Steven Spielberg, Natalie Portman, Jon Stewart, Alicia Silverstone, Leonard Nimoy. And, well, there's always Madonna. At Jewsweek, these and other icons of Jewish pop culture represent our bread and butter, our bagels and lox if you will. But what does it all mean really?

All that is Jewish in pop culture is not merely a chance to laugh, to be entertained. The memory of where we've been is told through the lens of our culture, our famous fellow tribe mates tell us where we are, and possibly where we're going. In short, pop culture is more than, well, pop. Believe it or not, there's substance beneath the surface.

Since the dawn of mass media, and well before that, Jews have been slipping in the bedroom windows of popular culture. We've been making movies, putting on plays, singing little ditties, and writing our collective kippahs off. The result has been a pervasive Jewish influence in the history of film and television, the dawn of popular music from rock to hip-hop.

Most significant, what are the historic highlights of Jewish pop? What do these moments in time represent? Are they merely points of pride or are they symbolic signposts? Perhaps they show us where we've come, and how we got there.

Looking back at the past half-century of Jewish pop serves as one of the best blueprints, road maps if you will, to that evolution.

In just the past 50 years alone, give or take a few years, we can trace the Jewish pulp and comic writers - who hid their Judaism but managed to work it subtly into the mythos of our most beloved superheroes - through to the ubiquitous Jews who dot our modern television landscape. The story is both American and Jewish, representative of how the two have been fused in the history of what we've watched, listened to, and fallen in love with.

Sometimes, they say, entertainment is just fun. Sometimes, it's more.

Cleveland kids who leapt tall buildings...

With 13 pages, published in Action Comics no. 1, a little pulp magazine that sold for a dime, Superman was born. That was 1938, but the penultimate superhero wouldn't fully flesh out its mythology for several years. The planet Krypton, the various cast of characters, and the bald Lex Luthor only fully emerged in the 1940s and 1950s.

But lest anyone think of Superman merely as a vanilla, all-American story about a man with a penchant for red and blue tights, it's important to remember the two Cleveland boys who created him.

After graduating from Glenville High School together, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster crafted the Man of Steel. They were initially rejected by a slew of comic strip houses, but ultimately sold the rights for less than $200, which would ultimately deprive them of the massive wealth Superman would generate.

But while their business acumen probably won't serve as any point of pride among Jews, the subtle parallels between the Jewish immigrant experience and Superman himself have produced reams of pontification on just how Jewish the Krypton cast-off really is.

Noted cartoonist Jules Feiffer has described the Superman series as the "ultimate assimilationist fantasy," pointing out that, "It wasn't Krypton that Superman really came from; it was the planet Minsk."

It's not such a far off idea. Superman was, after all, the uber-immigrant turned into an American by his adoptive parents. His jaunt off to the biggest of big cities, to live the role of nebbish reporter Clark Kent, just trying to get the girl, plays into Jewish self-image stereotypes while reflecting the immigrant desire to fully enter and excel in WASP-world.

Jewish authors, particularly pulp fiction authors, in the 1940s and 1950s didn't make much hay about their Hebrew roots. With that in mind, how much more of a mirror is Superman's dual life, his writing gig as the fictional Clark Kent, and his night job as his true self, the triumphant super mensch?

Schtick in the Catskills

But while Jewish pulp writers were crafting caper-foiling superheroes, the middle of the 20th century also featured a network of resorts that dotted the Catskill Mountains and gave birth to the who's who of Jewish comics for decades to come.

From Max Liebman to Sid Caesar, the Catskill resorts entertained their patrons with Catskill comedians, Jewish funny men who made material with a healthy smattering of Yiddish. Nevele (named after 11, spelled backwards), the Avon Lodge, the White Roe Inn, all were staging grounds for the world of Jewish comedy in the second half of the 20th century.

But while Catskill comedy provided a safe place to explore Jewish humor and Jewish self-deprecation, it also provided a mainstream jumping off point for a legion of Jewish entertainers. Danny Kay, Jerry Lewis, and a host of others took their tours through the Borscht Belt, then proceeded to make it big in television and Hollywood.

These comics, the children of immigrants, managed to balance the playful self-deprecation that marks so much of Jewish humor with a conscious desire to assimilate. The Catskills gave them safety to hone their skills, but the comfort of the mountain resorts wasn't the end in and of itself.

