Jimmy Cagney, the Best Yiddish Speaker in Hollywood

 

James Cagney, the American actor best known for playing tough guys in gangster films and for winning an Oscar for playing George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, was a fluent Yiddish speaker.

He spoke Yiddish in a few of his films, including Taxi (1932) and The Fighting 69th (1940).

As Henry Sapoznik wrote yesterday in The Jewish Daily Forward,

In his eponymous 1976 autobiography, Cagney crowed about his street cred zhargon that he learned from school friends who lived on the Lower East Side. And, while it does not appear that he employed Yiddish as a stage performer in New York, Cagney’s eyebrow raising bilingual skills became famous in Hollywood.

One oft repeated story was how during Cagney’s first negotiations at Warners, the brothers – not realizing his language chops — attempted to outmaneuver him by periodically switching into Yiddish. Cagney not only joined in but also did so in a Yiddish better than theirs.

Here's the clip of Cagney as a taxi driver in Taxi. He watches as a man (played by burlesque and vaudeville actor Joe Barton) tries to ask an Irish policeman how to get to Ellis Island to see his wife. When he sees that the man can't get through to the cop and says he has a goyishe kop, Cagney asks the man in Yiddish where he wants to go. The man, surprised, asks Cagney if he is Jewish. Cagney replies, "What then, a shaygetz?"

Enjoy the video excerpt.

 

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