One of the most prominent figures in American literature and cinema for over sixty years and widely regarded in the 1950s as America’s leading dramatist, Arthur Miller (1915-2005) gave postwar American drama a sense of tragic conflict in contemporary American life. He is perhaps best known for Death of a Salesman (1949), the first play to sweep the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
A recurrent theme in Miller’s work is the tragic defeats that befall common people. His specific use of that theme in Salesman, the tragedy of an “American everyman” who is destroyed by the failure of the American dream, is likely a semi-autobiographical reflection of his own childhood, when his father fell victim to the great stock market crash (1929) and the family was suddenly thrust into abject poverty.
Miller warmly recalled sitting in synagogue with his grandfather, who was the synagogue president, and fondly remembered Friday night meals when he “felt the warmth of closeness with my family.” He had some familiarity with the Hebrew language, had a bar mitzvah, and Jewishness infused his early life. However, he later distanced himself from his Jewish origins; as he wrote in his autobiography, “I had already been programmed to choose something other than pride in my origins… in my most private reveries I was no sallow Talmud reader but Frank Meriwell or Tom Swift, heroic models of athletic verve and military courage.” He married out of the faith both before and after his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, discussed in detail below, marrying two Catholic women, Mary Grace Slattery (1940) and Inge Morath (1962).
Some commentators ascribe Miller’s estrangement from Judaism to his mother’s increasingly harsh critique of his father’s “mean spirited and money mad” approach to business and, as Miller described in his autobiography, her endless anger and disappointment with her fellow Jews. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Miller was not only deprived of his financial security – which undoubtedly planted the seeds of his subsequent bitter critique of American capitalism – but also triggered an emotional rebellion against his family and his past.
Miller struggled with his Jewish identity and, though he viewed traditional Judaism as a useless ancient remnant and characterized himself as an atheist, he nonetheless never hid his Jewish heritage. It is interesting that although his work does not generally present overtly Jewish characters and ideas, and his few Jewish characters often rued their status as Jews and sought to escape it, he is considered the first American playwright to explore Jewish identity from the prospective of a self-searching Jew.
In fact, many commentators argue not only that Jewish themes pervade his work but that, in fact, even his best-known character, Salesman’s Willy Loman, was actually a Jew. Scholars have characterized the language of the play as “Yiddish-inflected;” Willie Loman’s obsession with acceptance and his eventual self-destruction resonated unnervingly with the American Jewish nightmare of the Holocaust; and, notwithstanding Miller’s attempt to paper over his protagonist’s ethnicity – and though he refused to comment on Willie Loman’s alleged Jewish heritage and he steadily maintained that the question of Loman’s religious background constitutes the ultimate irrelevancy – he later referred to the wretched Loman family in his 1987 autobiography, Timebends, as “Jews who were light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity.” (However, during a 1999 interview years later appealing to the universality of Willie Loman, Miller downplayed the issue, remarking that “ethnic particularity seems to me such an artificial limitation.”)
To be sure, some commentators characterize Willy Loman’s cryptic Jewish identity, recognizable but covert, as an act of “ethnic betrayal” that “evidences Arthur Miller’s inauthenticity as a Jewish writer.” However, as many critics argue, in a post-war environment where many successful American Jews felt compelled to conceal their Jewish identities and where an explicitly Jewish protagonist would have turned off Broadway audiences, Miller had no choice but to mask the Judaism of the Loman family. Moreover, other critics maintain that by outwardly presenting the universalism of the Loman family while internally hinting at their Judaism, Miller was able to express Jewishness in a way recognizable only to other Jews and that he attempted to walk the line between not alienating gentile theatregoers while simultaneously allowing Jewish attendees to recognize their protagonist “lansman.”
In much of his work, Miller addressed Jewish identity through the prism of American assimilation, developing the idea that the Depression facilitated the growth of antisemitism and the ability of the power elites to distract the country from its economic and other woes by following the well-tread historical path of “blaming it all on the Jews.” After his graduation in 1938, Miller had written two Jewish-themed plays. In The Grass Still Grows, an autobiographical family comedy with socialist overtones, he displays a preoccupation with dramatizing his father’s perceived failure to break free from capitalistic seduction. The Golden Years, his epic account of Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec Kingdom, served as a bitter metaphoric criticism of the Allies for attempting to appease Hitler.
However, while discouraged by his failure to get either play produced, and though convinced that the New York theatre establishment was uneasy about presenting explicitly Jewish material, he scored a commercial success in 1945 with his only novel, Focus, which broke new societal ground in shining a critical light on the persistence of antisemitism. (In several of his subsequent works, including After the Fall, Miller would grapple with the question of whether morality could exist in the shadow of the Holocaust.)
