On Goldman’s The American Jewish Story Through Cinema

Eric Goldman’s cultural case studies of nine mainstream representative films join a growing body of key studies of the American Jewish experience(s) that portray the social history of “reel Jews” and Jewish issues. The book recounts the “Zeligesque” process of mimesis, adaptation, and assimilation, as represented throughout the twentieth century through film. The book is clearly written and places its subjects in a general historical context that incorporates primary documents as well as personal interviews with filmmakers such as Barry Levinson.

Goldman’s scope is limited to nine American-made films: The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk, 1958), The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973), The Prince of Tides (Barbra Streisand, 1991), Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990), Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson, 1999), and Everything Is Illuminated (Liev Schreiber, 2005). This focus allows him to illustrate themes such as coming out of the ghetto (The Jazz Singer); anti-Semitism in the 1940s (Gentleman’s Agreement and Crossfire); “guaranteeing acceptance” (The Young Lions); the evolving Jewish woman as a strong, successful, assertive, and vibrant professional (The Way We Were, The Prince of Tides); the fragmentation of Jewish life, offered as a paradigmatic sketch of the American Jewish immigrant experience (Avalon, Liberty Heights); and the new trend whereby the search for “home” in Eastern Europe’s pre-Holocaust shtetl represents the comfort of identifying with Jewish heritage, and the search for a “usable past” by which to construct a transcontinental multigenerational Jewish identity (Everything Is Illuminated).

Goldman’s book, which broadens our understanding of acculturated Jewishness as represented in American cinema, develops further the mid-1980s surveys of American Jewish film by Patricia Erens (The Jew in American Cinema, 1984) and Lester Friedman (The Jewish Image in American Film, 1987). However, Erens’s and Friedman’s surveys attempt to cover the entirety of American film history and deal in general outlines, whereas Goldman’s focuses on a small number of case studies that specifically raise questions about the construction of Jewish identity, assimilation, and Jewish-gentile social and economic relations. (Further recent groundbreaking work has also appeared in print.)¹

Goldman, the author of Visions, Images, and Dreams: Yiddish Film—Past & Present (2011), is well positioned to draw on his experience as curator of film for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where he supervised the preservation of archival Yiddish films. For many years Goldman also developed and moderated the film program at the Center for Jewish History and Yeshiva University, and in 2011 he served as film curator at the International Yiddish Theatre Festival in Montreal.

A great strength of the book is Goldman’s tracing of the ideological tensions behind adapting a book to film. The novel The Young Lions, for example, was published by Irwin Shaw in 1948. Its later film adaptation involved many differences of interpretation over how to represent the plot, which followed the lives of three soldiers during World War II. Shaw bitterly disagreed with Marlon Brando’s sympathetic portrayal of Christian and with the playing down of the anti-Semitism that Noah encounters in the original book. Shaw felt Brando unjustifiably exculpated the perpetrators and bystanders in a way that did an injustice to the victims of the Nazis. The process and product of this contested adaptation would reveal a shift in the ways some Americans came to respond to images of the Holocaust. Goldman’s analysis of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), as adapted and directed by actor Liev Schreiber, also brilliantly reveals how the author revealed what it means for an American Jew without a known immediate connection to the Shoah to return to an annihilated European shtetl to confront “unfinished business.”

In his chapter on The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, USA, 1927), which wonderfully draws comparisons in counter-point...