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

Chapter 1. The Jew

A history in brief(s) of ‘the Jew’ in film Given that the history of Jews in cinema is almost synonymous with the representation of the Jewish man, often conflated into the overarching term ‘the Jew’, it seems redundant here to rehash fully that history which I sketched out in my introduction. However, to summarise the period before 1990, representations and stereotypes of the Jew traditionally fell into one or more of the following categories: racialised and antisemitic; invisible or non-existent; idealised, de-Judainised and de-Semitised, often replaced by the Gentile mimicking the Jew; ethnicised, anxious and neurotic; or victimised and humiliated. Furthermore, since the 1960s, underlying these characterisationswerecertainrecurringstereotypicaltics,whichstubbornly persisted, particularly in US cinema, including fast-talking intelligence, physical weakness, small stature and sexual preference for the blonde shiksa (Yiddish: a non-Jewish woman bearing derogatory connotations that objectify and sexualise her) (Desser 2001). Self-images of the Jew traditionally fell into two opposing categories, both of which were ‘openly resistant to and critical of the prevailing ideology of “manliness” dominant in Europe’ (Boyarin 1997: 23), that is goyim naches. First, the ‘tough’ Jew, that is the idealised hyper-masculine, macho, militarised, muscled and bronzed, though not very intellectual, Jew of the Zionist project (Breines 1990, Yosef 2004) with its variations of CHAPTER 1 The Jew 19 THE NEW JEW IN FILM 20 the ‘Muscle-Jew’ (Nordau 1898), and, later, the sabra (Hebrew: lit. ‘prickly pear’; a native-born Israeli) (Almog 2000) – these will be explored in more detail in Chapter 5. Second, the ‘queer’ or ‘sissy’ diaspora Jew, which can be defined as the intellectual yet insufficiently, incompetently and inadequately masculine Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European) male found in the diaspora – the subject of Chapter 4. This Jew is a ‘nonmale’ or an ‘unmanly man’. He is feminised, effeminate, gentle, timid, studious and delicate. He never uses his hands for manual labour, exercises or pays attention to maintaining his body. The diaspora Jew of traditional Ashkenazi Jewish culture who devoted his life to the study of the Torah embodies him. For centuries the diaspora Jew, especially his physiognomy and physiology, was tenaciously intertwined with notions of unmanly passivity, weakness, hysteria and pathology, all bred by the lack of outdoor and healthy activity. The Jew’s legs and feet in particular were characterised as non-athletic, unsuited to nature, sport, war-making, brutality and violence. At the same time, Yiddishkeit valued timidity, meekness, physical frailty and gentleness, privileging the pale scholarly Jew who studied indoors, excluded from labour and warfare. This resulted in a number of self-images of the Jew: the nebbish (Yiddish: an unfortunate simpleton; an insignificant or ineffectual person; a nobody; a nonentity), the yeshiva bocher (Yiddish: a religious scholar), the schlemiel, the mensch (Yiddish: a decent, upstanding, ethical and responsible person with admirable characteristics) and the haredi (often conflated, but not synonymous, with ‘Hasid’).3 All of these images were defined by their softness, gentleness, weakness and nonphysical passivity, what shall be called ‘queer’ or ‘sissy’. This queer/sissy Jew was characterised as ‘hysteric’, the result of prominent nineteenth-century antisemitic prejudices. Psychoanalysts such as Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot worked towards understanding the Jew’s hysteria. The Jew as an unmanly hysteric seeped into the Jew’s own selfconsciousness and identity. Boyarin noted how ‘by focusing on hysteria, especially in light of his own self-diagnosed hysteria, Freud was fashioning a self-representation that collaborated with one of the most tenacious of anti-Semitic topoi – that Jews are a third sex: men who menstruate’ (2000: 354). Franz Kafka, for his part, was morbidly preoccupied with his own insubstantial physicality, especially in relation to his physically imposing father (Gilman 1995, Pawel 1997). Otto Weininger concluded in his Sex and Character (1903) that ‘Judaism was saturated with femininity’ and that the 21 Jew was, ‘found to approach so slightly and so rarely the ideal of manhood’. Like women, the Jew shared an ‘exaggerated susceptibility to disease’ (quoted in Friedman 2007: 15). Adding repressed homosexuality to his fragile self-consciousness, Weininger’s self-hatred was so acute that he committed suicide shortly after the publication of his work. Boyarin noted the conflation between homosexual and Jew, that the same constructs were attached to both, namely, ‘hypersexuality, melancholia, and passivity […] the Jew was queer and hysterical – and therefore not a man’ (2000: 355). Gilman summarised that ‘the Jew is the hysteric; the Jew is...