Race in American Film by Daniel Bernardi

Author:Daniel Bernardi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780313398407
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

The Jew Comes to Life

While the previous decades skirted around the existence of Jews in the United States, films in the 1960s and 1970s have many more representations of Jews and a sharp increase in the number of Jewish characters playing major roles, marking this decade and the next as a “golden age” for Jews in the film industry. However, even in significant roles, Jewishness was often kept as an insignificant part of character personas. Films at this time also ventured into subjects previously considered taboo, such as depicting the Holocaust, Jewish criminals, and the alienated Jewish intellectual.

As the civil rights movement of the 1960s took off, the discourse of asserting a distinct blackness encouraged other ethnic groups to claim their individuality and their difference from WASPs. This affinity for ethnicity created a rhetoric of pluralism rather than assimilation in society at large, as well as within films. While assimilation wasn’t enforced by media narratives, Jews had, for the most part, acculturated in the public sphere, keeping their traditions and distinctive culture within the home.

Many of the films about Jews focused on European oppression when the films were dramas, and on family life when comedies. Several comedies and musicals of the time had strong Jewish themes. The Producers (1967, Brooks) is a well-known instance of this, in which the film makes a mockery of Nazis while also portraying Jews as the money-obsessed stereotype through Max and Leo’s characters (Jewish actors Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder).

Films that did engage in detail with Jewishness created the notion of “the Jewish syndrome” in which cultural norms of the family in Jewish homes created exceedingly neurotic sons (and, in later narratives, daughters). These sons were immature, reliant on their mothers, hypochondriacs, and adolescent in sexuality (Erens 262).

Along with the new narratives of distinctiveness and American pluralism, Jewishness was embraced on the screen through a variety of approaches. Some films began to use Yiddish phrases and in-group jokes that were only accessible to Jewish audiences and maybe a handful of others. Some also used Jewish humor for a means of social commentary on the life of American Jews.

With the increased acculturation of Jews in the United States, the narrative of the JAP evolved in the 1960s. The mother who once sacrificed herself so her children could have a small amount of success in the “New World” now wanted to give her children the best things money could buy. The JAP was depicted as smart, aggressive, and assertive, and seated firmly in the lap of luxury, even when straying momentarily from the family. While the JAP is spoiled and has all of the trappings of success and achievement in the United States, films about the Holocaust returned the narratives of Jewishness to the Jew as sufferer.

Films about the Holocaust depicted victims as psychologically damaged and weak. Morituri (1965, Wicki) shows not only the victimization of Jews in the Holocaust, but marks Jewish women as sexually attainable by gentiles. In some films of this era, female Jewish

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.