Remarkably, Focus was one of the first fictional narratives to directly confront American antisemitism at a time that long preceded the civil rights movement. The underlying angst of the novel, which went on to become instrumental in generating a national dialogue about antisemitism, was based upon Miller’s own experience as a night shift worker at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, where he was subject to ubiquitous antisemitism from his co-workers. Although Focus is little-known and does not rank among Miller’s most popular works, it nonetheless remains an original and important social statement.
Set in New York toward the end of World War II, Focus tells the story of the journey of Lawrence Newman who experiences a strange, punishing, and Kafkaesque metamorphosis from antisemite to defending the oppressed. A middle-aged personnel manager for a prominent public utilities corporation, Newman was charged with ensuring that no Jews were hired by the company, but when he hires a Christian secretary whom his supervisor believes is Jewish, he is demoted. (He later accepts a position at a Jewishly owned company and many of the employees are Jewish.)
When a new pair of glasses alters his appearance such that he is mistaken for a Jew – Miller’s device of the glasses is the perfect metaphor for his protagonist’s “corrected” vision – Newman is seen as a Jew by virtually everyone he meets. He is refused service at hotels, his garbage cans are suddenly turned over, and even his friend and neighbor Fred, a member of a KKK-type organization with whom he empathized, turns on him, and the more he insists that he is not Jewish, the more antisemitism he experiences. He begins to change after an antisemitic gang tries to force his only Jewish neighbor, candy store owner Finkelstein, out of the neighborhood.
Finkelstein, a non-Observant Jew, is Miller’s metaphor for the attempt by Jews to assimilate into the mainstream American culture but can never escape the truth of their identity as Jews. When Newman is attacked by local antisemitic white supremacists, he begins to see that the white supremacists in his midst were little more than ignorant hoodlums, not least because they took him and his Christian wife for Jews. He begins to question the propriety of prejudging people by their appearances as he suddenly realizes that because Finkelstein was a Jew, he had never before noticed that the shopkeeper was not “cheap”; he was always fair, pleasant, and kind to his customers; and he was neat, clean, honest, and self-respecting – all the things contrary to the accepted Jewish stereotype.
In the end, Newman and Finkelstein survive a brutal street attack and, in his indignant defensive fury, Newman finally resolves his inner conflict between not wanting to be perceived as a Jew but also no longer participating in antisemitism: in a key dramatic twist, when Newman goes to the police station to report the attack and is mistaken for a Jew, he decides not to correct the officer’s error.
Shown here is an original newspaper photograph of Miller (right) looking on as James Whitmore and Colleen Dewhurst (foreground) rehearse a scene from Focus, which was dramatized as an NBC TV special on Sunday, January 21, 1962. With them are director Fielder Cook (background left) and script adapter S. Lee Pogostin. The presentation was produced in cooperation with the American Jewish Committee’s Institute of Human Relations.
Nearly two decades after writing Focus, Miller expressed similar views in Incident at Vichy, a short 1964 play about a gentile who gives up his life during World War II to save a Jew, Leduc, who declares “Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, that agony we cannot feel, that death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other. And the Jews have their Jews.”
In After the Fall, where the stage is set with only a single chair next to a guard tower in a concentration camp, Miller grappled with the question of whether morality could exist after the Holocaust. In Broken Glass (1994), a Jewish wife becomes paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair through the combination of Kristallnacht and the acute Jewish self-hatred projected onto her by her egocentric Jewish husband. Hyman, a Jewish doctor who insists that Jews are no different from gentiles, pointedly asks Gellburg, a self-hating Jewish patient, “And supposing it turns out that we’re not different, who are you going to blame then? I’ll tell you a secret – I have all kinds coming into my office, and there’s not one of them who one way or another is not persecuted. Yes. Everybody is persecuted.”
As one commentator cogently observed:
In each of these three works [Incident at Vichy, After the Fall, and Broken Glass], Jewishness is portrayed merely as an imposed identity, devoid of any spiritual or ethical characteristics. Miller’s solution for shedding this mantle of otherness is for Jews to abandon their ghettos and, presumably, their traditions: Finkelstein fights to move his family into an all-Christian neighborhood; Leduc discovers that his distrust of all gentiles is unfounded; Hyman marries a non-Jew.
Most of Miller’s plays were performed in Israel, beginning with Salesman, which was performed at the Habimah National Theatre in Tel Aviv (1951). He visited Israel several times, once attending a presentation of his All My Sons and sitting next to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on his last day in office, May 17, 1977. (Rabin would later serve again as prime minister from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.) But he was no friend of Israel. For example, unable due to illness to travel there to receive the Jerusalem Prize (2003), Israel’s prestigious international literary award, he created an uproar when he sent a video with an acceptance speech in which he slammed Israeli leaders for abandoning the country’s enlightenment values and visionary character; characterized Israel as “an armed and rather desperate society at odds with its neighbors but also the world;” and argued that Israel is not worth preserving unless it finds a way to reconsider its “unjust” settlement policies.
