Jewish Characters Research Articles

Going Unseen in the Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Magical Tradition

Abstract After a brief methodological introduction, the article reconstructs invisibility magic, its uses and rationale in medieval and early modern Jewish culture, based on a rich selection of manuscript texts, many of which remain unpublished. In contrast to other treatments of invisibility magic, it argues that in this specific cultural context the desire of going unseen was often motivated by contingent purposes such as protection on the road and self-defense. Some techniques of Jewish invisibility magic exhibit a marked Jewish character, some were inspired by the observation of nature, others were modulated on popular motifs shared cross-culturally. This study demonstrates that, regardless to their nature, most of these techniques were reworked according to a Jewish taste, proving that invisibility magic was not an extravagant import from foreign traditions, but an integral part of a magical culture shared by many Jews during the Middle Ages and early modern period.

Multilingualism, Music and Gendered Roles in Unorthodox

Through a multidisciplinary approach that combines translation studies and gender studies, this paper analyzes multilingualism in the series Unorthodox (Netflix 2020). We examine the presence and functions of identities and gendered roles in the series. Unorthodox tells the story of Esther Saphiro (Esty), a young Jewish woman who flees from her country and leaves her ultra-Orthodox community, with very strict rules and traditional gender roles. We explore the connections between the gendered roles of the main characters, their cultural or social contexts, and, especially, the role of third languages in the series (Yiddish, German, Russian, and Hebrew). As it is a German-American production, we consider English as its main language (L1) because the story is directed to mainstream Western audiences. The role of third languages (L3) is very relevant in depicting the intercultural encounters in the series. Yiddish is the most prominent L3 followed by German and a little Russian and Hebrew. The most recurrent functions of L3-instances are signaling otherness and character portrayal, where Yiddish and German are used. Hebrew is used for ceremonies, prayers and songs, and it portrays Jewish characters in their traditional contexts. We pay special attention to songs, as rich L3 instances, where there is interaction of L3 function, gender significance, translation strategies, and narrative roles. The translation of songs shows the relative importance of conveying the word or the music. Finally, the identification of third languages is not marked in the subtitling of either songs or dialogues; therefore, language diversity can be hindered for audiences not discriminating between the various languages.

Holocaust denial, Le Vicaire, and the absent presence of Nadine Fresco and Paul Rassinier in Jorge Semprún's La Montagne blanche

The importance to Jorge Semprún of confronting Holocaust denial in Vichy Syndrome France is not central to analyses that have been done of La Montagne blanche. To detect it, we must do what Semprún never stops asking readers to do: visit the external worlds to which his text directs us and reread his corpus so as to return with new insights and questions to pose to the text at hand. This essay examines La Montagne blanche in light of Semprún's presentation of Jewish characters in Le grand voyage; his adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth's Le Vicaire; his critique of the Communist party's belated acknowledgment of the gulag; his relationships to the Holocaust denier and severe critic of the Communists at Buchenwald, Paul Rassinier, and to Nadine Fresco, the most penetrating analyst of Rassinier; and his attention to Holocaust denial when he wrote fiction rooted in historical situations. Holocaust denial is an erasure. La Montagne blanche draws our attention to that erasure in a novel in which the subject is hardly mentioned.

Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz

Reviewed by: Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero by Roy Schwartz Matthew Brake (bio) Roy Schwartz, Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero. McFarland, 2021. x + 364 pp, $45.00. In Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero, Roy Schwartz sets out to demonstrate that despite the many Christian allegories portraying Superman as a Christ figure (made popular by the 1978 Superman movie), Superman is actually a Jewish character. Schwartz's work joins a growing body of scholarship dedicated to parsing out the Jewishness of the Man of Steel. Schwartz himself makes note of works like Danny Fingeroth's Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007). While Schwartz does not mention it, one could suggest Martin Lund's 2016 book, Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish-Comics Connection, another text that examines Superman's supposed Jewishness (with a more critical eye toward the question). Schwartz offers three ways that his book uniquely contributes to this growing body of literature: "it examines the entirety of Superman's career, from 1938 to date, whereas others have limited themselves to his formative 'Golden Age,' ending around 1945, with a few ventures up to 1960. It also explores more deeply the Jewish parallels, including their theological, folkloric, historical and sociological meaning. And it's the first to focus exclusively on Superman" (5). One of the best ways to evaluate this book is to judge it by the criteria Schwartz lays out here. Starting with Schwartz's first point, the book is impressive in its breadth of material. Schwartz guides readers through Superman's origins and the early concepts from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster that eventually led to Superman's debut in Action Comics #1. From there, he doesn't stop until events from Brian Michael Bendis's recent run on the character, including when Superman reveals his identity to the world. Schwartz also references the recent CW television show Superman & Lois, which debuted in 2020. In between, he discusses Superman's depiction in various comic book publishing "ages" (i.e., the Golden Age, the Silver Age, etc.) as well as the various serials, television shows, movies, and other transmedia adaptations of the character. While a book like this will end up leaving some things out, Schwartz follows through [End Page 89] on his promise to explore the entirety of Superman's existence, from the early ideas leading to his creation to works that have appeared within the last two years, all the while attempting to highlight the Jewishness of the character. I will address the exploration of Jewish parallels last, but to Schwartz's claim that this book is the first to focus exclusively on Superman, that's not quite accurate. Lund's (previously mentioned) text predates Schwartz's by five years, although Lund's does confine itself to Superman's early years. Also, Schwartz's book does focus on Superman overall, although at times in deviates into a discussion, more broadly, on the history of comics in general and on Jewish contributions to the creation and growth of the industry specifically. This is fine, and is done to provide context for the claim of Superman's Jewishness, but there are places where the text veers off course into one of these other directions so that Schwartz needs to throw in a sentence to remind us that the book is about Superman's Jewishness. I direct a majority of my critiques to Schwartz's claim that the book more deeply explores Superman's Jewish parallels than many other texts. To this point, Schwartz does need to be commended for the breadth of material he has assembled in this text. It is an interesting survey of comics history as well as the Jewish presence in the comic book industry throughout this history. Many scholars studying the history of the Man of Steel may also appreciate this text as a resource to find primary and secondary sources for their own research. There are places where Schwartz makes the...

Ernest Hemingway’s Recognition of Ideologies of White Supremacy, Colonialism, and Anti-Semitism in The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway’s creation of a vilified Jewish character in The Sun Also Rises (1926) has outed him as anti-Semitic. His negative treatment of the Jewish character Robert Cohn can be read as an unpleasant portrait of Jews. Putting theories of postcolonialism in conversation with the theory of performativity, I read The Sun Also Rises (1926) as a narrative that challenges racial stereotypes generated by colonial discourses of race and ethnicity. This study challenges any claims of Hemingway’s anti-Semitism by investigating his defiance of notions of white supremacy and colonialism as inspired by scientific racism and its reinforcement and legitimization of white dominance. I contend that Hemingway’s deployment of anti-Semitic language and representations serves to illustrate his recognition and subversion of the racial hierarchies perpetuated by colonialism and scientific racism. Hemingway’s novel tends to unveil and interrogate notions of white supremacy and colonialism rather than to racialize Jews.

Grotesque Europe: The Gothic Grotesque and Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in Dead Europe

ABSTRACT Christos Tsiolkas’s Gothic novel Dead Europe (2005) has been criticised by some for its offensive representation of Jewish characters, and lauded by others as an unflinching interrogation of historical and contemporary anti-Semitism. The Gothic genre more broadly has a difficult history of rendering the marginalised Other as monstrous, and while contemporary writers often experiment with Gothic tropes to challenge and disrupt such representations, as a non-Jewish writer, Tsiolkas uses the figure of the monstrous Jew in problematic ways. This article analyses Dead Europe’s use of the Gothic grotesque in depicting Jewish characters, arguing that the novel engages in an ethical critique of anti-Semitic stereotypes using the grotesque’s ambivalence, overdetermination and ability to compel attention through shock and disgust.

