On Epstein’s American Jewish Films: The Search for Identity

Anyone seeking to survey the depiction of Jews in American movies faces a crucial choice of how to arrange them for purposes of analysis. Adherence to the dictates of chronology is one option (and historical obligation). Prime examples of this strategy are Lester D. Friedman’s Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (1982) and Patricia Erens’s The Jew in American Cinema (1984), both of which are pioneering and still useful overviews. They seek to be comprehensive in coverage (at the expense of depth of diagnosis), and tend to be encyclopedic more than interpretive. Highlighting the fate of common representations of Jews onscreen, Nathan Abrams has recently updated the works of Friedman and Erens in The New Jew in Film (2012). Eric A. Goldman’s recent book, The American Jewish Story through Cinema (2013), seeks to make a handful of films reflective of particular phases of the communal experience, and covers roughly nine decades to illumine the animating impulses of this minority group. David Desser and Lester Friedman made an odd choice by organizing American Jewish Filmmakers (1993) around four noteworthy directors (Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Paul Mazursky). Much that is relevant in imagining American Jews is therefore neglected. Moreover the co-authors are forced to consider works that have not survived the test of timeless value, as well as those that betray only the slightest interest in the singularity of Jewish experience. Nor have all important films about Jews been directed by Jews; think of D. W. Griffith’s Romance of a Jewess (1908), Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), and Norman Jewisons Fiddler on the Roof (1971).

Lawrence J. Epstein has sensibly opted for a different approach. He has elected to arrange movies by certain common themes—whether by locale (the Catskills, the Lower East Side, the Near East), by the variety of communal types (the pious, the gangsters), or by social problem (assimilation, anti-Semitism). The topics are neither arbitrary nor surprising. The focus on issues, as well as on the sites of the struggle to reconcile citizenship and ethnicity, is promising. But the execution is quite disappointing.

American Jewish Films suffers primarily from an absence of energetic research. The endnotes are extended over a mere two pages; by contrast, far more of a scholarly apparatus is expected of a typical undergraduate paper. Epstein’s bibliography is more useful, and runs four pages—but the volumes and articles that he lists do not seem to have been confronted or even implicitly criticized in his text as a way of moving the study of the subject into fresh or illuminating directions. As a work of serious engagement with his subject, Epstein’s foray into cinematic history does not pass muster, and is much inferior to his previous work, a charming study of American Jewish comedians, The Haunted Smile (2001). That book, like American Jewish Films, constitutes an effort to answer the question of what happens to religious faith and collective memory when America intervenes.

Thus Epstein’s primary concern, it can be inferred, is neither aesthetic nor primarily historical. He regards film not as an art form that must obey (or invent) formal rules to get its emotional effects, nor movies even as specimens of sociological evidence that reveal over time the vicissitudes of Jewish life in the United States. He writes about the movies as a fan, a member of the audience, grateful for the entertainment that Hollywood has provided (and who does not cherish the impact of movies upon one’s life?). But his book also bristles with a certain frustration that movies cannot constitute more effective forms of resistance against the corrosive forces of assimilation. At least implicitly, Epstein seems to be asking for what he knows cannot be given. Movies simply cannot summon images sufficiently powerful to reinforce the religious sentiment on which Jewish continuity now seems destined to depend. Here, for instance, is his take on...