On Reznik's New Jews? New Jews?: Race and Identity in 21st-Century Film. By David L. Reznik. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm, 2012. 193 pp., ISBN 978-1-61205-071-3 (hc). US $96.00.In New Jews?: Race and Identity in 21st-Century Film, sociologist David L. Reznik explores the persistence of four stereotypes in postmillennial Hollywood cinema. Through study of more than fifty films released theatrically between 2000 and 2009 and 125 characters, Reznik categorizes and identifies the twenty-first century's racialized images of meddling matriarchs, neurotic nebbishes, pampered princesses, and scheming scumbags. His qualitative analysis delimits content through attention only to those films that contain at least one central character identified directly in the film as American Jewish or one that pronouncedly embodies traits of one of the stereotypes under consideration. In chapters devoted to each of the four figures, Reznik scrutinizes character physiognomy, communication styles, and behaviors alongside social roles (e.g., occupation, class status), emotional nature (e.g., warm/cold, anxious/calm), and what Reznik terms thematic concerns (e.g., characters' political views, values). Most generally the study is a response to the concept of the new Jew in Hollywood cinema, a figure alleged to challenge traditional stereotypes through subversion, transcendence, or redefinition (viii). The author is particularly concerned with conceptions of America as a postracial society, and a goal of his study is the revaluation of Jews as a racial minority.Between introductory and concluding chapters on racial identity politics, Reznik offers considerations of family dynamics, romance and sexuality, material consumption, and political economy through discussion of stereotypes. For example, his chapter on the mass media stereotype of the mother considers the changing form and function of the family through its meddling matriarchs. A paragraph in the introduction explains that this stereotype emerged from the archetypal figure of the 'Jewish mother,' who owes her dominant appearance and personality to a diasporic history in often-hostile environments where the duty of keeping the family together was largely leftto the mother (3-4). The meddling matriarch is differentiated from other racialized immigrant mothers through her overnurturance and manipulation through guilt, perfectly exemplified for Reznik in the giant projected mother-in-the-sky of Woody Allen's Oedipus Wrecks segment in New York Stories (1989).Within the specific chapter devoted to this figure, Reznik concentrates on twenty-first-century images only. He outlines her traits: loudmouthed, nitpicky, overbearing, overprotective, and domineering (with respect to her husband) and pushy (with regard to her son's romantic life) (40). He finds the presence of this enduring stereotype in nearly half of the films under consideration. Drawing conclusions from work with thirty-five representations, Reznik finds two versions of the meddling matriarch: historically constructed (traditional) and evolved. In the former category he places characters such as Michele Lee's Vivian Feffer in Along Came Polly (2004). The evolved figure, who features traditional characteristics of the stereotype but reflects cultural changes in women's roles, is exemplified by such characters as Anne Bancroft's neo-Bohemian divorcee Ruth in Keeping the Faith (2000).For Reznik, the stereotype even transgresses gender and generation in examples of meddling matriarch fathers, children, siblings, and friends. …