The Johns Hopkins University Press American Jewish History

Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star
Author(s): AMELIA S. HOLBERG

Source: American Jewish History, Vol. 87, No. 4, Performance and Jewish Cultural
History (December 1999), pp. 291-312
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23886225
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Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star
AMELIA S. HOLBERG
The American dream might read something like this: two br

from a family of five, one an immigrant, one born soon after his m
sailed to New York and came through Ellis Island, rebel against t
World parents, refuse to finish school, and instead enter the le
respectable world of movie-making in a less-than-respectab
animation. Against all odds and expectations and due to an ing
invention they do more than make good. They become Hol
movie moguls with a studio which produces films starring som
most famous leading actors of the 30s, none of whom requires
or dressing room, and none of whom ever breaks a contra
Fleischer brothers, Max and Dave, created and controlled one o
great 30s sex symbols, animated Betty Boop. Betty's cartoons,
bered most vividly for their overt sexuality and often grotesque im
are even more provocative when viewed in relation to the live
working-class, Eastern European immigrant, Jewish creators.
The Fleischer Brothers, in fact, provided America with som
most memorable animated characters, including Popeye and his
and Superman. They were also the creators of a series of techn
apparatuses—including the rotoscope and 3-D sets—that provid
basis for all modern drawn animation until the advent of com
animation in recent years. As well known as Disney (thei
competitor) in the 30s, by 1998 Max and Dave Fleischer only r
short description (which omitted their names) in the docum
Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream as t
Jewish brothers" who created the first film version of Super
revival of interest in animation among film scholars has insured
Fleischers' cartoons are more memorable than their names, ho
Betty Boop's return to the movie screen in the 90s has garner
excitement usually reserved for restorations of great "lost classics"
cinema, like Wells' Magnificent Ambersons or von Stroheim's
Kelly. Betty's initial disappearance can be traced to the Hays Pr
Code office, which determined Betty Boop too racy for general
in 1934. The Hays Code led directly to her retirement in 1938, a
was relegated to the status of has-been for decades. Her cartoo
rereleased for television in the fifties, and then again mothballed in
of new cartoon stars. A large number of the Betty Boop cartoo
292 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
remastered to tour the art house circuit in 199

compilation of Boop cartoons has proved so po
volumes are scheduled for release in the next year
stars have had varied fates. For example, Popeye
on television since the 50s,1 but the Fleischer Sup
superseded by live-action television and cinema ver
other cartoon versions, have not enjoyed the same
It is Betty Boop, the Fleischers' first sound film s
here. Encapsulated in the story of her cartoons
themselves, is the reality behind the American H
real relationship between Eastern European, Yiddi
immigrants to America and cinema, a relationship
the international success of mainstream Hollywoo
narrowly distributed films of Yiddish cinema. En
Betty Boop and her friends were able to speak to thes
audiences: in English, the Boop cartoons were distr
What Jewish, Yiddish-speaking audiences discovere
the movies, however, was that Betty's cartoons al
of the Yiddish cinema. That language included no
Yiddish but also references to the themes of the Yi
lives of working-class Jews jammed together in te
East Side.
This is a story that begins with the very earliest moments of cinema and
a group of people who appeared seemingly out of nowhere: the lower- and
working-class, overwhelmingly immigrant audiences which came first to the
kinetoscope midways at the end of the nineteenth century and then to the
nickelodeons in the first decade of the twentieth, supporting the new
industry with what few entertainment pennies they had to spend. And in a
way they truly did come out of nowhere. First, they appeared out of the
nowhere of history, suddenly an historically interesting group that was the
main economic force driving the success of very early cinema. Second, the
massive waves of immigration to America between 1880 and 1924 coincide
so precisely with the origin and early development of cinema that it is almost
as if those new American citizens came to America just to become the early
cinema audience.2 National myth has especially emphasized the over two
million Jewish immigrants who not only joined the audiences but also
1. Though I won't discuss the Popeye cartoons here the early cartoons are also replete
with Yiddish phrases and Jewish references.
2. Edison patented his peephole kinetoscope in January 1894. Film projection was
invented in 1895, and by 1896 projected short films were being shown throughout the
world.
A.S. Holberg: Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star 293
transformed the American cinema industry into the fantasy factory of

Hollywood. In fact, film historian Miriam Hansen claims that because of
the strong ties to both aspects of the narrative of the birth and success of
American cinema—production and reception—the Yiddish-speaking au
dience "offers a paradigmatic, if overdetermined, instance of the dialectic
of ethnic image-making and image-consumption."3 The Fleischers and
their star, Betty Boop, firmly located in New York's Yiddish-speaking
community while playing to film audiences all over the United States, are
the embodiment of that paradigm.
The technological development of early American cinema is often
linked to the simultaneous economic development of this lower-class
immigrant audience, and the Jewish audience of New York's Lower East
Side in particular, as if cinema itself embodied in its form the very rules
for progress to economic and social success in America. Betty Boop's
creators, the sons of a poor inventor and his wife, are themselves seeming
proof for this assertion.4 Here, however, there is a profound disjunction
between the mythical origin story of American cinema and its actual one.
The narrative cinema we have come to recognize as our basic cinematic
form developed almost in spite of this immigrant group, which had
found its own form of entertainment in the bawdy short films of the first
decade of cinema. Film historians Noel Burch and Miriam Hansen both
support the characterization of the early American film audience as
mainly working-class and, in its first and largest market, New York City,
largely immigrant. The Fleischer brothers, growing up on the Lower East
Side during the first 15 years of cinema, would have had access to the
largest concentration of movie houses in the world.5 By 1908, halfway
through the reign of the nickelodeon, "nearly a fourth of Manhattan's
123 movie theaters were located amid Lower East Side tenements, with
another 13 squeezed among the Bowery's Yiddish theaters and music
halls, and 7 more clustered in the somewhat tonier entertainment zone to the
north at Union Square."6 Jewish, primarily Yiddish-speaking, patrons,
3. Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (