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin

Reviewed by: The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism by Adrienne Williams Boyarin Miriamne Ara Krummel Adrienne Williams Boyarin. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. iii, 325. $79.95 cloth. Built on nearly two centuries of Jewish studies scholarship, Adrienne Williams Boyarin's The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess: The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism brings nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century scholars into conversation with each other to explore her observations about the distressing practice of "saming the Jew." Closing with a discussion of Grace Aguilar's 1847 essay "The Story of the Jews in England," Boyarin deploys the work of this "first author to attempt a history of medieval English Jewry" (222) to conclude her study of the misogynistic and antisemitic agenda that lingers in and fuels the veritable landmine that Boyarin terms the "politics of sameness" throughout her book. Boyarin's ideas are new, and her vision of sameness, especially in the production of the female Jewish characters, investigates how the viewer and reader are made to feel comfortable with Jewish proximity at the same time that "Judaism and living Jews" (224) are being erased. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess follows a somewhat unique structure that complements Boyarin's claims about sameness. The book opens in the usual way with a comprehensive introduction, aptly entitled "Saming the Jew," which announces how the monograph's larger project departs from the scholarship that has preceded hers: "Many studies of medieval anti-Jewish texts and images in recent decades have discussed difference. This book is concerned, instead, with realities and fantasies of sameness" (1). The note to this point clarifies the departure from recent criticism: a number of the works that have preceded The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess, Boyarin explains, "have discussed issues of Jewish–Christian contact and sameness in sensitive ways, though none has presented sameness as a primary frame of analysis for understanding anti-Jewish polemics" (245 n. 1). After the introduction The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess unfolds in two parts: Part 1, "The Potential of Sameness," and Part 2, "The Unmarked Jewess." Both parts 1 and 2 open with "Historiae" that provide intimate glances into the temporal liminalities that inhere in the lives of select pre-1290 Expulsion Jews who changed their Jewish identities into Christian ones. The dangers that inhere in desires for sameness are then enlarged upon in all five chapters of Boyarin's book. Throughout, the book traces the idea that medieval Jews—and all Jewish [End Page 376] difference associated with these Jews—were eliminated from English Christian society through the process of "saming the Jew." Part I's "Historiae," entitled "The Friar and the Foundling," opens the study of the intersection between sameness and Jewishness by pondering the thirteenth-century Jewish man Sampson, son of Samuel, who disguises himself as a "fratris minoris" or "Friar Minor" (The National Archives, Kew, E 9/24, m. 5d; cited in Appendix 1, 228, 229). Sampson, son of Samuel—a Jew who pretends to be a Franciscan—embodies the fraught intersections, imperiled boundaries, and close proximities of real and invented Christian and Jewish bodies. Along with a brief look into the narrative of Sampson's identity, Part 1's "Historiae" also considers the strange tale of the Jewished—that is, "recently circumcised" (23)—body of the Christian foundling Jurnepin/Odard. After the opening "Historiae," Part 1 theorizes the category of "sameness" in Chapters 1 and 2. The title of Chapter 1, "The Same, but Not Quite," intentionally echoes a line in Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994) when Bhabha refers to postcolonial identities as "almost the same, but not quite" (35; italics also Bhabha's). Boyarin also invokes Bhabha's notions of "partial presence" and the "incomplete" and "virtual" identities that are produced in her studies of the partly erased medieval English Jew. Chapter 2, "English 'Jews,'" presents typology as deploying "'Jewish' features" to design "the correct Christian self" (77), thereby...

Roth and the Jews: Another Look

Philip Roth's career was largely shaped by early criticism from Jewish leaders and organizations who were rankled by the less than savory Jewish characters in his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In particular, Roth's short story "Defender of the Faith," which depicted a Jewish soldier who uses his religion to shirk his military duties, prompted negative responses from a number of Jewish critics. While recent scholarship on Roth has often adopted Roth's claim that he was unfairly judged on what some perceived as his early unfavorable depictions of Jews and Jewish practice, the case is not as one-sided as Roth would have had his readers believe. This essay also takes a deeper look at some lesser-known material relating to Jewishness in Roth, including the Commentary letters responding to Roth's essay "Writing About Jews," and the Chofetz Chaim's thought on lashon hara (evil speech). During his career, Roth drew on Jewish sources such as the Chofetz Chaim and Vladimir Jabotinsky to provoke his critics while at the same time defending himself against charges of Jewish self-hatred.

