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” equaled “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 surge in the number of new books and articles on Jewish films and on 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, colors, 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 legislation, 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.
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 20th 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment