What's in a (Jewish) name?
SHANKS, HERSHEL
PERSPECTIVE Editor’s Viewpoint What's in a (Jewish) Name? Rabbi Jack Riemer recently told me a cute one-liner that I thought was good enough to include in a collection, 101 Best Jewish Jokes....
...Some said he took the names King and Merton from two colleges at Oxford...
...to order, call 800-221-4644...
...Today being Jewish is mostly a matter of pride...
...And it is easy to forget the intensity of anti-Semitism—even experienced here in America...
...I think of Abe Rosenthal, former executive editor of the New York Times, who signed himself A.M...
...I don't know quite how to think about this...
...In a talk to the American Council of Learned Societies in 1994, he explained for the first time publicly that he had adopted the pseudonym when he was 14—a budding magician with a calling card...
...Issur Danielovitch Demsky became Kirk Douglas...
...He was born Israel Ehrenberg...
...In the early volumes of Who’s Who in America, he declined to list his parents...
...He cited others, in the performing arts, who had done the same thing: Leonard Rosenberg became Tony Randall...
...The time was, as he said, "generations before the emergence of anything resembling today's multicultural-ism...
...It goes like this: The Ostroffs named their new baby Shlomo—after his grandfather Sean...
...Rosenthal and His Times...
...Even when I was studying with him at Columbia University in the 1950s, there were rumors that he was Jewish...
...According to Goulden, Rosenthal did not get a byline on his stories until the day he abbreviated the name of his newsroom mailbox from Abraham to A.M...
...It was he who created the concept of the "self-fulfilling prophecy," which was first applied to the sociological problem of ethnic and racial discrimination...
...He was born Meyer Schkolnick...
...I don't blame Jews for trying to get ahead in a world that was prejudiced against them...
...The paper viewed Jewish bylines as an "anathema," writes Joseph Goulden, in Fit to Print: A.M...
...Recently— he is nearly 90—he came out...
...Rosenthal so that his Jewish-sounding first name would not sully the pages of that august, Jewish-owned newspaper...
...So it is easy to be critical of others from a bygone day...
...Yet he could write insightfully and sensitively about matters Jewish...
...I think of a teacher of mine long ago, one of the most eminent sociologists in the country—Robert King Merton...
...I was reminded of this when I read an obituary of the elegant British anthropologist, TV personality, and polymath Ashley Montagu—talk about goyish...
...Not long before he joined the Times, the paper asked labor reporter Abraham H. Raskin to abbreviate his byline to A.H...
...12.95...
...Not until the 49th edition, in 1995, are his parents, Harry and Ida (Rosoff) Schkolnick, listed...
...Perhaps they would have understood...
...But there is something disturbing that Merton has never explained...
...there is no real price to pay-It is almost a badge of honor...
...Irving Grossberg became Larry Rivers...
...and Erich Weiss became Harry Houdini...
...Raskin...
...The point is that Jewish names are in or, more importandy, that Jews are no longer giving their children names that mask their Jewishness, names that sound goyish...
...And it wasn't just Rosenthal, of course...
Vol. 25 • February 2000 • No. 1
