Jewish Faces in French Cinema Part 7

Shifts in Taste and Sensibility

There were occasionally explicitly Jewish characters on [American] television, but if aliens invaded planet Earth with only Must-See TV as an anthropological guide to the peoples they had conquered, they would think ”Jew” equalled “single neurotic urban male who lives exclusively in New York and dates blond women who seem bemusedly to tolerate him”….[1]

It has been noted recently that there has been a regular cascade of new books and articles on Jewish films and cinema about Jews, not just in America or Israel, but in the world at large.[2]  Though I have not even attempted to read all these new books, reviewers have shown what each book is about and where the trend seems to be going.  From these reviewers and the books they deal with, it would seem that research has focused on the kind of people, actions and situations are depicted, with attention also on the ideological trends to be observed.  If we expand the scope from film to television, allowing advances in home videos and satellite stations devoted to older films, the range of electronic or digital works of art and entertainment breaks many of the older shibboleths about how general audiences would react to Jews, Jewishness and Judaism on screen used by Hollywood and other directorial centres in western nations to keep those topics on the margins, in the background or under the surface.

The transition is exemplified by a late 1980s American sitcom The Wonder Years.[3] An episode from 1989 called “Birthday Boy” (first aired on 11 April 1989) showed the main character, Kevin Arnold (played by Josh Saviano) a typical though bright and articulate boy with secularized parents being best friends with a somewhat gawky but not unintelligent Jewish boy of the same age, Paul Pfeiffer (played by Fred Savage).  At the time of the Jewish lad’s bar mitzvah, Kevin—whose voice-over is the narrative guide to what is going on and what he is thinking in the scenes presented—listens to his friend prepare his prayers and reading skills for the upcoming ritual, joins in the dinner-table conversations with the extended Jewish family, and comes to envy what he vaguely comprehends as the meaningfulness of the Bar Mitzvah both as a religious rite of passage and as demonstration of family closeness, the moral and domestic significance of Paul’s grandfather’s gift of an heirloom (siddur or prayer book) and seemingly most of all a sense of intergenerational continuity lacking in his own life.  At first, not sure why he is jealous, Kevin says that he cannot attend his best friend’s Bar Mitzvah ceremony or party afterwards—because it is also his own birthday.   Though the two boys’ birthdays do not fall on identical days, the need to celebrate Paul’s ritual in a synagogue on Saturday means there is a conflict and Kevin, who had known this for a while and saw no problem because of the timing of his own party at home, seizes on this excuse to back off from sharing the joy with Paul.  In the course of this episode, Paul makes several attempts to establish an emotional closeness to his own father and find something meaningful in their bonding that will be equivalent to Jewish tradition; and this equivalence is found, albeit with some hesitation and scepticism, when Mr. Arnold invites his son to work on the family car so that mechanical skills and some anecdotes about his grandfather are passed on. 

Sweet and nostalgic (one might say, instead, banal and sentimental, as well as superficial and insulting) as this already dated comic programme is, it does exemplify an inadequate attempt to integrate Jews, Jewishness and Judaism into mainstream viewing time.  It represents the so-called demarcation line of 1990[4] that Shai Ginsburg cites Nathan Abrams’ The New Jew in Film as claiming when a normalization of Jew, their behaviour and their religion shift from the exotic otherness of the early period to the assimilated familiarity of the present.  Ginsburg points out the superficiality both of the terms Abrams uses—wherein Jewishness consists in images and actions such as sexuality, bathroom activities, and clothing style, and Judaism has been reduced from its dynamic variations to a misrepresentative version of neo-Orthodoxy–and its post-modernist theoretical bases.  There is also, not only a too-easy slide between film-makers (directors, producers, actors, distributors), audiences (ordinary spectators, professional critics and university professors of sociology, psychology, politics, and other social studies) and theory-bound ideologues of political correctness in all the media, but also an over-emphasis on North American experiences, as though tis stereotypes and clichés were the dominant mentality of Jewish contemporaneity.

At the same time as there is this new (or renewed) interest in and acceptance of Jews in cinema and Jewish films, there has been, however, historically speaking, an increasing incidence of anti-Semitism throughout the world, including among many so-called liberal, anti-Israeli Jews.  One way to investigate such a trend is, of course, to examine the language used in scripts, to look very closely at the images of persons and actions, and to parse the circumstances that can be seen to drive the action and motivate the actors.  But I think such an approach to what can be categorized as ignorance, misunderstanding or deliberate distortion of Jewishness and Judaism as a civilization is only the beginning of a real understanding the phenomenon, not the place where the study should take us: call it aesthetic, technological or epistemological.  By aesthetic here I mean, of course, something more than an evaluation of the beauty or pleasant or negative emotions stimulated by the films in question; but rather the way in which such feelings are produced by the film-makers and in the imaginations of the spectators, thus something at once cultural, psychological and rhetorical.  By technological, too, I take the approach to go beyond the mere apparatus and practice of cinematography—the way a film is put together out of sounds, actions, colours, mood-creation, and so forth; but how feelings and knowledge are produced, memories stimulated, and allusions triggered.  By epistemological, while closer to the normal philosophical sense of how to recognize, test and apply the truth in moral circumstances, I mean the deepening of the contexts in which reality is perceived as something both dynamic and controlled for rhetorical effects.

