Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition, by Helene Meyers: Rutgers University Press © 2021; ISBN 9781978821880; paperback; 236 pages; $34.95.
By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Helene Meyer’s book Movie-Made Jews explores how films mirror and shape the diverse identities embraced by contemporary American Jewry. Readers of the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith and the Jewish Women’s Archive Blog will be familiar with Meyers’ insightful movie reviews. Here on a bigger canvas, she analyzes documentaries and feature films that venture beyond common cinematic stereotypes of American Jews to dramatize their attitudes towards antisemitism, assimilation, feminism, gender orientation, the Holocaust, Jewish assertiveness, and race relations.
Contending that the representation of Jewish life in popular culture influences how Jews view themselves and how Gentiles perceive them, Meyers examines three components of this process: how the interactions between directors and studio management affect what actions, beliefs, and traits of Jewish characters get portrayed; how the final cut of the film itself addresses Jewishness and Jewish themes; and how the Jewish aspects of films are accentuated or minimized by Jewish and non-Jewish audiences and critics.
While most of the films Meyers discusses were produced in the last 30 years, she includes a few earlier ones that grappled with the above topics to illustrate the nature of the film industry when they were made, the historical context then, and how the status of Jews in American society in that period affected the way these subjects were handled. For example, during the Twenties the major studios financed films that attracted the broadest possible audience and promoted Jewish assimilation heeding the nativist biases inherent in the restrictive immigration quotas passed that decade and the dominant “Melting Pot” paradigm for minority integration. To counteract the antisemitic accusation that the Jewish movie moguls used their films to corrupt Christian Americans leveled by prominent figures like Henry Ford, they championed acculturation over parochialism as exemplified by the most famous Jewish film from this era The Jazz Singer (1927).
More recent Jewish films have benefitted from several factors permitting them to focus on Jewish distinctiveness and issues without coding or effacing the Jewish identities of their characters or the ethnic or religious concerns that inform their actions. The rise of identity politics and multiculturism and the upward mobility of American Jews paved the way for this change. So has the increased centrality of the Holocaust and Israel in the consciousness of Americans in general and American Jews in particular. Meyers credits the proliferation of Jewish film festivals since the 1980s for providing venues for Jewish films produced independently and therefore less beholden to the business model of maximizing audience size. Home entertainment formats like DVD and streaming services also contribute to the practice of narrowcasting to niche audiences rather than broadcasting to the public at large.
For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the chapter about antisemitism to illustrate Meyer’s approach. Hollywood had avoided making films that explicitly portrayed American antisemitism. During the Thirties, the film industry adopted the Production Code whose guidelines prohibited films that ridiculed any religion and required fair treatment of other countries. Joseph Breen, the head of the Production Code Administration from 1934 on, feared exacerbating antisemitism or offending Germany with films condemning its domestic and foreign manifestations. The major studio owners sought to avert the imposition of federal censorship and to assure the distribution of their films in Germany by not violating its ban on movies critical of its persecution of Jews. Once the United States entered the war, the Office of War Information and Breen’s agency demanded the redaction of movies that suggested antisemitism was an American problem or singled out Jews as Hitler’s primary victims. This strategy aimed at undercutting Nazi propaganda that the war had been foisted upon the country by Jewish studio owners to promote a Jewish agenda and that American denunciations of Nazi antisemitism were hypocritical given its pervasiveness in the United States.
The shocking images of what Allied troops saw when they liberated German concentration and death camps, as well as public opinion polls indicating high levels of American antisemitism motivated a few Hollywood filmmakers to expose the prevalence of anti-Jewish bigotry within the United States. Meyers assesses Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) for the pros and cons of these “social problem” movies. A gentile investigative reporter named Phil assumes a Jewish identity to personally experience instances of antisemitic discrimination. Although Meyers appreciates how relevant the film was when it was released, she justly faults it for its dearth of Jewish content. Aside from abhorring antisemitism, Phil’s Jewish friend Dave exhibits no beliefs, practices, or traits that mark him as Jewish. Making a gentile the protagonist enhanced the movie’s appeal to gentile audiences but failed to educate viewers about the cultural and religious factors that distinguished Jews from their gentile neighbors. As Ring Lardner Jr. aptly put it, “The movie’s moral is that you should never be mean to a Jew, because he might turn out to be a gentile.”