Cambridge, 1991), 71.
4. Unless otherwise indicated, biographical information on the Fleischers is drawn
primarily from Leslie Cabarga, The Fleischer Story, (New York, 1988).
5. Max Fleischer was born in Austria in 1884, the family immigrated in 1887, and Dave
was born in New York in 1894.
6. The nickelodeons played a variety of short subjects for a nickel. The earliest films
were only a few minutes at most, but by 1905 films of a full reel (about 15 minutes) were
being shown, and by 1910 multi reel narratives were becoming more common. For the
location of the nickelodeons, see J. Hoberman, Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two
Worlds, (Philadelphia, 1991), 26.
joined by the Italians, Irish, and other immigrants s

nearby, were the single largest localized community
Both Hansen and Burch point out that despite the
of nickelodeons in the immigrant neighborhoods, "
took implied the rejection of a whole social stratum
most of its audience for more than five years came
Around 1905, the beginning of the nickelodeon ph
owners and producers began to draw material from
and popular vaudeville stage, more genteel entertain
fights and peep shows that had initially filled ear
Burch claims that vaudeville was not, as is common
class entertainment but instead catered to what he terms America's
"mass audience," largely upwardly mobile lower-middle-class city dwell
ers who had aspirations of shedding their ethnic identity in order to join
America's middle and upper-middle classes.8 As vaudeville became more
acceptable, the live theater owners and producers began to enjoy the
increased status and the increased revenues that this more economically
advantaged group of patrons brought to them.
In contrast, the first 10 years of cinema consisted largely of vulgar
exhibitionism, and film gained a reputation as the type of entertainment
uptown vaudeville audiences could not attend. Once the first producers
began to see large returns on their investments in film, however, they
hoped to break into the mass audience which supported vaudeville.9 In
order to share in the revenue and social status enjoyed by vaudeville
theater owners, cinema purveyors had to eliminate strip teases, violent
slapstick, peephole scenes, cross-dressers, and prize fights—all the most
popular attractions on their bills. Trying to find new material, cinema
moved away from the "cinema of attractions," characterized by a
number of short, spectacular films, and towards narrative.10
The movie theater owners soon discovered it was not enough to
change the subject matter of their films from peep shows to uplifting
narratives. Although they began to attract some middle-class patrons,
7. Noel Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans, and ed., Ben Brewster (Berkeley:
1990),109.
8. Burch, Life, 1x2.
9. Burch, Life, 112.
10. Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment," Art & Text 34 (1989). Following
Gunning, film studies has appropriated this phrase to refer to the short films of very early
cinema. Each film would consist of a single subject: a woman dancing, a kiss, or a two-part
joke, for example. These films were rarely more than a few minutes long and often had no
narrative whatsoever.
particularly women, few attended openly.11 The real problem was the
nickelodeon theater itself, another result of cinema's birth in the slums of
big cities. An affluent, respectable mass audience would not patronize
the early cinema less because the films were unappealing than because of
the theaters themselves:
Within two or three years nickelodeons were perceived by middle-class

reformers as 'the core of the cheap amusement problem,' not only because
they drew by far the largest crowds, but also for the unprecedented hazards that
lurked between the flickering screen and the darkness of the theater space.12
The reformers likened the nickelodeon theaters to "prostitution and

working-class drinking," other sins that needed to be eliminated from
the cities.13 And so, to convince the guardians of middle-class respect
ability to at least tolerate middle-class patronage of movie theaters, local
theater owners responded to their charges of indecency by creating the
first of what would be many "voluntary" self-censorship boards in the
life of American cinema.14 In addition, "nickelodeon managers pledged
to refrain from Sunday performances and to bar films which offended
community morals," and "the institution of uniformed ushers...was
created, providing a kind of pseudo-police force whose averred function
was to control the noisy, popular elements of the audience and to
reassure its middle-class component."15 As the cleaning up proceeded
between 1907 and 1909 the nickelodeons were gradually replaced by
cleaner, safer movie houses. The cinema reforms of 1908 also anticipated
the widespread reforms of the zos and 30s. While the cleaning up of the
nickelodeons provided Betty Boop with a wider audience when she
appeared in the early 30s, those reforms would eventually encompass
film content and cause her demise.
Still, during the years of the cleaning up process, the original cinema
audience, the immigrants and working-classes, didn't abandon cinema.
The more genteel audiences the theater owners hoped would appear also
did not materialize until the early teens. Thus, for a number of years the
cinema played primarily to audiences its films did not address. The
vulgar displays which were purged first from vaudeville and then from
cinema reflected the amusements of people with little money who lived
on top of one another. Sex and violence, while relatively easy to keep
xi. See David Robinson, From Peep Show to Palace, (New York, 1996), 92-4.
12. Hansen, Babel, 63 with quote from John Collier, "Cheap Amusements," Charities
and the Commons 20 (1908): 74. See also Hansen, Babel, 311, note 7.
13. Hansen, Babel, 63.
14. Burch, Lj'/e, 123.
15. Hoberman, Light, 27; Burch, Life, 123.
undercover and behind doors in a middle-class

unavoidable in neighborhoods where thousands of p
area.16 Betty Boop herself, frequently the object of bo
was an inhabitant of this world. In one of the first
"Any Rags" (1931), Betty hangs out of her teneme
with the ragman. This cartoon is only one of a num
Betty contends with the hazards of life as a single g
What would be funny or familiar to this audience
of jokes or scenarios which resulted from opening
time, drunkenness, practical jokes, amusements w
money, no travel, and no extra implements beside
body, the attractions the Fleischers would bring bac
Boop: her dress slipping down to reveal her bra,
stories of travel or middle-class love affairs which c
nickelodeon playbills certainly would have been co
tenement audience, but the films no longer reflecte
Burch claims that cinema's new reliance on vaudev
disjointed address because of language and cultural d
more of national origin than of class:
Let alone its specifically xenophobic content, a form

show, for example, born three decades before the
immigrants, quickly became a highly coded spectacle,
cultural allusions only meaningful to native Americans
important extent on wordplay.19
If the vaudeville-based subject matter was truly in

