Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema ed. by Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (review)

This collection of provocative essays explores issues of Jewish cultural, ethnic, and religious identity. The essays are preceded by an excellent introduction that places the American Jewish experience in its historical context. The book shows how Jews have helped “construct” Hollywood versions of the American dream. It illuminates aspects of Hollywood’s Jewish aesthetics, economics, and politics. The anthology achieves its goal of aiming “to highlight ways in which the Jewish experience is essential to both the history of Jews in America and to the history of the film and media in America” (12). It sounds an interdisciplinary call for further research by film historians, critics, and scholars of the American Jewish experience, to shed light on American Jewish life (18).

Hollywood’s Chosen People joins a growing number of books from different disciplinary approaches that explore Hollywood’s construction of the American Jewish experience in film.¹⁴ Its audience will include lovers of Hollywood film, readers who care about the complexities of the Jewish experience, scholars of film studies and the history of Jews in America, cultural critics, and sociologists. The chapters are organized more or less chronologically and can be divided into three sometimes-overlapping categories: essays on Hollywood’s Jewish history; essays on Jewish actors and directors; and essays on Holocaust cinema.

In the first category, Lester Friedman offers a close analysis and recuperation of Edward Sloman’s classic “forgotten masterpiece” (19) His People (1925), a film that represents a Jewish-Irish romance and what Arthur Hertzberg calls “money that buys power,” but, atypically, is critical of unbridled assimilation of Immigrant experience if it infringes on filial piety and religious devotion. Friedman notes that screen Jews often became “icons of the ritual of Americanization” (134) at a price of losing religious ties. Catherine Portuges documents Jewish immigrant directors who fled Nazi persecution and their impact on Hollywood. She notes their resistance to the Nazis: Warner Brothers, for example, stopped distributing films to Germany in 1935 (44) and made Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). Wheeler Dixon’s article on the anti-Semite Joseph Breen, who was a strict enforcer of the Motion Picture Production Code, reveals legal and political forces that led to censorship. Sumiko Higashi explores the scandal that surrounded the love-triangle between Jewish actor Eddie Fisher and actresses Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor converted to Judaism before discomfited parents, promised to cast her lot with the Jews, and was renamed Elisheba Rachel (86). Higashi suggests that Jewish entertainers often repressed their Jewish identities, “passing as white” (77). Sarah Kozloff draws on the concept of “Jewish moral seriousness” In American Movies from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” to illustrate a liberal ethical consciousness of social activism against injustices, including the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, and advocates for women’s rights (114).

In the category of Jewish directors and actors, William Rothman offers an appreciation of director George Cukor, who was responsible for Philadelphia Story and Adam’s Rib. Rothman portrays Cukor as “an insider who is also an outsider” (103). He argues that Cukor’s handling of Judy Holliday (nee Tuvim) allowed her to articulate her own “recognizable New York Jewish voice… in which Yiddish inflections can plainly be heard” (107). Lucy Fischer offers an excellent close reading of David Mamet’s film Homicide, which portrays the existential crisis and journey of the main character, a policeman, in search of his own Jewish identity, which evolves in the process of his solving a murder case. In a chapter titled “Boy-man Schlemiels and Super-Nebishes,” Vincent Brook argues that Adam Sandler, in playing the macho Israeli Mosad Special Forces commander in You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (2008), departs from his usual role as a “nebishe but kind hearted soul” (176). He is critical of Sandler and Ben Stiller, who typically play assimilated post-modern Jews who...