said.

And now, on to the next section, "The Question of Net Neutrality," and an excerpt from the comments that I provided:

However, that analysis assumes that telecom providers would be unable to restrict consumers from viewing content from any source, including a competitor's.

Acquiring the second-largest satellite TV company would help AT&T catch up as a content distributor, but at the cost of consumer choice regarding available services, Lance Strate, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham, told the E-Commerce Times.

The consolidation of the telecommunications industry "can only strengthen the hand of the corporations that are trying to undermine the founding principles of the Internet as a public service, choke off services, channels and sites that they do not have a financial agreement with or do not care for, and give special fast service to those that they favor, either economically or politically," he said.

 And that's it for me, but there is one last section to the article, one that echoes my sentiments, "The Consumer Loses":

Even leaving the ongoing battle surrounding Net neutrality out of the equation, a DirecTV acquisition is bad news for consumers, according to Topher Morrison, author of the book Collaboration Economy, and managing director of Entrevo.

"The advantages are almost all for AT&T, and very few for the customers. They will bill this as their ability to provide better service and wider selection, but that's just a fancy way of saying they will charge the consumer more," he explained.

Consumers don't even need DirecTV anymore, he said, pointing to the very competitors that are likely motivating AT&T in this move.

"I can watch every show I want online through collaboration apps like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime," said Morrison. "AT&T needs to ask themselves how they can partner up with their customers—not their competitors."

And hats off to Morrison, really, I couldn't have said it better myself. Why not see your customers as partners and collaborators, rather than products and patsies? 

And of course, the point here is not in how much I get quoted, I just provide my raw comments so that they don't go to waste, and also to show how journalism works. But the important point here is the disservice being done to us as consumers, and more importantly to us as citizens, by all this merger-mania.

Newton Minow, where have you gone? The sharks in the water are circling all around us!

Amazing Ourselves from Second Nature

So, they say that three times makes a pattern, and in that trinitarian spirit, I would like to share one more view on Amazing Ourselves to Death, to follow up on A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing, and the Catholic view from Fordham Notes Amazing. This one comes from Second Nature, which describes itself as "an online journal for critical thinking about technology and new media in light of the Christian tradition."

Entitled Lance Strate’s “Amazing Ourselves to Death”: A Review, the article posted on May 5th is the first full book review, and the author, Peter Fallon, was one of Neil Postman's students as well. Peter is also a media ecology scholar and the author of several books, Printing, Literacy, and Education in 18th Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English, The Metaphysics of Media: Toward an End of Postmodern Cynicism and the Construction of a Virtuous Reality, and Cultural Defiance, Cultural Deviance: Collected Essays. 

Anyway, the point is that Peter is not only well qualified to review my book, but could well have written his own version of it, as well.

So, let's see how Peter begins his review. Perhaps with an engaging anecdote?

Years ago at NBC News, Gene Shalit told me a story about the difficulties of being an arts critic on television. In 1974 he delivered a less than appreciative review of the sentimental Joe Camp movie Benji, about a lovable, stray and cloyingly cute mixed-breed dog and his unlikely adventures. As he always did at the end of his “Critic’s Corner” segment, he segued into a commercial spot with the tag line, “Now, it’s time for this message. This is TODAY on NBC.” Later, he recounted, he was walking past the Guild Theatre on 50th Street, where Benji happened to be playing, and noticed the marquee. Below the huge letters spelling out the name of both the movie and its eponymous mongrel/star, he saw what was, in truth, an actual quote from his “Critic’s Corner” review: “It’s time for this message. – Gene Shalit, TODAY Show.”

A good one, Peter. And I am really flattered about the way that he connects the story to the subject of his review:

With this cautionary tale in mind, and recognizing that for a closed-minded minority of techno-utopians Neil Postman was a reactionary and a Luddite, a relic of a literate age nostalgic for a simpler time, I never the less wish to report about Lance Strate’s Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited: It’s time for this message. Like Postman, Lance Strate understands that while the medium may be the message, some messages transcend media, defy media, and resist reduction to mere afterthought. Postman’s (1984) critique of the American television culture of nearly thirty years ago was such a message; Strate’s reconsideration and updating of that critique is not a new message, but constitutes, rather, a continuation of Postman’s message in Amusing Ourselves to Death (AOTD).