immigrants steeped in the culture of the Eastern Euro
likely that the theaters would have closed and t
entertainment, would have disappeared altogether.
presound era, exhibitors could replace English title
in Yiddish, or an enterprising bilingual audience me
them out loud, thus negating the language difficul
wordplay, though, of course, double entendres and slan
16. "New York's Lower East Side was the greatest of immigran
1910, this clamorous city reached its maximum density—more
crammed into a few square miles of vermin-infested tenements
17. Another of these city types is played by Koko the Clown, id
the red tie." Koko is clearly a gay character in this film, and the
is full of 1920s homosexual slang ("Stick out your can, here com
is a cartoon firmly situated in its creators' urban, theatrical mil
18. "Any Rags" (1931) and "Poor Cinderella" (1934) are two
19. Burch, Life, 111-12..
Miriam Hansen tries to explain this audience's loyalty to cinema by

suggesting that the poor, overworked, crowded residents of the Lower East
Side would have attended the cinema regardless of the product being shown:
The nickelodeons filled this market gap with their low admission fee (a vaudeville
ticket cost twenty-five cents) and flexible time schedule...The nickelodeons
offered easy access and a space apart, an escape from overcrowded tenements and
sweatshop labor, a reprieve from the time discipline of urban industrial life.20
The Fleischers depict this function of the cinema in a 1935 Betty Boop,
"Judge for a Day," which begins as Betty navigates her way to work in
a large city. Enraged with "public pests" who blow smoke in her face,
splash mud on her dress, and crowd her off the bus, Betty, who lives in
a film and doesn't have to attend one, resorts to her dreams to right the
wrong. In Betty's dream each pest is displayed on stage in a sort of Betty's
Inferno of punishment; her dream returns the cinema of attractions to its
carnival midway origins. The cartoon depicts city-dwellers' dreams of
finding an escape to another, better world inside the movie theater.
However, this theory can't provide the entire explanation for working
class attendance at early cinema; the nickelodeons were cleaned up after
a series of public scandals precisely because they were loud, dirty, and
crowded, not much of a Utopian space apart.
So why did the immigrant audiences remain so loyal to the cinema?
The reality of the nickelodeon more likely offered to the immigrant
something different than either Burch's incomprehensible storylines or
Hansen's idyllic theaters. The nickelodeons offered a low-priced, conve
nient, enjoyable enough form of entertainment that immigrant audiences
would attend even if the shows were not entirely comprehensible. These
shows were not, however, completely incomprehensible either; the
Yiddish-speaking immigrants were learning American customs and
cultural codes on a daily basis (as well as influencing them), and the
narratives relied for the most part on stories that were very similar to the
same sorts of stories these immigrants might read in their native
languages—love stories, for example, or slapstick comedies for which the
humor was mostly visual anyway.
The lack of direct address did have an impact on these audiences,
though the extent to which the new content propelled them into middle
class respectability is perhaps overstated.21 Probably the most lasting
effect of these narratives was encouraging assimilation and the loss of
ethnic markers in its audiences. The tamer humor from the vaudeville
20. Hansen, Babel, 61.

21. Hansen, p. 62.
stage reproduced the latest craze—the shtick of com

newly arrived ethnics, a much easier translation to
the more traditional vaudeville act, the musical
show.22 Very quickly the avaricious Jew, the drunk
dull-witted Swede began to populate the cinema
Americans as the new American Other. Eventually t
replaced with silent set pieces featuring the lazy, cr
alongside the immigrants; James Stuart Blackton's "
(1907), which turns the words "coon" and "Cohen"
their namesakes, is the paradigmatic example of th
Early narrative film depicted the immigrant as Ot
to an immigrant crowd. For example, in Skyscraper
the immigrant who is the Other, and his extrem
quarrelsome and treacherous...propels the action."2
munity was no exception: The anti-Semitic "cliche
found their way into early films (such as Cohen's
[Edison, 1904], Cohen's Fire Sale [Edison, 1907], and
[Vitagraph, 1907]), had survived most vigorously in
genre defined by caricature and exaggeration."24 I
imagine that audiences who identified with the
would try to distance themselves from it. The most
was to transcend the working-class altogether, but
displaced to another ethnic group. Burch even prop
portrayal of the immigrant Other in early film w
American history of interethnic hatred.25 The
provide evidence for the impact of these cinematic
cinema of the 30s. Clear references to Yiddishkeit f
reveal a degree of comfort with their cinematic im
Jews whose success provided some distance from th
stereotypes. The cartoons are not as kind to o
however, and the stereotypically racist depictions f
"Mask-A-Raid" (1931), which spoofs Italian and C
emphasizes the longlasting effects of these wid
frequently repeated caricatures.
By the beginnings of the sound era immigrant gro
to turn this tendency toward comedic racism to
Rogin provides a compelling argument that Jewish
22. Burch, p. in.

23. Burch, p. 120
24. Hansen, p. 71.
25. Burch, note 1, p. 139.
succeed in their attempts to assimilate into white, middle-class America

in part through a resurgence of the racist minstrel show on the screen.26
The Betty Boop cartoons themselves frequently pair Betty with cartoon
images of black jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway,
and she even wears brown face as a Samoan in one cartoon. The
references to Yiddish culture in the cartoons are played out against the
background of American popular culture, in which the true Other,
African-Americans, alternately entertain and frighten mostly assimilated
Betty and her boyfriend Bimbo.
Betty Boop is a result of the sound era and the ability to bring popular
music and dance to the cinema screen. Before sound brought the
possibility of reinstating the minstrel show, however, the immigrants on
the Lower East Side responded to the popular "soft racism"27 of the film
comedy sketches with local theatrical entertainments, novels and news
papers aimed at and created by the immigrants themselves. Soon an
alternative cinema had also developed in response to the demands of the
community. During the teens and early 20s, immigrants to the Jewish,
Yiddish-speaking community centered on the Lower East Side, which
already had a popular and economically viable Yiddish theater, brought
with them an understanding of film and a desire for self-representation,
the prerequisites for a Yiddish cinema.
In Europe, most notably in Russia's Pale of Settlement, home to more
than half the world's Jews when cinema was invented, film distributors
and projectionists soon recognized a specifically Jewish audience for
film. J. Hoberman tells a story which bears repeating here:
[Francois] Doublier, [a teenaged employee of the Lumieres] arrived [in the

