Introduction

We are delighted to introduce the second issue of Jewish Film & New Media. Elyce Rae Helford opens with a study considering the ways in which Jewishness figures in the production of George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947). Helford contextualizes the film within Hollywood director George Cukor’s personal experience, film oeuvre, and the post–World War II era in which it was released. As she demonstrates, issues of cultural assimilation and discourses of gender, race, class, and ethnicity are evident in the film’s form, content, and especially process, including casting, direction, narrative, and visual design. Helford argues that, from the film’s mobilization of blackface to its condemnation of “ethnic” femininity, this little-studied, Oscar-nominated thriller about a murderous Shakespearean actor offers valuable commentary on Jewish identity and anxieties in mid-twentieth-century America.

Sticking with Hollywood, Jennifer Frost reconsiders Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Based on an original screenplay by Abby Mann, this fictional film was inspired by factual events. But, as Frost notes, the fictional film moved the “factual events” of 1946–47 (the Justice Case) forward a year so that it could better reflect encroaching Cold War tensions, including the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade and airlift that year. Using archival sources, Frost shows how the film reflects the context in which it was made—namely, that of the early 1960s intensification of the Cold War, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and the building of the Berlin Wall. In the final analysis, she concludes that Judgment at Nuremberg cannot simply be categorized as yet another example of the “Americanization” or “Hollywoodization” of the Holocaust.

Finally in the articles section, Itay Harlap compares two Israeli texts, the much-discussed feature film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) and the television serial Parashat Ha-Shavu’a (“weekly Torah portion” in Hebrew, channel HOT 3, 2006–2009), both of which deal with the traumatic effects of the First Lebanon War in 1982. Parashat Ha-Shavu’a displays its preoccupation with the war through the character of Shaul Nawi (Menashe Noy), who is plagued by post-conflict nightmares, hallucinations, and memories. Similarly, in Waltz with Bashir the protagonist also has delayed recall of the traumas of that war. But where a solution is ultimately discovered and the post-traumatic experience ends in closure if not outright healing in Waltz with Bashir, Parashat Ha-Shavu’a features a “subject in the narrative without end,” and even after the “riddle” is solved, the traumatic event continues to haunt Shaul. The reason for this, Harlap argues, is that the narrative structure of a television serial like Parashat Ha-Shavu’a allows for a more complex representation of the post-traumatic experience than does the narrative structure of film, which typically relies on closure.

In light of the prominence of Ben Urwand’s recent book, The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler, and the amount of media attention it has received due to its controversial claims that the Jewish Hollywood moguls “collaborated” with the Nazi regime from 1933 onward, we decided to allow Joel Rosenberg to pen a long review essay on the book to test the veracity of Urwand’s claims. Certainly, when it was first advertised, the book seemed to promote an alternative explanation for the lack of visible Jewishness onscreen during the 1930s and early 1940s. Whether this actually holds up is ascertained by Rosenberg.

We conclude with a reviews section which, in addition to five book reviews, also includes a review of the Canadian film Memorandum (Donald Brittain and John Spotton, 1967). A somewhat unusual Holocaust film, Memorandum is available to watch for free on the National Film Board of Canada’s website at www.nfb.ca/film/memorandum/ or can be streamed through the National Film Board of Canada’s official app as well.

Like its predecessor, this second issue of Jewish Film & New Media is again by no means comprehensive in its offerings. Rather we aim to point the way to the sort of submissions we would like to encourage in future issues. Consequently, this issue covers cinema and television...