The Jew in American Cinema

The Jew in American Cinema
Author: Patricia Erens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 488
Release: 1984
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

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.

Movie-Made Jews

Movie-Made Jews
Author: Helene Meyers
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-09-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1978821905

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.

Hollywood's Chosen People

Hollywood's Chosen People
Author: Daniel Bernardi
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2012-09-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0814338070

As studio bosses, directors, and actors, Jews have been heavily involved in film history and vitally involved in all aspects of film production. Yet Jewish characters have been represented onscreen in stereotypical and disturbing ways, while Jews have also helped to produce some of the most troubling stereotypes of people of color in Hollywood film history. In Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, leading scholars consider the complex relationship between Jews and the film industry, as Jews have helped to construct Hollywood's vision of the American dream and American collective identity and have in turn been shaped by those representations. Editors Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson introduce the volume with an overview of the history of Jews in American popular culture and the American film industry. Multidisciplinary contributors go on to discuss topics such as early Jewish films and directors, institutionalized anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and gossip culture, and issues of Jewish performance on film. Contributors draw on a diverse sampling of films, from representations of the Holocaust on film to screen comedy; filmmakers and writers, including David Mamet, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Edward Sloman, and Steven Spielberg; and stars, like Barbra Streisand, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller. The Jewish experience in American cinema reveals much about the degree to which Jews have been integrated into and contribute to the making of American popular film culture. Scholars of Jewish studies, film studies, American history, and American culture as well as anyone interested in film history will find this volume fascinating reading.

The "Jew" in Cinema

The
Author: Omer Bartov
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2005-01-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780253217455

Explores cinematic representations of the "Jew" from film's early days to the present.

The Jew in American Cinema

The Jew in American Cinema
Author: Patricia Erens
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 1988-08-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780253204936

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

The New Jew in Film

The New Jew in Film
Author: Nathan Abrams
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0813553431

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 significant departure from the past. With a fresh generation of Jewish filmmakers, writers, and actors at work, contemporary cinemas have been depicting a multiplicity of new variants, including tough Jews; brutish Jews; gay and lesbian Jews; Jewish cowboys, skinheads, and superheroes; and even Jews in space. The New Jew in Film is grounded in the study of over three hundred films from Hollywood and beyond. Nathan Abrams explores these new and changing depictions of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism, providing a wider, more representative picture of this transformation. In this compelling, surprising, and provocative book, chapters explore masculinity, femininity, passivity, agency, and religion in addition to a departure into new territory—including bathrooms and food. Abrams’s 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 questions of racial, sexual, and gender politics. In doing so, he provides a welcome overview of important Jewish films produced globally over the past twenty years.

An Empire of Their Own

An Empire of Their Own
Author: Neal Gabler
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2010-11-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 030777371X

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.

Hollywood and Anti-Semitism

Hollywood and Anti-Semitism
Author: Steven Alan Carr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2001
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521798549

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.