First Jews involved in animation

This Friday night marks the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the two-day celebration marking the Jewish New Year.

As cartoon fans and members of the Forum will have noticed by now, many Jews have been involved in animation, both in the creative and business sides. In fact, at least three (including yours truly) are moderators of the Big Cartoon Forum!

It is a point of some interest that one of the characters in the world's first drawn cartoon was Jewish, although the depiction was much less than flattering. In Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, released by the Vitagraph Company of America in 1906, director-writer-animator J. Stuart Blackton draws (in chalk) the name "Cohen," which morphs into a stereotyped character.

Among the first Jewish animators were brothers Max and Dave Fleischer, who eventually went on to establish their own studio; The Clown's Pup, released on August 30, 1919, was the very first cartoon in the very popular live-action and animated Out Of The Inkwell series, produced for Bray Studios. As one of the animators, Max Fleischer also directed, wrote and appeared in live action! The Clown, as you may guess, eventually became Ko-Ko.

But Dave Fleischer was not the first Jewish maker of an animated cartoon!

No, that honor -- in a very tight race -- should go, it appears, to Frederick Burr Opper.

"Who was he?" you ask. Here's the answer:

Opper was the leading caricaturist and political lampoonist in William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain. One of his strips, And Her Name Was Maud, became an animated series, Maud the Mule, produced by Hearst's International Film Service, Inc. The cartoons were written by Opper and distributed in the Hearst-Vitagraph News Pictorial; the first known cartoon in the series, Poor Si Keeler, was released on February 4, 1916.

Another Opper creation, Happy Hooligan, became a series of 55 animated cartoons for Hearst, which ran until 1921; the first of these, He Tries the Movies Again, was shown on October 9, 1916.

Only three months behind Opper -- for a very close second place -- was Rube (Reuben Lucius) Goldberg, whose name is a byword for complicated inventions devised to do simple tasks. Besides his crazy inventions, he produced a very popular comic strip, Boob McNutt. Loosely based, it appears, on this cartoon, Goldberg produced at least seven episodes of The Boob Weekly for Barré Studios. A satire of newsreels of the day, it was first seen on May 8, 1916; the first episode was The Boob Weekly, the name of the series.

Abie Kabibble was a character made famous in a comic strip by Harry Hershfield, whose character was described as "the wandering Jew taking a short rest in the suburbs of the world." Hershfield's strip, Abie the Agent, was called "the first adult comic strip in America." There were only two Abie the Agent animated films, both of which were also produced for Hearst. The first, Iska Worreh, came out on August 5, 1917.

After the Fleischers, but still in the silent era, came Milt Gross, who narrated illustrated Yiddish dialect stories known as "Milt Grocery." He had his own series, Milt Gross Cartoons, for Paramount's Bray Productions in 1920. He also directed, wrote and animated Ink-Ravings for Bray in 1922-23. (These were occasional cartoons in a newsreel, Bray Magazine.)

So...these were the first Jews who, in one capacity or another, made animated cartoons. They would not be the last.

Mazel Tov to all of them!