A series riding high in the ratings and an impressive run of media coverage: Mad Men is one of the fashionable phenomena of the moment. As a chronicle of 1960s America, the series unrolls a set of socio-historical facts both well attested and well documented — sexism, racism, an obsession with dress, the heavy consumption of tobacco and alcohol. At first glance, nothing that prompts a head-on engagement with the Jewish question; yet on closer inspection one discovers it running beneath the surface, in the form of a revived quest for identity. What are the pieces that make up this picture? Explicit allusions; a favorable sociological context that points back to a period of American history shot through with antisemitism and discrimination. A booming professional milieu — advertising — marked by competition between the dominant class, the WASPs, and new firms, new talents drawn from the Jewish community. The presence of female characters defined by their ethno-religious origins, who throw light on Jewishness in a fantasized but decisive way. And finally a hero, Don Draper, who unfurls his quest for identity across the seasons.
In the course of advertising campaigns and contacts with clients, the characters in the series make several allusions indicating that Jews are different, excluded, clannish. In season two, one of the bosses of the Sterling Cooper agency asks the creative director: “Have we ever hired any Jews?” “Not that I know of,” Draper answers, before adding, “You want me to run down to the deli and grab one for you?” In other words, the Jew, for the upholders of this elite world, is still the small shopkeeper from the New York grocery stores known as delis (delicatessens) — not an executive, not an educated and capable person, but some vulgar nobody.
In episode six of season one, titled “Babylon,” the Israeli tourism office asks Don Draper to alter Israel’s image in the eyes of the American public. While the country is known only for its “squabbles,” which the press flags on its front pages but which readers skim over, Draper must promote the image of a cosmopolitan country — a mission that confronts him with manifest confusion. Don bemoans the difficulties: “We’ve got a more or less communist country full of Jews and women with revolvers.” The scene opens on a photo of an Israeli woman in uniform and on a more-than-ironic remark from a colleague: “Go on, kill me, you Jewish brute!” The scene ends on a poster designed by one of his colleagues showing a half-naked woman with the following tagline: “This country’s greatest treasure is its people, because they are beautiful. Over there, the Jews don’t look like our Jews.” As proof, the art director brandishes the cover of an Israeli magazine on which one recognizes the face of Claudia Cardinale — who, as we know, is not Israeli, something the characters appear to be unaware of. And the art director adds: “Have you ever been to the diamond district?” The way the specificity of the Israeli state is pinned down, within an agency dominated by sexism and by the seductive power of its male executives, owes much to the representation of the Israeli woman seen as a threatening warrior stripped of the traditional feminine attributes (gentleness, pacifism, submission). Beyond the Israeli woman, it is — as we shall see — the representation of the Jewish woman that thereby announces itself. On the occasion of an earlier meeting with other Jewish clients, in order to make up for the absence of a Jewish executive, the boss, Roger Sterling, comically invites a lowly employee from the mail room, who will not utter a word: he has no other reason to attend the meeting than his name, for he is a Cohen — a kind of nod to Jewish liturgical observances in which the presence of a Cohen is traditionally required.
To educate himself and accomplish his mission, Don reads Exodus, Leon Uris’s book, published in 1958, recounting the adventure of the ship Exodus, tasked with clandestinely bringing European Jewish immigrants to Palestine in 1947. A whole symbol of the creation of the State of Israel. Which is to say, a way of educating oneself on the cheap. Don knows no Jews, as Rachel Menken will throw back at him when she agrees to have lunch with him for the first time: “So I’m the only Jew you know in New York?” Which is to say that in the America of the 1960s, dominated by WASP power, Jews represent a category apart, and an exotic one. Most particularly in the world of advertising, where Jews would carve out a place of choice and embody admired models of creativity. If Don Draper is a character built out of real-life advertising men, one cannot forget that among these models are Jewish figures such as Bill Bernbach of the agency DDB (Doyle Dane Bernbach), author of the campaign for the German brand Volkswagen’s Beetle, a campaign that remained famous for its innovation, its boldness, and its slogan “Think small” — and whose irony cannot be missed, inasmuch as it was a Jew who popularized a car created under Nazism. In Manhattan, when people spoke of Bill in the 1960s, they thought immediately of Bernbach, because he was creative, charismatic, and because he profoundly altered the working methods within advertising agencies. Don Draper makes an insistent allusion to him, in fact. He extols to his colleagues the merits of that campaign and lets his jealousy show. This reference indicates the power of fascination that the Jewish world exerts over the character, a fascination he will confirm through his subsequent love affairs. A fascination that comes accompanied by both ignorance and an awareness of the power of exclusion and rejection visited upon Jews, for the same Don Draper will tell a colleague eminently representative of the WASP class, Peter Campbell, that the Sterling Cooper agency gathers within its walls as many frustrated artists and intellectuals as the Third Reich: an analogy as violent as it is revealing.
