The Jewish Roots of John Garfield

This episode explores the life and legacy of actor John Garfield (born Julius Garfinkel), focusing on how his Jewish roots shaped his identity, artistic choices, and political stance. Journalist Robert Nott, author of He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield, recounts Garfield’s upbringing on New York’s Lower East Side, among Jewish immigrant poverty, and strict religious expectations. Rejecting his Orthodox father’s path, Garfield turned to acting, eventually joining the leftist Group Theater—a hub of Jewish-American creativity and political activism.

Garfield’s performances in the play Golden Boy and the movies Body and Soul, and Gentleman’s Agreement reflect recurring themes: the immigrant struggle, the lure of the American Dream, and resistance to systemic injustice. Body and Soul—produced independently—blended his real-life experiences with a fictional reworking of the biography of the famous Jewish boxer Barney Ross. Despite facing the Hollywood blacklist and pressure from HUAC during the Red Scare, Garfield refused to name names, an act of integrity that prematurely ended his acting career and possibly his life (he died at the age of 39)  but one that was rooted in his cultural and moral upbringing.

Garfield, though not religiously observant, remained culturally Jewish, embodying a complex, deeply American Jewish identity in both life and art.

Guest Information
Robert Nott, Author, “He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield (2003)”
Robert Nott is an arts and entertainment writer for The Santa Fe New Mexican

Resources

Books
Nott, Robert. He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield.

Plays and Movies

Odets, Clifford. Waiting for Lefty

Odets, Clifford. Awake and Sing

Odets, Clifford. Golden Boy.

20th Century Fox, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)

Hollywood Backstories: Gentlemen’s Agreement

LINK TO TRANSCRIPT

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.
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Transcript

Robert Nott: My name is Robert Nott. I'm a journalist for the Santa Fe New Mexican, and the author of He Ran All the Way: The Life Story of John Garfield. I got interested in John Garfield because I was a 13-year-old, awkward, lonely adolescent who was having trouble in school, usual personal problems, and found refuge in the late show. And there on television around 2:30 in the morning is Body and Soul. I'd never seen Garfield before. I knew nothing about his life, but the picture and the way he played the role just captured me right away. Maybe I just saw another guy that looked scared and lonely but was trying to figure it out. 

Robert Philipson: When did you actually start researching his life and what led you to that? 

Robert Nott: I started as a theater major, particularly trying to put together a one-person play on Garfield, which fell apart as I began researching his life. This was in the late 1980s. Sometime in the early 1990s, I started refocusing it with the idea of putting together a biography of him. 

Robert Philipson: Can you describe the social environment of Garfield's youth? 

Robert Nott: Garfield grows up on the Lower East Side. Uh, he's born in 1913 on a place called Rivington Street. And it is a place where most of the Jewish immigrants who had come over in the past 20, 30 years and were some 2 million of them trying to escape Europe, settled, and it was a place that he dubbed Pushcart Alley because of all the outside activity and the food carts and the swelling market and including a lot of tough guys. It was also a place where Jewish immigrants felt they could seek refuge, where they could be among their own and start their own close knit Jewish community. 

Robert Philipson: What were conditions like in terms of health hygiene? 

Robert Nott: 1913, 1915, 1920 New York City. Tenements, tenements, slums. A lot of people crammed into one apartment, taking cold baths, if at all, in the sink, one toilet per floor for five, six families and Garfield sleeping on the floor quite often in the kitchen, tuberculosis ran rampant. The people did not go to the doctor, they did not go to the dentist. So, it was a really challenging environment when it came to trying to maintain good health. 

Robert Philipson: What did Robbe Garfield's wife say about her parents' opinion of Garfield when they met him for the first time? 

Robert Nott: Robbe's parents, right? John Garfield meets Robbe Seidman. He falls in love with her. She's gonna become Robbe Garfield, and when he first meets her parents and she tells them that he wants to be an actor, they say actors are bums. 

Robert Philipson: Why were they considered to be bums? 

