Movie Made Jews

Movie-Made Jews focuses on American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, and through unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. While it's a truism that Jews make movies, this book demonstrates how movies make Jews.

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.

Like the haggadah, the traditional “telling” of the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt that is read at the Passover seder, cinema offers a valuable text from which to gain an understanding of the social, political, and cultural realities of Jews in America. In an industry strongly influenced by Jewish filmmakers who made and continue to make the decisions as to which films are produced, the complex and evolving nature of the American Jewish condition has had considerable impact on American cinema and, in particular, on how Jews are reflected on the screen. This groundbreaking study analyzes select mainstream films from the beginning of the sound era to today to provide an understanding of the American Jewish experience over the last century. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s movie moguls, most of whom were Jewish, shied away from asserting a Jewish image on the screen for fear that they might be too closely identified with that representation. Over the next two decades, Jewish moviemakers became more comfortable with the concept of a Jewish hero and with an overpowered, yet heroic, Israel. In time, the Holocaust assumed center stage as the single event with the greatest effect on American Jewish identity. Recently, as American Jewish screenwriters, directors, and producers have become increasingly comfortable with their heritage, we are seeing an unprecedented number of movies that spotlight Jewish protagonists, experiences, and challenges.

Placing cinematic representations of the "Jew" within their historical context, Bartov demonstrates the powerful political, social, and cultural impact of these images on popular attitudes. He argues that these representations generally fall into four categories: the "Jew" as perpetrator, as victim, as hero, and as anti-hero. Examples range from film's early days to the present, from Europe, Israel, and the United States.

From cinema's beginnings, the film image of the Jew has closely followed the fortunes and misfortunes of Jews. Analyzing more than 70 films made in the Soviet Union. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. East and West Germany, France, Italy, the United States, and Israel from 1920 to the 1990s, noted historian Omer Bartov argues that depictions of the Jew in film have been fed by, or have reacted to, certain stereotypical depictions of Jews arising from age-old prejudices. These images, in turn, both reflected public attitudes and helped to shape them. He points to Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ as one of the most recent examples of the phenomenon. In trenchant discussions of individual films, Bartov develops four basic cinematic representations of the Jew: as perpetrator (especially in antisemitic films), as victim (especially in films about the Holocaust), as hero (especially in films about the state of Israel), and as anti-hero (especially in films about the Arab-Israel conflict). This absorbing book reveals the ways in which powerful images remained deeply embedded in the creative imagination, even as the circumstances that originally engendered them underwent profound changes, Bartov concludes that some of the fundamental prejudices about Jews, which predate cinema, persisted in cinematic depictions throughout the 20th century, although they have been reinterpreted according to changing political regimes, ideologies, and tastes. Covering a range of traditions and periods, The Jew in Cinema provides original and provocative interpretations that often contradict conventional views. Placing cinematic representations of the Jew within theirhistorical context, Bartov demonstrates the powerful political, social, and cultural impact of these images on popular attitudes.

The definitive history of Yiddish cinema returns to print with additional material

Does saying that Jesus Christ is a Jew hurt Jews and Jewish communities? This is the question that Nicholas Irish asks. Nicholas Irish's answer? YES! Irish provides ample evidence from history, society, politics, religion, and sociology to show that saying that Jesus Christ is a Jew hurts Jews and Jewish communities. Irish argues that stating that Jesus Christ is a Jew will push historical processes such as the violent pogroms that Jews experienced in Russia and the Holocaust that Jews experienced in Europe. This book is a must read for Jews and non-Jews alike. It is insightful and very readable. Even a person without any previous knowledge of Jewish history or Christianity can understand this book after reading it. This book may well hold the key to Jewish survival for the 21st Century!