Though being hailed on her current concert tour as this generation's ultimate entertainer, Barbra Streisand's most enduring accomplishment was breaking new ground in Hollywood for Jewish heroines.
In her book "The Jew in American Cinema," author Patricia Erens recounts a story involving the making of the 1949 Biblical epic "Samson and Delilah." When director Cecil B. De Mille told producer Jesse Lasky, Jr., that the small role of an Israelite woman in the movie required a real "Jewish Jewess," Lasky suggested Olive Deering, a young actress drawn from New York's Yiddish theater whom he described as "a walking synagogue." De Mille cast her, but later couldn't help later ribbing the producer that Deering was "the one actress in Hollywood who couldn't be photographed well from any angle."
Concludes Erens: "This remained the verdict for all Jewish-looking actresses, until Barbra Streisand took center stage and proved that one could have no good angles and still be a star."
Barbra Streisand's current world concert tour - her first in 27 years - has not only produced the kind of hysteria that has led to $ 350 tickets being scalped for more than three times that much. It has also led to a general reevaluation and reappreciation of her career by both the media and her adoring public. While she has been admired, envied and sometimes disparaged during her past quarter century as a one-woman Hollywood powerhouse, the critical consensus seems to be that by returning to her roots as a live performer, she has reclaimed her stake to greatness. "Her claim to Mount Olympus," declared Jess Cagle in Entertainment Weekly, "is her one miracle: the voice. My God, the voice."
But long after the current rage over her concert tour ends, and even long after The Voice is no longer being heard, Streisand will be remembered
for a far more significant reason than her vocal chords. Rather than simply following in the footsteps of Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland in becoming the great entertainer of her time, she deserves credit for being something entirely new and different. Barbra Streisand was the Jackie Robinson of female Jewish performers, the first to truly make it all the way to the top without changing her nose or name.
"Barbra Streisand made it possible," says the writer Anne Roiphe, "for Jewish girls to feel beautiful."
Streisand, who turned 52 on April 24, was born and raised in the once pre-domina tely Jewish Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Her father Emanuel, a high-school teacher, died a year and a half after she was born, and her mother, Diana, later remarried a used-car salesman named Lou Kind. Her older brother Sheldon is a wealthy New York lawyer, said to be religiously observant; her step-sister is the New York cabaret singer Roz Kind.
Streisand has described her late stepfather as verbally abusive and indifferent, and others say her tangled relationship with her mother is one of the roots of a personality described as difficult, egoistic and demanding.
"Her mother is an interesting person," says one Hollywood figure who knows Diana Streisand, "and she all had kinds of pretensions to grandeur. Barbra grew up as somebody not slated for ordinary things."
Streisand first gained note as a nightclub and stage performer in the early 60s, and scored on Broadway in a small part in the 1963 musical "I Can Get It for You Wholesale." It was the lead role in the stage and 1968 screen version of "Funny Girl" that propelled her to international stardom. Streisand was hailed as perfectly cast in the role of Fanny Brice, a comic stage and radio star of the 20s and 30s, who was one of those female Jewish performers considered too ethnic to make it in the movies. For while such obviously Jewish male stars as John Garfield and Eddie Cantor did become screen stars, those Jewish actresses who did succeed in Hollywood - like Paulette Goddard and Lauren Bacall - had to do more than merely change their names; they had to also conform to more standard norms of glamour.
Streisand not only displayed sharp comic skills and a peerless voice in "Funny Girl," but insisted that the audience see her, big nose and all, as attractive, sexy and desirable - even to the likes of the gorgeous Omar Sharif. Indeed, throughout her career Streisand has seemed to make a point of playing opposite some of the most attractive actors in Hollywood - Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Nick Nolte - and proving she can hold her own on screen with the best-looking goyim in the business.
In the films she made after "Funny Girl" Streisand honed her image of an unabashedly aggressive, sharp, funny and forceful woman who insists that men accept her on her own terms. While in some of the movies, like "What's Up Doc?" and "The Main Event," this figure verges into the stereotype of the pushy Jewish broad, in others she created a screen type not yet seen in the American cinema.