Robert Nott: I suppose it's because there was no way they were gonna earn a living. That's really not much different from today unless you're a movie star. And maybe they felt it was a large step away from reality. I think most Jewish immigrant parents at that time wanted their children to pursue some sort of professional career. 

I'm sure lawyers, I'm sure doctors, and in the case of Garfield and a lot of other Jewish immigrants, rabbis, that would've been the perfect occupation. John Garfield's father was a man named David Garfinkel, and he came up from the old country and he was a very devout Jewish man. He wanted to be a rabbi. 

He was a frustrated, wannabe rabbi. He was in fact, what they called a rabbi for hire. You could get him to do the birthday party or something, but he really couldn't get a job with any sort of temple. He was very strict. He really wanted his son to follow all of the Jewish traditions, religious, cultural, and there was a lot of difficulty between the two of them because young John Garfield then known as Julius Garfinkel, he wanted to go out and play in the streets. He wanted to cause trouble. He didn't wanna stay in school. He totally rejected this whole Orthodox Jew idea and really tried to Americanize himself in a way that I think a lot of immigrant families found a little disturbing at the time. 

Robert Philipson: Why did David Garfinkel attack Robbe with a cane the first time he met her? 

Robert Nott: David Garfinkel. He's got his own set of Jewish beliefs, his own traditions, his cultures. I'm sure he had his prejudices. He meets John Garfield's wife to be Robbe. She's so tan that he thinks she is African American and he uses a Yiddish term that I won't repeat, a very derogatory term for African Americans when he meets her and starts to pursue her around the room with a cane. 

She thought he was insane. He probably was. 

Robert Philipson: Describe the Group Theater and Garfield's role in it. 

Robert Nott: The Group Theater is born out of a feeling that theater in America at that time -- we're talking in the 1930s -- was not really portraying American life in a realistic manner. And it also had the subtext of politics, of social unrest, of perhaps even social revolution, which is why it was tainted later on with pink or red or with communist colors. 

Garfield was a young actor who knew this was an exciting new venture and wanted to be part of it and tried very hard by befriending Clifford Odets, another young, frustrated Jewish actor who could also write and would write some of the best plays for the Group Theater. 

Robert Philipson: What did the Group Theater bring to American Theater that was new? 

Robert Nott: American Theater in the 1930s -- this is a bit of a stereotype -- was drawing room comedies, very stodgy dramatic plays, commercial hits just like today. So the Group Theater brought a sense of vitality, a sense of focusing in on real serious American challenges, particularly for the lower middle class, what we would call the, the lower class. 

They aimed really at the lower class. Here's the struggles that we're going through every day and here's what needs to be done in order to improve our lives. And in its own way, it really zeroed in on the Jewish urban American experience. 

Robert Philipson: Why do you say that? 

Robert Nott: The vast majority of the plays that the Group Theater did in the 1930s were about Jewish families. Most of the time that was really evident in the casting and the dialog and in the names involved. 

Excerpt from "Waiting for Lefty":  

BENJAMIN: But that's not all?  

BARNES: They have to make cuts in staff too. 

BENJAMIN: Well, that's too bad. Does it touch me?  

BARNES: Yeah. I'm afraid it does.  

BENJAMIN: But I'm top man here. I I, I don't mean I'm better than anyone else, but I've worked harder  

BARNES: And shown more promise. 

BENJAMIN: I always supposed they cut from the bottom first. 

BARNES: Usually. 

BENJAMIN: But in this case?  

BARNES: Complications. 

BENJAMIN: For instance.  

BARNES: I like you, Benjamin. It’s one ripping shame. 

BENJAMIN: I’m no sensitive plant. What's the answer? 

BARNES: It's an old disease. Malignant. Tumescent. We need an antitoxin for it.  

BENJAMIN: I see.  

BARNES: What? 

BENJAMIN: I met that disease before. At Harvard first. 

BARNES: You have seniority here, Benjamin,  

BENJAMIN: But I'm a Jew!  