This seems like a good place to pause briefly and add in the really cool graphic that accompanied Peter's review:

Okay, now as he was saying:

After finishing the book I sat quietly and thoughtfully trying to think of a couple of appropriate adjectives to sum up my initial reaction to it. (Adjectives, I’ve come to believe, are the heart of any critical review, and the wrong adjective can take what was intended to be a glowing review and make it tepid and half-hearted; by the same token, a carelessly chosen adjective can make what was intended to be an incisive and critical review appear to the reader little more than an exercise in puffery.) The first descriptive word that came into my head was “important,” but to that closed-minded minority I mentioned above this word will appear to be a very subjective judgment. Another adjective that came to mind was “authoritative.” Again I corrected myself, remembering that we’re living in an age where the concept of authority has been rendered impotent by a media ecology that places subjective, personal opinion on an equal level (at the very least) with what was once called “expert opinion”–the informed opinion of someone who has systematically studied, in a disciplined way, with the use of empirical methods, some phenomenon or group of phenomena in the physical, natural, biological or social sciences.

I finally settled on a descriptor that I believe is unquestionably true and, therefore, unquestionably objective: mature. Lance Strate’s Amazing Ourselves to Death is a mature reconsideration of an important media theorist and cultural critic and what is perhaps his best-known book. It is also a mature consideration–one of the most mature, well-rounded, and unbiased I have read–of our current culture of amusement and diversion. Strate is neither cynical nor naïve in his attention to Postman’s observations or the culture that was the subject of those observations. He succumbs neither to nostalgia nor apologetics, but carefully and objectively delivers a point-by-point reappraisal of Postman’s argument and the evidence with which he supported it. He also provides contemporary evidence, where appropriate, to illustrate the continuing relevance of AOTD to today’s media ecology. It is precisely this kind of intellectual maturity that makes Strate’s book both an essential companion to AOTD as well as an important piece of scholarship in its own right.

So, I must admit that the adjective "mature" took me a little bit by surprise. Getting on in years, I hate to say it, but I resemble that remark. Of course, I remember the days when I was described as anything but... (for a long time, I  often found myself to be the youngest member of whatever group I was a part of). 

But one of the amazing things about Neil Postman was his ability to understand other people, and reveal to them something about themselves that they didn't know or realize until he pointed it out. For me, and this goes back to when I was in my early 20s, he once said to me, "you're like me, Lance, you take responsibility." And to be honest, I didn't think of myself as being a particularly responsible person, but he saw something in me that I had not seen in myself. So maybe Peter's description of the book as mature is also an insight of the same sort, something I had not previously considered.

Anyway, back to Peter's review: 

In many ways, this book is both an echo of Neil Postman and a reflection of his legacy. It is organized in two sections; the first serves as “echo,” a recap, a primer on the life, work, and legacy of Neil Postman. The second is a reflection, a deeply thoughtful interpretation and reconsideration, within the context of a complex digital culture, of Postman’s original critique of television culture.

Let me just interrupt here to point out that Peter has cleverly alluded to my first book, Echoes And Reflections: On Media Ecology As a Field of Study:
 



 Okay, back to Peter once more:

The first part of the book is comprised of four chapters: the first restates Postman’s original argument that “what we love will ruin us” (p. viii), that we are drowning in a “sea of amusements” (p. 156), our “serious discourse [dissolving] into giggles” (ibid.), our culture being “drained by laughter” (ibid.); the second is a biographical sketch of Postman himself which provides a useful and interesting context within which to situate his work and thoughts; the third considers media ecology as both meta-discipline and method; and the fourth surveys the changing technological (and intellectual, emotional, and spiritual) terrain leading up AOTD as well as that of the (nearly) three decades since its publication.

