aren't they all?
(Golden Globe winner) Sacha Baron Cohen reminisced about his dissertation in an LA Times interview last week:
Born into a middle-class family in London, Cohen had early dreams of being a basketball player or a break dancer. He spent a year on a kibbutz as a teenager and was a member of Habonim, a Socialist-Zionist youth movement that he jokes "basically meant that we shared our sweets." He was ambivalent about becoming a performer. "I think I was embarrassed to admit to my friends or myself that I wanted to be a comic — it was sort of like admitting you wanted to be a model."
At Cambridge he read history, spending a summer in the U.S. researching a dissertation on the prominent role Jews played in the American civil rights movement titled "The Black-Jewish Allies: A Case of Mistaking Identity." As the title suggests, he was already fascinated by the Ali G-like notion that irony and identity play a big role in cultural differences.
"I was writing this at the time of the Crown Heights riots when the Jewish community was obsessed with black anti-Semitism," he explains. "And I argued that this obsession came out of Jews feeling betrayed by their old blood brothers from the civil rights movement. But while it was perceived in the Jewish community that Jews were disproportionately involved in civil rights, my conclusion was black Americans didn't see Jews as being more involved than any white Americans.
"The Jewish kids were all there in the South, but because they were there as part of church organizations like the [Southern Christian Leadership Council], they weren't seen as Jews, but as white liberals. So there was this deep irony that the Jewish establishment took martyrs like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner" — two civil rights workers from New York who went to Mississippi to register black voters and were killed by the Ku Klux Klan — "and used them as symbols of a Jewish-black alliance when, in fact, they didn't really see themselves as Jews at all."
Cohen pauses, drolly adding: "The dissertation is a lot funnier than I depicted it."
