What Does It Mean to Be Photographed as a Jew?

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 8–11 What Does It Mean to Be Photographed as a Jew? JEFFREY S HANDLER ON A FRIDAY in early August 1982, my classmates and I in the YIVO/ Columbia Summer Yiddish Program had just celebrated our siyemhazman , marking the conclusion of six weeks of intensive study of Yiddish language, literature, and culture. Before heading our separate ways, we gathered in front of the YIVO building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 86th Street to pose for a picture. As we lined up before the camera, an elderly couple suddenly rushed over to us from out of nowhere and shouted, ‘‘Take our picture! We’re Jews, too! We’re from the Bronx!’’ The photographer, one of the other students in the program, explained to them that this was a class picture and motioned them out of the way, and then we resumed taking our group picture. At the time this seemed to be nothing more than a brief, comically awkward moment. But in thinking about it over the years, I’ve found it to be a revealing and, in a way, strangely moving interaction. What should we make of this couple’s wanting to be included as fellow Jews in a group portrait, of their desire to be photographed as Jews? Indeed, what does it mean to be photographed as a Jew? Since the mid-nineteenth century, shortly after the invention of this medium, photography has presented Jews, as it has many other communities, with the unprecedented opportunities and challenges of a new means of representation and communication. Jews’ negative responses to photography may come to mind more readily, such as the resistance of some ultraorthodox Jews, to this day, to being photographed—whether because they understand it as a violation of the prohibition against image-making or because they regard photography as a problematic challenge to Jewish notions of modesty in public, or for some additional reason. There are other unpleasant associations some Jews have with the medium—the use of photography as a tool of anti-Semites to stigmatize Jews as a pernicious racial type; its use as an instrument of state control for the purposes of inventory , restriction, and at its worst, annihilation. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. The Hebrew Academy, The Luxor, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1994. Photo by Frédéric Brenner from Jews/ America/a Representation (Abrams, 1996). 10 JQR 94:1 (2004) At the same time, photography has played an important definitional role in modern Jewish life, providing Jews—again, like so many others— with an important new way of experiencing modernity. Having one’s picture taken is an inherently modernist undertaking, not only by dint of the technology required but also because of the various cultural protocols that surround taking pictures, which each community has evolved in response to this technological innovation. Moreover, although photography results in fixed, silent, two-dimensional images, their creation is a performative act. Photographs of Jews, therefore, might be understood not only as artifacts of Jewish life but as the product of modern Jewish performances . For example, the many thousands of portraits of Jews taken by studio photographers in towns and cities throughout Poland from the late nineteenth century until the eve of World War II reveal how members of this community saw photography as an occasion to engage with the modern world. Their motives for this engagement were anything but uniform; they included the thorough embrace of modernity as well as efforts to resist or counteract it. Some of these portraits celebrate Jewish political or cultural activism; others commemorate life-cycle events or the bonds of family and friendship. Still others, aided by the studio photographer’s costumes and props, provide their subjects with opportunities to indulge in fantasy. But uniting all the many thousands of these images—now cherished as memorials to the vibrancy of a lost world—is their subjects’ use of this modern medium to enact a sense of self according to protocols distinctive to photography...