Jewish Film Research Articles

Transcendental Style Reconsidered: Absence, Presence, and a “Place Which Is Not-a-Place”

Research Article| October 01 2021 Transcendental Style Reconsidered: Absence, Presence, and a “Place Which Is Not-a-Place” Dan Chyutin Dan Chyutin DAN CHYUTIN is a teaching fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Steve Tisch Film and Television School and University of Haifa’s master’s program in culture and film studies. His articles have been published in such peer-reviewed publications as Cinema Journal, Shofar, Jewish Identities, Short Film Studies, and Jewish Film & New Media, and his coedited anthology Casting a Giant Shadow: The Transnational Shaping of Israeli Cinema was published by Indiana University Press in 2021. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Film and Video (2021) 73 (3): 34–46. https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.73.3.0034 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Dan Chyutin; Transcendental Style Reconsidered: Absence, Presence, and a “Place Which Is Not-a-Place”. Journal of Film and Video 1 January 2021; 73 (3): 34–46. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.73.3.0034 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Film and Video Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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...

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

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...

On Skorin-Kapov's Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope and Laine's Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky

On Skorin-Kapov's Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope and Laine's Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky Benjamin Franz Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope. By Jadranka Skorin-Kapov. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 216 pp., ISBN 978-1501306976. US $32. Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky. By Tarja Laine. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. 194 pp., ISBN 978-1782385752. US $115. These two books, written in the past few years, seek to delve into the cinema of Darren Aronofksy. A strong filmmaking presence, Aronofsky has created a cinema of psychological melodrama, according to these scholars. The films discussed in these volumes are magnificent works,1 which to this reviewer belie a deep understanding of Judaism and rich a Jewish background. If either of these authors delved into Aronofsky's background as a Jewish filmmaker, these volumes would have been elevated to must-reads for subscribers to Jewish Film & New Media. However, neither Laine nor Skorin-Kapov seem to have any interest in exploring that crucial facet of Aronofsky's approach to storytelling. Instead, both books are deeply rooted in surveying the psychological topographies of the mind that Aronofsky's films dwell on and the manifestation of pain and trauma his protagonists' experience in their particular cinematic worlds. [End Page 114] Were these books being reviewed for any other publication, it would have sufficed to summon citations bearing out the thoughtful and clear methodologies provided by these scholars on the subject of Aronofsky's films. However, as this journal's agency is to explore the Jewish nature of Aronofsky's body of work, I must admit that these volumes are quite lacking in that regard. Particularly painful is Skorin-Kapov's monograph. She has clearly mapped the psychological subtext of each Aronofsky film from Pi (1998) to Noah (2014). Her summaries of each film are clear. The theories she uses to summon the intent and delivery of scenes in these films is profound. However, not once does she connect a praxis from Aronofsky's psychological and artistic ideas to his innate Jewishness. This will disappoint people looking for a clear explication of how Aronofsky's identity as a secular Jew informs his art. For example, consider her approach to Pi. First she presents an overview of the film's story. Then she dissects its protagonist, Max Cohen. She explores his psychology and how it aligns with various theorists. Then she looks at the intentionality of Max's actions as he pursues the mathematical proof of God: the repeating perfectly self-replicating string of numbers that verifies the creator's place in our universe. The gallery of film scholars she cites to discuss this idea is robust and deep. I found great pleasure in reading many of the threads she chose to weave to create a full psychologically examined portrait of this character. Unfortunately, this is not further tied into the Kabbalistic ideas or the places Aronofsky may have learned of such mystical Jewish concepts. We are bereft of any interrogation or inquiry into the filmmaker's Brooklyn-based background, which would have granted a young Aronofsky access to glean details of Kabbalah, Hasidut, or even any Aggadata, which may or may not be relevant to these films. It just does not happen here. Laine is more interested in exploring the manifestations of physical agony portrayed by the protagonists of each film. Where Skorin-Kapov mines the psychological background of lead characters, Laine wants to understand how the physical meets the neurological. For Laine, the emotional outbursts of characters bring clues to the meaning and intent of each film she elaborates on. Here is a bold, inspired attempt to connect Randy the Ram's heart condition in The Wrestler (2012) with his most rewarding identity as a former professional wrestler. To watch Randy's tragic story unfold as expressed through the varying amounts of chest pain he experiences is quite the heady material for melodrama. If only there was a thought [End Page 115] given to how this could be derived from the Ashkenazic Jewish obsession with the sicknesses, plagues, and diseases that afflict us...