It is therefore one thing to note the grotesque imagery that pervades the anti-Semitic media from at least the late nineteenth century onwards and its links through the rise of our own contemporary versions of anti-Zionism, insofar as the perpetrators of these slanders and slurs continue the hate-filled attitudes and perceptions of the racist bigots in the past; but quite another thing, and a very deeply disturbing phenomenon, to see Jewish men and women in Israel and throughout the Diaspora reproducing these same libellous motifs, albeit without indulging in the most extreme expressions of parodic imagery or even being aware of how closely they recreate the same old lies, vilifications and insults.  Thus it would be too simplistic to explain away these recent manifestations in cinema, television and digital formats as merely the result of self-loathing and an obsequious wish to preclude the imminent return of genocidal instincts by seeking to agree with or even outdo the Jew-haters in their ideological campaigns of mockery and calls to violence.[5]

Seeing with Anti-Semitic Eyes[6]

The superficial, the facile, the staccato, and the brilliant repelled him.  Not that he was an “abstract painter”—as the jargon goes.  He was eminently concrete.  He plays a legitimate trompe-l’œil on the optic nerve.[7]

When Max Nordau at the end of the nineteenth century remarked that the anti-Semites seemed to be succeeding because too many assimilated and smugly westernized Jews were victims of what is now called the Stockholm Syndrome, that is, they adapted the viewpoint and the evaluations of their enemies—this in a purely psychological and certainly in a metaphorical sense.  The notion that modern Jews—and perhaps not only them—speak, act, feel and think about themselves with the same kind of deep-seated hatred, disgust and grotesque fear as can be found in Judeophobic writings, parodic caricatures, and pernicious legislations, not to mention even genocidal actions can be amply demonstrated by any glance at the current media.  However, instead of discussing why certain Israelis are willing to work hand-in-hand with their enemies to undermine the legitimacy and security of their state or why others go beyond finding excuses for anti-Semitic violence in Europe and North America to active participation in boycotts, divestment movements and even fund-raising for terrorist causes, I want to look at Nordau’s comments from a different perspective. 

From this other perspective, I want to examine the proposition that Jews actually start to see themselves through other eyes than the ones they were born with, or perhaps in some instances those of their grandparents.  By this, of course, I don’t mean that the actual biological apparatus of seeing has been exchanged in some bizarre surgical operation or genetic experiments.  But working on the premise that seeing, in the widest sense of responding to stimuli, classifying received sensations, recognizing and classifying such sensory events, evaluating and storing these perceptions, and then recollecting them at a later time is a culturally-constructed sequence of phenomena.  In other words, it is not only or mainly a matter of what is said, written and broadcast in response to circumstances, but rather something more deeply implicated in the epistemology and aesthetics of seeing and recollecting, making the perceiver essentially unaware of the dysfunction and distortion, and assuming that his or her consequent judgments and actions are logical outcomes.

Is there something 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 modern French cinema and what does it work from and towards?

NOTES

---

[1] Rachel Shukert, “ABC’s New Sitcom ‘The Golbergs’ isn’t a Remake and that’s a Good Thing” Tablet (21 June 2013) online at http//www.tabletmagazine.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/135599/sitcom-goldbergs?print=1  However, see David Shasha’s earlier (originally 2009,now reposted 2013) DVD Review “The Lost Jewish World of Gertrude Berg” Sephardic Heritage Update (1 July 2013).

[2] For instance Shai Ginsberg in his review of Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012) on H-Net Reviews (June 2013) lists two collections—Lawrence Baron, ed., The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (2011), Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, eds., Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (2013)—and several older studies—Lester D. Fridman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (1982), Patricia Eens, The Jew in American Cinema (1984) and Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989; repr 2010).

[3] Created and written by Carol Black and Neal Marlens, The Wonder Years was directed by Steve Miner.  “Birthday Boy” was the thirteenth episode of the second season in the series.

[4] This was the period, too, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end, and then the clash of cultures and the end of history didn’t happen with the rise of the Islamicist menace and the beginning of the War on Terror. 

[5] David Shasha in “The Lost Jewish World of Gertrude Berg” puts it this way in his acerbic statement: “We have tragically moved from a warm and giving heimische immigrant Jewish culture typified by perhaps the best-known American Jew of the first half of the 20^th century, to a Hollywood Jewish nihilism that marks Jewish couture and the Jewish psyche as fatalistic and hopelessly, fanatically misanthropic” (See Note 1 above).

[6] For a more sustained discussion on the theoretical basis of such technologically-enhanced  “seeing”, see Norman Simms, In the Context of his Times: Alfred Dreyfus as Lover, Intellectual, Poet and Jew   (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013), esp. the Prologue

[7] James Huneker, Unicorns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917) p. 103.  Huneker is talking about Paul Cézanne. James Huneker, Unicorns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917) p. 103.  Huneker is talking about Paul Cézanne.