Lejzor and Fiszel Sing the Blues: Chess Records and the Black-Jewish Alliance

Hollywood has a way of turning history upside down. Hollywood directors often don't know what their own movies mean. The classic instance is horror movies. Martin Scorcese made the point to David Cronenberg, when he told him that Rabid was a great film, but that Cronenberg didn't understand it.

The same is true in general of the genre known as the biopic and in particular of the biopic of the Chess brothers, Cadillac Records. It is difficult to imagine a topic more likely to generate animosity between Blacks and Jews than the sordid story of two Polish Jews ripping off the royalties of illiterate blues singers from Mississippi, which is what Cadillac Records portrays; and yet here we have a Hollywood movie on one of the most sordid chapters of the movement known as the Black-Jewish Alliance.

Murray Friedman, who used to be head of the American Jewish Committee in Philadelphia, once wrote a book about the Black-Jewish Alliance called What Went Wrong?

Cultural critic E. Michael Jones's Lejzor and Fiszel Sing the Blues answers that question in minute if depressing detail.