On Skorin-Kapov's <em>Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope</em> and Laine's <em>Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky</em>

On Skorin-Kapov's Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope and Laine's Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky Benjamin Franz Darren Aronofsky's Films and the Fragility of Hope. By Jadranka Skorin-Kapov. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 216 pp., ISBN 978-1501306976. US $32. Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky. By Tarja Laine. New York: Berghahn Books, 2015. 194 pp., ISBN 978-1782385752. US $115. These two books, written in the past few years, seek to delve into the cinema of Darren Aronofksy. A strong filmmaking presence, Aronofsky has created a cinema of psychological melodrama, according to these scholars. The films discussed in these volumes are magnificent works,1 which to this reviewer belie a deep understanding of Judaism and rich a Jewish background. If either of these authors delved into Aronofsky's background as a Jewish filmmaker, these volumes would have been elevated to must-reads for subscribers to Jewish Film & New Media. However, neither Laine nor Skorin-Kapov seem to have any interest in exploring that crucial facet of Aronofsky's approach to storytelling. Instead, both books are deeply rooted in surveying the psychological topographies of the mind that Aronofsky's films dwell on and the manifestation of pain and trauma his protagonists' experience in their particular cinematic worlds. [End Page 114] Were these books being reviewed for any other publication, it would have sufficed to summon citations bearing out the thoughtful and clear methodologies provided by these scholars on the subject of Aronofsky's films. However, as this journal's agency is to explore the Jewish nature of Aronofsky's body of work, I must admit that these volumes are quite lacking in that regard. Particularly painful is Skorin-Kapov's monograph. She has clearly mapped the psychological subtext of each Aronofsky film from Pi (1998) to Noah (2014). Her summaries of each film are clear. The theories she uses to summon the intent and delivery of scenes in these films is profound. However, not once does she connect a praxis from Aronofsky's psychological and artistic ideas to his innate Jewishness. This will disappoint people looking for a clear explication of how Aronofsky's identity as a secular Jew informs his art. For example, consider her approach to Pi. First she presents an overview of the film's story. Then she dissects its protagonist, Max Cohen. She explores his psychology and how it aligns with various theorists. Then she looks at the intentionality of Max's actions as he pursues the mathematical proof of God: the repeating perfectly self-replicating string of numbers that verifies the creator's place in our universe. The gallery of film scholars she cites to discuss this idea is robust and deep. I found great pleasure in reading many of the threads she chose to weave to create a full psychologically examined portrait of this character. Unfortunately, this is not further tied into the Kabbalistic ideas or the places Aronofsky may have learned of such mystical Jewish concepts. We are bereft of any interrogation or inquiry into the filmmaker's Brooklyn-based background, which would have granted a young Aronofsky access to glean details of Kabbalah, Hasidut, or even any Aggadata, which may or may not be relevant to these films. It just does not happen here. Laine is more interested in exploring the manifestations of physical agony portrayed by the protagonists of each film. Where Skorin-Kapov mines the psychological background of lead characters, Laine wants to understand how the physical meets the neurological. For Laine, the emotional outbursts of characters bring clues to the meaning and intent of each film she elaborates on. Here is a bold, inspired attempt to connect Randy the Ram's heart condition in The Wrestler (2012) with his most rewarding identity as a former professional wrestler. To watch Randy's tragic story unfold as expressed through the varying amounts of chest pain he experiences is quite the heady material for melodrama. If only there was a thought [End Page 115] given to how this could be derived from the Ashkenazic Jewish obsession with the sicknesses, plagues, and diseases that afflict us...

Joseph Green, producent polskich filmów jidyszowych

Włodek Roman, Joseph Green, producent polskich filmów jidyszowych [Joseph Green, producer of Polish Yiddish-language films]. „Images” vol. XXVI, no 35. Poznań 2019. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Pp. 77–101. ISSN 1731-450X. DOI 10.14746/i.2019.35.04.
 Joseph Green (1900–1996), born Josef Chaim Grinberg in Łódź, was one of the most important producers of films in Yiddish. At the beginning of the sound era in the United States, he worked on dubbing in Yiddish for Jewish films, including Joseph in the Land of Egypt. He received a copy of the film as a royalty, which he then used with great success. The money helped him produce four Jewish films in Poland between 1936 and 1938: Yiddle with His Fiddle, The Jester, Little Mother and A Letter to Mother. Green left Poland in the spring of 1939. When the world of Shtetls – evoked by him – disappeared as a result of the Second World War, he ceased making films.

