Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of an Image by Shaina Hammerman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of an Image by Shaina Hammerman Valerie Weinstein (bio) Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of an Image. By Shaina Hammerman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. xxix + 157 pp. Shaina Hammerman's Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews makes a valuable contribution to a growing body of scholarly work on Jewish visibility in cinema. Hammerman analyzes key examples of U.S. and French films from the 1970s to the present, situating them in their respective social, political, and historical contexts and within distinct national discourses on religion, multiculturalism, and acculturation. Organizing her analyses around images of Hasidic men, Hammerman conceptualizes [End Page 99] the cinematic image of the male Hasid as a hypervisible, opaque, and overdetermined signifier of Jewishness. She explores this signifier's symbolic functions vis-à-vis cinematic representations of hegemonic Americanness and Frenchness; other religious and ethnic minorities such as Native Americans and Muslims; and less clearly visible Jews, which includes assimilated Jews of all genders and observant women. Hammerman's comparative approach highlights the variability, contingency, and flexibility of meanings conveyed by Hasidic Jewish costumes and characters and how they function to inscribe Jews within U.S. and French multiculturalisms. In the first chapter, Hammerman discusses The Frisco Kid as a "Hasidic western," an attempt to visualize the meaning of American Jewish identity using the mythology and iconography of the Wild West and to locate an ethnic Jewish identity in the tension between cowboy and Indian. In Hammerman's reading, Gene Wilder's Hasidic garb and various costume changes serve as privileged sites for working through competing paradigms of performance and authenticity in U.S. multiculturalism of the late 1970s. Chapter Two turns to Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob, showing how Hasidic costume and comedy navigate the unique terrain of Jewishness and Frenchness in the early 1970s. On the one hand, this film envisions the inclusion of Jews and Muslims and friendship between Jewish, Muslim, and Catholic French. On the other hand, according to Hammerman, by visualizing Jewishness primarily through the Hasidic man, Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob draws narrow conceptual, cultural, and spatial boundaries around Jewishness, excluding less visible Jewish identities that are historically and ideologically more troubling to dominant ideas of Frenchness. In Chapter Three, Hammerman scrutinizes Hasidic and Orthodox Jewish imagery in Woody Allen's films and around his public persona. Contrary to what one might expect, Hammerman argues, the films Allen made after his very public personal scandals—particularly Deconstructing Harry—depict religious women as complex, nuanced, and desexualized subjects, because of the subtle visibility of their religiosity. The image and costume of the Hasidic man, however, function in a pornographic manner, displaying an objectified Jewishness that is vivid, sexualized, and impenetrable. Chapter Four strays from the central image of the male Hasid, looking at three depictions of Jewish-Muslim romance (some secular, some religious) in French film from the first decade of the twenty-first century. While falling rather outside the promise of the book's title, this chapter nevertheless performs some very interesting conceptual work and [End Page 100] connects the analysis of Hasidic imagery in other chapters to resonant contemporary debates about religion, migration, and French identity. The analyses in this chapter compare the signifying power of Hasidic garb and the hijab, reflect on the corresponding gendered reversal of Jewish and Muslim visibility, and deepen readers' understanding of French secularism, multiculturalism, and sexualization of national identity. In Chapter Five, Hammerman returns to where she began—American cinema in the 1970s—with an astute reading of Hester Street. Hammerman shows how this film exemplifies and navigates a tension between nostalgia for fantasized ethnic origins and second wave feminism, symptomatic of its era. In doing so, she explains both Hester Street's production and the protagonist's immigrant experience as adaptations, processes of mutation that produce a "new original" (126). I enjoyed this book very much. By presenting her film analyses in dialogue with current events and writing in a clear accessible style, Hammerman has written a book that will appeal to students and scholars in film studies, Jewish studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, American studies, French studies, and beyond. The chapters could be read together...