In Part Two Strate focuses on four major themes from AOTD–the news, politics, religion, and education – and reexamines them in the light of our contemporary digital, info-glutted, 24/7/365 media ecology. He finds much cultural grist for the intellectual mill, and finely grinds out a meal of critical insights that should nourish (if only they would taste) even the most militantly unquestioning believer in the universal efficacy of the technological solution. In a chapter called “Breaking the News” (Strate is an inveterate wordsmith and punster, and the double entendre is priceless) he considers Postman’s concern that serious discourse was falling prey to entertainment, and calls our attention to how even the idea of entertainment has changed in a crowded and boisterous free-market. In “The Tribe Has Spoken” Strate considers Postman’s argument that television transforms culture–and, consequently, democracy–in a way that the Founders never could have anticipated; and notes that we are now in the process of squandering the opportunities offered by the Internet and so-called “social media” to use the power of those media for our collective benefit. “Neon Gods” recalls Postman’s conscientious objection to the unlikely–but again widely accepted–possibility that television might constitute a “sacred space” wherein the internal experience of spirit may be fruitfully pursued, and points out that in the noisy, hyper-connected world of wi-fi, cellular, and mobile Internet, silent contemplation has become the quaintest of notions. And in “Grand Theft Education” Strate reconsiders Postman’s description of television as an educational curriculum with no prerequisites, without complexity, without context, dependent not on exposition but on images and sounds and music; he then considers the implications of the increasingly technologized pedagogies of today (what I like to consider, in Jacques Ellul’s words, an extremely cynical technological bluff) for the children–and citizens–of tomorrow. (As I write this the Washington Post has reported on a suburban New York school district where an elementary school has cancelled the annual end-of-the-year kindergarten play so as not to distract these four- and five-year-olds from what I am sure is highly technical work; play and socialization fall in favor of “preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills…”)

In the final chapter of the book, Strate contrasts Marshall McLuhan’s view of understanding media with that of Neil Postman. Edgar Allen Poe’s “Descent Into the Maelstrom” was McLuhan’s guiding metaphor for navigating the treacherous waters of technological change. I’ve had many discussions and even arguments, some quite heated, with colleagues and scholars who insist I am misinterpreting McLuhan (and ignoring his Catholicism) in taking issue with his stance. But it was McLuhan (1997) himself who once said “A moral point of view too often substitutes for understanding in technical matters” (p. 66) and I take him at his word. The old sailor who survives the maelstrom by becoming one with its awesome and destructive flow does so at the expense of the lives of his brothers; he took no risks for them and saved himself instead. Strate, however, proposes Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as a suitable metaphor within which to understand Postman’s approach to understanding media. Young, naïve Miranda, witnessing the results of her Prospero’s sorcery as storm-tossed sailors are thrown aground on her shore, is both amazed and amused by the spectacle of the first foreigners she’s ever seen. “O brave new world,” she says, breathlessly, “that has such people in’t.” These same words are uttered by John the savage in Huxley’s Brave New World in learning that he would leave his reservation and live in the World State he’d heard of in legend. The dystopic reality he finds, however, is too much for him and he kills himself.

Postman’s approach is to reject the responses of both Miranda and John, to be neither enthralled nor distraught by change, to neither serve technology nor recoil in fear of it. Instead, as Strate tells us, “Postman advocated respectful engagement, open dialogue, and being a loving resistance fighter” (p. 137). Understanding media, technology, and technological change, to Postman, is no different from understanding any aspect of human culture and the human experience: we create it; it does not thereafter shape us in its likeness. Our human intelligence, whether one sees it as evolved or a gift of Divine Providence, has provided us with the therapeutic intervention that serves as antidote to our animal nature: language. And our language allows us to both reason and feel, to make judgments and to empathize. Our literacy is the key to our critical faculties, to understanding that it is we who are agents of change or of stasis, we who are responsible for creating the world we live in, we who construct the realities in which we reside.

It’s time for this message.

