Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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American imports to

baseball

. Harmony between the two nations was sometimes strained

as American military expansion became increasingly reliant on a nuclear arsenal. Since

the Japanese had experienced the real effects of “mutually assured destruction,” they

often have been outspoken in opposition to the use of nuclear arms (potentially

stimulating American guilt about using these weapons).

With the slowdown of the American economy in the 1970s, the collapse of the

American auto industry in the face of more fuel-efficient cars from Japan (2 million cars

were imported in 1981) and the related growth of the US trade deficit with Japan ($16

billion in 1981), antagonism grew between the two governments. The

Reagan

administration pushed the Japanese to pay a larger share of its defense costs, trim car

exports to the US and reduce barriers to the importation of American agricultural

commodities. But the impact of these initiatives, continued during the

Clinton

presidency

(though with less urgency), was limited owing to the generally recognized superiority o

Japanese manufactured goods throughout the 1980s.

Some racism inflects US responses to the Japanese; Japan sometimes virtually

becomes “The Yellow Peril,” though with some modification over older images. The fear

that the Japanese were buying up many American companies, for example, was

exaggerated (especially given larger purchases made by the English). Americans quickly

rovided cultural reasons to explain Japanese economic supremacy: lack of corruption or

Japanese educational methods. Such talk disappeared during the 1990s, however.

Competition with the European Community increased, thereby diminishing concern

about Japan. When the

Pacific Rim

nation hit a severe economic crisis, this exposed high

levels of corruption and inability to respond to new loci of competition like

China

. But,

if trade disputes are lessening, other disputes grow. Japan shows signs of wanting greater

military independence, including growing hostility to the presence of US naval bases,

exacerbated by the rape of a Japanese woman by an American sailor in Okinawa.

Images of the Japanese in American media reflect this history and complexity While

Frank Capra’s

Battle of China

(1945) used racist stereotypes, postwar films like

Teahouse of the August Moon

(1956) and

Sayonara

(1957) promoted intercultural

understanding. Japanese business in the US has received comic sympathy in

Gung Ho

(1986), although racist/Orientalist overtones haunted the American-made

Black Rain

(1989; to be distinguished from the 1990 Japanese film on Hiroshima) and

Rising Sun

(1993). These attitudes also subtly shape many news reports on Japan.

ROBERT GREGG

Japanese Americans

Although among the earliest immigrants from Asia, Japanese Americans have not

experienced significant growth since 1960s

immigration

reforms. Instead, the Japanese

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 606

American experience is divided between an older citizenry (shaped by the Second World

War persecution) and modern sojourners who intend to return to Japan at some point in

their lives. It is especially striking that the rhythm of these connections is shaped as much

by Japanese outward orientations as by American policy.

The first Japanese came as laborers around the 1880s, escaping poor areas of Japan for

Hawai’i and the West Coast. By the 1920s–30s, many became small-

usiness owners and

agriculturalists, and were able, unlike the Chinese, to import their families. Yet, with the

rise of Japanese militarism and Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese

sentiment grew. One hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans on the West

Coast (40 percent of the total population) had property confiscated and were interned in

remote camps scattered around the country. Those in Hawai’i and the East were not

interned, nor were citizens of German or Italian descent. After the war, when the camps

closed, many returned to the West Coast, although they had lost homes, businesses and

communities. Nonetheless, some Japanese Second World War

veterans,

mostly

American-born, were able to reap the benefits of the

GI Bill,

and eventually entered the

professional class. Daniel Inouye, the first senator of Japanese descent (from Hawai’i),

was a decorated veteran. For others, the struggle for compensation and even recognition

and apology for a racist wrong lasted for decades before redress bills were passed and

signed in 1988. Many Japanese Americans have examined this experience in literature

and film, forcing mainstream America to look at their history Steven Okazaki won an

Academy Award for

Day of Waiting

in 1991. Kayo Hatta’s

Picture Bride

(1994), which

focuses on the travails of earlier immigrants, gained studio funding and national

distribution.

According to Bill Ong Hing (see

Asian Americans

), three factors have made America

less attractive to Japanese immigrants since the Second World War. First, unlike the

Chinese who were initially barred from bringing in families and then post–1965

established chain migrations, few Japanese people need to reunite with relations abroad.