Pale] at the height of the Dreyfus affair, shortly after Emile Zola's second
conviction and the sensational suicide of confessed forger Major Hubert
Joseph Henry had further stimulated an already intense interest among
Russian Jews. Not surprisingly, the Jews of Kishinev wondered about the
absence of Dreyfus material in Doublier's presentation. The young showman
didn't have to be asked twice. By the time he reached Zhitomir, his program
included an extra attraction. Anticipating the montage experiments of Lev
Kuleshov, Doublier assembled a new movie, splicing together four shots—a
French military parade, a Paris street scene with an imposing building, a
Finnish tugboat meeting a barge, and a panorama of the Nile delta. These, he
informed spectators, presented Dreyfus before his arrest, the Palais de Justice
26. Michael Rogin. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood
Melting Pot. U . California Press; Berkeley, 1996. p. 42.
27. Most spectacularly, of course, in 1927's The Jazz Singer, which also popularized
sound film. For "soft racism," See Burch, Life, 111.
where Dreyfus was court-martialed, the boat that took

and finally Devil's Island itself.28
It was an immediate hit. Doublier had responded t

market by producing a film specifically for it, e
claimed to show the events in the Dreyfus case of 1
before the cinematographe was even invented.29
willingness to believe in the veracity of the film a
power of the film medium, but this incident also
particular early film audience was not so amazed
first glimpse of cinema that it could not place de
Yiddish-speaking audience of the Pale recognized
which could carry messages as well as entertain an
controlled by the consumers as well as the produce
As early as 19x1, Yiddish films were being produced
Fifteen years after the invention of cinema, Jewis
beginning to become a greater part of what had b
prevailing myth, the almost entirely non-Jewish world
Hollywood of American cinematic myth populated
born in the late teens. During the earliest days of Yid
was only a shooting location for Westerns. As the larg
in New York's Jewish neighborhoods attests, inst
directing, the earliest Jewish film pioneers did in
Jews in the film industry were doing in Europe: pa
of being itinerant merchants into the distribution and
By 1924, fleeing pogroms and persecution, near
Yiddish-speaking communities in Eastern Euro
America, bringing their cinematic literacy and tas
massive immigration of these Jews to America dem
ing of Yiddish cinema as well. The Yiddish-speakin
Pale not only provided a ready-made audience for t
they immigrated but also provided a distribution a
among the Yiddish-speaking communities in Ame
z8. Hoberman, p. 14.

29. The cinematographe, a combination camera, projector,
invented in 1895 by the Lumiere brothers in Paris. Lumiere ca
world recording what they saw (actuality films) and presenti
large city centers, the traveling Lumiere cameramen provided
with cinema.
30. Hoberman, p. 14.
31. The first real Jewish movie mogul, Sigmund Lubin, began making films in 1907.
3 2. for an in-depth discussion of Jewish immigration patterns, see Irving Howe. World
of Our Fathers.Schocken Books, Inc.; New York: 1989.
Through the 1930s American products would play side by side with
Yiddish ones. The Yiddish cinema the Fleischers would have attended as
young men in New York was produced primarily in the Pale and created on
a low budget specifically to exploit the Yiddish-speaking inner-city popula
tion. The films also did not look always look like the multireel narrative
films that were being shown throughout the country by the teens. Instead,
Yiddish films were interspersed with live bits of Yiddish theater long after
the "legitimate" screen had begun to show films in movie houses exclusively
for cinema product, having finally attracted that wealthier mass audience.33
Unlike other forms of early ethnic filmmaking, "Yiddish cinema
would gain much in terms of technical proficiency from the widespread
influence of Jews at all levels of the film industry (both in Europe and the
United States)" who, conceivably, would lend their talents to helping
family and friends making Yiddish films.34 As Jewish participation in the
film industry grew in the midteens, technical proficiency was not the only
gain; as Hansen suggests, "Because Jews were involved in film produc
tion early on, they had a certain input in the shaping of their public
image from which other minorities, especially blacks, were barred."35
Despite this influence, the need for an alternative cinema remained.
While Jewish members of the film industry might be able to prevent
overtly negative Jewish images on the screen, they were not especially
interested in catering to the relatively small Jewish market on a regular
basis. Yiddish cinema filled that gap, providing (melodramatic) depic
tions of real life in the Yiddish communities of New York and Eastern
Europe as well as adaptations of famous pieces of Yiddish literature.
In reality, mainstream producers did not entirely ignore the lucrative
Yiddish-speaking audience, which prompted studios to produce a small
number of films like D. W. Griffith's Romance of a Jewess (1908), which
was shot on location on the Lower East Side and capitalized on Jewish
themes. Romance, and films like it, sought to appeal to both the mass
audience as an "exotic" film and the particular audience of the Yiddish
speaking community, but as Hansen says of it,
the narration remains quite elliptical, relying on the viewer's familiarity with
Jewish marriage customs. Even if the information was supplied by the missing
intertitles, the film addresses an audience probably just as familiar with the
comic routines in the opening scene, which seem to have come from the
setting of the pawnshop.36
33- Hoberman, 36.

35. Hansen, p. 71.
36. Among other such features were A Child of the Ghetto (1910) and The Heart of a
Jewess (1913); Hansen, p. 72-3.
In other words, the story would have been noticeably

of its title, and to any members of the audience w
shadkhn or, more likely, the pawnshop routine as Jew
the most part Romance like other films of its sort, w
about a girl who wants to marry the man she loves
family wants her to marry. It was a decidedly "mass a
really addressing the audiences of New York's Yidd
its Lower East Side location shots. The Fleischers w
to appeal to both these audiences, one that would capit
Griffith left out—the specific cultural codes of th
During the 20s, an alternative cinema develop
audience distribution sphere, providing an outlet f
work aimed exclusively at neither the mass audie
audience. Neither the main draw nor the main mo
screening, the Fleischers were able to take greate
content of their films. In 1916 they began a proc
cartoon star, Koko the Clown, which culminate
cartoons. Max Fleischer didn't merely appear on s
the Clown, Bimbo, and Betty Boop out of his ink
these characters to carry "more or less camouflage
creators' Yiddish-American background.37 Their a
with short subjects and comedies playing second on a
address the urban audience ignored by feature film
"cinema of attractions" style of early cinema to dr
from precisely the material the nickelodeons had s
the screen 15 years earlier. The Fleischer cartoons a
a unique moment in American cinema in which a
mass audience also reflected the concerns and cultu
audience altogether—the audience for the alterna
Animation attracted the scientists and mechanics
art world; animators were as interested in the tech
made films possible as they were in actually mak
Max achieved their first real success as animators
invention developed with the help of their th
between Dave's shifts as a cutter for Pathe Freres a
director for Popular Science Monthly. With this inv
a process for capturing lifelike movement in anim
37- Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film 189