Illuminating the Motives of Racism When Adapting and Directing The Merchant of Venice

ABSTRACT Based on my own experience of adapting and directing The Merchant of Venice, I discuss the challenges and responsibilities of portraying the Jewish characters, Shylock and Jessica in a twenty-first century production. Blending theory and practice, the rehearsal process and results in performance are expounded to provide a detailed account of how the context affects the practice and outcomes. Moreover, the motivations, intentions and distortions within the intricacies of interactions between characters is described and discussed to explore the myth of Jewish stereotypes.

Lesbian Identity and “Personal Dishonesty” in Lorraine Hansberry’s “Flowers for the General”

ABSTRACT Misconceptions and myths that surround Hansberry and her most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are examined through a close reading of an unpublished play from Lorraine Hansberry’s archived papers, “Flowers for the General” (1955). In this play, Hansberry articulates lesbian identity fully in the character Marcia. The play’s major themes of the importance of upholding sociopolitical beliefs, the possibility of a sustainable lesbian identity, and the commonalities between the lesbian, Jewish, African American, and working-class characters combine to create a significant statement at an early point in Hansberry’s career. Various cultural, social, and political obstacles prevented Hansberry’s writing on sexuality—which anticipates current critical conceptions of female sexuality, same-sex relationships, and homosocial bonds—from being published or staged. However, examination of archival materials such as “Flowers for the General” is a necessary step in expanding the view of Hansberry’s complex and contradictory life and work outside of A Raisin in the Sun.

Revolution in Paradise: Veiled Representations of Jewish Characters in Cinema of Occupied France

Revolution in Paradise: Veiled Representations of Jewish Characters in Cinema of Occupied France

Representations of Israel, literal and allegorical, in X-Men comics

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to argue that the Zionist idea offers an effective lens through which we can understand the X-Men comics. Through the metaphor of mutants as Jews, Marvel has presented readers with both literal representations of Israel and what can be read as a Jewish state. Early storylines placed allegorically Jewish characters in Israel and appear to endorse the need for a mutant nation. Later comics, following shifts in international perception of Israel, feature the Israeli superhero Sabra, whose Zionist rhetoric is perennially ignored or curtailed. Most recently, the mutant nation of Krakoa, which provides safety and unity for a historically persecuted and globally-dispersed people, can be productively understood as a Zionist utopia, fulfiling the potential offered in earlier comics.

Abraham Cahan’sThe Rise of David LevinskyinMcClure’s Magazine: Race, Capitalism, and Jewish American Identity

AbstractBy situating The Rise of David Levinsky in its original 1913 magazine context, I recognize the ways in which Abraham Cahan set out to undermine the theories of race—and attendant ideas about Jewish identity—with which McClure’s and other American periodicals were obsessed. I argue that the novel appears to accept the premise that races exist while it also undermines a belief in racial inequality. In short, I argue that Cahan likely used race, and McClure’s propensity for “exotic” characters as a kind of Trojan horse in order to deny the prevailing view that, in the United States, only one race, the Anglo-Saxon, can lay claim to the achievements of civilization. Cahan’s Yiddish-speaking world of Russian Jewish characters became a convenient and critical foil for capitalism itself.

Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated ed. by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman

Reviewed by: Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated ed. by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman Lawrence Baron (bio) Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated. Edited by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 212 pp., ISBN 9781496824028 (pb), US $30.95. One can gauge how much attitudes toward Steven Spielberg’s movies have changed between the publication of the first edition of Steven Spielberg Interviews in 2000 and the updated version by comparing Lester Friedman’s introductions to each. In the former, Friedman laments the dearth of scholarship about Spielberg’s films and attributes this neglect to the preference of academics to analyze auteurs and neglect commercially successful filmmakers like Spielberg for pandering to popular taste. Until the interview on Empire of the Sun (1987), Spielberg dwells on the vicissitudes of financing films, their box-office success, and his goal of entertaining audiences. As he turns his attention to topics such as the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993), slavery in Amistad (1997), and the carnage of war in Saving Private Ryan (1998), his responses to questions become more substantive and thoughtful. Conversely, the introduction to the revised edition highlights the scholarly recognition of Spielberg as a serious director. Friedman cites a spate of books published in the interim by film studies scholars including Nigel Morris, James Kendrick, Dean Kowalski, Andrew Gordon, Richard Schickel, and Friedman himself, that acknowledge Spielberg “as a supremely skilled filmmaker unafraid [End Page 240] to tackle significant, and sometimes, controversial issues” (ix). While Spielberg has never abandoned action-adventure or fanciful fare, over the past two decades he has inverted recurring themes from earlier films. The benevolent aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET: The Extraterrestrial (1982) morphed into the menacing tripods from The War of the Worlds (2005). Rather than marvel at the wizardry of science and technology, Spielberg now warns against their potential for authoritarian abuse and dehumanization in works from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report (2002) to Ready Player One (2018). Moreover, his films increasingly venture into the realm of politics, exploring the bureaucratic obstacles to granting asylum in The Terminal (2004), the moral ambiguities of lobbying in Lincoln (2012), and the cycle of violence arising from Israel’s targeted assassinations of terrorists in Munich (2005). One wishes that Friedman would have expanded the introduction to include a review of the Spielberg scholarship he mentions and expounded more on the contrasts between the movies from the first half and last half of his career. Notbohm and Friedman have retained most of the interviews that appeared in the first edition of the book. These reiterate the familiar stories of Spielberg’s suburban childhood where he encountered instances of antisemitism that fostered his sense of being an outsider; his making of films as a teen about space and war to enthrall family and friends; and his meteoric rise to fame by renovating formulaic genres with flashy aural and cinematographic techniques. Readers of Jewish Film & New Media will find the interviews conducted by John Richardson (100–110) and Stephen Schiff (111–130) about Schindler’s List the most germane to their areas of specialization. The former captures Spielberg’s directorial process during the shooting of the film, whereas the latter places the movie within the context of his personal and professional maturation. Therein Spielberg discloses how he convinced screenwriter Steve Zallian to heighten the profiles of key Jewish characters and follow what happened to them during the ghetto liquidation scene. This challenges the criticism commonly leveled at Schindler’s List by Holocaust scholars who fault the movie for diminishing the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust by focusing on the transformation of its German protagonist. That viewpoint ignores how Spielberg renders Schindler’s deeds as the rare exception to the rule since they are consistently bookended by the escalating brutality and lethality of German anti-Jewish measures. The new material in the book starts with an interview regarding Catch Me If You Can (2002) and ends with one devoted to Ready Player One. Not all the [End Page 241] films Spielberg made in this period are accorded an interview. It would have been...

Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher

Reviewed by: Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews by Omri Asscher Anthony Wexler Omri Asscher . Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation between Jews . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press , 2020 . 256 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000732 Although they often share geographic and linguistic origins, Jewish communities in Israel and America have come to be divided not only by language and location, but also by divergent conceptions of Jewishness. It would be easy to assume that the translation of literary works between these centers of Jewish life has helped bridge the gaps separating them, encouraging each to see itself as an organ of Klal Yisra'el . Omri Asscher's fascinating and original study on [End Page 226] literary translation tells a different story, however. He considers the translation of Hebrew works into English for American Jewish readers, and vice versa, from the 1940s through the 1980s, focusing specifically on the ways that translations of texts between Diaspora and homeland perform ideological work, exposing a "subterranean struggle" (175) between "rival siblings" (back cover) with different conceptions of Jewish life and culture. To this end, Asscher looks at the reception of literary works in and across both countries; sometimes, he points out significant instances of outright manipulation of translations. Two luminous examples at the start of the book introduce the scope and shape of Asscher's project. David Shahar's Hebrew novel His Majesty's Agent features an American Jewish character named Abie Driesel, an obvious parody of Elie Wiesel. In the English translation, however, Driesel's name was changed to Jules Levi, and passages that openly critique Wiesel and his brand of Jewishness were removed. The second example focuses on a 1971 review of Saul Bellow's Herzog in which the Israeli critic Alexander Barzel invites Sha'ul Bellow and his peers to "come home, to the nation's homeland" (2). These two moments show that the mediation of literary works for Jewish readers in both countries promoted and protected the ideals, values, and identities of the target culture—what Asscher describes as "a conversation of sorts, or negotiation of ideas, between two platforms of Jewish identity" (3). The first three chapters consider the absorption of Hebrew literature in American Jewish culture between the 1950s and the 1980s, a period during which Israel became a cornerstone of Jewish American identity. Asscher identifies trends in translation practices during these decades, including an effort to highlight connections between "Hebrew literature's national underpinnings and American historical myths," which helped American Jews preserve a distinct sense of a Jewish and American national identity (45). Starting in the 1960s, Israeli writers, including Aharon Megged, A. B. Yehoshua, and Amos Oz, began reflecting on the moral implications of the war of independence and the treatment of the Palestinian population. Asscher identifies two trends in the ways that American Jewish cultural agents responded to these critical accounts of the Israeli state. On the one hand, he argues that American cultural agents tended to describe them as "ethical expressions of moral opposition," labeling Israeli writers as the "dissenting voice of the humanistic Left in the country" (58). On the other hand, he argues that these agents sought to "soften" and "blur" (59) expressions of moral criticism in these works. Such censorship extended from the choice of texts for translation to the ways those texts were translated and interpreted in mainstream venues. The second chapter features a fascinating discussion of the ways that combat soldiers and Palestinian perspectives in these works were routinely modified or removed in translation, which, in turn, helped preserve Israel's moral image for American Jews. Asscher also considers how Jewish cultural agents in America responded to Israeli representations of Jewishness and Judaism that challenged Jewish American identity. He describes how Hebrew works that stressed the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, that openly denigrated Christians, or that highlighted the presence of antisemitic persecution were altered to help protect the standing of the Jewish community in America. These chapters, then, [End Page 227] can help us better understand the ways that the translation process helped mitigate the tension between Zionism and morality, ensuring Israel's function as a source of collective...