The true highlight of the burgeoning Jewish humorists from the 1950s was a little TV show that played five seasons: Your Show of Shows. Looking back, it's hard to imagine just how much talent teemed out of that comedy-variety program. Its writers included Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Neil Simon. Each week, it would offer up an entirely new Broadway revue with comedy sketches galore, but while the show was overflowing with Jewish comedians, it diverged from the Borscht Belt roots of its creators - it didn't include much overt Judaism.

Indeed, the mainstream press, which hailed the show for pushing the quality of television upward never bothered to mention the Jewishness of the show. As with most Jewish influences in pop culture of that time period, even the highlights weren't overtly Jewish. They sufficed with inside jokes and winks to the tribe.

You may now officially say the "F" word

The image of Jewish comedy, however, changed in a very big way with the introduction of Lenny Bruce in the waning years of the 1950s and into the early 1960s. Decidedly unlike those who came out of the Borscht Belt and wrote for Your Show of Shows, Bruce pushed the envelope of what constituted acceptable comedic language, and got arrested for it.

In 1961, he was arrested in San Francisco (of all places) for performing an obscene show. His crime was using a certain unmentionable word for a purveyor of oral stimulation, and while he was acquitted, he managed to get arrested for the same offense another half dozen times between 1962 and 1964. Before he died in 1966, Bruce had redefined comedic acceptability, paving the way for the George Carlins, Richard Pryors, Eddie Murphies, and other less tzniut comics of our day.

But Bruce also talked about his Judaism, or more specifically, his perceptions on the Jewish community and the gentile world. He was funny about it, but as opposed to those who came before him, he was also overt and public about it. What Bruce did was make fun of his community, play up their stereotypes to the point of absurdity and then poke at them. As he spoke to a predominantly non-Jewish world, and as he legally and culturally stepped afoul of the more mainstream Jewish community, he managed to make Jews seem less threatening, more hip and less like the reviled "other" and more like the foul-mouthed every guy down the street.

In that way, he represented the slow emergence of identity politics that would explode the decade after he made his mark. Bruce also served as a reflection of the increasing willingness of Jews to assert themselves as overt parts of the Americana tapestry.

Was he self-hating? Probably, though not because he was a Jew. He ended up destroying himself in a pool of drugs and a paranoid lifestyle that saw him targeted by the FBI. But whatever he was, his portrayal of Jewish humor, of Jewish stereotypes, reflected a larger awakening of open Jewish confidence with their role in society.

The kosher coon and the ultimate shiksappeal score

But before Bruce was the heeb going hip, there were hipsters going heeb. The 1960s also displayed the prominence of Jewish conversion among the celebrity elite, a cultural milestone to be sure in a predominantly Christian country.

The year was 1956. There was Sammy Davis Jr., a Rat Pack alum and arguably the coolest black man in America at the time. He was easily the most accepted black celebrity. But after a near-fatal car crash took his left eye, Davis began rethinking his relationship to "The Cat Upstairs," as he liked to refer to the artist otherwise known as Hashem.

Sammy's conclusions: The Jews were a "swinging bunch of people," who'd survived centuries of persecution and still managed to make decent movies. Davis Jr. was known to view the world in simple, idealized terms, and the Jews were no different, but nonetheless he was moved to join us.

And so he did, though his celebrity turned the whole affair into a headline grabber and served as one of many lightning rods in early 1960s controversies over race and religious pluralism in America. His role as a black Jew made him a target, to put it mildly, and he was once interrupted mid-performance in Washington, D.C. by a group of Neo-Nazis demanding he "go back to the Congo" and calling him a "kosher coon."

The year of Sammy's slip into the mikvah, however, also saw the conversion of one Miss Marilyn Monroe, who found herself as the new Mrs. Arthur Miller. The prolific Jewish playwright met Monroe at a cocktail party in Hollywood, and some years later they met back up after her divorce from Joe DiMaggio. Love blossomed, but when a dinner discussion regarding marriage plans cropped up, Marilyn made a strange request.

"I think I'd like to have a rabbi," she said. Just one problem: she wasn't Jewish and a rabbi wouldn't marry the couple. Easily fixed, Marilyn converted in June of 1956, flanked by Rabbi Robert Goldburg, Miller, and his family. She even got a musical menorah that played Hatikvah as a gift.