Chicago: 1993. p. 11.
38. Before rotoscoping, animated drawings changed position
movements. Audiences often found them difficult to watch. See
Cabarga, The Fleischer Story, for more on the development of
create a rotoscoped cartoon character the Fleischers first shot a normal

film strip of a body in motion. Dave, dressed in a clown suit, provided the
initial subject matter. Next, Max and Dave used the rotoscope to magnify
individual frames of the filmstrip onto a piece of glass. Then they traced
Dave's changing positions onto celluloid frame by frame, modifying his
features into those of their new star.39 Finally, they photographed each
piece of celluloid onto a single frame of motion picture film. The result
was the first Koko the Clown filmstrip, in which Koko's body reflected
all of the subtle changes made by a human body in motion. When their
invention was brought to the attention of an old acquaintance, John
Bray of Paramount, the now famous Fleischer cartoons were born, and
Bray moved the brothers into Paramount's New York studios.
Before rotoscoping, animation was alternately choppy or surreal in
quality, making cartoons ill-suited to character-driven narratives. The
rotoscope, and what it revealed about lifelike motion, created the
possibility for the cartoons we know today; by the mid-2os, Warners,
Paramount, Hearst and Columbia all had animation departments, and
animation-only studios like Bray, Lantz, and Disney were in heavy
production. The Fleischers were the only ones to explicitly address a
Yiddish audience (though the Warner Bros, cartoons reveal a similar
urban, ethnically Jewish aesthetic), and Fleischer innovations, including
experiments with 3-D sets, color, and sound would keep Koko and his
friends (eventually to include Popeye the Sailorman and Superman)
among the most technologically advanced films of the 20s and 30s.40
The Fleischers themselves starred in their innovative cartoons along
side Koko. Animation had long featured the animator himself as subject
of the films; in the earliest animations, the animator and his magical
ability to bring drawings to life were the focus of attention, like a
magician whose tricks serve to focus on his abilities. The tradition of
"From the Hand of the Artist" films beginning with Blackton's portrait
of Edison (1896), gave the animator a personal relationship with both
his animated characters and the audience that live-action film directors,
usually invisible, did not have.41 Donald Crafton explains that
the early animated film was the location of a process found elsewhere in
cinema but nowhere else in such intense concentration: self-figuration, the
39- There are 16 frames per second in silent film, 2.4 in sound film. The first one-minute
Koko cartoon contained 960 individually traced and inked frames.
40. See Cabarga, The Fleischer Story for the most complete description of the Fleischer
innovations.
41. Crafton, p. 46. The film depicts an artist, Blackton, doing a faster-than-life sketch
of Edison.
tendency of the filmmaker to interject himself into h

several forms; it can be direct or indirect, and more or
this tendency, which persisted throughout [the years
the evidence of the films' contents and the memories of v
be real and conscious. At first it was obvious and lite
subtle and cloaked in metaphors and symbolic imagery
This tradition of the animator on screen remained e

photography made animation as we know it possib
Cohl expanded the ability of the artist to inte
characters when he introduced matting as a techniq
live-action animator and his creation as separate
frame.
Through matting Koko, not the Fleischers, became the seemingly
autonomous star of their cartoons as he moved back and forth between
the live-action world and an animated one. But even though the artists
were no longer necessary in every shot, the Koko cartoons still empha
sized the character's creators. They titled Koko's 1916-19Z9 series Out
of the Inkwell, and each cartoon began with Max bringing Koko to life
at his drawing board. Koko doubly inscribed the Fleischers in their films
as both their creation and as Dave's animated alter ego. He was a
personal character and as such his cartoons often contained references to
Max's and Dave's own personal background in the Yiddish culture of
New York's Lower East Side, a self-reflexivity less possible in feature
filmmaking. By the time Betty Boop appeared in 1930 the transition
Crafton cites from literal to cloaked self-figuration had been made. In
over 100 Betty Boop films from 1930-1939 Max only appears in one
("Betty Boop's Rise to Fame" [1934]), and Dave in none. The transfer of
animator to character, literalized in the Out of the Inkwell series, is more
subtle in Betty Boop's cartoons, integrated into the films themselves.
The Fleischers' films, products of their Yiddish-American back
ground, reflected the seductions and fears of assimilation for the
twentieth-century Jew in a peculiarly American way. Only in America
were Jews allowed to choose whether or not to assimilate completely and
know that they were choosing to leave their culture behind. What J.
Hoberman notes as a "bitter ambivalence" in Yiddish film is a recurring
theme in the Fleischer cartoons.43 Film after film in the Yiddish cinema
depicted a difficult America which offered Eastern European Jews
opportunities they had only dreamed of but which seemed to demand
42.. Crafton, p. n.
complete assimilation as its price. The cost of that bargain created