Got Jewish Milk? Screening Epstein and Van Sant for Intersectional Film History

Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk (USA, 1984) and Gus Van Sant's Milk (USA, 2008), the two major films that narrate the life and tragically dramatic death of gay politician and activist Harvey Milk (1930–1978), are widely recognized as part of the queer cinematic canon but are less often categorized as Jewish films. While Epstein's film adroitly presents a Kosher-style Milk, the Jewishness of Van Sant's Milk is less certain; however, a well-established pattern of gay and lesbian Jews citing Milk as one of their own—what I term Jewqhooing—enabled a Jewish reception of Milk . Querying and queerying the Jewishness of Milk (the man as well as the movies that purport to represent his life and times) illuminate the complex ways Jewishness continues to be cinematically conveyed or whitewashed as well as the intersections between queer and Jewish film history.

Polscy aktorzy a międzywojenne kino jidysz

Polish actors and Yiddish cinema of the inter-war period The author presents the thesis that despite the cloistered character of the interwar era Yiddish cinema, Polish actors left their mark on Yiddish productions. Their participation in two silent films, which didn’t survive the war - Jeden z 36 and W lasach polskich were connected to the topic of assimilation, the community of faith and the historical experience of fighting with the invaders, as well as the main idea of rapprochement between the two nations. Polish actors’ roles were connected to non-Jewish characters, although one very important exception to this rule was the role of Berek Joselewicz. The Yiddish cinema of the late-1930’s, which was dominated by escapist stories detached from the contemporary social-political reality, does not contain any trace of cooperation with Polish actors. As the public press from the interwar era as well as from the years after the Second World War shows, its subject-matter was, however, rendered taboo by some Polish participants of interwar-period Jewish film productions, even though the initiative for creating the films ostensibily to break down prejudices and stereotypes was in, in fact, Polish.

I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman by Marianne Lambert

Lambert, Marianne, réal. I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman. Int. Chantal Akerman. Artémis, 2015. . In an interview from Lambert’s documentary, Akerman astutely sums up what both admirers have appreciated and detractors have critiqued about her films, namely her idiosyncratic approach to cinematic time:“Souvent quand les gens sortent d’un film et quand le film est bien, ils disent qu’ils n’ont pas senti le temps passer. Et, moi, ce que je veux, c’est que les gens sentent, eux, le temps passer. Donc, je [ne] leur ai pas volé ces deux heures. Ils les ont vécues.” Little did Lambert know that time was of the essence in her decision to make the film when she did. The documentary, released in September 2015, fortuitously captures Akerman’s thoughts on filmmaking, love, life, and family before she took her own life in Oct. 2015. Lambert’s approximately hourlong documentary intersperses a retrospective of Akerman’s films with her own reflections on her work, as well as interviews with actress Aurore Clément (who played the eponymous character of Akerman’s 1978 Les rendez-vous d’Anna) and American director Gus Van Sant, an ardent admirer of Akerman’s work.Van Sant, like Akerman, underlines the importance of time in her films:“[Akerman] rejects real time, she calls it ‘her time’ or ‘my time’ [...] by not worrying about time, you enter into this other realm [...] [one that works in opposition to]‘cinema time.’”Shots of Akerman in New York, Brussels, Paris, and Tel Aviv pepper the film—demonstrating Akerman’s constant state of motion while also unveiling the significance of the film’s disquietingly declarative title. When Akerman returns to Paris after a trip to Brussels, she asserts that she has always preferred her Belgian hometown and has never felt at home in the French capital. However, after her mother’s death she feels there is “nothing left” for her in Belgium. Furthermore, Akerman regrets that she was not born in Israel because she believes that, had she been, her mother would have let her play in the streets—unlike in Brussels where she watched the world from a window, “folding in on herself,” a habit she says she found hard to shake. One gets the feeling from Lambert’s film that Akerman has spent her entire life attempting to gain passage into the “other realm” described by Van Sant. It becomes clear throughout the film that Akerman suffers from a professional and theoretical “homelessness” as well. For instance, while a love scene from Akerman’s 1974 Je tu il elle plays, Akerman, in voice-over, explains that she never wanted her films to be shown in gay, feminist, or Jewish films festivals but instead in “regular” festivals so as not to be pigeonholed. Given Akerman’s passing so soon after the release of the film, it is hard not to feel melancholy watching Lambert’s documentary. However, optimism can and should be found in Van Sant’s reflection on her corpus: “The young filmmakers of today will find and popularize [Akerman’s films]. I hope.” Boise State University (ID) Mariah Devereux Herbeck 250 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 ...

On Goldman’s <em>The American Jewish Story Through Cinema</em>

On Goldman's The American Jewish Story Through CinemaEric A. Goldman, The American Jewish Story Through Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 254 pp., ISBN 978-0-292-74430-1 (hc), US $55.00; 978-0-29275469-0 (pb), US $25.00.Eric Goldman's cultural case studies of nine mainstream representative films join a growing body of key studies of the American Jewish experience(s) that portray the social history of reel Jews and Jewish issues. The book recounts the Zeligesque process of mimesis, adaptation, and assimilation, as represented throughout the twentieth century through film. The book is clearly written and places its subjects in a general historical context that incorporates primary documents as well as personal interviews with filmmakers such as Barry Levinson.Goldman's scope is limited to nine American-made films: The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1958), The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973), The Prince of Tides (Barbra Streisand, 1991), Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990), Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson, 1999), and Everything Is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2005). This focus allows him to illustrate themes such as coming out of the ghetto (The Jazz Singer); anti-Semitism in the 1940s (Gentleman's Agreement and Crossfire); guaranteeing acceptance (The Young Lions); the evolving Jewish woman as a strong, successful, assertive, and vibrant professional (The Way We Were, The Prince of Tides); the fragmentation of Jewish life, offered as a paradigmatic sketch of the American Jewish immigrant experience (Avalon, Liberty Heights); and the new trend whereby the search for home in Eastern Europe's pre-Holocaust shtetl represents the comfort of identifying with Jewish heritage, and the search for a usable past by which to construct a transcontinental multigenerational Jewish identity (Everything Is Illuminated).Goldman's book, which broadens our understanding of acculturated Jewishness as represented in American cinema, develops further the mid-1980s surveys of American Jewish film by Patricia Erens (The Jew in American Cinema, 1984) and Lester Friedman (The Jewish Image in American Film, 1987). However, Erens's and Friedman's surveys attempt to cover the entirety of American film history and deal in general outlines, whereas Goldman's focuses on a small number of case studies that specifically raise questions about the construction of Jewish identity, assimilation, and Jewish-gentile social and economic relations. (Further recent groundbreaking work has also appeared in print.)1Goldman, the author of Visions, Images, and Dreams: Yiddish Film-Past & Present (2011), is well positioned to draw on his experience as curator of film for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he supervised the preservation of archival Yiddish films. For many years Goldman also developed and moderated the film program at the Center for Jewish History and Yeshiva University, and in 2011 he served as film curator at the International Yiddish Theatre Festival in Montreal.A great strength of the book is Goldman's tracing of the ideological tensions behind adapting a book to film. The novel The Young Lions, for example, was published by Irwin Shaw in 1948. Its later film adaptation involved many differences of interpretation over how to represent the plot, which followed the lives of three soldiers during World War II. Shaw bitterly disagreed with Marlon Brando's sympathetic portrayal of Christian and with the playing down of the anti-Semitism that Noah encounters in the original book. Shaw felt Brando unjustifiably exculpated the perpetrators and bystanders in a way that did an injustice to the victims of the Nazis. The process and product of this contested adaptation would reveal a shift in the ways some Americans came to respond to images of the Holocaust. Goldman's analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), as adapted and directed by actor Liev Schreiber, also brilliantly reveals how the author revealed what it means for an American Jew without a known immediate connection to the Shoah to return to an annihilated European shtetl to confront unfinished business. …

Cinema Studies/Jewish Studies, 2011–2013

In an era of massive university budget cuts and pervasive malaise regarding the future of the humanities, cinema and media studies continue to be a growth industry. Many academic fields have been paying increasing attention to film, in terms of both curriculum development and research. Jewish studies is no exception. Since 2011, a boom in publications has included a range of new books that deal with Jews on screen, Jewish themes in cinema, and the construction of Jewish identity through film. To assess what these recent titles contribute to Jewish cinema studies, though, requires assessing the parameters of the field—and that is no easy task. The definition of what belongs is as elastic as the boundaries of Jewish identity and as perplexing as the perennial question, who is a Jew? Consequently, the field is wildly expansive, potentially encompassing the many geographical locales where films on Jewish topics have been produced as well as the multiple languages and cinematic traditions within which such films have emerged. At issue are not just numerous national cinemas, but also transnational productions and international histories. Yiddish film, for instance, was produced in Poland, the Soviet Union, the US, Argentina, and other places as well. Compounding the challenge of assessing the field of Jewish film is the fact that Jewish studies overlaps with Holocaust studies, itself a vast enterprise that has grown dramatically over the past two decades. A simple WorldCat search, restricted to scholarly books from respectable academic presses, turns up dozens of titles on cinema and the Holocaust published since the year 2000. Not surprisingly, the long-standing debates on “what is Jewish literature?” have morphed into controversy over “what is Jewish cinema”?