In the unjustly neglected 1972 film "Up the Sandbox," adapted from the novel by Anne Roiphe and sensitively directed by Irvin Kershner, Streisand gives one of the best performances of her career as an upper-class New York housewife who starts to question an identity defined strictly by her role as a wife and mother. "At the time this film represented what was thought to be the far-out edge of feminism," notes Roiphe (also a contributing editor for The Jerusalem Report). "But Streisand has always been willing to play right at the edge of what is considered politically dangerous."
Small wonder then that the role in which Streisand gives her most heartfelt performance is that of Katie Morosky in 1973's "The Way We Were." As a Jewish radical activist in McCarthy-era Hollywood, Katie has the ethics and backbone to challenge the Communist witch hunters, something lacking in her golden goy screenwriter husband played by Robert Redford. Streisand's ardent support of liberal causes has made her especially close to the Clinton White House, to the point where the President is sometimes referred to in the media as himself a FOB (Friend of Barbra).
Streisand made her directorial debut in 1984 with the screen version of the Isaac Bashevis Singer story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy." Although derided by some critics (and Singer himself) as a sort of "Funny Girl" in shtreimls, it was a surprisingly sensitive and self-assured first film. With its lovingly idealized depiction of the shtetl world, "Yentl" also represented the high point of Streisand's Jewish consciousness.
" Yentl' was a major effort at promoting a positive Jewish image," asserts Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, the long-time director of UCLA-Hillel who served as an adviser on the film. "It was also a vehicle for Streisand to assert her public identification and commitment as a Jew."
During the period when she was preparing for the production of "Yentl," Streisand was attending weekly Jewish studies classes in preparation for the bar mitzvah of her son Jason (born during her six-year marriage to Elliott Gould, which ended in 1971) at the Pacific Jewish Center in Venice Beach. She also contributed generously to local Jewish charities, as well as to Hebrew University in Jerusalem and later to Peace Now.
But Streisand's ardor for the Jewish world has apparently cooled since then. Her funding of specifically Jewish charities has tailed off; The Streisand Center for Jewish Cultural Arts at UCLA closed down and The Emanuel Streisand Cultural School at the Pacific Jewish Center changed its name to the Or Eliyahu Academy after Streisand discontinued funding in recent years.
Says one Hollywood Jewish community figure acquainted with Streisand: "What happened was that she felt exploited by the Jewish world. Everybody descended on her once it became known she was sort of Jewishly involved, including every weird and bizarre Jewish kabbalist."
These days when Streisand discusses her spiritual side in interviews, she is more likely to cite New Age-pyschologist John Bradshaw - an adovocate of "healing the inner child" - than Jewish sources, and her philanthropic efforts are now mainly toward AIDS research. But on-screen she continues to embody strong, positive, explicitly Jewish women, such as the psychiatrist Dr. Susan Lowenstein in "The Prince of Tides." After her 22-concert world tour finishes this summer, she is set to start directing the screen version of Larry Kramer's play about the early days of the AIDS plague, "The Normal Heart," in which she will play a character based on Dr. Linda Laubenstein, the New York City health official who was one of the pioneer fighters against the disease.
Other actresses now walk down the path blazed by Barbra. Roseanne Arnold and Debra Winger talk publicly and proudly about their Jewishness. Broadway star Tovah Feldshuh and Fran Drescher of TV's "Nanny" sitcom have built careers based on their ethnicity in a way that would have seemed unthinkable if they had not had Streisand's footsteps to follow in.
Whatever her personal relationship to her Jewish roots these days, it's hard to argue with Chaim Seidler-Feller's contention that "Streisand was a Jew, is a Jew and will always be a Jew. Her sense of self and commitment always drew on her essential Jewishness. Never was there an effort to deny it, and when opportunities arose to affirm, she pursued them."
Barbra Streisand, to be sure, has no small share of detractors, ready to knock both her character and her work. But her pride as a Jewish woman, and her insistence - or chutzpah, if you will - in asserting it loud and clear in a world where negative stereotypes about Jewish women still predominate, are qualities that look good from any angle.