BARNES: Don’t think Kennedy and I didn’t fight for you!  

BENJAMIN: Such discrimination! With all those wealthy brother Jews on the board.  

BARNES: Doesn't seem to be much difference between a wealthy Jew and a rich Gentile. They're both cut from the same piece.  

Robert Nott: Even when it wasn't just something like Golden Boy, which was a big commercial hit -- a violinist wants to become a boxer --there was really a whole undertow of that, that very life that John Garfield had grown up with. Young Jewish immigrant wants to make it to the top. He wants the American dream. How do you get there? You gotta sell something. And it's usually in stories like that, your soul. 

Robert Philipson: Very good. Can you name a few actors and directors of Jewish descent associated with the Group Theater. 

Robert Nott: When you think about the Group Theater from the people who founded it, that would include Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. You're really looking at a line of really strong theatrical Jewish personalities. That includes Julius Garfinkel. It includes Clifford Odets, it includes the Stella Adler and her brother Luther Adler. Morris Carnovsky. Sanford Meisner. There's just one Jewish figure after another, really, not only leading that group, but really comprising the theatrical army that keeps it going year after year. 

Robert Philipson: To what extent was the group a left-wing phenomenon? 

Robert Nott: Most of the people that I talked to who were involved with the Group Theater in the 1930s brought up the fact that everybody in their view seemed to care about trying to change things in America, and that meant leaning to the left in the broadest term. That meant suggesting that something had to change and people had to rise up and change it. And the very themes that ran through the Group Theater’s plays about trying to make a better life for themselves without selling out -- Waiting for Lefty comes to mind. Awake and Sing -- really spoke to what was then considered a popular, typical non-threatening American desire, an American way of life. 

Excerpt from "Awake and Sing":  

BESSIE: I'm not only the mother, but also the father. First two years I worked in the stocking factory for $6 a week. While Myron Berger went to law school. If I didn't worry about the family, who would?  In the calendar, it's a different place, but here without a dollar, you don't look the world in the eye. So talk from now until next year. This is life in America. 

RALPH: Then it's wrong. It don't make sense. If life made you this way, then it's wrong. 

BESSIE: Listen maybe you'd want me to give up 20 years ago, where would you be now? You'll excuse the expression, a bum in the park.  

RALPH: Mom, I'm not blaming you. Sink or swim. I see it, but it can't stay like this  

BESSIE: Foolish boy.  

RALPH: No, I, I see every house lousy with lies and hate.  He said it, grandpa. Brooklyn hates the Bronx. Smacked on the nose twice a day. Boys and girls can't get ahead like that. Mom, we don't want life printed on dollar bills. 

BESSIE: So go out and change the world if you don't like it.  

RALPH: I will. Why? 'Cause life's different in my head, I'm strong. Gimme the world in two hands.  

Robert Nott: 10 or 12 years later, when people look back at that through a pink colored lens, it spoke left wing, it spoke radical, it spoke communist. 

Robert Philipson: Talk a little bit about Clifford Odets’ first success with Waiting for Lefty. It’s very much in line of what you were talking about. 

Robert Nott: There was a pretty serious and well publicized taxicab driver strike late in 1934. Today we can't imagine. We can get by without a taxicab fine. But in those days it was big news. Odets took this and put together a series of five, almost interrelated sequences about the people involved with that strike, with the families, the union leaders who wanted to break it, the politicians and the guys on the street who just wanted a little more money so that they could feed their families. And this was what Odets did brilliantly. He portrayed what was happening on the streets. He really understood New York; he really understood the people struggling every day. And this very play that the Group put up turned out to be the biggest hit they ever had up to that time. People stood up in the aisles; they waited outside for the actors. Suddenly theater was about them. Theater was communal. They could talk about theater. This was their lives. Clifford Odets managed to paint their lives in a way that no American playwright up to that time probably had done. 

Robert Philipson: So of course, Golden Boy was one of their hits. Explain Garfield's relation to the role of Joe Bonaparte in the Clifford Odets play. 