characters who belonged fully to neither community, American or
Jewish. The theme is particularly strong in one of the earliest Fleischer
Talkartoons, "Bimbo's Initiation" (1931), probably one of the most
disturbing cartoons the Fleischers ever made.44
Bimbo, beckoned forward by an unidentified Betty ("Bimbo's Initia
tion" precedes the cartoons which give Betty a marquis credit), finds
himself in a secret clubhouse. He endures a series of humiliating and
painful initiation rites at the hands of black-hooded figures, all the while
insisting that he does not want to join their club. He is beaten,
frightened, almost sliced in half, almost impaled by stakes, and then
thrown down a chute. Despite his constant refusal to accept club
membership, the punishing initiation continues. Finally, confronted by a
weird, rubbery, undulating Betty who appears to promise herself as a
prize for joining, Bimbo gives in. The walls disappear, revealing the
hooded figures, who rip off their hoods and expose themselves as rows
of identically dressed Bettys. A now beaming Bimbo performs a chorus
line dance with them in which he and a lead Betty spank each other in a
burlesque of the initiation rites. Clearly pleased and excited, Bimbo
seems to have forgotten his brutal treatment at their hands earlier.
If Bimbo represents the New York Yid and the club represents "pure
Americanness" (particularly as it's being defined at this time through a
lack of ethnic markers), then this film seems to say that America offers
some pretty wonderful things (rows of Bettys) if you can put up with the
humiliations and confusions of initiation into the culture. "Bimbo's
Initiation" also resonates with Rogin's argument about the function of
blackface minstrelsy as a means of assimilation in the 1930s. The mark
that one belongs to this society is a form of blackface—once admitted,
Bimbo would presumably don his own black hood and join the chorus
line of undifferentiated black America (though in this case, white
America, the Bettys, is equally undifferentiated). It is significant, how
ever, that Bimbo remains surrounded by Bettys in the end; he doesn't
become a Betty. No matter how well-initiated and happy he might be as
a member of "the club," Bimbo would still be easy to pick out from the
unhooded crowd.
While the film underscores the seductive nature of white American
culture, there seems to be an implicit warning here about the real
44- Talkartoons soon became Betty Boop's vehicle, but originally she was conceived of
only as Bimbo's dog-like girlfriend. Bimbo, Koko the Clown's sidekick from the silent Out
of the Inkwell series, was supposed to be the main attraction of the Talkartoons. Betty
definitely looks more poodlelike in this cartoon than in her later guise. Cabarga, p. 53-7.
possibility of shedding all your ethnic markers to

else could pick you out from your chosen crowd. Unli
Jazz Singer, who realizes the successful transform
immigrant group to white Americans through bl
never actually dons a black hood, is refused eve
conformity in the short.45 Throughout the Ta
depicting Betty and Bimbo as generic, fully as
characters, the Fleischers consistently reinscribe their
"Bimbo's Initiation," with its unmasked appe
depiction of graphic violence and violation, ma
blatant examples of the Fleischer aesthetic, descr
"broad, direct, and somewhat vulgar."46 This desc
the one Hoberman gives to the Yiddish world and
cultural source of the Fleischers material and the audi
Yiddish is imbued with the perspective of the p

Jew)...Earthy, expressive, marked by the experie
marginality, and lacking the scriptural authority of Heb
entirely respectful or altogether respectable. For rel
language of the secular world; for the 'enlightened,' t
insularity.47
"Bimbo's Initiation," with its strange, distorted characters and its sexual
and violent content, does not directly address either assimilated Jews,
who had become a part of the mass audience, or religious, purposely
unassimilated Jews, for whom the content would be unconscionable.
Those most directly addressed by "Bimbo's Initiation" (and the Fleicsher
cartoons in general) were the lower-class, urban, Yiddish-speaking
audience of which the Fleischers had been a part and which was precisely
the audience disregarded by most Hollywood films.
Hoberman's definition of the Yiddish world also suggests that the very
"crudeness" of Yiddish itself was embraced quasi-politically by its
speakers. For European Jews, always considered outsiders in countries
where they had been settled for hundreds of years, Yiddish represented
the nation which didn't exist. Despite differences in dialect it was more
than a language; it tied together Jews of different national backgrounds
in a single ethnic group so that once in New York, Jews from Russia,
Poland, and Austria could all converse. Drawing from this expressive
language, filmmakers like the Fleischers, who had the advantage of mass
45- Rogin, p. 73-158.

46. Lenburg, Jeff. The Great Cartoon Directors. Da Capo Press; New York: 1993. p. 188.
47. Hoberman, p. 9.
distribution of a marginal genre, could include bits of Yiddishkeit in their

productions as a sign of ties to the community even as the films
themselves were aimed at and distributed to a more diverse, mainstream
American audience.48
As one example of this coding, the word IvK becomes almost a
leitmotif in the Fleischer cartoons. At times, as in "Betty Boop's Big
Boss" (1933), where a sign reading IvK is seen momentarily on the top
of an emergency vehicle, the kosher letters are merely an easily over
looked flash. In other instances, however, they are used to make a joke
that has a secondary meaning to audiences familiar with the tradition.
Betty's screen debut, in "Dizzy Dishes" (1930), presents an enraged
restaurateur being badgered by his hungry customers. Following a
stream of orders, one customer, yells, "I want ham!" The restaurateur
hits him with a ham that has been labeled "IvK"—a gag in and of itself,
since ham could never be kosher. Another example is found in "I'll Be
Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You" (1932): Koko the Clown is
literally burning up the roads as he is chased around the world. Suddenly,
the peplum of his jacket begins to bulge and a thermometer pops out of
it. At first the numbers rise as expected, but then the gauge reads "?" and
then "!" and finally "IvK". The kosher sign is not only funny because
the Hebrew letters are unexpected on a temperature gauge (the "?" and
"!" had already provided for that joke); it is funny because the way to
kasher (make kosher) a dish which is not yet usable in a kosher kitchen
is to hold it over an open flame of a certain temperature. And so Koko's
IV K marks the specific temperature he has reached—he has run so fast,
he is now Kosher Koko.
This joke references an entire scale of temperature and a cultural
relationship to fire and food preparation which only the Yiddish
audience would recognize and would appreciate as much for the insideness
of the joke as for the reference to Hebrew and the laws of kashruth.
While this religious reference indicated the Fleischers' insider status to in
the-know audiences, it also marked their films as not quite ready for
America's mass audience, dangerously incomprehensible in places. This was
ethnic humor which, unlike the ethnic humor of vaudeville which poked
fun through broad stereotypes of Jewish immigrants, instead required
fairly in-depth knowledge of Yiddish culture to get the entire joke.
48. The Marx Bros.' comedy films are probably the best additional example. They also
frequently include bits of Yiddish and have frequently been discussed as assimilationist
fantasies (or nightmares). The famous stateroom scene from A Night at the Opera has been
read by one student of mine (convincingly) as a parody of the conditions immigrants faced
in steerage.
In another example, "Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle"