Second, the strong economy and low birth rate in Japan (especially since the postwar

recovery) present no incentive to leave Japan. Third, the internment proved to the

Japanese that Americans would not welcome them in times of crisis, a negativity fanned

by anti-Japanese sentiments whipped up around manufacturing and trade issues since the

1970s. Today many Japanese, however, enter the US not as immigrants, but as tourists

and sojourners, including students, professionals and business people. Many stay in the

US for a few years, orienting

community

reproduction towards their homeland through

schools, grocery stores, bookstores and Japanese

cable

stations like those found in

metropolitan

New York

City, Boutiques and

department stores

like Takashimaya also

define a cutting-edge urban style.

Meanwhile, today’s third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans generally lack

discernible residential patterns or linguistic differences. Japan towns in

San Francisco,

and

Los Angeles, CA

are now commercial centers and tourist attractions, rather than

residential

ethnic enclaves

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Further reading

Nakano, M. (1990)

Japanese American Women,

Berkeley: Mina.

Niiya, B. (ed.) (1993)

Japanese American History,

New York: Facts On File.

CINDY WONG

jazz

Style of

African American

music that started in the South, particularly in New Orleans,

around the end of the nineteenth century Syncopated and polyrhythmic, jazz’s early

influences can be found in nineteenth-century vernacular forms: ragtime, spirituals,

stringbands, Dixieland. Jazz bands used European symphonic instruments, but

emphasized the brass sections. Bands often had more than one trumpet or saxophone

layer as well as a string section, piano and rhythm sections. As jazz spread throughout

the country and into Europe by the 1920s, bandleaders and composers such as Louis

Armstrong became prominent. Bands became larger in the 1930s, and the complex music

ecame simplified by white big bands such as those led by Glenn Miller and Jimmy

Dorsey.

In the 1940s, swing music ended and bop emerged as the predominant form,

originating from jazz clubs of

New York

City, NY. A new generation of musicians

emerged such as Charlie Parker (saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) and Thelonious

Monk

(piano) who left the big bands to start their own smaller, more experimental

ensembles. The great jazz vocalists of the era—Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Betty

Carter—took bop’s vigorous rhythms and harmonic changes into singing styles and took

up what came to be called scat singing: improvisations based on—

ut not necessarily

loyal to—a recurring melody that mimicked instruments in their phrasing.

In the 1950s, jazz splintered off into a few styles. On the West Coast, a “cool” school

emerged with practitioners such as Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. In the

late 1950s, a fusion between jazz and

classical music

emerged, exemplified by the

Modern Jazz Quartet. Hard bop or soul jazz also emerged as a style that used

blues

themes in the music—this was performed by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Also in the

1950s, an avant-garde developed that was less concerned with improvisations built

around the melody and harmonic structure, but were investigating sound textures. These

innovators were Miles Davis on the trumpet, Ornette Coleman on the saxophone, trumpet

and violin and John Coltrane on the saxophone.

In the 1960s, jazz music was influenced by the rise of protest in the

African American

community Saxophonist Charlie Shepp, for example, played angry plaintive music that

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 608

rejected the standard theme-improvisational solos-theme format of small ensembles. This

music, however, never developed great commercial appeal. Instead, fusion music of the

1970s that moved to the more standard rhythms of

rock ’n’ roll

and utilized electronic

instruments reached a mass audience.

By the end of the century neo-classicist virtuosos such as Wynton Marsalis emerged as

key players in the world of jazz, bringing back the melodycentered musics of the 1920s

and 1930s. Marsalis is currently artistic director of the jazz program at Lincoln Center o

Performing Arts in

New York

City, signaling that jazz is now considered an officially

recognized form of music, alongside European-

ased classical music in its rigor and

history.

Further reading

Feather, L. and Gitler, I. (1999)

The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz,

New York:

Oxford University Press.

Kernfield, B. (ed.) (1994)

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz,

New York: Grove.

EDWARD MILLER

jeans

fashion; Levi Strauss

Jews

Jews account for about 2 percent of the population of the United States—a figure that has

been relatively steady throughout most of the post-Second World War period, declining

from a high of about 3.5 percent in 1940. Throughout the postwar period, the majority o

that population has been native-

orn, mostly descended from the waves of poor Eastern

European immigrants from the 1880s through the early 1920s, with smaller numbers

descended from the wealthy German immigrants of the 1840s and from Holocaust

refugees.

The Jewish population is concentrated in a few states, particularly in the Northeast—

Jews accounted for about 9 percent of

New York

State’s population in 1998—and

Florida

and

California

. The population is, however, far more geographically diffuse

than it was in 1945 when New York City was the epicenter of Jewish life to a far greater

extent—as it was for American life as a whole. The population also has shifted from

being predominantly urban to being predominantly

suburban

—again paralleling national

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trends.