Robert Nott: During his tenure with the Group Theater, Garfield wants a starring role. It was a communal theater. It was an ensemble. But somebody had to be the star every now and then. Golden Boy has a starring part about a guy, a violinist, who decides he's gonna be a boxer in order to win that American Dream. 

Garfield believed that he could play the protagonist Joe Bonaparte better than anyone. He understood this guy wanting to come up from the streets. He understood having an artistic ambition. He understood lust and love and the want for money.  

Excerpt from "Golden Boy":  

JOE: Someday… Papa, everything moves too quickly! Life goes by 200 miles an hour, and you want me to wait for the future! It might never come. Papa, I want to own things and to give things, everything you want from breakfast until you turn out the light. I want you to go to concerts every night. Money's the answer. I can get it fighting, no other way. I won't get it playing a violin.  

MR. BONAPARTE: Money, Money. We got our hearts. We got our souls. We gotta take care of them, huh? Joe, listen to me. Do what is in your heart, not in your head. In there is music, violin. It comes out and it sings when you play. Then you are happy. You do what you born for. Other things are fake. A bad dream. When you wake up, it's too late.  

JOE: Papa, I wish I could make you understand. I gotta do what I gotta do.  

Robert Nott: He felt the part was his. There's a lot of suggestion that Clifford Odets who wrote it may have told him the part's yours, but ultimately the part went to Luther Adler, a much more experienced, older and not very boxer-like looking character, who by all accounts did a really great job. And Garfield in turn felt betrayed. 

And I think that's one of the reasons he turned to Hollywood. But he totally identified with Joe Bonaparte, and he would bring him back to some degree nearly a decade later with Body and Soul.  

Robert Philipson But he did have a part in the original production.  

Robert Nott: Garfield did have a smaller part as Siggy, a comic relief character in Golden Boy. He was happy to be working with Phoebe Brand, an actress he admired It helped that Spencer Tracy saw the play, came backstage, said to Garfield, great job, but still, he didn't get the lead. But he was part of that. He was part of that communal exciting feeling in what was really the last hit for the Group Theater. 

Robert Philipson: Who is Barney Ross and why do you call him another product of Rivington Street? 

Robert Nott: Barney Ross is born on Rivingston Street a few years before Garfield. He won't stay in New York City. His parents will take him over to Chicago, where he starts working for the mob. The similarities to Garfield's life are amazing. 

Both of their parents are very devout religious men. Ross' dad, I think, was a rabbi and the mom disappeared just like in Garfield's life. He's on the streets; he's fighting; He's another one of those young Jewish immigrants who has a dream of making it big, and in his case, he's gonna make it as a boxer. 

And his identity ties closely into John Garfield's  'cause Garfield really plays Barney Ross in his own way in Body and Soul. 

Robert Philipson: So, to what extent was Body and Soul a redo of Golden Boy? 

Robert Nott: Body and Soul is a little bit Golden Boy, a little bit the story of Barney Ross, and a little bit the story of John Garfield. And how they all come together is intertwined into this really fascinating tapestry of three different elements, three different components, all tied to John Garfield in telling the  story about a guy who's about to sell out. Again, a Jewish guy, even though it's very, it's veiled in the movie that he's Jewish, but it's really in a large way, the story of Barney Ross, a Jewish immigrant who's gonna make it as a boxer. 

He's not gonna ever fall down. He'll last in the ring. Maybe the other guy will beat him up, but he's never gonna fall down because he's Jewish and he's not gonna let his people see that. And in its own way, that plays a role in Body and Soul. 

Robert Philipson: How did Body and Soul get made? It wasn't a major studio production, right. 

Robert Nott: Body and Soul was an independent, made by John Garfield and his business partner, Bob Roberts. It's a Bob Roberts production. They went to a small studio right off the side of Paramount called Enterprise. Enterprise was not John Garfield's studio. That's a mistake that a lot of people believe. So they, they pitched the idea of a Barney Ross story. 