And what a great way to connect the end of the review with the opening anecdote. And thank you Peter, that was truly wonderful.

Oh, and there are some end notes:

—

Get the book:

Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited
Lance Strate
New York: Peter Lang, 2014
ISBN 978-1-4331-1930-9
Works Cited

McLuhan, M. (1997). Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin.

Strate, L. (2014). Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited. New York: Peter Lang.

And since you bring it up, here are the Amazon links:

 

And when it comes to noting all the ways in which Neil Postman was right about the impact of electronic media on society and culture, well, I guess you could say that comes as second nature too.

Fordham Notes Amazing

So, since my last post offered A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing, in this post I would like to share, in an ecumenical spirit, a post on my book from Fordham Notes, the official blog of Fordham University, Fordham being a Catholic and Jesuit institution.

The blog post is entitled Strate on Postman: Resisting Telegraphic Discourse, and it was written by Tom Stoelker, based on an interview he conducted with me, and posted on May 2nd.

And here is how it went down:

Several people who have read Lance Strate’s new book have described it as a “love letter” to his late mentor, the media ecologist Neil Postman. In the just-released Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited, (Peter Lang, 2014) Strate, professor of communication and media studies, riffs on more than just the title of Postman’s seminal book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which analyzed the way broadcast television, affects politics, journalism, education, and religion.

Strate’s book sets the stage for his academic peers to explore Postman’s theories in today’s new media. Postman explored television landscape in the mid-1980s before cable radically changed the nature of TV, whereas Strate’s book considers the same theories in light of the vast expansion of channel offerings and new networks via cable and satellite, and the addition of the Internet and world-wide web.

Regardless of the time period, Strate said electronic media are all interrelated. But how they have an effect on our democracy seems to have increased exponentially. He noted that the 18th-century leaders struck a healthy balance between the written and spoken word. They were great readers, which informed them to be great rhetoricians.

“Our country was founded by literate individuals and ours is a country that was argued into existence,” he said.

Postman wrote that the image-saturated electronic media eventually undermined reading-and-rhetoric, as electronic media’s emphasis on image elicits an emotional and irrational response. Strate broadens the focus to include the Internet’s speed and immediacy, which he said creates information overload.

“Speed, efficiency, and the overemphasis on technology—where only efficiency matters—puts us into what I call ‘hyper-irrationality,’” he said “Efficiency is a numbers game that takes us away from the balance of literate and oral.”

Postman and Strate argue that such a balance is the very basis of American culture.

When new media first arrived its emphasis on text spurred hope of a new generation of literacy. But now that the net has become increasingly visual, Strate says a “telegraphic discourse” has come to dominate.

“The Internet intrudes in so many ways that even at a church people don’t turn their phones off,” he said. “How do you get a sense of the sacred when we’re just a click away from something else?”

Not surprising, there is a certain commonality of interest between Fordham Notes and the Jewish Standard, and while only part of the book is about religion, as it addresses subjects such as news, politics, education, and American culture as a whole, it is gratifying to know the book has some value beyond secular scholarship.

A Jewish Take on Amusing and Amazing

So, over in northern New Jersey and nearby Rockland County in New York State, there is a weekly periodical called the Jewish Standard. And as you may have gathered from its name, it serves the Jewish community in that neck of the woods. And it's actually the recipient of multiple awards from the prestigious Society of Professional Journalists.

So, as you may know, I am president of Congregation Adas Emuno, a Reform temple in Leonia, New Jersey, in Bergen County, in Northern New Jersey. And given that fact, along with the fact that I include some discussion of Neil Postman's Jewish background and sensibility in Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited, it made perfect sense for the Jewish Standard to include an article about the publication, based on an interview with me, which was conducted by the paper's editor, Joanne Palmer.

The article is entitled From Amusing to Amazing, and you can click on the link to read it on the Jewish Standard's website, along with seeing the photos and comments that were posted there (and if you are so moved, add your own). Or read it here.