But, throughout the postwar period, the very questions of who is a Jew—censuses tend

to rely on self-identification—and what it means to be a Jew in the US have become

increasingly complex.

Assimilation

has been the hallmark of Jewish life in the United

States since 1945 as anti-Semitism has declined and most barriers to full Jewish

articipation in American life have fallen. The revival of ethnic identification in the US

since the late 1960s and the interest in

“multicultural ism”

have in some ways made

Jews (as a group) more visible, but have not altered the general tendency towards

assimilation

To take one key indicator, intermarriage has steadily increased throughout the period.

In the mid-1960s, the Jewish intermarriage rate was only about 7 percent; by the end o

the 1990s, the rate was about 50 percent; and in about one-third of US households with

Jewish adults, one marriage partner was not Jewish.

As a result, intermarriage, which once was likely to lead to permanent rifts between

arents and their intermarried children, is now more often accepted (however grudgingly)

as a fact of life. While many rabbis will not perform intermarriages, many synagogues

(particularly in the more liberal movements of Judaism) have shifted from inveighing

against intermarriage to creating programs to encourage parents to give the children o

interfaith marriages a Jewish education.

Assimilation—and a concomitant sense of having a secure place in American life—has

sometimes made Jews (as a group) less visible to the general population and sometimes

more so. For example, for decades following President Woodrow Wilson’s appointment

of Louis Brandeis to the

Supreme Court

in 1916, there was a general political

understanding that there was a “Jewish seat” in the Court. (Wilson had been attacked for

nominating a Jew to the high court.) Yet when President Richard

Nixon

chose in 1969

not to replace Justice Abe Fortas with another Jewish jurist, allowing the Jewish seat to

lapse, only minimal controversy resulted—the general feeling being that Jews were such

an active part of the legal and political scene that the “Jewish seat” was an anachronism.

By the time President Bill

Clinton

appointed Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Steven Breyer to

the Supreme Court, the fact that both were Jewish was generally not deemed significant

enough for public comment.

On the other hand, media attention and public discussion of the “Jewish vote” has

increased throughout the postwar period. This is in part due to a greater focus in both

academia and the media on ethnic voting patterns and “interest groups.” Jews, who have

higher turnout rates than do other ethnic groups, can provide the deciding votes in several

large states.

But the greater focus also reflects the tendency of an ever-more secure and financially

healthy Jewish populace (and Jewish organizations) to take an active and visible role in

the electoral process. While during the Second World War, Jews and Jewish

organizations had generally limited their public efforts to raise concerns about the Nazi

slaughter of European Jewry for fear of a backlash, during the postwar period Jews have

not hesitated to push for US support for Israel, particularly in the wake of the Six Day

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 610

War in 1967.

Jewish involvement in politics has also garnered attention because Jews have remained

a stalwart, liberal

Democratic Party

constituency even as most white ethnic groups have

shifted further to the right. Jews were the only white group that did not cast a majority o

their votes for Ronald

Reagan

in 1984, for instance, although Reagan did win over a

greater percentage of Jewish voters than had any previous

Republican

in the postwar

period.

Still, the Jewish vote has become less reliably liberal over time. This in part reflects a

shift in relations between Jews and

African Americans

—two key and often-linked

constituencies from the days of Franklin

Roosevelt

through John F.

Kennedy

—which

have become more tense and complicated. Many Jews and Jewish organizations played

leading roles in the

Civil Rights movement,

but black—Jewish relations slowly soured

with, among other things: the rise of black separatism; the

race riots

of the late 1960s

(which often wiped out stores owned by Jews in

neighborhoods

which had become

redominantly black as Jews moved to the suburbs); the efforts by blacks in the late

1960s to play a greater role in the New York City schools, which were dominated by

Jewish teachers and principals; increasingly vocal anti-Semitism on the part of some

black leaders, most notably Louis

Farrakhan

in the 1990s; and the rise of

affirmative

action

. which particularly threatened jobs held by Jews in academia, where Jews were

overrepresented after having fought for decades to remove anti-Jewish quotas.

In culture, as in politics,

assimilation

has paradoxically sometimes increased the

visibility of Jews. Throughout the postwar period, Jews have been prominent

playwrights,

directors,

novelists, critics and academics, and, at least from the late 1950s

on, have been more likely to deal with explicitly Jewish characters, issues and themes.

Such authors as Phillip

Roth,

Saul

Bellow

and Bernard

Malamud

became lions of the

literary establishment in the 1960s with their recognizably Jewish novels and short

stories, while slightly older Jewish writers, such as the playwright Arthur

Miller,

did not

highlight the Jewish background in their works.

