The American Jewish Story through Cinema

Notes

203  noTes PrefAce 1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., foreword to American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, ed. John E. O’Conner and Martin A. Jackson (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), x. 2. John E. O’Connor, ed., Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1990), 110. 3. K. R. M. Short, ed., Feature Films as History (Knoxville: Universityof Tennessee Press, 1981), 28. 4. Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). 5. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New York: Random House, 1975), vi. 6. Michael Paris, “MoreThan Just Entertainment: The Feature Film and the Historian ,” in Using Visual Evidence, ed. Robert Howells and Robert W. Matson (Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2009), 126. 7. John Belton, American Cinema/American Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), xxi. 8. Sklar, Movie-Made America, vi. 9. Peter C. Rollins, Hollywood as Historian (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky , 1998), 250. chAPTer 1 1. Neal Gabler, Frank Rich, and Joyce Antler, Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (New York and Los Angeles: American Jewish Committee and the Norman Lear Center, 2000), 10. 2. Judith E. Doneson,The Holocaust in American Film (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 16. 3. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared that permissive or mandatory segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Cooper v. Aaron (1958) provided the muscle for enforcement. 4. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 277. 204 • noTes To PAges 6 –17 5. Herbert J.Gans, “Park Forest: Birth of a Jewish Community,” in Commentaryon the American Scene: Portraits of Jewish Life in America, ed. Elliot E. Cohen (New York: Knopf, 1953), 221. 6. It must be pointed out that screenwriter Edward Anhalt’s adaptation of the 1948 Shaw novel reflects societal changes between the time Shaw penned the novel (in part during thewar) and when the film was released a decade later. Americans related to Germans differently in the two decades. America’s relationshipwith Germany had changed significantly in the fifties, as West Germany had become a close American ally in the Cold War and a friend and benefactor to the State of Israel. 7. Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1980), 21. 8. J. J.Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1996), 120. 9. There had been lesser-known films made earlier about Israel. Most notable are Sword in the Desert (1949) and The Juggler (1953). 10. Leonard J. Fein, Where We Are? The Inner Life of America’s Jews (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 79. 11. Howard M. Sachar, A History of Jews in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 730. 12. Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 190. 13. Lester D. Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), 215. 14. Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 302. 15. For an interesting analysis, see Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Zelig and Contemporary Theory: Meditations on the Chameleon Text,” in Charles L. P. Silet’s The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 198–216. 16. Gabler, Rich, and Antler,Television’s Changing Image, 17. 17. Peter Novick,The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 214. 18. Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 321. 19. Sorlin,The Film in History, 16. 20. D. W. Griffith, as quoted in Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 198. 21. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 642. chAPTer 2 1. CassWarner Sperling, Hollywood BeThy Name (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 18. noTes To PAges 17–29 • 205 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 27. 5. Reminiscences of Samson Raphaelson, June 1959, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University, New York. 6. Samson Raphaelson, “Birth of The Jazz Singer,” The American Hebrew, October 14, 1927, 812. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Arthur Hertzberg,The Jews in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 184. 10. Harry Jolson, Mistah Jolson, as told to Alban Emley (Hollywood: HouseWarvan Publishers, 1951), 47. 11. For more about Arnstein, see Michael C. Steinlauf, “Mark Arnshteyn and Polish Jewish Theater,” in The...