Here's how the article begins:

Was Neil Postman right nearly 30 years ago, when he said that television had trivialized nearly everything about our lives? That our ability to apply reason to make sense of the world had begun to atrophy in the overwhelmingly visual, no-delayed-gratification-necessary world we saw by its blue-flickering light?

And if he was right, what have the technological advances that make TV seem so very old-school done to us since then?

One of Dr. Postman’s disciples, Dr. Lance Strate of Palisades Park, has undertaken the challenge of examining both Dr. Postman’s life and worldview and the accuracy of his predictions.

In his new book, “Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman’s Brave New World Revisited,” Dr. Strate, who was Dr. Postman’s student at NYU and now is a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University in the Bronx, continues his teacher’s analysis. His book follows up on Dr. Postman’s best-known work, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” which first was published in 1985. (Dr. Postman died in 2003.)

I will interrupt at this point to provide you with the links for the two books being discussed:

And now to continue with the rest of the article:

Dr. Strate, who is president of his synagogue, Congregation Adas Emuno in Leonia, thinks that both Dr. Postman and his arguments are profoundly influenced by the Jewish world in which he grew up.

Dr. Postman, who was born in 1931 to parents who grew up on the Lower East Side, spent his own formative years in Flatbush. “One of the things that we kind of have a leg up on when we grow up in a Jewish neighborhood in New York is that it is multicultural and multilingual,” Dr. Strate said. “When you go to Hebrew school, you learn a different alphabet. When you go to shul, you are exposed to a different kind of book—a scroll. You really learn to be sensitive to the differences between different media, different modes of communication.”

That sensitivity, Dr. Strate continued, is at the heart of a discipline called media ecology, which Dr. Postman pioneered and he now champions.

Dr. Strate knows about such sensitivities firsthand. The son of Holocaust survivors, he is from Kew Gardens in Queens, another heavily Jewish neighborhood.

“The idea is that different media or forms of communication influence the way we feel, we perceive the world, and we behave, and on a larger scale the ways in which we organize ourselves as a society and as a culture.

“Something very profound that Dr. Postman pointed out is that the second commandment doesn’t just say there should be images of God. It says no images.”

That, Dr. Strate said, is because “with words, we can think much more abstractly.” Images are emotional and evocative, but “you can’t make an argument with images.

“Reasoning by analogy is very much at the heart of Jewish learning, and it involves a balance between the spoken and the written word,” he continued. “You can look at ancient Israel as the first great culture to come out of the alphabet. The Semitic alphabet first was introduced in around 1850 B.C.E.

“We are not clear on the history, of course, but within a few centuries we have the Exodus and the law. You can’t have written or codified law without writing. Judaism was the first religion to be based on a sacred written text, the first to venerate the book.

“Monotheism itself—the idea of one God—requires an abstract kind of thinking. God is a God of words—d’varim—not of images, and images are what we see in other religions all the time.”

Once the Semitic inheritance of abstract thought met with Greek philosophy—which itself needed the Semitic alphabet it got through the Israelites’ cousins, the Phoenicians—“that trajectory takes us through Western civilization,” Dr. Strate said. “It was amplified by the printing press, which brought on the modern world.

“The American republic was very much printing, particularly on pamphlets and broadsides. It was the first nation ever to be argued into existence. And one of the places that the Founding Fathers turned to for inspiration was the Torah.”

So what does this have to do with his argument about television, the Internet, and beyond?

“Postman, like many New York Jews, came down on the liberal side of things,” Dr. Strate said. “He was a defender of the potential of American democracy, and he came to the conclusion that television was completely undermining it.

“Building on that, and looking at the expansion of television through cable and satellite, and with the addition of the Internet—we know that there are great benefits that these technologies bring, but the problem is that all we tend to talk about are those benefits.

“Nobody talks at all about what they are costing us, and it is foolish not to look at the price tag. That’s what Postman wanted us to do—to ask, ‘Well, what is all this going to cost?’”

In his own book, Dr. Strate looks at four areas that Dr. Postman tackled first—with the new technology, what happens to journalism? To politics? To religion? And to education? Those four pillars of our culture all were built on words. “All have been damaged by the electronic media,” he said.

