Satchmo and the Jews

He was the most beloved jazz musician of the 20th century, and according to this piece by music critic Terry Teachout, Louis Armstrong was also a great friend of the Jews.

He was similarly admiring of the Karnofskys, a family of Jewish peddlers from Lithuania for whom he had worked as a boy in New Orleans. In 1969 he wrote a lengthy memoir of his relationship with the Karnofskys called “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family in New Orleans, La., the Year of 1907.” In it he told of how surprised he had been to discover that they “were having problems of their own—[a]long with hard times from the other white folks[’] nationalities who felt that they were better than the Jewish race. . . . I was only Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.”

The young Armstrong saw the Karnofskys’ problems up close, for they took him under their wing, treating him almost like a relative. “They were always warm and kind to me, which was very noticeable to me—just a kid who could use a little word of kindness,” he recalled. He shared meals with them and borrowed money from them to buy his first cornet. Thereafter he would identify with the Karnofskys and the other Jews of New Orleans so closely that he became an ardent philo-Semite who wore a Star of David around his neck (Joe Glaser gave it to him). “I will love the Jewish people, all of my life,” he wrote in “Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family,” adding that he learned from them “how to live—real life and determination.”

One of the most striking aspects of Armstrong’s memoir of the Karnofskys is the explicitness with which it compares their conduct to that of New Orleans’s black community. Armstrong was impressed by the way in which the Jews whom he knew banded together in the face of prejudice, seeking to better their lot through work, and he was dismayed by the contrast with the irresponsibility of the fathers of the black children in his neighborhood. “Many [black] kids suffered with hunger because their Fathers could have done some honest work for a change,” he wrote. “No, they would not do that. It would be too much like Right. They’d rather lazy around + gamble, etc.”