natives greet Betty and Bimbo with a clearly enu
Aleicheml", the traditional Hebrew (and Yiddish) gree
joke is much deeper for audiences who can recognize th
incongruity of Samoan natives using it to greet other
fied in the film as also Samoan. And perhaps it indicate
incongruity for the Yiddish speaker as well, the still s
using the Yiddish language to identify other Jews in Ame
was no Pale of Settlement in which one could assume e
able to make the traditional response, "Aleichem Shalom
historian David Shneer there is evidence that as Jews b
shtetls for Russian cities (at the same time that many w
America) "Shalom Aleichem" was used precisely as this
to identify fellow Jews from among the general Russi
Perhaps, then, "Bamboo Isle" also represents a wish
most unfamiliar, uncivilized land a Jew could always f
It was exactly this inability to lose all trace of ethnic
which prevented the Fleischer cartoons from becomin
Disney's. By the 1930s most film had become respectab
a style embodied by Disney, whose cartoons were missin
sort of ethnic identity (except, of course, white, midd
Located near the orange groves of Los Angeles, even Di
far removed from the world the Fleischers operated in
New York. In contrast to the starring roles of working-cla
the Betty Boop cartoons, Nic Sammond has pointed ou
villainous nature of the working-class world as po
Disney's Pinocchio (1940).50 Pleasure Island, where Pin
into a jackass, is full of beer-swilling, pool-playing bo
have nothing better to do, have no jobs, and don't
accentless English (much like the crowded quarter
immigrant neighborhoods). The twenties and thirties
great reform in inner-city recreation; truants were p
grounds and parks were built, and parents learned that
to work, their children needed time to play, which me
children's spaces, and separate children's films.51 Sam
Disney's conscious effort to be a part of this movemen
its cartoons as "family" entertainment which would h
49- David Shneer, UC Berkeley Department of History, personal co

50. Sammond, Nic. "Imagineering the Normal Child: Disney and D
Berkeley Film Conference; Berkeley: 1996. presentation.
51. Ibid.
their children into middle-class respectability.52 By the time Pinocchio

was released, Disney had redefined animation as a children's genre. The
very adult Betty Boop, on the other hand, was a flapper, a flashy city
party girl, not a respectable young lady and definitely not an appropriate
character for children's films.
The Fleischers eventually made concessions to the trend, making Betty
more all-American and eliminating some of the more bizarre elements of
her cartoons. In 1934, when Betty was fighting for her life as an
uncensored character against the provisions of the Hays office Produc
tion Code which had drastically redefined acceptable material for
American cinema (a fight she mainly lost), the Fleischers introduced
Bimbo's replacement in "Betty Boop's Life Guard" (i934).s3 In this film
Betty is paired with Fearless Freddy, who had appeared the month before
as a policeman and would reappear in a series of cartoons involving Fred
saving Betty from a dastardly villain. Fearless Freddy, lounging on his
chair at the lifeguard station, is the epitome of American male pulchri
tude: dark curly hair, a slim waist, a large, well-built chest. Even in this
cartoon, however, the Fleischers still made gestures toward the Yiddish
community. Betty's New York accent is particularly pronounced in this
film, a decided contrast to Freddy's characteristically melodious bari
tone. In addition, Betty, drowning, believes she is a mermaid and travels
to the bottom of the sea, where she is met by a fish with sidecurls
kvetching in Yiddish. And even Freddy, the quintessential American, is
not really the hero he appears to be. Freddy the lifeguard is afraid of the
cold water, and in later films, Freddy the Dashing Hero frequently fights
with the villain while leaving Betty in life-threatening situations. Even his
voice seems to be something of a joke. After "Betty Boop's Life Guard"
nearly all the Fearless Freddy cartoons are moved to the stage, where
Betty the Virginal Homesteader, Fearless Freddy, and the Dastardly
Villain all play their newest personae explicitly as fictional roles.
The original, uncensored Betty Boop was constantly negotiating her
ethnic status, playing roles even as an American character. She imperson
ated Fanny Brice and Maurice Chevalier, danced with Cab Calloway,
52.. Ibid.
53. In 1934 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the official
organization of the major and minor Hollywood studios, agreed to abide by the Production
Code administered by the Hays Office. The provisions of the code forbid depictions of
graphic violence, unpunished criminal behavior, graphic or immoral sexual relations
(including depictions of homosexuality), profanity, miscegenation, and drug addiction. See
David Cook. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd ed.. W.W. Norton & Co.; New York: 1996.
pp. 28Z-3.
and was painted slightly darker to act as a Samo

(1932).54 In this latter film, Betty plays a native is
love with shipwrecked American Bimbo. To save h
(her own family) Betty helps Bimbo put on brown
bone in his hair. The ruse is successful for a while,
as an honored guest. Unfortunately, a rainstorm c
Bimbo's face and reveals his true identity. Bimbo is
taking a smitten Samoan Betty with him. Is "B
picture about the Samoan savage or about the ridic
Jewish girl from the Lower East Side who wants to
(Or a Samoan—is there much difference?) "Bamboo
the disguise will eventually be discovered, and even
better off following Bimbo, who, having been identifi
in cartoon after cartoon, is one of her own kind.
Are Samoans black or white? Asian or American? Unassimilable
ethnic other or part of the melting pot? These themes were also concerns
of the immigrant Yiddish community of the 20s and 30s, their numbers
the catalyst for the worst anti-Semitism in American history.55 Even the
silent Koko cartoons reveal this anxiety, dealing with the racial traces of
skin color and accent. An Out of the Inkwell film, "Chemical Koko"
(1929), shows a chemist conjuring a magic potion. He summons a black
janitor who drinks the potion and turns into a white man who
immediately throws away his mop, smiling, enacting the transformation
from unwanted Other to successful American. In a late compilation of
Betty's star-turns, "Betty Boop's Rise to Fame" (1934), the chosen
segments are the passing-drag impersonations: Fanny Brice (as an Indian
maid!), Maurice Chevalier, Betty's dance with Cab Calloway, and her
Samoan dance. For this last segment Betty makes the blackface of "Bamboo
Isle" explicit, returning to the ink bottle and drawing out enough ink to
stain her skin slightly darker for the Samoan hula, reversing the janitor's
transformation. "Betty Boop's Rise to Fame" was also a mid-1934
attempt to salvage some of Betty's original pre-Code persona. Through a
compilation of older, pre-Code films the Fleischers were able to present
54- On the flipside of Betty's ethnic suppleness is the constant appearance of other
ethnic groups—African-Americans or, in this case, Samoans—in conjunction with Betty
and Bimbo's Jewish markers. While the real entertainers are visible in the films, introducing
the animation with live-action musical segments of real black jazz or real Samoan dance,
they then switch to incredibly broad animated caricatures of the same ethnics next to Betty
and Bimbo in their normal guise, replicating the stereotypes direct from vaudeville.
55. Howard M. Sachar. A History of the Jews in America. Vintage Books; New York:
T993- PP- 300-04
A.S. Hoiberg: Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star 311
Betty at her sexiest: topless in the Samoan dance, in male drag as

