Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot.(Brief Article)

Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot Michael Rogin. Univ. of California, $24.95 ISBN 0-520-20407-1

As part of the interest in stereotypical depictions of African Americans after Reconstruction, there have been a number of books on the powerful tradition of blackface minstrelsy. But it didn't just inform popular stage and film representations of blacks, says UC--Berkeley political scientist Rogin (Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology). In a story with some similarities to that told in Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish became White, Rogin says blackface also served to "Americanize" or whiten immigrant Jewish blackface performers during a …