The same trend was clear in popular culture. Although Jews had founded and run most

Hollywood’s

major movie studios, films with recognizably Jewish characters and

issues were a rarity until the postwar period. (

The Jazz Singer,

the first sound motion

picture, produced in 1929, was a notable exception.) When the movie

Gentleman’

greemen

(1947), an examination of anti-Semitism, was released in 1947 (eventually

winning an Academy Award), its Jewish subject-matter created a stir and many Jewish

leaders feared a backlash. In the 1990s, when the

director

Woody

Allen

dealt with

Jewish themes and characters, barely anyone batted an eye.

Characters identified as Jewish have become much more prevalent on

television

—

another medium in which Jewish corporate leaders first had shied away from explicit

Jewish themes. Comedians—another field long dominated by Jewish entertainers and

writers—are much more likely to deal directly with Jewish subjects before general

audiences, while in the early postwar period such material was generally presented solely

to Jewish audiences at predominantly Jewish locations, such as the hotels of the so-called

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“Borscht Belt” in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City.

Jewish religious life has also become more visible to the general population even as

fewer Jews belong to synagogues or practice their faith at home. The building boom o

large, visible, suburban synagogues, which began in the 1950s and crested over the

following decade, made Jewish houses of worship a much more noticeable physical

resence in many communities. Moreover, beginning in the 1950s, the notion became

widespread that the US had three major religious groups—

Protestants,

Catholics and

Jews—equally deserving of respect, as did the idea that the nation was based on “Judeo-

Christian” (as opposed to simply “Christian”) values. Judaism was increasingly being

referenced and in a way that made it seem part of the American mainstream.

At the same time, more Jews were moving away from orthodox approaches to Judaism

into less traditional and fundamentalist branches, particularly Conservative Judaism,

which sought to bridge the gap between orthodoxy and the more liberal Reform

movement. After the 1950s, Jews on the whole were moving away from a focus on the

practices and scholarship that emphasized the more unique aspects of the

religion

This has perhaps become most apparent in the transformation of Hanukkah—a quite

minor

holiday

on the traditional Jewish calendar—into a major event, widely noted

outside the Jewish

community

and very publicly celebrated as a kind of Jewish

equivalent of Christmas, which occurs at about the same time. Ironically, Hanukkah

commemorates a victory in ancient Israel over both enforced and voluntary assimilation.

Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the early twenty-first century there

have been small, but significant contrary trends towards increasing observance. A Jewish

renewal movement began to reinvigorate Jewish traditions and to encourage a spirituality

that some felt had been smothered by mainline synagogues. The number of Jewish

parochial schools,

known as day schools, began to rise and more of them were linked to

the more liberal branches of Judaism. In 1999 Reform rabbis issued a statement

encouraging Reform congregations to return to more traditional practices.

At the same time, Jewish congregations have had to grapple with new issues posed by

changes in larger American society While many leading feminists, such as Betty

Friedan,

were Jewish, traditional Judaism delineated clear and highly circumscribed

roles for women. In the 1970s, some of the barriers to full female participation began to

crumble, first in the Reform and later in the Conservative movements. The Reform

movement ordained its first female rabbi in 1972, and the Conservative movement

followed in 1985. In addition, a vibrant feminist Jewish scholarship developed to

reinterpret traditional texts, uncover lost history and create new liturgy.

Still, by the late 1990s, Jews were more likely to define their “Jewishness” in ethnic or

cultural terms than in religious ones, and to focus more on an emotional link to Israel or

the Holocaust as touchstones of their Jewishness than on synagogue or other

organizational activities. As the immigrant generations pass away debate in the Jewish

community has increased about what it will mean to be Jewish in the US in the future. Al

Gore’s selection of Orthodox Jewish Senator Joseph Lieberman as his Democratic

vice-

presidential

running mate in 2000 has stimulated discussion about Jewish identity and

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 612

participation in American life, as well as resistance to this participation.

Further reading

Hertzberg, A. (1989)

The Jews in America,

New York: Simon & Schuster.

Sachar, H. (1992)

A History of the Jews in America,

New York: Random House.

Shapiro, E. (1992)

A Time for Healing,

Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

DAVID GOLDSTON

Jim Crow

segregation

John Birch Society

A small group of Americans organized the John Birch Society in 1958 to fight what they

considered to be the growing influence of

communism

in the American government.