American Jewish Films: The Search for Jewish Identity by Lawrence J. Epstein and The American Jewish Story Through Cinema by Eric A. Goldman (review)

American Jewish Films: The Search for Jewish Identity by Lawrence J. Epstein and The American Jewish Story Through Cinema by Eric A. Goldman (review)

On Acevedo-Muñoz’s <em>West Side Story as Cinema</em>

On Acevedo-Munoz's West Side Story as Cinema West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece. By Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. x + 204 pp., 978-0-7006-1921-4 (hc). US $29.95.Which titles deserve to be designated in the category of film? Those that are done in languages like Yiddish or Hebrew would easily make the cut, perhaps even if done by Hebrew-speaking Israeli Arab directors and scenarists. Documentaries of Jewish life would normally be included, but not those the Nazis produced depicting the Warsaw Ghetto or the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. To list The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City as a Jewish film would be grotesque. That also goes for movies made in the Third Reich, like Jud Suss (Veit Harlan, Germany, 1940), a deliberate rebuttal of the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, a Jewish refugee from Nazism. The taxonomy should make room, however, for the works of all sorts of Gentile directors who portray Jewish characters, whether Norman Jewison (Fiddler on the Roof; USA, 1971) or Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; Canada, 1974). Special consideration might be given to films that might have directly engaged the Jewish condition but didn't. In The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle, USA, 1937), for example, the letter J on a dossier, next to the name of Alfred Dreyfus, is the only hint of the genesis of the frame-up that would rock France.Perhaps the most intellectually intriguing subset would embrace films bereft of any overt or explicit Jewish content. But if the major creative figures in such cinematic endeavors are Jews, a distinctive sensibility might nevertheless be detected; a singular ethnic stance might somehow be fathomed. Here the strongest instance is Casablanca (USA, 1942), directed by Michael Curtiz (ne Kertesz Kaminer Mano) and written by Philip and Julius Epstein and Howard Koch. The filmmakers informed the audience of the high price imposed on the United States for its policy of isolation, as a world war raged on three continents; and Michael Walsh's crafty novel, As Time Goes By (1998), by imagining the backstory to the film, clinches the case by making saloon-keeper Richard (Rick) Blaine Jewish. Another opportunity for inclusion as a Jewish film is West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, USA, 1961), the subject of this informative and engaging book, West Side Story as Cinema: The Making and Impact of an American Masterpiece.When the musical West Side Story opened on stage in New York City in 1957, the generalization offered later in Spamalot was validated: You just won't succeed on Broadway if you don't have any Jews. Jerome Robbins (ne Rabinowitz) conceived, directed, and choreographed the show. Arthur Laurents, who first achieved success with a play exposing bigotry (Home of the Brave), wrote the book of West Side Story. Its lyrics are credited to Stephen Sondheim, but composer Leonard Bernstein was his collaborator. (In a striking but characteristic gesture, Bernstein gave the twenty-seven-year-old Sondheim sole credit so that he could advance his own remarkable career.) It was hardly unusual for Jews like Harold Prince to co-produce a Broadway show. But even the first actor to play Tony, Larry Kert, was Jewish. Perhaps their commitment to a musical that portrays the high cost of hatred was not coincidental. Perhaps such a message had special meaning for Jews who had managed to live through the most devastating demographic-and cultural and moral-loss in the modern history of their people.Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz, who teaches film studies at the University of Colorado, is not especially attentive to the changes recorded in translating the play to the film, which was released four years later. He focuses more on structural and technical features of the movie rather than the interpretive issues it raises. Robbins signed on as co-director with Robert Wise (who was not Jewish), and the challenge they met was formal. …