Like Sammy's religious switch, Monroe's conversion generated headlines and was featured on the cover of Modern Screen magazine later that year. There was less controversy for Monroe than for Sammy, and ultimately Monroe would face a far more tragic fate than the black Rat Pack member, but for a while, at least, celebrities were doing Jewish and doing it well. The ultimate shiksa had snagged herself a Jewish boy, and the Jews had snagged themselves a couple of pop culture superstars.

From New York with love

By the 1970s and into the 1980s, Jewish influence was out and open. Nothing exemplified that more than the role Woody Allen, the Weinstein brothers, and Lloyd Kaufman would play in building up the New York film industry.

Today, Miramax is a cinematic titan, distributing some of the best and highest-grossing films of the year. But when it started in 1979, the project of brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein was just another small time distributor of concert films. Branching out to become a distributor of independent films off the festival circuit, it quietly built itself up as the hub of New York distribution houses and became the de facto center of what little existed of a New York film world.

While the Weinsteins were hitting big on the business end of New York film distribution, Woody Allen was turning the 1970s and 1980s into his personal playground for Jewish neuroses on celluloid. Over the course of those two decades, he became synonymous with the Big Apple, making all his films there and capturing the magic of Manhattan for the silver screen.

And while those Jewish boys were helping to build up the mainstream New York cinematic form, another Jewish boy was doing the underground proud. Lloyd Kaufman, head of Troma Entertainment, has built an independent cult following with lots of blood, breasts, and beasts. Not particularly the stuff of Jewish religious chic, but Kaufman is arguably the biggest independent film force of all time, all out of his compact and cluttered Ninth Avenue office.

The thing about Kaufman, Allen, and the Weinsteins, is that they've been overtly Jewish. In contrast to the Jewish moguls who built Hollywood half a century earlier, New York's Jewish pop voice has never shied away from being openly Jewish and proud of it.

Nobody ever bothered to complain that a Jewish cabal was controlling New York City filmmaking, and not just because the Jewish greats were joined by the likes of Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, or other gentiles. If the Jewish cultural influence of the middle part of the century was covert, under the radar, and full of winks and nods to the tribe, the Jewish media mogul wannabes were out of the cultural closet by the 1980s.

Elsewhere in New York, a few middle-class Jewish kids running around the punk underground emerged as inheritors of the hip-hop home, forming the Beastie Boys to critical scorn and popular acclaim. That a group of white kids could do rap was thought anathema to hip-hop purists, but with time and a healthy infusion of underground influences, the Beasties helped turn hip-hop mainstream.

And so it was in the 1980s. Jews were pushing culturally revolutionary trends and underground productions, at the same time members of the tribe were being portrayed in the mainstream fare in increasingly diverse lime lights. The two themes eventually converged, as the indie film and underground music scenes became mainstream phenomenon in the 1990s. Jews had finally hit it big, and the rest of America was taking notice that they were Jewish, even reveling in Jewish as chic.

Discuss...

Nothing could have put that on display more than how much Jewish characters, actors, and occasionally caricatures were showing up on the small screen in the 1980s and 1990s.

How was it that a gentile Canadian, in the form of Mike Meyers, most effective captured the bubbe stereotype with the Coffee Talk skits on Saturday Night Live? Jews, culture, full acceptance in American life. Discuss.

Meanwhile, from Fran Drescher to Jerry Seinfeld, Jews and Jewish stereotypes were being redefined, torn down, and played for laughs in the early 1990s. The number of sitcoms featuring Jewish strands now includes even Sex and the City, where the waspiest of all WASPs has converted, toured the Jewish dating scene, and gotten married under a chupah.

From Will & Grace to Keeping the Faith, a whole new generation takes their Jewish cultural influence as an overt, out of the closet affair. Non-Jews are claiming Jewish cred, doing Jewish characters not as the butt of racist stereotyping, but as humorous and positive parts of the American cultural experience.

But the cultural experience of Jews isn't just a long laundry list of entertainers and funny one-liners. The evolution of Jewish influence, from the subtle and universalistic forms of Superman and 1950s variety shows through the identity politics and Jewish emergence of the 1960s and 1970s right up into the underground influences and cultural leaders of the 1980s and 1990s, Jewish culture has been as much about the Jewish journey into the American mainstream as anything else. We've come a long, long way.