Coming Out of the Ethnic Closet: Jewishness in the Films of Barry Levinson

A study of director and writer Barry Levinson's Baltimore films, Diner, Tin Men, Avalon, and Liberty Heights, demonstrates how his Jewish identity, repressed in films designed to reach larger audiences, like Good Morning, Vietnam and Rainman, slowly emerges in these more personal vehicles. The cultural moment of the late 1990s allowed Levinson to move from universalizing Jewishness, as in Avalon (1990), where the central family, never identified as Jewish, represents the American immigrant experience in general, to Liberty Heights (1999), where a particularized Jewish experience is depicted. Yet the turn to "Jewishness" in the latter film is fueled by conflicting images of Jewish masculinity that problematically intersect with the African American characters in the film. Levinson sets his film in 1950s Baltimore, raising questions about the kind of cultural work the film was intended to accomplish in 1999.