Religion, for example, often is broadcast, but religious services need a sense of the sacred, and that sense is hard to come by when you watch it in the profane space of your own home. “When you have religion on television, it is the preacher who becomes the focal point, not God,” Dr. Strate said. “And most religious services look awful on television because they are designed for real spaces, so the most successful kinds of televised religious services use entertainment formats. And when you do that, you lose all sense of what religion is about, and it becomes entertainment.”

Similarly, “more television channels have not given us a more serious form of television. Instead, they have given us more outlets for entertainment.

“They used to argue that we couldn’t get news in depth because there was only 20 minutes for it each night. Today, we have 24-hour news channels—and they still don’t do extended stories. Instead, they concentrate on people yelling at each other, or on sensational stories, and there is a lot of repetition. So the format really hasn’t changed dramatically.

“Politics has not improved much with the electronic media, even with blogs, YouTube videos, and news aggregators. All they have given us is more verbiage.

“And there is a lot of attention paid now to online education, to massive open online courses, but I think the best way to understand what makes for a good education is to look at what rich people do.” People who can afford just about anything “opt for very low teacher/student ratios and real face-to-face contact,” he said.

He explained the subtitle of his book by talking about the difference between the two dystopias imagined by two British writers more or less midway through the last century—George Orwell’s “1984” in 1949 and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in 1931.

One more interruption, in case you would like to get a hold of copies of either of these novels, here are the Amazon links:

Oh, and let's not forget about Huxley's essays that follow up on his novel, from which I derived the subtitle of my book:

Okay, and now back to the article:

“Orwell was not as prescient as Huxley,” Dr. Strate said. “Orwell’s future was totalitarian. Huxley’s was about complete control by technology. We have allowed technology to be a kind of governing force. It is about doing things as efficiently as possible, so other human values get pushed away as a result.

“The reason for the decadence in ‘Brave New World’ is to keep everyone happy and functioning, so they will continue to be productive, and society will continue to roll on.

“That’s one side of the coin now. The other is that we are drowning in information. We don’t know how to say no to any new technology.” Not all new products catch on, he added, but the technologies behind them do.

“At the end, the question that the book raises is whether there is a future for us,” Dr. Strate said. “Is there a way for us to take control of things?”

Judaism had that idea long ago. Jews have known since the beginning that once a week, it is necessary to take a break. Some secular Jews have adopted the idea of “technology Shabbat” from more observant ones; it is a time for them to disconnect from all their devices and interact with the world directly.

Despite the many virtues of our electronics, that occasional and regular disconnection is necessary if we are to continue to advance, Dr. Strate suggests.

And this is where the article ends. But before I end this post, let me note that I have also had some positive responses to the book from Christian sources, and I'll share them here on Blog Time Passing another time.

On the Amazing Neil Postman

So, I just got back from the annual Media Ecology Association, and I'll do a post on that another time, but back in April I was in Providence, Rhode Island for this year's Eastern Communication Association's annual meeting—ECA's the oldest communication association in existence, I should add. 

Anyway, there was a special session on my new book, Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited (and need I remind you that you can order it directly from Amazon over on the right?).

The participants included Susan Jasko of the California University of Pennsylvania (yes it's in Pennsylvania, why it's named that way I don't know), who served as moderator and panelist. The other panelists were Susan Drucker of Hofstra University, Don Fishman of Boston College, and Renee Hobbs, the Director of the recently established School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island, and a leader in the media literacy movement. Deborah Borisoff, a former colleague of Postman's, was also supposed to be on the panel, but wasn't able to make it to the conference.

All four of the panelists provided a review and comments about the book, and then I responded. To be honest, I expected them to mostly say nice things about the book. After all, it was a friendly panel. But I was surprised, and touched, by the extent to which they picked up on the emotional side of the work, and what they said about the degree to which it captured a sense of Neil Postman as a human being. Susan Drucker described it as a love letter to my mentor.