Seductive Splendour and Caricatured Simplicity

This article examines English Evangelical novels focused on the conversion of Jewish characters, published from the 1820s to the 1850s. It concentrates particularly on the way these novels emphasised the importance of the Church of England in constructing national and religious identity, and used Jewish conversion as a way to critique Catholicism and Nonconformity. Jewish worship, rabbinic authority and Talmudic devotion were linked to Roman Catholic attitudes towards priesthood and tradition, while Jews were also portrayed as victims of a persecuting Roman Church. Nonconformity was criticised for disordered worship and confusing Jews with its attacks on respectable Anglicanism. As a national religion, novelists therefore imagined that Jews would be saved by a national church, and often linked this to concepts of a national restoration to Palestine. This article develops and complicates understandings of Evangelical views of Jews in the nineteenth century, and their links to ‘writing the nation’ in popular literature.

Civil War as Musical Comedy: The Representation of the Ukrainian Revolution in the Soviet Film Wedding in Malinovka (1967)

This article explains the continued popularity in Russia of the 1967 Soviet film Wedding in Malinovka by analyzing its reliance on the traditional Russian cultural stereotype of Ukraine embedded in the burlesque style of kotliarevshchyna. The threat that the Ukrainian Revolution historically represented to Soviet Russian identity is normalised in the film, as well as in the 1936 eponymous operetta on which it is based, by framing it as an ethnic musical sitcom with dances. Although the two main yokels of the musical hail from a long line of Ukrainian and Jewish characters of popular theatre, both are also deeply ambivalent: one is a trickster who suddenly embraces the Bolshevik cause, while the other is the funniest and least threatening villain in Soviet film.

No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth Century American Literature by Sharon B. Oster

