This week marks the 40th anniversary of the historic Woodstock Music Festival, which attracted perhaps as many as a half-million, mostly young, concertgoers.
The peaceful behavior of festival-goers gave, and still gives, Woodstock the aura of being the tangible affirmation of the peace and love ethos of the 60s hippie counterculture. The good vibes were preserved for posterity by the best concert film of the 60s. As I recall from Hebrew school, the Torah likes the number 40 40 years in the desert and so on. So, I guess it is appropriate, on this anniversary, to explore Woodstocks many Jewish connections. Lets put on a show The Semitic race seemed to be the only people who have the combination of financial acumen and artistic sense. The response of Hollywood star Douglas Fairbanks Sr., in 1919, to the question of why Jews created and ran almost all the Hollywood movie studios. (Fairbanks father, whom he hardly knew, was Jewish.) This quote, I know, will bother many Jews. There is the use of the now vaguely offensive term Semitic race. Plus, Fairbanks is stating what Jews shy away from acknowledging we do have a talent for show business and the arts, sometimes to the point of unplanned domination. Still, I think Fairbanks was right in his analysis, however awkwardly stated. Financial acumen came from centuries of oppression, when Jews had to create a living based on their wits. They had to learn to take a calculated gamble that non-Jews, secure in their place in society, probably wouldnt take. Show business has always been a high-risk field that the more secure usually avoid.
The Jewish artistic sense has other sources. First, theres the Jewish regard and respect for the clever, the funny, and the scholarly. Plus there is the Jewish sensibility, stemming from religious sources, that monetary success alone is not the measure of a person that it is far better when business success is crowned with community accolades and some patina of intellectual achievement.