A Brief and Temporary Conclusion
Is
there something unique or distinctive about the way in which traditional Jews
perceive the world, formulate their memories, call to mind past experiences,
and register their visual memories in verbal or tangible form? How does the Jewish imagination work in
cinema and what does it work from and towards?
And between these two questions, as it were, there emerges another,
which is how do Jews, when they are basically ignorant of their own traditions
and in a state of rejection from the behaviour and beliefs of their own
families and close neighbours, imagine themselves to be—that is project out for
the public to see those aspects of themselves they wish to be separated from?
Fairly
recently Ben Urwand presented an argument that during the 1920s and 1930s, as
the movie industry developed in Hollywood, the great Moguls, who were disproportionately
Jewish—directors, producers, and others associated with the filming and
distribution of cinema—went out of their way to delete the real Jewish
experiences they had grown up with in America and in Europe before that and too
often collaborated with the anti-Semitic tendencies in the United States and
then, after Hitler came to power in Germany, with the National Socialists.[1]
This is an extreme statement or “assertion” as Jennifer Scheussler puts, and
goes beyond Thomas P. Doherty’s Hollywood
and Hitler: 1933-1939.[2] The prevailing view is that the movie
industry overlooked what was going on in Germany because of its financial stake
in the distribution network in Europe, just as it attempted to make real Jews
invisible for American audiences whom they presumed were not ready to accept
such characters into the mainstream.
Urwand claims more nefarious motives were at work,[3]
at least in the sense of wilfully collaborating with Nazi agents in America and
Reich officers in Germany. It was not
until the Second World War II actually commenced for Americans that films began
to be made with Nazi spies threatening national security and refugees seen
escaping from persecution in their occupied homelands.[4] Still in Casablanca
made in 1942 it would be hard for anyone to identify who the Jewish characters
were and what they were seeking refuge from, even if you could recognize the
Jews playing leading parts in the film.
One list by Ed Fields includes:
Ed Asner, Bea Arthur, Gene Barry, Richard
Benjamin, Kevin Costner, Lee J. Cobb, Joan Collins, Richard Dreyfus, Ted
Danson, Peter Falk (Columbo), Eddie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Betty
Grable, Sharon Gless, Steven Segall Dustin Hoffman, Monty Hall, Amy Irving,
Jack Klugman, Leonard Nimoy, Ken Olin, Ron Perlman, George Segel, William
Shatner, Peter Strauss, Rod Steiger, Jane Seymour, Barbara Walters, Debra
Winger and Bruce Willis.[v]
While
movie makers in Hollywood did not indulge in explicit anti-Semitism and kept
grotesque stereotypes off the screen, the silencing of Jewish concerns and the
avoidance of Jewish faces—many actors and actresses performed under
“americanized” names and played the parts of other ethnic groups, such as
Italians or Englishmen, the absence of Judaism and Jewishness from the
depiction of ordinary American life was a painful and humiliating distortion of
reality. The extent of this distortion
may be easily seen when one looks at the way stage plays, vaudeville, radio and
phonograph recordings displayed Jewish life and voices to American audiences.[6] In short, whereas anti-Semitism could show
itself in Continental films during the 1930s and 1940s by a display of overtly caricatured
depictions of Semitic faces—hook-noses, leering eyes, grotesque insect-like
bodies—the American cinemas, as much in newsreels as in feature films, avoided
identifying Jews as such.
