THE NEXT DAY, I held my first full set of student meetings. Nearly every student came prepared with ideas for final projects. And nearly every student asked me, just minutes before our time was up, something along the lines of: "If it’s not too personal, can I ask why you want to teach Jewish studies since, well, you know, you’re not Jewish?" (One student, in a wild shot in the dark, tried to get me to admit, through a series of probing questions, that I really was Jewish and that my claiming not to be was a clever teaching device.) The query was perfectly reasonable. Understanding a lecturer’s interest in a subject — and presumably his passion for it — can be part of the complicated pedagogic relationship. What I told them was this: for the past 30 years (this seems like a very long time to a 19-year-old), I had written extensively (including hundreds of articles and four books) on popular culture. I had taught more classes and seminars on the topic than I could count. And, at least if you’re talking about the US, you can’t write about popular culture and not write about Jewish culture.

If it weren’t for Jews and African-Americans, we wouldn’t have American music (well, with the exception of that high-Midwest WASP Cole Porter). And if it weren’t for Jews and homosexuals, we wouldn’t have Hollywood (this pretty much applies to Broadway as well). And without Eddie Cantor, Sid Caesar, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, and Adam Sandler, American comedy as we know it wouldn’t exist. In so many ways, the history of US popular culture is inextricably intertwined with the many strands of what we call Jewish culture.

This answer satisfied them. It was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. My deep-seated connection to Jewish culture is rooted, ironically, in my years in Catholic school. I was raised in a parish that was composed primarily of first- and second-generation Irish and Italian immigrants. We were taught by an Italian-American order of nuns, and one of the strongest lessons we learned was that immigrants in America were treated differently: they were, historically and even in the present (which, at that time, was the1950s), frowned upon because of their religion. We were told that it was important to be open and honest about your religion and religious beliefs. And we were also told that the people who were open weren’t the lazy, secular Protestants (who didn’t even have to go to church on Sundays), but Catholics and Jews. The nuns were talking less about religion than they were about ethnicity, class, and marginality. During grade school, I was explicitly taught that there were strong similarities between Catholics and Jews. (At the same time, we were told nothing of the Roman Catholic Church’s appalling history of institutionalized anti-Semitism, including the fact that it was Pope Innocent III in 1215, and not Adolph Hitler in 1941, who first decreed that all European Jews had to wear a yellow badge or Star of David to set them apart from Christians.)

Along with religious empathy, my attraction to Judaism is rooted in my gay identity. An identity that was present in so many ways from my early teen years on. I loved the self-deprecating humor of Jewish culture that worked both as an assault on the mainstream and as self-protection. Comics like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl expressed the bitter anger that I felt toward the prevailing culture. And comics like Fanny Brice (whom I had seen in early films on television), Phyllis Diller, and Tottie Fields expressed a type of comic ambivalence that made complete sense to me: they turned being angry into a caustic, but always funny, critique of themselves as well as the world in which they lived. But most of all, I loved the sheer queerness of many Jewish comics — Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, and Jerry Lewis. These were men (all ostensibly heterosexual) who were not really men in the traditional sense. Groucho was far more interested in deriding and scorning the pomp and pretense of heterosexual normality than in finding a female sexual partner. And Harpo — with his silly grin and penchant for draping his thigh over the unwitting, and unwilling, hands of strange men — just seemed like a crazed queen. These performers ridiculed ideas about gender; Berle, for example, was famous for performing in alarmingly convincing drag to make fun of the very idea of how men and women were supposed to act. Jack Benny’s ironic stance — his famous "Well ..." — struck me as the perfect way to confront a world in which I knew I was an outsider. The spastic Jerry Lewis (who always got a girl, but never the girl) was my role model for sports: if he didn’t have to learn to "act like a man," why should I? And I also loved the fact that he kept leaping into Dean Martin’s arms at a moment’s notice and that, come to think of it, Dean Martin never got tired of catching him. When I was 10, I had a enormous crush on Danny Kaye — he seemed to me to be the height of sophistication, charm, and poise, and unlike Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, and Milton Berle, he was sexy as well. The Jewish culture I experienced by watching television and by going to Broadway shows showed me how to deal with the world and be myself.

Why didn’t I mention all this to my students? Well, some of it seems a little personal. I mean, would it really help the class to understand Jewish culture’s role in how ideas of gender, race, and ethnicity have shifted in US popular culture if they knew that I’d had explicit sexual fantasies about Danny Kaye when I was a kid? And I’m not sure my presence in the class would have been helped by giving them images of me dreading the humiliations of gym class and Little League as an 11-year-old. Of course, I’m probably fooling myself. After all, one of my strengths as a teacher (at least, I think it’s one of my strengths) is my ability to convey my personal excitement about the material I teach. How could they not, in some way, divine my own deeply personal attachment to this subject as I showed them yet another Jack Benny clip and enthused about how he was "interrogating the performance of maleness." How could they, on some level, not understand the subtext of my excitement over Joan Rivers’s material on her early LP recordings when she exposes in hilarious detail the absurdity of heterosexual marriage and family life?

Maybe the real reason for my anxiety about coming out as Catholic to my class was that I would be exposing too much of my inner life to them. Then again, I probably do that already over the course of a class (and thanks to Google). But maybe that isn’t such a bad thing after all. If students don’t realize that the material they are studying has myriad and vital implications for people’s lives, they aren’t going to understand just how much it’s worth studying.

Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com