And Barney Ross is all for it. He's come back from World War Two. He's an American hero. The problem is Ross gets addicted to morphine during World War Two. When he gets out of combat, now he's addicted to heroin, and then he turns himself in looking for help. And it hits the newspapers right as production is about to start on Body and Soul. 

So they've quickly gotta change what they're doing, but they've got everything set. They've got the Jewish kid growing up and he's gonna fight his way through the Depression, and he's gonna become a boxer and he's gonna be tempted by two women, and the bad guys are gonna move in; corruption's gonna move in. They've got the boxing ring set up, got the cast. They're just gonna change it, change the story a little bit but keep all of those elements to really make it a vibrant, exciting story of Body and Soul.  

Robert Philipson: Who were the Jewish production people involved with Body and Soul, like the director or the screenwriter? 

Robert Nott: The Body and Soul ensemble is not dissimilar to the Group Theater. I don't mean that you have some of the same people coming back, although you do have Art Smith -- a very American name by the way -- playing Garfield's father in the movie, and he was with the Group Theater. You have Robert Rosson, another Jewish immigrant who came up almost near Rivington Street. 

You've got Abraham Polanski, another Jewish immigrant. New York City. You've got a, a cast of Jews. Lily Palmer was German Jewish actually. I think just about everybody in that, except maybe William Conrad and a South African actress named Hazel Brooks, was Jewish. Not only were they very closely tied to their cultural and religious identity, but a lot of them were leaning to the left. 

Robert Philipson: Of course, Canada Lee wasn't Jewish. 

Robert Nott: I should have said that. 

Robert Philipson: So what was the leftwing influence on Body and Soul? 

Robert Nott: Every day on the set of Body and Soul the actors could go to a nice little commissary where they would eat like kings and tea would be served every day at four o'clock, like they were English royalty. 

But just about every other day, maybe some petitions were being swirled around the studio, asking people to sign up for various civil and social rights and maybe some causes that were very much considered extremely left at a time when American politics were changing, at a time when independent parties were starting to come to life, and you could feel that energy on the set of Body and Soul. If you wanted to be part of it, you just signed the petition and maybe not even pay attention to it. Conversely, they were about to make a big commercial picture that was gonna make a lot of money for Enterprise and everybody involved, and they were still enjoying the strawberries and ice cream. 

Robert Philipson: What were the racial politics of Body and Soul and were they unusual for the era? 

Robert Nott: Postwar America, postwar Hollywood is just beginning to dip its toe into the racial waters. What can it do with the race? What can it do with Jewish identity? What can it do with African American identity And hints of that in pictures like Lost Boundaries, Pinky, Home of the Brave, specifically for the African American. And with the Jewish American, you see it in Body and Soul, Gentleman's Agreement, and to some degree in a film noir called Crossfire. 

Body and Soul is the story of a Jewish American fighter. And his one good friend, the one person he can rely on is an African American fighter. Here are two different cultural groups who have been fighting against discrimination for decades in America, if not longer in other countries, watching each other's backs, trying very hard to support one another in a world that just seems to be up against them with corruption, commercialism, discrimination, prejudice. 

Body and Soul has a Jewish American fighter befriending an African American fighter. The two of them are sticking together almost back to fight off prejudice, discrimination, corruption, gangsters. And it's unfortunate that in the movie, to save the soul of the Jewish American fighter played by John Garfield, the African American fighter has to pay a really big price. 

He has to make a really big sacrifice. It's almost as if his willingness to give himself up for the cause gives his colleague in arms, his colleague in race in his own way, a chance at redemption. 

Robert Philipson: How well does Body and Soul hold up?  

Robert Nott: 70 years later how well does Body and Soul hold up? It's a damn good picture. 

If you look at it just on the surface, it's a damn good picture. If you look deeper and start looking at all the various cultural, racial, discriminatory themes running through it and the whole idea of corruption, how easily America can be corrupted, it carries even more weight today. That doesn't change the fact that to a young, modern viewer, it could look a little hokey in retrospect. I think it's always been a very good, not quite great, movie, but probably contains John Garfield's best performance. 

