Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers Boaz Hagin Helene Meyers, Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 224 pp. 12 b&w images. Cloth $120. Paperback $34.95. 9781978821897, 9781978821880 How can we discuss Jewish identities in an era that calls for inclusion and diversity but also restricts debate in its polarized online echo chambers, sanitized trigger-free histories, and rigid identity politics that sometimes relegate Jewishness to privileged whiteness? In Movie-Made Jews, Helene Meyers constructs an undogmatic, usable tradition of American Jewish motion pictures that through her often-brilliant readings can become a pluralistic “resource for healing a community riven by religious and political fault lines” (7). Inspired by Laura Mulvey’s landmark feminist work from the 1970s that demonstrated how films reinforced subjectivities, Meyers argues that fiction and documentary films make and remake Jews. This happens through an array of diverse onscreen characters and filmmakers, including ultra-Orthodox Jews, secular Jews, cultural Jews, honorary Jews, the Jewishly literate, and gentiles misidentified as Jews (such as Garry Marshall, whose son grew up suffering from bar mitzvah envy, and Charlie Chaplin). Moreover, following Mulvey, Meyers explores the politics and pleasures of the gaze not only between characters within a film but also from behind the camera and in the audience. Writers, directors, producers, and actors discover and reassess varied ways of being Jewish while researching films, spending time with their subjects as they make documentaries, and meeting Jews and allies when shooting on location. Non-Jewish filmmakers take part in this work, and, in this book, there is no prohibition against the “Jewface” casting of gentile actors as Jewish characters. In addition, analyzing reviews, commentaries, and intertextual allusions, Meyers shows how different audiences decode the films, talk back to them, and ignore or position them as Jewish as well as feminist, queer, and in alliance or tension with other identities, such as Muslims and Blacks. There is meaning in the choice to screen a film at Jewish or other themed film festivals and in frameworks like schools and cultural and religious centers. Jews are made not only within films but also in the cultural work involved in the production and reception of motion pictures. The usable Jewish American tradition that Meyers constructs is one of thought-provoking debate and difficult questions. It acknowledges the important role of Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer (1927) and figures like [End Page 259] Woody Allen who have been accused of deplorable acts. It creates a conversation that brings different perspectives into dialogue, and, at one point, amusingly stages a disagreement between the author and “the commonsense Jew” in her head who has a strong Brooklyn accent and thinks the author is “meshugge” (22). It is a tradition that invites us to re-view, re-hear, and re-think films more generously and expansively and find value in the work they do. Meyers is particularly eager to show us the cultural work performed by documentaries and lesser-known micro-budget productions; popular movies too easily dismissed as mere vulgar comedies, sentimental schmaltz, nostalgia, or guilty pleasures; films trapped in the double-bind of not being Jewish enough and being too Jewish; and the earnest work of supposedly privileged Hollywood insiders. The book offers novel insights into some significant earlier films including Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and The Pawnbroker (1964) but mostly focuses on works since the 1970s. Among others, the book discusses The Way We Were (1973) and Crossing Delancey (1988); Jewish works by Allen, the Coen Brothers, Barry Levinson, and Paul Mazursky; and limit cases in which the Jewishness of the protagonists is marginalized in the texts but not necessarily in their reception, like the Ruth Bader Ginsburg 2018 documentary RBG and Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk biopic Milk (2008). Movie-Made Jews does not argue that Jewish representations follow a single historical trajectory and especially not that they “progress” (13). Rather, it is organized in thematic chapters that discuss a selection of films chronologically. The first considers the possibility that antisemitism makes Jews and their allies. The next chapter provocatively suggests that the indirect and coded presence of...