To
Jewish audiences, however, the idealism, social consciousness and the urge to
assimilate often appearing in films as part and parcel of the New World
experience was recognizable as their own, and also their own personal histories
could make them identify these intrinsic attitutudes projected on to others as
their own—their immigrant experiences wre glimpsed in the xenophobia and racial
bigotry in small towns, amongst middle-class boobs and upper class snobs. That airbrushing away of anti-Semitism and
discrimination in social and commercial life, by calling it something else, was,
with very rare exceptions, an insult to the reality in which Jews lived and
worked.[7]
By
the time of The Mortal Storm (1940)
and To Be or Not to Be (1942) some of
these official attitudes had changed, and for a number of years sympathetic
Jewish characters and evil Nazi collaborators could be explicitly named for
what they were. Right up to the 1990s,
in fact, thanks to the revulsion against the Holocaust and the shift towards a
more cosmopolitan and tolerant nation, much of the old prejudice was gone. It was replaced, though, by a sentimentalized,
nostalgic view of immigrant experiences, with East European Jews observed to be
joining in the great melting pot of American society, and then in the next few
generations losing most specific markers of difference, whether in external
appearance or in behaviour and opinions. Residual caricatured traits could be
laughed off as harmless and superficial eccentricities, not as dangerous threats
to culture or social stability. Nevertheless,
though films about the Holocaust in the cinema and on television could become
rawer and more accurate—e.g., Sophie’s
Choice, Schindler’s List—anti-Semitism
was presented as an explored given of the Old World, with no concern for what
caused it, how it gained traction after World War I, and why it manifested in
the grotesque imagery exploited by the Nazis—nor why so many ordinary Europeans
were taken in by it. Moreover, there
also was a tendency to normalize and soften the picture of the perpetrators and
their apologists, to show that not all Germans were Nazis, all Nazis so bad as
they seemed, and to suggest that some Jews collaborated with them. This last element, which we will not discuss
in this essay, leads towards the current demonization of Israelis and Zionists,
and even, in some instances, towards all Jews.[8]
French
cinema has, as we have tried to show, a different trajectory, although the destination
has been towards the same negative views of Jews and Judaism. The normalized and virtually indistinguishable
Jewish faces give way to an Israeli typology of otherness. Perhaps—and this is the subject of another
discussion—the increasingly pro-Palestinian tenor of French-language cinema,
whether from the Middle East or other parts of Europe outside the metropolis,
tips the over-all balance of depictions created by mainstream French studios.
[1] Ben Urwand, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press, 2013). See Jennifer
Schuessler’s review, “Scholar Asserts that Hollywood Avidly Aided Nazis”, The
New Yoprk Times (25 June 2013) online at hhtp://www. nytimes.com/2013/06/26/scholar-asserts-that-hollywood-avidly-aided-nazis.html?pagewanted=print
[2] New York: Columbia University
Press. 2013. See “Interview with Thomas Doherty, Author of Hollywood and
Hitler, 1933-1939” online at http://www.cup.columbia.edu/static/interview-thomas-doherty-hollywood-and-hitler
[3] See
Scheussler’s review above for more tempered comments and
counter-arguments. Yet none of this
absolved Hollywood, as other parts of American society, from vacillating,
temporizing and collaborating with the Hitler regime and leaving Jewish
refugees high and dry to face the Holocaust on their own. More and more studies also show that Franklin
Delanore Roosevelt was more than passively
involved in preventing adequate help being shown to the persecuted millions
under Nazi threat—from providing proper mans of stopping the murder of six
million by bombing of the death camps, the railway trains bringing the victims
to their death, and holding the perpetrators to account up and down the line of responsibilities. See for instance, “The great moral failure of FDR” New York
Daily News (11
May 2013) www.nydailynews.com/opinion/great-moral-failure-fdr-article-1.1285363. For a more moderate position on FDR’s attitude and actions, see “FDR and
the Holocaust” at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/pdfs/holocaust“The great moral failure of FDR - NY Daily Newswww.nydailynews.com/opinion/great-moral-failure-fdr-article-1.1285363
[4]
Doherty points to a few of the films of the late 1930s that began to touch on
the dangers of fascists in Europe and racial groups at home in America, but
again, though the ranks of the Jewish directors and actors by emigrés from
oppression, and thus with direct personal experience of what was happening
under Hitler, at best caution reigned in Hollywood—studios feared organizations
such as the American Legion—and at worst showed sympathy for the anti-Semitic
and anti-Democratic causes.
[5] Ed Fields, “Jewish Stars over
Hollywood” at iamthewitness.com/doc/Jewish.Stars. Over. Hollywood/
[vi] This does not mean the
representation of Jews and Judaism was very realistic or satisfying to the
general public or the Jewish community itself, since what was created was
partly a wish-fulfillment version, with sentimentality and nostalgia more in
evidence than actual depictions of the long hard struggle for acceptance and
assimilation, and legacy of stereotypes, such as Woody Allen’s neurotic,
self-doubting and insecure character, Jack Benny’s bumbling and hesitant Mr
Nussbaum, and other comic shtick
figures.
[7] David
Shasha’s review on the revived and re-imagined Molly Goldberg series (see
previous section of this long essay) becomes an attack on what he sees as a
cynical, selfish and at times un/anti-Jewish new self-image of mostly Ashkenazi
Jews in America. In a sense, such a
refraction or distortion of the reality can be taken as a slight advance on the
Woody Allen typology, as seen in Allen’s own anti-Israeli remarks. See W. Spiers, “Woody Allen: Stop Violence by
Israel” philly.com (29 January 1988) http://articles.philly.com/1988-01-29/news/26281316_1_paternity-suit-terminal-illness-jewish-homeland
[8]
Manfred Gerstenfeld, Demonizing Israel and
the Jews (New York: RVP Press, 2013).
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