Ethnic Rituals and the Public Space: Mexican and Chilean Jews in Film

IntroductionThe incorporation of Latin American economies into the process of globalization that emerged in the eighties, and the consequent hegemony of neoliberalism, brought about a crisis in national identities. The deindustrialization process engendered massive unemployment and a clandestine economy; the decline of the welfare state triggered exclusion, poverty, and crime; migration altered the composition of the ethnic mosaic and gave rise to the growing legitimization of minority identities; freedom of choice, centered on consumerism and pleasure, now also extended to sexual diversity. One manifestation of these changes in the continent's cinemas has been the increasingly frequent appearance of Jewish narratives and characters in movies intended for the general public and the global movie market. These films represent their countries of origin in international festivals, and also take part in the Jewish film festivals held every year, attracting a wide audience that is not exclusively Jewish. The trend is indicative of the reconstruction of a white ethnicity, almost invisible on Latin American movie screens until three decades ago, with particularities that allow for the analysis of possibilities and limitations for the representation of cultural diversity. Thus Jewish experiences as represented in movies become, from my perspective, a testimony to the processes of multiculturalism.This article will analyze the movies Cinco dias sin Nora (Nora's Will), directed by Mariana Chenillo (Mexico, 2008), and El brindis (To Life), directed by Shai Agosin (Chile, Mexico, 2007), based on the premise that film texts are aesthetic testimonies to cultural processes taking place in the societies in which they are produced.1 If we consider the characters' presence in the public space, and the representation of traditions and rituals, we arrive at the conclusion that these movies construct the cultural difference, and the subaltern identity's alterity, by negotiating the legitimacy of Jewish religious rites in the face of each country's hegemonic identity, while the presence of the characters in the public space is a testimony of certain ethnic minority conflicts in the national context.Alterity and ContextThe sociopolitical crises unleashed by the modifications carried out for the inclusion of national economies in the process of globalization, in addition to the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, brought about changes that compelled national identities to adjust to the new circumstances. Barriers were lifted so that goods and capital could circulate freely; however, this created deindustrialization, which in turn generated population displacements from remote areas to the cities and between different countries on the same continent, as well as migratory flows to and from Latin America. Consequently, certain groups, previously excluded or newly arrived, gained visibility, such as indigenous peoples in Mexico and Chile, or Bolivian, Paraguayan, and Asian immigrants in Argentina. Thus the Other- ness of Jews, who in the past had been represented in literature as a transcendent alterity whose significance emerged from circumstances and context, seems to diminish and become integrated.2In societies in which whiteness is hegemonic-like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom-there are highly segregated groups suffering from racial marginalization, including African Americans and other people of color. In contrast, the segregation of Jews in these societies is mostly attributed to the community's own desire to preserve a distinctive identity, and only to a lesser degree to the impact of anti-Semitism. Studies centered on the discourse may describe the Jewish identities in Latin America as the result of a permanent struggle against discrimination and the exclusion engendered by anti-Semitism; on the other hand, sociological studies that examine the insertion of Jews into the social structure may conclude that they fall within the white category. …

Becoming Part of the Moving Story: Jews on the Latin American Screen

Jews were among the pioneers of film and television in most of Latin America. The historiography of cinema, however, does not usually mention the ethnicity or religion of the filmmakers since Latin American intellectuals tend to reject ethnicity as an important analytical category, unless it relates to indigenous groups or people of African descent. This approach is shared by many intellectuals identified with specific ethnic backgrounds, such as Jewish Latin Americans, Arab Latin Americans, and Asian Latin Americans.Most of the meager information about Jewish contributions to filmmaking in the past can be found in the publications of community institutions, which endeavor to highlight Jewish contributions to various facets of life in Latin America. They are also available in personal memoirs and on websites. Moreover, several authors writing about the Jewish achievement in Latin America have not considered cinema as a worthy enough activity to be mentioned among their accomplishments. In his 1960s book on the Jews of Argentina, for example, Jose Liberman recounted the history of Jewish agricultural settlement in the country, discussed the establishment of community institutions, and added a long list of Jews active in politics, the economy, and culture, 1 but he did not mention Jews active in popular culture, such as movies, television, music, or sports. More than forty years later, Ricardo Feierstein, in his history of Argentinian Jews, devoted only five pages out of 459 to mentioning Jews who were prominent in these fields.2 In both cases, it is impossible to know whether the characterization of certain people as Jewish relied on research in archives or was merely based on pinpointing names that sounded Jewish or simply on personal acquaintance.In the past decade methodological and theoretical discussions, however, have encouraged new studies of Jewish Latin American experiences.3 Recent studies are less focused on political aspects, giving more weight to cultural and social facets. Scholars nowadays are less concerned with Jews as victims of anti- Semitism, xenophobia, or racism and more with their place and role as integral parts of society at large. Research is no longer based so much on communal and institutional sources as on testimonies produced by nonaffiliated ethnics, focusing on history from below and on oral testimonies rather than on official stories. Many authors currently favor comparative perspectives, both across ethnic divides within the nation and from a transnational viewpoint regarding the Diaspora links to its real or imagined homeland.4 The present issue of Jewish Film & New Media reflects the vitality and innovativeness of Jewish Latin American studies.When it comes to the bibliography on Latin American cinema, the challenges are no less significant. Since Jews are often identified with the hegemonic white population, the research focused on the Jewish contribution to film and television, or on the representation of Jewish experiences in movies, has been minimal or conspicuously absent until the rise of multicultural perceptions in the late twentieth century. Thus a dictionary of filmmakers published in the late 1990s includes four hundred entries for Latin American directors without mentioning their ethnic identity or religious faith. On the other hand, the dictionary includes special chapters on foreign directors who visited the Latin American continent, and on exiled Spanish filmmakers who found refuge in Argentina and Mexico following the victory of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).5 Similarly, a book of interviews with seventy well-known filmmakers from all over Latin America casually mentioned the Jewishness of only one of them, and ignored that of at least one other.6Moreover, before the upsurge of democratization in the eighties, and the integration of national economies into globalized markets from the early 1990s onward, very few films featured Jewish characters. …

