The Cinema of Jewish Experience: Introduction

The place of film in a journal of Jewish literary studies may still require some justification, even though the past two decades have witnessed an impressive burgeoning of interest in cinematic constructions of the Jew as a valid concern for historians and literary scholars. Indeed, the field of film studies itself, which one is tempted to call the foundling child of the humanities, has, over a somewhat longer period, progressed from an uncertain status at the fringes of literary interpretation and art-historical analysis to being a major preoccupation for those involved in study of mass culture in the modern era. Originally the private obsession of film buffs and the professional bailiwick of a few devoted film critics, belletrists, and theoreticians, the study of cinema has become a complex and ramified discipline, embracing many fields and approaches, and it was inevitable that sooner or later its problems and issues would come to be a proper concern of Jewish studies. But the nature of that concern has undergone a significant change in the past twenty years as it has become clear that more is at stake than the "image" of the Jew on film.

It is presently less a matter—as was the case for an earlier generation of ethnic film studies—of how authentic or inauthentic, how favorable or unfavorable, is the representation of the Jew (or of any other ethnic figure or group) on screen. It has come to be more important to consider what the ethnic screen image says about the civil society from which the film emanates. The image of the Jew in an American film is an image of America, just as the image of the Arab in an Israeli film is an image of Israel. The specific textures of cinematic ethnicity are a measure of a society's openness, its collective aspirations, its social and cultural anxieties, its era and Zeitgeist, its reckoning with history. The Jew on screen, moreover, does not function in a vacuum but is part of a larger fabric of experience that binds Jew and non-Jew inextricably. The notion of a "cinema of Jewish experience" is only a provisional—and, to some degree, wishful—designation. But it aims at comprehending the world portrayed in a film as a multidimensional whole, larger than any one character, scene, or signifier—a complex construction that, though the product of artifice, visual artistry, and narrative strategies, grows from a given society and era and, at its best, engages the spectator in a philosophical conversation with that larger context. This investigative orientation enables us to include within a common framework films that emanate from the Jewish world as such ("Jewish film" in a narrower sense of the term, whether Yiddish, or Israeli, or any other product of a specific Jewish society or subculture) and films from nations where Jews reside as a minority culture and are taken as subjects for film within a broader, cosmopolitan setting. That these two domains are by now so thoroughly commingled and mutually influential as to be inseparable is more or less taken for granted by present-day practitioners of what we can loosely call Jewish film studies.

Nowhere is this common framework better tested than in considering the historical relation of cinema to Jewry's two main crises of the past century: the destruction of European Jewry and the bitter and seemingly intractable Arab-Israeli conflict that has grown from the formation of the State of Israel. At stake in this relation is a more fundamental question: How was cinema, in some sense, a defining force of twentieth-century history? Such a role was already foreseen in Walter Benjamin's exploratory essay of 1935, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which raised, among other issues, the question of cinema's relation to the totalitarian experiments of his time—those undertaken in the name of communism, fascism, and National Socialism. Benjamin's underlying concern, however, was not limited to totalitarian societies, for he was inquiring, more generally, into the unprecedented changes in human consciousness brought about by forces of modernity—which...