Robert Philipson: So how Jewish was John Garfield? 

Robert Nott: I think in a lot of ways John Garfield was still Julius Jacob Garfinkel. He was still that Jewish American trying to enjoy the American experience. 

He was well aware of his stature as a movie star. He was connected to his religion and to his culture. But again, in rejecting his father and his father's very traditional rigid ways, I think he didn't exactly live up to what one would hope spiritually bound Jewish figure would be.  

He didn't turn his back on religion. He knew he was Jewish. He was Jewish, but he didn't have to play it up. And in fact, Hollywood wasn't gonna let him play it up. 

Robert Philipson: And of course he wasn't observant in any way. 

Robert Nott:  John Garfield did not observe the Jewish holidays. I do not think they meant that much to him. 

Robert Philipson: Talk about Gentleman's Agreement and Garfield's role in it. 

Robert Nott: It is interesting that the same year that we see Body and Soul, Garfield takes a supporting part in a 20th Century Fox picture called Gentleman's Agreement. And the idea is that a journalist played by Gregory Peck is gonna pose as a Jewish person to see whether he's discriminated against. Garfield plays his best friend, a war hero, a Jewish war hero. 

It's very clear he is Jewish and he gets to play wide out, full throttle (he can go six gears, zooming down the highway) gets to play a contemporary Jewish American man trying to fight a discrimination that should no longer exist in a post-World War II world.  

Excerpt from "Hollywood Backstories: Gentlemen’s Agreement":  

Narrator: The part of Dave Goldman was an unusual one for actor John Garfield, who is accustomed to playing intense emotional leading roles. Here Garfield was cast as an openly Jewish character, one who offered thoughtful advice to Phil as he comes to terms with society's secret intolerance.  

Gregory Peck: I'm saying I'm Jewish.  

Garfield: You fool! You crazy fool! And it's working? 

Peck: It works. It works too well. I've been having my nose rubbed in it and I don't like the smell. 

Garfield: Yeah, I can guess. You're not insulated yet, Phil. It's new every time, so the impact must be quite a business on you.  

Julie Garfield: During the whole portrayal of this character, he, it was like he had tight reigns on him. Probably a great exercise in discipline for him to play the facilitator, the enlightener, but he has this one great moment in the restaurant. He gets a chance to show that thing that he had so great as an actor, that spontaneous moment, you know, when he would be so alive.  

Heckler: What's your name, bud?  

Garfield: Dave, Dave Goldman. What's yours?  

Heckler: Never mind what my name is? I told you I don't like officers. I especially don't like them if they're yids. 

Heckler’s friend: Sorry sir. He's terrible when he gets all tanked up.  

Narrator: Politically liberal, he supported progressive causes, which later drew scrutiny during the McCarthy era. In 1951, Garfield was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC. Though he denied communist ties and refused to name names, his wife's past Communist party membership and his own associations led to his blacklisting. 

The stress of this ordeal, combined with his fragile heart, took a toll. Work in Hollywood, dried up, pushing him back to Broadway where he starred in a 1952 revival of Golden Boy. On May 20th, 1952, he suffered a fatal heart attack at age 39. His death was attributed to long-term heart damage, though many believe the blacklist's emotional strain hastened it. 

His funeral drew thousands, rivaling Rudolph Valentino's in scale.  

Robert Nott: I wonder sometimes when we talk about the code of ethics that kids learned on the streets --they probably still do today in New York City --how much of that code of ethics for John Garfield was tied to his religion, his culture, his Jewish identity. 

And that code of ethics at a time when he really came under a lot of pressure from the government, (which would scare any of us if they suddenly put us out there and said name, names) that held firm in his heart. He just would not give that up. He would not name names. A lot of people like to romanticize that and say that's why he died. 

I, I suspect it was one of many reasons for a guy who had a bad heart that he died, but I'm always wondering how deeply that was tied, not just to his roots in Rivington Street, but to be a Jewish American.