On <em>Epstein’s American Jewish Films</em>: The Search for Identity

On Epstein's American Jewish Films: The Search for Identity American Jewish Films: The Search for Identity. By Lawrence J. Epstein. London: McFarland, 2013. xii + 210 pp., ISBN 978-0-7864-6962-8 (pbk). US $40.00.Anyone seeking to survey the depiction of Jews in American movies faces a crucial choice of how to arrange them for purposes of analysis. Adherence to the dictates of chronology is one option (and historical obligation). Prime examples of this strategy are Lester D. Friedman's Hollywood's Image of the Jew (1982) and Patricia Erens's The Jew in American Cinema (1984), both of which are pioneering and still useful overviews. They seek to be comprehensive in coverage (at the expense of depth of diagnosis), and tend to be encyclopedic more than interpretive. Highlighting the fate of common representations of Jews onscreen, Nathan Abrams has recently updated the works of Friedman and Erens in The New Jew in Film (2012). Eric A. Goldman's recent book, The American Jewish Story through Cinema (2013), seeks to make a handful of films reflective of particular phases of the communal experience, and covers roughly nine decades to illumine the animating impulses of this minority group. David Desser and Lester Friedman made an odd choice by organizing American Jewish Filmmakers (1993) around four noteworthy directors (Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Paul Mazursky). Much that is relevant in imagining American Jews is therefore neglected. Moreover the co-authors are forced to consider works that have not survived the test of timeless value, as well as those that betray only the slightest interest in the singularity of Jewish experience. Nor have all important films about Jews been directed by Jews; think of D. W. Griffith's Romance of a Jewess (1908), Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and Norman Jewison's Fiddler on the Roof (1971).Lawrence J. Epstein has sensibly opted for a different approach. He has elected to arrange movies by certain common themes-whether by locale (the Catskills, the Lower East Side, the Near East), by the variety of communal types (the pious, the gangsters), or by social problem (assimilation, anti-Semitism). The topics are neither arbitrary nor surprising. The focus on issues, as well as on the sites of the struggle to reconcile citizenship and ethnicity, is promising. But the execution is quite disappointing.American Jewish Films suffers primarily from an absence of energetic research. The endnotes are extended over a mere two pages; by contrast, far more of a scholarly apparatus is expected of a typical undergraduate paper. Epstein's bibliography is more useful, and runs four pages-but the volumes and articles that he lists do not seem to have been confronted or even implicitly criticized in his text as a way of moving the study of the subject into fresh or illuminating directions. As a work of serious engagement with his subject, Epstein's foray into cinematic history does not pass muster, and is much inferior to his previous work, a charming study of American Jewish comedians, The Haunted Smile (2001). That book, like American Jewish Films, constitutes an effort to answer the question of what happens to religious faith and collective memory when America intervenes.Thus Epstein's primary concern, it can be inferred, is neither aesthetic nor primarily historical. He regards film not as an art form that must obey (or invent) formal rules to get its emotional effects, nor movies even as specimens of sociological evidence that reveal over time the vicissitudes of Jewish life in the United States. …

