Hollywood S Image Of The Jew

A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry. The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.

The four volumes of Film Study include a fresh approach to each of the basic categories in the original edition. Volume one examines the film as film; volume two focuses on the thematic approach to film; volume three draws on the history of film; and volume four contains extensive appendices listing film distributors, sources, and historical information as well as an index of authors, titles, and film personalities.

Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews.

This book examines the role of American Jews in the entertainment industry, from the turn of the century to the outbreak of World War II. Eastern European Jewish immigrants are often credited with building a film industry during the first decade of the twentieth century that they dominated by the 1920s. In this study, Steven Carr reconceptualizes Jewish involvement in Hollywood by examining prevalent attitudes towards Jews among American audiences. Analogous to the Jewish Question of the nineteenth century, which was concerned with the full participation of Jews within public life, the Hollywood Question of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s addressed the Jewish population within mass media. This study reveals the powerful set of assumptions concerning ethnicity and media influence as related to the role of the Jew in the motion picture industry.

Examples range from film's early days to the present, from Europe, Israel, and the United States.

Key Texts in American Jewish Culture expands the frame of reference used by students of culture and history both by widening the "canon" of Jewish texts and by providing a way to extrapolate new meanings from well-known sources. Contributors come from a variety of disciplines, including American studies, anthropology, comparative literature, history, music, religious studies, and women's studies. Each provides an analysis of a specific text in art, music, television, literature, homily, liturgy, or history. Some of the works discussed, such as Philip Roth's novel Counterlife, the musical Fiddler on the Roof, and Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, are already widely acknowledged components of the American Jewish studies canon. Others-such as Bridget Loves Bernie, infamous for the hostile reception it received among American Jews+ may be considered "key texts" because of the controversy they provoked. Still others, such as Joshua Liebman's Piece of Mind and the radio and TV sitcom The Goldbergs, demonstrate the extent to which American Jewish culture and mainstream American culture intermingle with and borrow from each other.