Reviewed by: No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth Century American Literature by Sharon B. Oster Ezra Cappell (bio) No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth Century American Literature. By Sharon B. Oster. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 368 pp. The old Jewish joke goes something like this: two Jews are sitting on a park bench on New York City's Lower East Side reading newspapers. Shmulik holds a copy of the Forverts and is shocked to see his friend Yankel engrossed in reading Der Stürmer, the Nazi propagandist newspaper. Shmulik turns to his friend and says: "Yankel, what's the matter with you that you read such trash?" [End Page 305] "Trash?" responds Yankel. "Trash? You call this trash? In your newspaper we Jews are poor, we're starving, we're being killed in massive pogroms. In my newspaper, we Jews control the world's banks, we own Hollywood—we're the most prosperous people on the face of the Earth. Now you tell me who the fool is?" While much critical attention has been given to the antisemitic figure of the Jew in nineteenth-century and modernist literature, not nearly as much has been written about its contemporaneous opposite: a philosemitic modernist portrait. Sharon Oster has set out to change this unfortunate state of affairs. Yet, not surprisingly, according to Oster, the news is not all good. In trying to create a contemporary Jewish figure "in time" (in their own era), modernist writers still needed to negotiate their understanding of the historical figure of the "noble Hebrew." Readers of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda will recall the trope of the noble Jew, a character who is not really of the era in which he or she appears, but rather a stand-in for ancient Jewish virtue—a quality upon which the New Testament is based. As Oster explains in this beautifully written and important book, the challenge modernist writers faced was to place this ancient Jewish figure back "in time" so as to become a living, breathing, contemporary (modern) character. As Oster states in her introduction: "I read philosemitic discourse as fundamentally about time, pervading the writing of even the most prolific literary realists of the era" (3). Readers might understandably ask, why is this project of representing the Jew in realist and modernist literature so important, both then and now? The resulting Jewish characters that authors created were not just minor players on the American stage. Rather, according to Oster, once placed back in time (and not just a historical idealistic portrait of Biblical nobility), the figure of the Jew became a guarantor of a grand American future—the realized promise foretold in our founding documents and dramatized by an earlier generation of American writers. Oster convincingly argues that in the aftermath of the great Jewish migration to America, the challenge for modernist writers, both gentile and Jew, was to transform the myth of the Biblical Jew into a realistic, well-rounded character. As Oster frames it, to the prevalent Protestant writers of the age, Jews were "anachronistic" and thus were figures literally "out of time" (6). Through each chapter in her book, and in her close readings of writers as diverse as Edith Warton and Anzia Yezierska, what Oster does is place Jewish and gentile writers in dialogue with one another. In placing Jewish characters back in time, Oster create a more well-rounded portrait of Jewish literary characters. [End Page 306] So while many modernist and realist writers created Jewish figures that a contemporary ear might perceive as less than flattering, Oster's dramatic shift in temporal orientation is a welcome one that leads to a greater understanding of not just how major Protestant writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton perceived of and wrote about Jews, but also how Jewish immigrant writers like Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Anzia Yezierska wrote about their co-religionists, fellow recent immigrants to American shores. Unlike so many scholarly works grounded in cultural theory, Oster's book is elegantly written, and No Place in Time helps readers understand a vitally important period of American literary history while explicating how that...

Jewish Emigration and Soviet Propaganda in Films of the 1920s and 1930s

The article attempts to consider the appeals of the Soviet screen of the 20-30s to the topic of emigration in general and Jewish emigration in particular. The latter appeared most often in connection with the possibility of re-emigration. Unlike the plot about the professional or political immigration of foreigners to the USSR, the plot with the reemigration of Jews had a number of important advantages. It allowed to demonstrate the progress of the Soviet country in time. It exposed at the same time the horrors of the discriminatory policy of tsarist Russia and the illusion of equality, financial well-being and personal freedom of Western countries. Jewish emigration turned out to be justified by external factors for the Soviet authorities, unless, of course, we were talking about leaving for Palestine for Zionist beliefs. The Soviet screen of the 20s and 30s was critical of Zionism, but even this sometimes became insufficient. Some films had not been released like “Against the Will of the Fathers” by Yevgeny Ivanov-Barkov. One of the film’s characters – student Boris despite his Zionist preferences still remained a positive hero. Other films, for example, Mikhail Dubson’s “Border”, were subjected to numerous alterations, reducing the dangerous topic of Zionism to a minimum. The renewed Russia, now oriented towards internationalism and having discarded capitalist habits, appeared in the Soviet cinema of the 30s not only as an ideal old new homeland for Jews, but also as a universal proletarian paradise (“Horizon”, “The Return of Nathan Becker”, “Seekers of Happiness”, etc.). But not all Jewish characters got access to the Soviet “Promised Land”, but only those who were ready to give up their national, cultural, linguistic isolation in the end. After all, the revolution destroyed the main Jewish trait in Russia – the pale of settlement. And now it was time to return and find a share not in the future, but in the present, accomplished Soviet world without borders and hierarchies. The pragmatics of Soviet propaganda becomes more obvious when referring to censorship prohibitions and restrictions (“Against the will of the Fathers”, “Dream”), rejected versions of the script (“Border”), accompanying advertising texts (“Jewish Happiness”), as well as to the analysis of the plots of films based on Jewish material.

Review

Review