I wish we had recorded the entire session, but fortunately Renee Hobbs did record her comments, and turned them into a YouTube video, which I'm pleased to share with you here. What she has to say is much more about Postman than about my book, which is fine with me, and indeed quite fitting, and makes the video all the more valuable as another addition to the many remembrances of Postman that have been preserved online. So anyway, here is the video, entitled Remembering Neil Postman:





The "About" section states, "Renee Hobbs remembers Neil Postman as a teacher, field builder, humanist and protectionist in this talk from the Eastern Communication Association conference, April 26, 2014." 

And this give me the opportunity to say, once more, thank you Renee!

Politics 2014: That's Entertainment!

The title of this blog post is taken from my old professor, Terry Moran's influential article published in ETC: A Review of General Semantics some thirty years ago, entitled "Politics 1984: That's Entertainment," which Neil Postman drew upon in his best known book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.  And as you know (or at least I hope you know), I've written a bit of a follow-up entitled Amazing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman's Brave New World Revisited. And if you don't have your copy, you can order it right now through Amazon via that little box over on the right.

But a few weeks before the books was actually published, I received a request from Sarah Musooli, a producer for Bloomberg TV's Street Smart with Trish Regan and Adam Johnson program, asking if I'd come by the studio to talk about the blurred line between celebrities and politicians. This was in conjunction with comedian Jimmy Fallon taking over as host of the Tonight Show, and having First Lady Michelle Obama as one of his guests. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.

The segment was supposed to be 7 minutes long, which I understand is an eternity in the television medium's peculiar relation to time (it's the kind of time I have referred to as quicktime in my essay "Cybertime" in my co-edited anthology, Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment, first edition published in 1996, 2nd in 2003, the essay is in both, and the 2nd edition can be ordered from one of the boxes on the right). But, as should be apparent to any sane, let alone reasonable person, it's not very long at all to discuss a complex and significant issue. So, of course, the previous segment went long and ours got cut down to only a couple of minutes. But hey, that's show biz!

Before showing you my segment, let's take a look once again (or for the first time if you missed it) at Michelle Obama's appearance on The Tonight Show on Thursday night,  February 20th, which started with this skit:





Now here's the sit down portion, where they get serious, sort of:















So that was Thursday night, and my interview was scheduled for the next day, Friday February 21st, at 4:20 PM. This clip cuts off the very beginning and end of the segment, but for what it's worth, here it is:





As I noted, the clip cuts off the last little bit (you can also see the same clip here), during which we continued to talk, the anchors said they had to go to commercial and gave the impression that we would continue after the break, but during the break someone decided to move on to the next topic, and so it all ended rather abruptly. It was shades of And Now This! (and Postman's Daily Show interview by Rob Corddry). I heard from a few folks  who were watching the program live that they were surprised when they came back from the commercial break and immediately went on to some other story. But of course one of the characteristics of the television medium is its bias towards discontinuous content, in contrast to writing and print's bias towards linearity. And that is one of the main reasons why television is a poor medium for serious public discourse, but well-suited to entertainment and amusement.

If I had more time to talk, and think, in discussing the issue, I'd emphasize how this general trend of blurring the line between politics and celebrities has more than a little to do with the severe loss of respect for our political leaders, and the terrible lack of civility in politics today. We seem to have lost the idea of respecting the office, even if you disagree with the particular individual inhabiting it at the moment and the policies involved. Whatever other reasons there are for the political polarization that we've been experiencing in American political culture, the inability to engage in constructive debate, and especially negotiation, the inability to find any common ground whatsoever, is related, at least in part, to the lowering of political leaders down to the level of celebrity entertainers, individuals we feel entirely free to boo, disregard, and change the channel on.

In the case of the First Lady's appearance with Fallon, her justification for coming on the show is to talk about health and healthcare, so notice how that important and very serious message gets lost in all the focus on comedy and personality. 

I'd also note how, finally, how in this case, vital political discourse is reduced down to one word:  Eeewww!!!