Maurice Chevalier, and frequently naked behind screens and an inkpot.
This is also one of the last cartoons to feature her signature garter.
Betty's body, ethnic or not, is the focus of her appeal. From her earliest
films, like "Silly Scandals" (1931), "Bimbo's Initiation," and "Dizzy
Dishes" she is all body, all titillation. In fact, as in the compilation film
where she has to "change" costumes, most of her purpose seems to be in
being undressed. Interestingly enough, however, the first film in which
Betty appears as a distinct character with a personality, "Minnie the
Moocher" (1931), marks this sexy cartoon character as Jewish and also
marks her body as the source of conflict even within her Jewish home.
The cartoon opens with Betty and her parents sitting around a dinner
table about to eat. Her father comes complete with a Yarmulke-shaped
bald spot, and both parents speak with heavy Eastern European accents.
Before any image appears we hear her father beating on the table as he
yells, "Vy don't you eat? Vy don't you eat?" while her mother exhorts
her to eat her sauerbraten. This is obviously a common scene in the
household; as he threatens to throw her "haus-out," Betty's father turns
into a Victrola phonograph which keeps playing his complaints.
The parents yell, and Betty just cries—the heavy food her parents are
used to, and which will produce a proper yidishe mame, would ruin the
figure of a girl like Betty. Betty, certain they will never understand her, runs
away and goes to hide in a cave. Cab Calloway in the form of a ghostly
walrus chases her, scaring her back to her parents' house, where she
buries herself under the blankets. Focussing on Betty's figure, "Minnie the
Moocher" also repeats one of the main themes of American Yiddish cinema,
the conflict between Old World and New as generational conflict,
between Betty who dreams of joining the world outside her home and
her parents who have already decided how her life should be led.56
Betty ends up back home at the end because she's scared of an
unfamiliar body—Cab Calloway, whose black body is here converted
into a white spirit (as it will be when he again frightens Betty in "Snow
White" [1933]), not as the jazz musician that one would expect Betty's
flapper persona to like. He is altogether different in the outside world
than on a record—too frightening—and she returns to her parents, who
are certainly less than sympathetic characters. The world outside Betty's
home is a world of ghosts and spirits, not of flesh-and-blood people,
black or white. This is a world she has no idea how to inhabit. Her final
realization that home is where she belongs seems to suggest that as much
fun as life out there is, in the end the only national a
the Yid can count on is in his own family. And one
family when you've achieved success in the wider
found, is to continue to address it more or less ob
The overt Yiddish references seem intentional, the
to Yiddish film much less so, but the Fleischer car
quite-assimilated (or not willing to be and yet alw
status of the American Yid.
In the post-Code films Betty loses the ability to see ghosts and
becomes a perfectly respectable young lady with a dog as a pet instead of
as a boyfriend, impish nephews, and longer, less-revealing dresses. Soon
her costars, like puppy Pudgy and crackpot inventor Grampy, take over
as stars of the Fleischer cartoons, and Betty herself disappears by 1940.
Mae Questel, Betty's voice from 1931 to 1939, remarked that "Betty
Boop ended when the studio moved to Florida [in 1938] and she was
unable to move from New York."57 Questel was referring to herself, but
she might as well have been talking about Betty. The Code had cut her
off from her urban background five years earlier, and the move of the
Fleischer studios merely confirmed that she was out of place in
contemporary cinema.
Betty Boop was often compared to Mae West—another screen sexpot
who lost her sting in post-Code Hollywood, but perhaps she should have
been compared to the first sex-symbol of them all, Theda Bara, another
good little Jewish girl who became a Hollywood star and an American
fantasy.
57- Cabarga, p. 113

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Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star

Author(s): AMELIA S. HOLBERG

The American dream might read something like this: two br

remastered to tour the art house circuit in 199

transformed the American cinema industry into the fantasy factory of

3. Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (

joined by the Italians, Irish, and other immigrants s

Within two or three years nickelodeons were perceived by middle-class

The reformers likened the nickelodeon theaters to "prostitution and

undercover and behind doors in a middle-class

Let alone its specifically xenophobic content, a form

If the vaudeville-based subject matter was truly in

Miriam Hansen tries to explain this audience's loyalty to cinema by

20. Hansen, Babel, 61.

stage reproduced the latest craze—the shtick of com

22. Burch, p. in.

succeed in their attempts to assimilate into white, middle-class America

[Francois] Doublier, [a teenaged employee of the Lumieres] arrived [in the

where Dreyfus was court-martialed, the boat that took

It was an immediate hit. Doublier had responded t

z8. Hoberman, p. 14.

33- Hoberman, 36.

In other words, the story would have been noticeably

37- Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film 189

create a rotoscoped cartoon character the Fleischers first shot a normal

tendency of the filmmaker to interject himself into h

This tradition of the animator on screen remained e

complete assimilation as its price. The cost of that bargain created

possibility of shedding all your ethnic markers to

Yiddish is imbued with the perspective of the p

45- Rogin, p. 73-158.

distribution of a marginal genre, could include bits of Yiddishkeit in their

In another example, "Betty Boop's Bamboo Isle"

49- David Shneer, UC Berkeley Department of History, personal co

their children into middle-class respectability.52 By the time Pinocchio

and was painted slightly darker to act as a Samo

Betty at her sexiest: topless in the Samoan dance, in male drag as

56. Hoberman, p. 54.

57- Cabarga, p. 113

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