An Open Letter to Jon StewartBring back Leibowitz!

Jon StewartDear Jon Stewart,

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You probably don't recall, but I was one of your earliest, most enthusiastic media admirers. I wrote a column nearly a decade ago, shortly after you took over The Daily Show, when you were still struggling for recognition of your genius, before the massive media love-in that took a while to develop. My column then took the form of an open letter to David Letterman, about how his show was getting tired and how he ought to get Jon Stewart to replace him. (I like open letters.) I talked about how much I loved the perfect pitch of your TV "newsmagazine" parodies but most of all how I was blown away by your astonishing quickness of wit, most evident in the unscripted interviews. I called you "an idiot savant" of comedy. (That was a compliment—ignore the idiot part, focus on the savant.)

So please know I'm writing as an admirer, someone who thinks you have the courage as well as comedic smarts to take the simple but radical step I'm going to suggest.

I want you to change your name. Back to Leibowitz. Stewart is just so 20^th-century, a relic of that dark age when Jews in show biz changed their names because they feared "real Americans" wouldn't accept the originals.

It's not as if you're trying to hide your Jewishness in your TV persona. As the Jewish magazine Moment put it:

As his star has risen, Stewart, born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, has also become an ambassador of Jewishness. Dispensing Jewish humor like a tic, Stewart's impish grin, self-deprecating punch lines and jokey cultural references are a staple of the show. He has referred to himself as "Jewey Von Jewstein" and cracked wise on Jewish noses, circumcision, anti-Semites ... and his grandma at Passover.

It's almost as if the Leibowitz in you is trying desperately to escape from behind the mask of the Stewart. So why not set it free? Change the name back?

At this point, it wouldn't hurt you. It would only help you: Most of your fans would see it as a touching gesture. And you'd no doubt get lots of comedic mileage out of it. I'm sure that you could milk the buildup and get a good-natured laugh out of the audience every time you used Leibowitz or pretended to get confused.

And, on a more serious note, it would represent the end of a shabby, antiquated era, pronouncing that aspect of anti-Semitism now (hopefully) dead and gone. It might even make it easier for young comedians, actors, and rock stars to resist the temptation to try to "pass." (Although, frankly, I hope that Gene Simmons of Kiss keeps his origins hidden from those who don't know about them.) It could be an important cultural moment.

Don't you think it's about time for Jews to reject the rejection of their ancestry and the WASP-ification of their names? Not just you, but all Jews in show business, indeed all Jews in business business. The practice might once have served a purpose, back in the '20s and '30s, when it was insisted upon by powerful but fearful Hollywood movie moguls who wanted Jewish talent but were afraid of Jewish names seeming un-American to the mass of the populace who, it's probably true at that time, suffered from a low-grade case of anti-Semitism. Or nativist hostility to foreign names in general. So Issur Danielovitch Demsky became Kirk Douglas. (You could have gone with Kirk Leibowitz.)

It's strange, isn't it? Shouldn't that era be long over? And yet it persists, diminished somewhat. In fact, you're one of the last to feel the need to do it. I mean, it pains me to say this, given how I feel about the man, but … Jerry Seinfeld. It hurts me, anyway, as the nation's leading anti-Seinfeldian, that he gets credit for exploiting a watered-down version of his ethnicity by retaining his identifiable Jewish last name. The Jerry Stone Show? Would sink like one. (Although, come to think of it: George playing an "Italian"? With those parents? What's up with that? A kind of retro "quota"? Would making him a Jew, too, have been one Jew too many?)

You might ask: Why do I bring this whole thing up now? I was wondering that myself. I thought it might have something to do with Bob Dylan changing his name from Zimmerman back in the early '60s, since I'm working on a book for Yale University Press' "Jewish Lives" series on Dylan and religion and one crux of the Dylan mystery is whether Dylan would have become Dylan—despite all that talent—if he'd remained Zimmerman.

But, actually, I think I started thinking about your last name because of Michael Jackson. Because since his death, I've been focusing for the first time—staring in amazement, really—at images of his whiter-than-white face.

I guess you could make the case that Michael just happened to think he looked better that way, that there's no need to introduce theories about racial pathology, or the oppressed internalizing the aesthetic values of the oppressor, into the discussion. He had every right to make himself look white if he felt like it.

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.

Photograph of Jon Stewart by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images.

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