The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema

Conclusion

‘There is more than one way to be Jewish,’ said Israeli novelist Sami Michael, opening a gay pride rally in Jerusalem in 2006. Contemporary cinema’s depiction of the Jew/ess since 1990 convincingly demonstrates this, as ‘Jews arecomfortably“out”inavarietyofsenses’(Rosenberg1996:44).Inaddition to the stereotypes and self-images of the past, we have witnessed New Jews who are nasty, brutish, solitary, short, tough, fat, manly, unmanly, endogamous, exogamous, aggressive, passive-aggressive, traitors, losers, shysters, spaced-out, criminals, porn stars, assassins, killers, gangsters, cops, rebellious, in outer space, cowboys, skinheads, gay, lesbian, transsexual, superheroes, deviant, dysfunctional, liberated, working-class, Reform, Liberal,Conservative,haredi,Yiddish/Hebrew/Aramaic-speaking,immigrants, refugees, survivors, and so on. It is also in part a cinematic fulfilment of the dream of the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, who said, ‘We will know we have become a normal country when Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in Hebrew.’ It represents Jewish normalisation, as if cinema was, in the words of Hannah Arendt, quoting Kafka, ‘an instrument whereby’ Jews ‘might become “a people like other peoples”’ (1944: 120). These New Jews are located in contemporary narratives that are marked by a celebration, and a critique, of Jewish relations, by a sense that threats to Jewish continuity persist from within (assimilation/intermarriage) and without (antisemitism), as does resistance to both these threats. They are notmarkedbyinvisibilityorthedesiretobecome‘white’,butrathercelebrate New Jews in many guises. Such films are therefore quite overt and selfconscious about both the traditions of representation and their confident revisionist take on those representations as a source of ethnic pride. They display a ‘relative freedom from classical film paradigms of Jewish Conclusion 207 THE NEW JEW IN FILM 208 experience’ (Rosenberg 1996: 44). This shift towards more subtle, nuanced, playful and even outrageous representations signals that Jews feel more comfortable – and not just in the United States – that they have arrived; and for American Jews, even more so than they had done in the late 1960s and 1970s. Yet, at the same time, they are integrated to the extent that Jewishness has become accepted as normal or, as Brook put it, ‘Jewish normalcy has become everyone’s normalcy’ (2003: 177). Consequently, the proliferation of post-1990s Jewish images is partly overcompensation for the sense of a recedingly distinctive Jewishness. The more Jews become accepted, the more their difference must be asserted. Jewish representation in the post1990s period exists, therefore, in dialectical tension between assimilation and multiculturalism. It says much, then, that there are so many examples of this trend in contemporary cinema that not all of them could be listed or treated here. Contemporary cinema manifests much Jewish assertiveness. What was once said about The Producers (dir. Mel Brooks, 1968), that it conveys ‘considerable cultural confidence – loud and proud’ and is ‘a rebellion against invisibility’ (Hoberman 2003: 229) is just as applicable today, but to a whole series of films in a range of countries. These New Jews a re not afraid of their ‘surplus visibility’ or ‘burden of representation’ – ‘the feeling among minority members and others that whatever members of that group say or do, it is too much and moreover, they are being too conspicuous about it’ – that is being considered ‘too Jewish’, (Zurawik 2003: 6). Indeed, it is often the non-Jew who is now the outsider. As Martin (Martin Starr) in Knocked Up states, ‘Fuck you guys. I’m glad I’m not Jewish.’ To which the response comes, ‘So are we…You weren’t chosen for a reason.’ Contemporary cinema is, in the words of Eric L. Goldstein, ‘unafraid to engage in “open cultural narcissism,” undermining the assimilationist paradigm’ (2006: 210). It reflects how Jewish filmmakers, actors, actresses, directors and screenwriters are increasingly representing themselves without the mediation or biases that either non-Jewish or older, more assimilatory directors may deploy in their films. In today’s multicultural, postethnic and pluralist world these New Jews are less focused on Jewishness as a marker of an oppressed, diaspora-conscience minority. To take just one measure discussed throughout this book: language. Where Yiddish (and Hebrew) was once perceived by a generation of Jews 209 as an obstacle to acculturation, the language of mainstream contemporary cinema is more ethnically inflected, more ‘Jewish’. A diverse range of films uses suggestive and un-translated phrases (as well as rhythms, cadences and even made-up words) in Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish, and...