On Ashkenazi’s <em>Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity</em>

On Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity Kerry Wallach Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. By Ofer Ashkenazi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 234 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-34136-4 (hc). US $90.00 Every scholar of modern Jewish history is familiar with the poet Judah Leib Gordon’s 1862 exhortation to European Jewry: “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home” (as quoted in Ashkenazi, xv, 48). This motto takes on new relevance in the work of historian Ofer Ashkenazi, for whom public and private behaviors play out in the spatial terms of Weimar cinematic representation. Within the world of the street, Jews display only authentic bourgeois mannerisms and appearances; in private, the masquerade ceases to be necessary. According to Ashkenazi, we see this duality reflected in films made by Jewish directors and writers for whom public and domestic spaces are necessarily linked in the project of representing Jewish identity. In his innovative contribution to Weimar Jewish history and cinema studies, Ashkenazi compellingly argues that the urban and immigrant experiences of Jewish filmmakers—particularly their investment in becoming further integrated into German culture—shaped many of the films made in Weimar Germany. Moreover, he boldly asserts that even more than theatrical works, “film was the main contribution of German Jews” to Weimar culture, and that Weimar films to a large extent “promote the formation of a liberal, multicultural, transnational bourgeois society, in which ‘the Jew’ could be different, but equal” (14–15). By [End Page 226] making a case for film as the quintessential mode of creative expression for Jews in Weimar Germany, Ashkenazi insists that historians and other scholars consider film alongside literature, theater, art, and other forms of German-Jewish cultural production. This move follows recent turns in German and Jewish studies to explore cinematic works as an integral part of twentieth-century visual culture. It also connects arguments about “Jewish talent” and mastery of theater acting with Jewish film performances, thereby building on the claims of such early critics as Arnold Zweig as well as more recent work by scholars including Galili Shahar. As a way of grappling with the potentially essentialist (and often anti-Semitic) nature of claims about the link between perceived otherness and Jewish artistic talent, Ashkenazi notes that although it is “at best, problematic,” this portrayal “is, however, a fair depiction of an influential group within German urban Jewry” (21). In Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, Ashkenazi skillfully blends formal analysis of popular and lesser-known films with a broader discussion of Jewish acculturation. In five concise chapters, the book addresses genres key to his central argument that Jewish filmmakers “formulated and exploited” the conventions of Weimar genre film: urban comedies, domestic melodramas, horror film, and exotic adventure and war films (13). In chapter 2, Ashkenazi focuses on visual mimicry of Germanness and stereotypical representation of Jewishness in such comedies as Hans Steinhoff’s Family Day at the Prellsteins (1927), Reinhold Schünzel’s Heaven on Earth (1926–27) and Hercules Maier (1927), and Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man (1918) and Meyer from Berlin (1919). Changes of clothing serve as a coded mask for both gender and Jewish identities, the latter expressed fully only in private. Failed attempts to convey authentic (Jewish) identity in spaces including nightclubs lead alienated characters back to the safety of their apartments. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 take up the genres of domestic melodrama, horror film, and exotic adventure and war films. In his readings of Karl Grune’s Jealousy (1925) and The Street (1923), Ashkenazi reiterates “that role-play can express authenticity (and efface individual ‘otherness’)” in melodramas as in comedies (46). Here he argues against Siegfried Kracauer’s reading of The Street as exemplary of the German psyche, suggesting instead that the film mirrors the Jewish immigrant experience of desiring not to be other. Additional sections focus on the tragic consequences of perceived difference in Paul Czinner’s Nju (1924) and Fritz Lang’s early films, and in F. W. Murnau’s The Walk into the Night (1921), from which Ashkenazi borrowed the title of his 2010 book on reason and subjectivity...

Diaspora and National Identity in Daniel Burman's El abrazo partido

This article discusses how national and diasporic identity is negotiated in El abrazo partido (Daniel Burman, 2004) as part of an investigation into how the film engages with its own categorisation as an Argentine Jewish film. Through the protagonist's narration and point-of-view, the spectator becomes acquainted with the day-to-day life in a multicultural shopping centre in Once, a Jewish neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, where Burman himself has an insider status. In light of theories of diasporic filmmaking, the article explores Burman's situatedness and the implications that his own positioning has for the narrative, visual style, character and subject matter of the film. It aims to investigate how the film attests to the impact of neoliberal economics on culture and the extent to which the film simultaneously negotiates local and global issues in its reassertion of national identity.

The new Jew in film: exploring Jewishness and Judaism in contemporary cinema

Jewish film characters have existed almost as long as the medium itself. But around 1990, films about Jews and their representation in cinema multiplied and took on new forms, marking a radical rupture with the past. With a new generation of Jewish filmmakers, writers and actors at work, contemporary cinemas in Hollywood and the rest of the world have been depicting a multiplicity of new Jews, including tough Jews, brutish Jews, gay and lesbian Jews, Jewish cowboys, skinheads and superheroes, Jews in space and so on. Grounded in the study of over 300 films from Hollywood and beyond, 'The New Jew in FIlm' explores these new and changing depictions of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism, providing a wider, more representative picture of the subject than has hitherto been attempted. This is a compelling, surprising and provocative book, whose chapters explore masculinity, femininity, passivity, agency, religion, as well as a departure into new territory including food and bathrooms. Its concern is to reveal how the representation of the Jew is used to convey confidence or anxieties about Jewish identity and history, as well as how it engages with questions of racial, sexual and gender politics. In so doing, 'The New Jew in Film' also provides a welcome overview of important Jewish films produced globally over the last twenty years.

‘Is Israel part of Russia?’ Immigrants on Russian and Israeli screens

The mass immigration from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) changed both the Israeli and Russian cultures. Since the 1990s, Russian immigrants and their homeland began appearing in Israeli films. Meanwhile, Jewish themes, including emigration, became more common in Russian cinema: Israel now appears in Russian films. Whether Russian or Israeli, these movies circulate through the internet, transnational TV channels, and Jewish film festivals, and are seen in Russia and elsewhere in the Russian diaspora. This shows that cultural processes in today's globalized mediated world are interrelated: as Russian-Jewish immigrants transform themselves through migration, they also transform cultures around them.