Another explicit allusion: Don Draper rails against the fact that Jewish agencies work on Jewish products bought by Jews, a circuit that is, in his view, entirely closed and impenetrable. In his sights, the Grey agency, founded in 1925 by Larry Valenstein and Arthur Fatt, of which the DDB agency, founded in 1949, would be a sizable offshoot. From that point on, a glut of copywriters of Jewish origin and art directors of Italian or Greek descent — among them the famous George Lois — pour onto the market. Beyond mere commercial competition, this is a breakthrough that WASP power experiences as an invasion, a redistribution, and a social threat. Incidentally, while he is at home reading Exodus, Don Draper receives a confidence from his wife Betty, who tells him that her first boyfriend was named David Rosenberg, that he was very handsome, and that he had chosen her because she did not belong to the synagogue — a flirtation that earned her the hostility of her classmates. A scene innocuous in appearance, but one that would indicate once again that, from Don Draper’s point of view, the Jewish worm is in the WASP fruit — right down to his own bed.
Within the Sterling Cooper agency, then, no Jews — only an art director of Italian origin, and homosexual into the bargain. And yet the character of Peggy Olson holds our attention. A well-behaved young woman, hired as a mere secretary, she reveals unsuspected creative talents and becomes the first copywriter on a team that until then was entirely male. A native of Brooklyn, she grew up in a very Catholic family, which sets her apart from her mostly WASP — hence Protestant — colleagues. She is the most religious character in the series. To everyone, she is a young woman with drive but without the codes, because she does not come from the inner circle, that is, the WASP milieu that sends its children to good universities. On several occasions she will point out that she went only to secretarial school. Moreover, she is secretive, does not open up, gives birth in secret to a child she gives up, and does not take the road of marriage and family life despite being twenty-six by the end of season four. Historically, Weiner could have chosen a young Jewish woman in her place and confronted her with the same obstacles on the road to success and integration, but that would no doubt have been too explicit. Instead, he opts for a young Catholic, a kind of choice in negative that makes Peggy Olson a Jew. All the more so since, as far as New York advertising men can recall, one fact seems established: by the end of the 1960s, all the copywriters were Jewish.
But Weiner is not content with discourse in negative, since he chose to place, as early as season one, an openly Jewish woman, Rachel Menken. A choice he claims for himself: “God knows I know television! Well, I have never seen a character show up and declare point-blank that he was Jewish. And that, with Rachel, is exactly what I wanted to do.” Heiress to a fictional department store called Menken, founded by her father — of the kind that abounded in New York in the first part of the twentieth century, like Bendel or Russek (the department store of the father of the photographer Diane Arbus) — Rachel comes to the Sterling Cooper agency to ask them to modernize its image. Her first contacts with the creatives are rough. She is looked down on because she is a woman, because she is Jewish, and because she has a quick tongue. Pete Campbell does not hesitate to throw out: “Having money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Don Draper is hostile to her before realizing that she attracts him and deciding to seduce her. But Rachel resists, asserts her independence and her steely character. Between them then begins an approach in several stages, ending in a love affair nourished by mutual confidences. Each recognizes in the other a shared sense of non-belonging and strangeness, which Rachel verbalizes thus: “Jews have lived in exile for a long time, and they’ve made a strength of it. Maybe that’s because we have to scrap to do business with people who hate us.” More than any reading he might do, it is by talking with Rachel that Don understands a little better what the Jewishness and the Zionism of an American woman of his time amount to, and that he recognizes in her qualities of his own that he can speak of to no one. As Matt Weiner’s words confirm: “Don is Jewish in the sense that he’s a white man who remains an outsider, and that’s what Rachel reflects back to him. That’s what binds them so deeply.” Unlike the other women in the series, Rachel wears very fanciful couture outfits, daring hats, but her physical signature is her long, thick brown hair, a sort of Semitic mark of the character. In present-day American society, one would say that Rachel is a JAP and not a WASP, the first acronym being phonetically modeled on the second — that is, a Jewish American Princess. Symbolically, one would even find in her the physical traits of a forbidden biblical princess (Rachel can fall in love only with a Jewish man) in the lineage of a Bérénice. For Don, Rachel is a temptress, with whom he falls in love, with whom he is ready to start his life over — in other words, a powerful and dangerous woman.
