On Toffell's Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain

Abstract

On Toffell's Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain Jingan Young Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain. By Gil Toffell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 233 pp., ISBN 978-1-137-56931-8, £93.59 Gil Toffell's Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain is a welcome and important addition to growing body of scholarship that examines the cultural output and contribution of British Jews in cinema studies. Toffell's chief consideration is of the British Jewish experience of cinemagoing and film as observed and lived by working-class and petit-bourgeois Jews in the urban centers of interwar Britain, such as London, Manchester, and Leeds. This is a wholly unique topic, particularly the focus on how Jewish neighborhoods mediated the spaces of the cinema and, in turn, revealed "the extent to which ordinary Jewish individuals experienced an active participation in, and alienation from, the national family, as well as the manner in which transnational affiliations between Jews in Britain, Europe and the USA were facilitated in the everyday" (5–6). This publication will interest researchers whose topics of interest include the interwar period, performance and experience of cinemagoing, spaces of consumption, forgotten Jewish films, British Jewish press history, and the relationship between Hollywood and British film industries in the context of Jewish representation. Toffell argues that despite the growing scholarship on the British-Jewish experience through landmark volumes by other scholars, "One area that has … [End Page 255] received less attention is the sphere of culture. … Given the prominence of cinema-going in interwar leisure lives this represents a significant blind spot in assessing the cultural preferences and social behaviours of ordinary British Jews during those years" (4). Echoing a seminal work that highlights the scarcity of academic scholarship on British Jewish figures working in the British film industry, Toffell states that it also remains a complex issue for "Jewish Studies [which] has failed to take cinema seriously, then, for the most part, Film Studies has ignored British Jews" (5). Toffell lays out his argument in seven well-structured chapters, including an introduction and an epilogue. He uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining textual analysis, archival material, cinema ephemera, and newspaper commentary to provide us with an expansive view of the promotion, reception, and content of films on Jewish themes specifically marketed for Jewish communities. Included in this methodology are semi-structured interviews collected by the author with members of various Jewish neighborhoods who were children or young adults during the interwar period. This decision to capture data on memory was made to "examine how film and film-going might structure the memory" as it "remains an important tool for narrating marginal and otherwise historical moments" (14). Toffell begins his examination of filmgoing Jewish communities in 1931. In chapter 2, "The Spaces and Places of Jewish Cinema Culture," he looks at the way cinema has a "communalising rather than individualising technology"; he looks first at British Jewish cinema culture in the United States because although it "may appear counterintuitive … there is a historiographic purpose" (22–23). Despite the vast differences in the "social conditions" of immigrant Jews in the United States and Britain, Toffell argues, "during the first decade of the twentieth century similarities significant for narrating the emergence of Jewish-run cinemas on either side of the Atlantic were in effect" (22–23). This is followed by a comparative study of how New York Jews came to "enhance an autonomous Jewish cultural realm" by creating exhibition spaces in order to meet the changing tastes of Jewish consumers (24). Toffell then discusses the mushrooming of film halls and exhibition spaces in the East End of London in this period, where the "film-going scene would be at its richest and most sizeable" (24). Chapter 3, "Films of Jewish Interest," largely examines the tastes of Jewish cinema audiences in Britain, along with the variety of generic forms they were offered by exhibitors of the period. A large proportion of these cinema programmers [End Page 256] claimed their tastes represented "the lives of Jews … produced for the generalised audiences of new mass consumer markets, and niche titles oriented to ethnically marked dispositions and interests, such as Yiddish...