Abie the Agent

Harry Hershfield's Abie the Agent

Abie the Agent was a popular early American comic strip about a Jewish car salesman by Harry Hershfield. When Hershfield had success with a Yiddish character in his comic strip Desperate Desmond, he was encouraged by his editor to create a new strip centered around Yiddishism and Jewish immigrants in the United States.

Characters and story

Abraham Kabibble, known as Abie the Agent, was the first Jewish protagonist in an American comic strip.^[1] The car salesman debuted in the New York Journal on February 2, 1914.^[2] Abie was a positive rebuttal of the many Jewish stereotypes in caricatures, and showed with gentle humor a successful middle-class immigrant.^[3] While Abie and his friends had many typical Jewish characteristics, such as their names or their use of Yiddish words and accents, they also lacked many of the negative or malicious elements, such as exaggerated physical traits, found in the depictions of Jews from this time. Abie was in many ways indistinguishable from other white Americans, and he was a prime example of the belief in the integration of German Jews into U.S. society. In 1917, Abie enlisted in the Army to help the USA win World War I.

The character lost many of his more typical Jewish characteristics over the decades, showing his successful integration but also slowly diminishing the particular character that set this comic strip apart from the others.^[4] However, the comic can hardly be seen as anti-racist or anti-discriminatory, since it only tried to promote the assimilation of Jews as white Americans, but at the same time distanced them from other ethnicities like the Mexicans or the African Americans who were generally depicted in an inferior role.^[4]

Harry Hershfield's Abie the Agent (July 20, 1917)

Animation

Syndicated by King Features, the strip became popular, and in 1917 two animated cartoons were made.^[2] No further spinoffs or much merchandise appeared though, and the comic strip went on hiatus between 1931 and 1935, to finally disappear in 1940. An indication of its popularity was the reference to Abie Kabibble used in Animal Crackers, the 1930 Marx Brothers movie.^[4] In a time when Jews were often caricatured and put in a negative light in America, the gentle humor of Hershfield and the positive depiction of a Jew as a successful lower middle class immigrant trying to integrate himself,^[4] shed a different light on the problems immigrants faced in those years, and is one of the reasons Abie the Agent has been called the first adult comic.^[5]

References

External links

• Hershfield biography at Comiclopedia
• IMDb entry for Abie Kabibble Outwitted His Rival cartoon
• IMDb entry for Iska Worreh cartoon