In the second season, Don has an affair with Bobbie Barrett, the wife and manager of a comedian whom the agency casts in an advertising spot that flirts with bad taste. Jimmy Barrett (whose real name is Brownstein) is the typical portrait of the New York Jewish comedian: scrawny and unprepossessing physique, a nasty and cynical humor, great freedom of tone. To conceive him, the writer drew on a Lenny Bruce or a Jerry Lewis, comedians very much in vogue in the 1960s and highly representative of Borscht Belt humor. By metonymy, one assumes that Bobbie Barrett is Jewish too. Unlike Don’s other mistresses, she is a mature woman, unsentimental and sexually free, who drags him into nights of drunkenness in which they both nearly get themselves killed, notably in a car accident. What is more, it is through Jimmy and Bobbie Barrett that scandal arrives, since it is Jimmy who slyly reveals to Betty her husband’s chronic infidelities. Here again looms a representation of the Jewish woman as temptress, domineering and dangerous, inasmuch as she is capable of shaking the existential edifice of the hero.
In season two, a new secretary also appears at the agency, Jane Siegel — a surname that Weiner could not have chosen at random. Beautiful and young, she nonetheless stands out from the others by her boldness. It is she who leads the young executives to slip into Bert Cooper’s office to admire his Rothko, a painter known for his Jewish origins. At the close of this scene, in the elevator, she even suggests to them that they could have stolen it, which earns her in return Harry Crane’s acerbic question: “Who are you?” In short, Jane is fearless, and while Roger Sterling racks up extramarital affairs, while he refuses to put his marriage at risk for the love of Joan, it is for Jane that he decides to take the plunge and leave his wife Mona. It is therefore Jane who wins the day, becoming Jane Sterling. Another dramatic turn will confirm, in season four, Jane’s Jewishness, in the person of her cousin David, whom she asks her new husband to hire at the agency despite a very mediocre résumé — a way of indicating that she is now the boss’s wife and that, as a Jew, she may display a slight tendency toward nepotism. The irony of fate will have it that, despite his laughable incompetence, Don Draper will find himself obliged to hire said cousin, an ugly and sneaky little man.
Finally, and more marginally, two other Jewish women pass through the series. Two women of mature age and saddled with a strong German accent: Lily Meyer, one of the representatives of the Israeli tourism office, and Dr. Greta Gutman, in charge of research at the agency. Besides the fact that these two women are in no way candidates for seduction and cannot sexually interest Don Draper, they both present themselves as strong characters, potentially castrating and endowed with a knowledge stamped with the seal of old Europe.
The dramatic force of the entire series rests on the mystery of its central character, namely Don Draper, a man in perpetual quest of himself. We learn over the course of the seasons that he usurped a false identity in order to desert the Korean War, but above all to escape his heavy family past, a wretched and unhappy past that forced him to grow up among adoptive and hostile parental couples. That the dramatic engine should be tied to this change of name must hold our attention from the outset, for who more than the Jews has known the vicissitudes of such an option, advantages and dislocations included? Despite the series of revelations surrounding Draper’s past, one shadowy zone remains intact: the identity of his mother. In the rare confidences he allows himself, he declares that she was a young prostitute who died giving birth to him, nothing more. He knows neither her name nor her origins. If one sets this plot datum alongside the character’s evolutions — a man who wants to climb the ladder of success and realize his American dream by reinventing his whole life — and alongside the writer’s declarations, one may come to ask oneself whether Don Draper might not be Jewish. Weiner recounts in an interview that everyone constantly asks him this, to which he replies that in fact nothing says so, but that at the origin of this story was the figure of his maternal grandfather, a Manhattan furrier. Let us recall in this regard that Don Draper crosses the path of his mentor, Roger Sterling, while he is himself employed by a furrier. Besides, Weiner adds, when the actor who plays Rachel’s father appeared on set in period costume, he nearly choked, so much did the man remind him of his grandfather. “I’d say that Don is emotionally Jewish,” Weiner specifies, before continuing: “What interests me is telling the story of someone who succeeds in America by being an outsider, a person with no ties who manages to win the recognition of others. To succeed in America, you have to become a white man, which implies that you have to give up something enormous, something we have all done willingly but painfully. In fact, that’s the real story of Mad Men. You can reinvent yourself, you’ll be tolerated, but you have to accept losing something whose value you don’t measure, and that is a suffering, because deep down you never escape what you are.” In creating the character of Don Draper, as well as that of his alter ego Peggy Olson, Weiner creates a character who confronts the same difficulties of assimilation as the Jews: a complicated past, a social ascent strewn with obstacles, and the impossibility of ever lowering one’s guard, even for an instant.
If, then, the Jewish question in Mad Men is not an obvious given — by the very admission of its creator — it is a decisive dramatic line. Whether he deploys it sociologically, historically, or symbolically, Matt Weiner instills a questioning of identity that we are accustomed to reading from the pens of the great American novelists like Philip Roth, or to seeing in filmmakers like Woody Allen, but more rarely on television — hence, no doubt, the indirections he employs. “When I think about my characters,” he concludes, “I try to think about what I heard in my parents’ mouths, about what it meant to them to be American Jews.”