Conversely, School Ties (1992) reverses Gentleman’s Agreement’s premise by having a Jewish teen named David feign he is a Christian to play quarterback for a Christian prep school whose administrators recruit him to guarantee a championship football season, but counsel him not to disclose his secret. Before David’s religious affiliation is revealed, he hears antisemitic slurs voiced by his teammates and roommates. After he is outed, they ostracize him. When a cheating scandal emerges, they blame David who eventually is exonerated by a fellow student who identifies the real culprit. Though hardly a devout Jew, David privately prays on Yom Kippur following a game he played in earlier that day and defends himself against the antisemitic barbs directed at him. Studios rejected the script for nine years until Paramount purchased the rights to it. The exclusion and taunting David endures reminded Jews involved in the production of School Ties of their past treatment in predominantly Christian environments. The gentile actors appearing in the movie noted how they were sensitized to the insidiousness of antisemitism. Though Meyers argues that the harassment David receives remains relevant, the setting of the film in 1955 at a Christian school also can enable audiences to consider it a period piece and thus outdated in its depiction of how most American Christians perceive Jews today.
Meyers contrasts more controversial and overtly Jewish treatments of antisemitism by two independent films with those employed in Gentleman’s Agreement and School Ties. Based on the true story of Danny Burros, The Believer (2001) chronicles the radicalization of his cinematic counterpart Danny Balint from a yeshiva bocher into a neo-Nazi. Danny disavows his origins because he contends Judaism encourages passivity as epitomized by Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac and the general lack of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, he still admires the power exerted on Jews by Adonai and the Torah. He warns his former yeshiva friends about a bomb his neo-Nazi group plants in the Jewish Theological Seminary and dies in the blast rather than deal with the fallout of being exposed as a Jew by a newspaper reporter.
Jewish self-hatred and the antisemitic canards Danny and his minions spout were unlikely topics to attract commercial distribution but winning the Grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, getting aired on Showtime, and garnering accolades from attendees of the Jerusalem Film Festival expanded the audience reach of The Believer. Even the ADL screened the movie to a leadership training program. Indeed, I showed it at a local synagogue and can attest to the lively discussion it generated about neo-Nazism, Jewish identity, and Danny’s epiphany that antisemitism fosters Jewish solidarity as much as it drives some Jews to distance themselves from their ethnic and religious roots.
The documentary Protocols of Zion (2005) consists of interviews of neo-Nazis, anti-Israeli Arabs, Christian pastors, and a spectrum of Jewish figures about antisemitic conspiracy theories inspired by the eponymous tract referenced in its title. Perplexed by a New York taxi driver’s claim that Jews were implicated in 9/11 and the ubiquitous availability of English translations of the Protocols, director Marc Levin delved into the subject to comprehend the mindset of those who parroted its calumnies and other accusations of Jewish perfidy. Searching for the roots of Arab receptivity to the Protocols in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians and sway over American policy makers, he found ample evidence of the phenomenon, but also of extremist Israelis whose vilification of all Palestinians was just as execrable.
The distribution and reception trajectory of Protocols of Zion resembled that of The Believer. It initially generated a buzz at Sundance and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. That led to its syndication by HBO and screenings and discussions of it at Jewish community centers, a Palestinian group at NYU, and inner-city public-school students in Chicago. There were critics within the Jewish community who objected to Levin supplying a soapbox for antisemites to vent. While some of the debates elicited by the film further polarized the positions of participants, others led to fruitful dialogue. The rejection of Levin’s invitations to interview Jewish celebrities like Larry David, Norman Lear, and Rob Reiner about their reactions to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ (2004) indicated that airing such toxic bigotry remained a third rail in Hollywood. In retrospect, the recent spate of antisemitic terrorist attacks and the mainstreaming of antisemitic conspiracy theories by “news” networks like Fox and prominent Republican politicians highlight the urgent need for more films that address the subject as frankly as Levin does in Protocols of Zion.
Although I can quibble with Meyer’s selections of films like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) or Keeping Up with the Steins (2006) which I find riddled with trite stereotypes of homosexuals in the former and affluent Jews in the latter, I am impressed by her cogent interpretations of movies and the evidence she adduces to demonstrate how the contemporary depictions of Jewish identities and issues have originated in shifts in the production and distribution of motion pictures and impacted those who watch them. This has resulted in more nuanced and varied portrayals of cultural and religious Jews, the lingering trauma of the Holocaust, LGBTQ Jews, Jewish women, and the interactions between Jews and other ethnic, racial, and religious minorities. If you’re a movie buff looking for a good summer read, Movie-Made Jews will introduce you to significant Jewish films you might have missed and enrich your understanding of ones you have already watched. Representation matters, and it particularly matters to Jews who occupy an insider-outsider position within American society and an outsized one in Hollywood.
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Lawrence (Laurie) Baron, now retired, served as the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He served from 1988 to 2006 as director of SDSU’s Lipinsky Institute for Judaic Studies. He was the founder in 1995 of the Western Jewish Studies Association.