Thought too radical by many the society went as far as to accuse President Dwight

Eisenhower

of being an agent of the “communist conspiracy” Its growth in the 1950s

and 1960s paralleled that of the political

right

in America generally This new political

right became a vocal critic of the

Democratic Party,

as well as of the liberal consensus

that had dominated American policy since the New Deal. The society continues to agitate

for economic and moral issues.

SUSAN SCHULTEN

Johns, Jasper

abstract expressionism

Johnson, Lyndon Baines

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b. 1908; d. 1973

Elected vice-

resident in 1960, Lyndon Baines Johnson became president when John

Kennedy

was assassinated in

Dallas, TX

on November 22, 1963. Combining his

legislative experience with public sympathy for the slain Kennedy, Johnson successfully

guided many of Kennedy’s legislative programs through

Congress

in 1964 and 1965,

such as tax cuts for both individuals and corporations. Legislation passed during this

period also marked the beginning of Johnson’s “Great Society”

rograms. Early

legislation included the

Civil Rights Act

of 1964, anti-discrimination legislation

introduced by the Kennedy administration, and the

Voting Rights Act

of 1965.

Paralleling Johnson’s accomplishments with domestic legislation was the United

States’ growing involvement in Vietnam. North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked a US

destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964 and, Johnson believed, launched

another assault two days later. While the attack was never confirmed, Johnson asked

Congress for the authority to take military action against North Vietnam. Congress

approved these powers in the

Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,

which provided the legal

foundation for American involvement in the

Vietnam War

With Minnesota Senator Hubert

Humphrey

as his running-mate, Johnson won the

1964 presidential election in a landslide, getting over 61 percent of the vote against

Republican

nominee and Arizona Senator Barry

Goldwater

. In 1965 and 1966, Johnson

continued to pass “Great Society”

rograms. These included Medicare and Medicaid,

which provided

healthcare

for the country’s senior citizens and for the poor. Two others,

the Higher Education Act and the Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965, gave aid to

schools. Johnson labeled these programs the

War on Poverty

As Johnson’s domestic legislative successes increased, so did US engagement in the

Vietnam War. In 1965 Johnson ordered American combat troops to South Vietnam. By

1968 there were over 500,000 US troops in South Vietnam, up from the approximately

16,000 military advisers there when Johnson became president.

From 1966 to 1968, Johnson continued his procivil-rights agenda. He appointed

Thurgood

Marshall

to the

Supreme Court,

making Marshall the first

African

American

to serve on the high court. However, Johnson faced heightened conflict at

home as well as abroad. Opposition to the Vietnam War and racial unrest culminated in

urban riots in slum areas of many American cities. To determine the causes of the riots,

Johnson appointed a special commission, which issued its conclusions in the

Kerner

Commission

Report. The report contended that the United States was moving towards

two societies: black and white, separate and unequal.

The

Tet Offensive

in January 1968 revealed that an end to the Vietnam War was not

imminent, and Minnesota Senator Eugene

McCarthy’s

strong finish against Johnson in

the New Hampshire

Democratic

presidential primary showed the president’s political

weakness. Johnson surprisingly withdrew from the race in a televised address on March

31, 1968. On November 1, 1968, Johnson halted bombing on North Vietnam, temporarily

spurring peace talks.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 614

Further reading

Beschloss, M. (1997)

Taking Charge,

New York: Simon & Schuster.

Dallek, R. (1998)

Flawed Giant,

New York: Oxford University Press.

JAMES DEVITT

Johnson, Magic

basketball

Johnson, Philip

b. 1906

A major figure in the American art and

architecture

communities in the twentieth

century Johnson studied with German Walter Gropius at Harvard, was instrumental in

romoting modern architecture in the United States and is credited with inventing the

term “International Style.” Still practicing at his ninetieth birthday Johnson has been

called an architectural “chameleon,” as his projects have shifted from International Style

modernism to neoclassicism,

postmodernism,

even expressionism. Among Johnson’s

more notable buildings are his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Lincoln

Center, the AT&T Building and the pinkglazed “lipstick building” in New York.

BIANCA T.SIEGL

Jones, James Earl

b. 1931

Distinguished stage and film actor, Jones made his Broadway debut in

The Blacks

1957 and his film debut in

Dr Strangelove

in 1964. Born in Mississippi and raised in

Michigan, Jones majored in drama at the University of Michigan. In 1969 he became

nationally known for his portrayal of heavyweight boxer Joe Jackson in

The Great White

ope

. Known for his deep voice, Jones has narrated many productions and is the voice o

Darth Vader in the

Star Wars

trilogy. Jones’

awards

for his contributions include a

Grammy, a Golden Globe, two Emmys and two Tony Awards.

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