* * * * *
It is well known that Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson and that she legally changed her name to “Marilyn Monroe” on February 23, 1956. (She had actually begun using the name in 1946 after her divorce from her first husband, James Dougherty, when she signed her first contract with 20th Century Fox.) What is not generally known is that her mother, Gladys, named her for a Jewish girl after she gained temporary employment as a housekeeper to Harry and Lena Cohen and took care of their young daughters, Dorothy and Norma Jean, of whom she was particularly fond. After Marilyn’s untimely death in 1962, Gladys indignantly insisted that her late daughter was not named after any actress, as some maintained, but after Norma Jean Cohen from Louisville, Kentucky.
Before she wed Miller, Monroe officially converted to Reform Judaism (1956) and she formally renounced her former faith (she actually had none, although she was born a Christian); pledged her loyalty to Judaism; and promised to cast her lot with the people of Israel, to live a Jewish life, and to raise her children as Jews. The rabbi solemnly gave her a new name chosen from the Bible, a name which she curiously always kept to herself. (Her original signed conversion certificate sold in 2015 for $70,400; see exhibit.
Monroe first married Miller in a civil ceremony on June 29, 1956 in White Plains, N.Y., because, according to Rabbi Robert Goldberg, Miller’s rabbi, the couple hoped to keep the soon-to-follow religious ceremony free from a paparazzi blitzkrieg. Although Miller was wholly indifferent to having a Jewish marriage, Monroe insisted that the couple marry under a chuppah and, on July 1. 1956, the couple held a second ceremony at the home of her agent, Kay Brown, with the rite performed by Rabbi Goldberg. Her beloved acting coach, Lee (nee Israel) Strasberg, escorted her to the chuppah, where a bare-headed Miller awaited her, and she chose to recite the famous verse from the Book of Ruth, where Ruth recites to Naomi, her mother-in-law: “Where you go, I shall go; where you live, I shall live; your people shall are my people, and your G-d is my G-d” (Ruth 1:15).
After the signing of the beautifully illustrated ketubah, a kiddush was held where the happy couple indulged themselves and their guests in a distinctly non-kosher meal of cold lobster. In attendance were Miller’s parents Augusta and Isidore, who gifted their new daughter-in-law with a beautiful brass menorah (more on this below) and lovingly welcomed her into their family and the Jewish community.
Marilyn’s estate later consigned the ketubah to Christies for auction and, on December 21, 1990, the auctioneer hammered down the item for a $13,700 bid by an unidentified American. [At that same auction, a bullwhip used by Harrison Ford in his Indiana Jones movies was bought for $24,300 by a French restaurant owner.]
Having grown up subject to evangelical Christian theology, Monroe once explained to Susan Strasberg, Lee’s daughter and her close friend, that she identified with the Jewish people in part because “Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me.” Miller was originally unconvinced about his wife’s conversion sincerity: “I’m not religious, but she wanted to be one of us and that was why she took some instruction. I don’t think you could say she became a Jewess, but still she took it all very seriously. I would say she wanted to join me and become part of my life. But her interest in talking to the rabbi had about it an unreality to me.”
However, both he and Rabbi Goldberg were always firm that Monroe was sincere in her desire to become Jewish and that no one had ever brought any pressure to bear on her to convert. Moreover, there is ample evidence to support Monroe’s sincere embrace of her Judaism, including both objects that she held dear and public positions that she took in support of Jews and Israel. In a famous letter about Monroe’s conversion written twenty days after her death, Rabbi Goldberg wrote to fellow scholar, Rabbi Jacob Rader Marcus:
[…] In the late spring of 1956, I met with Arthur Miller at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He had recently been divorced… and [he] told me of his plans to marry Marilyn Monroe… Arthur said that Marilyn was interested in becoming Jewish and that they would like me to perform their wedding ceremony… he made it clear to me that in no way did he make this demand on Marilyn…
I met Marilyn with Arthur at her apartment in New York… I don’t remember what I expected but I was struck by her personal sweetness and charm. She seemed very shy. She said that she had no religious training other than some memories of a Fundamentalist Protestantism which she had long rejected. She indicated that she was attracted to Judaism by being impressed with Jewish people that she knew, especially Mr. Miller. She said that she was aware of the great characters that the Jewish people had produced and that she had read selections from Albert Einstein’s Out Of My Later Years…
She indicated that she was impressed by the rationalism of Judaism – its ethical and prophetic ideals and its concept of close family life. After that meeting, we met a number of times and she read a few books that I gave her. These included What Is A Jew? by Morris Kurtzer, Sacher’s History of the Jews, Milton Steinberg’s A Partisan Guide to the Jewish Problem, and The Conversion Manual of the CCAR [the Reform Central Conference of American Rabbis]. We discussed the contents of these books… and I attempted to answer her questions. Marilyn was not an intellectual person but she was sincere in her desire to learn. It was also clear that her ability to concentrate over a long period of time was limited. However, I did feel that she understood and accepted the basic principles of Judaism…
Before the wedding ceremony, I performed the Ceremony of Conversion, which was witnessed by Arthur Miller, Kermit Miller (his brother), Morton Miller, Mr. and Mrs. Lee Strasberg, and Mr. and Mrs. Norman Rosten.
Even after her divorce from Miller, Monroe continued to engage with Jewish traditions, including giving Chanukah presents to Miller’s children and attending Passover Ssders. As Rabbi Goldberg confirmed in an August 24, 1962 correspondence only a week after Monroe’s death, “After the divorce, Marilyn told me that she had no plans to renounce Judaism at any time… and she remained on excellent terms with Arthur’s children and Arthur’s father…” She continued to proudly display her menorah, a conversion gift from Miller’s parents which played the Hatikvah, her favorite Jewish song. The menorah sold for $19,550 during the “The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe” 1999 sale at Christie’s auction house, but later sold for $112,522, reflecting a winning bid of $90,018 and an additional 25% buyer’s premium. (The actual original winning bid was for $90,000, but the successful bidder insisted that an additional $18 be added to his bid as a symbolic chai (“life”).) Incredibly, absent its association with Monroe, this common menorah was worth no more than $25-$50.
Monroe would have attended synagogue but for the fear of an invasive and aggressive press disturbing the prayer services, and she prayed from a personal siddur, which appears to have been used daily and included annotations in her own hand recording instructions she had received from her rabbi, including notes to “omit” or “skip.” Decorated with a Jewish star and a shofar, the siddur bears the imprint of the Avenue N Jewish Center in Brooklyn, the synagogue occasionally attended by Miller. The siddur, which went up for auction in November 2018 at an auction house in Cedarhurst, N.Y., sold for over $25,000.
There is no question that Monroe was a Zionist. Invited along with her husband to address a 1957 UJA conference in Miami, she wrote a speech about why she believed that Jewish institutions, especially Israel, deserve broad public support, but she ultimately declined to deliver the address when the UJA rescinded its invitation to Miller after his indictment by the House Un-American Activities Committee indictment. (One of Miller’s most significant works was The Crucible (1953), which was deeply influenced by the blacklisting of his left-wing friends during the McCarthy era. Miller was himself cited for contempt of Congress for his refusal to inform on his colleagues before the infamous HUAAC.)
Monroe did, however, later attend a dinner held on September 27, 1959 in Philadelphia by a chapter of the American Friends of the Hebrew University where Miller was awarded an honorary degree to commemorate his “distinguished achievement in the Dramatic Arts.” Shown here is an incredible item from my collection, a program from that historic event on which Monroe has signed and inscribed “To Stevie – Happy Bar Mitzvah! Marilyn Monroe.” In the year she signed this program, she appeared in what was arguably the greatest screen performance of her career, as “Sugar” Kane Kowalczyk in Some Like It Hot.
Even after the couple obtained a Mexican divorce on January 24, 1961, Monroe never repudiated her conversion. She kept her mezuzah on her doorpost and her menorah on her mantle, she continued to pepper her speech with occasional Yiddishisms, and she cheerfully referred to herself as “an atheist Jew.”
After her wedding to Miller, the Central Boycott Office (CBO) of the Arab League in Egypt, immediately blacklisted her films for having “shown pronounced pro-Israeli sympathies and collected donations for Israel.” Ironically, soon after the couple’s divorce, The United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria sent an urgent telegram to Spyros Skouras, president of 20th Century Fox, requesting Monroe’s attendance “for inaugurational (sic) light and sound of pyramids and sphinx. All expenses to be borne by the government.” Hoping to cash in on Monroe’s worldwide fame now that she was no longer married to the Jew Miller, they were wholly unaware that notwithstanding her divorce, she still strongly self-identified as Jewish. (The UAR request was summarily rejected.)
Before their divorce, Miller wrote The Misfits for Monroe, which some commentators submit was written as a final gesture toward their life together. In the 1961 film, which went on to become what many consider to be her greatest dramatic role, Monroe plays Roslyn Taber, a just-divorced former burlesque dancer who befriends a pair of cowhands and spends several days with them as they round up wild horses in the Nevada desert. Rabbi Goldberg wrote admiringly that Taber “was very much like the real Marilyn: a sensitive girl who could not bear cruelty to animals, much less human beings.”
On August 4, 1962, Monroe was tragically found dead in her Brentwood home and, despite her connections to Judaism, she was not buried in a Jewish cemetery, and, against her wishes, her funeral was conducted by a Lutheran minister. The final irony, however, is that Monroe seems to have cared more about her Judaism than her Jewish husband ever did about his.
