Silver Screen, Hasidic Jews: The Story of an Image by Shaina Hammerman (review)

The cover of the book features one of the greatest moments in film history: the brief and sudden appearance in Annie Hall of Alvy Singer, played by Woody Allen, as a Hasidic Jew. As we immediately intuited watching the film, this is precisely how Alvy feels Grammy Hall sees him—as a “real Jew,” disguised beneath his Americanized, secular exterior. Adding a layer to the story, however, this image of Allen/Alvy’s inner-Hasid materializes on the front cover of Shaina Hammerman’s fascinating new book, Silver Screen, Hasidic Jew, on a poster rather than on a cinema screen. Labeled “der heyliker rebbe,” the poster is plastered on a building on the Lower East Side of New York, selling the clothes of American Apparel. Not only about Jewish self-consciousness, then, Allen’s bearded and sidelocked face in this context connects, over time and professions, two successful secular Jewish men, both of whom apparently had a Hasidic fetish; in fact, both men went on to use Hasidic imagery in different ways in their work in years to come. But there is a further backstory here: American Apparel CEO Dov Char-ney claims, as the book relates, that the image was speaking to the men’s shared experiences, as well, as both were accused of being bad Jews, and of harassing women. And there is a follow-on to the story: Allen, who clearly did not appreciate the connections established by the poster, sued Charney for unauthorized use of the film still. So much for solidarity. All in, then, the front cover picture cues readers, before they have so much as cracked open this slim but compact study, to the simultaneous transparency and opacity of the iconic Hasidic male image. We know it when we see it, but what is it that we know? Indeed, throughout the book, Hammerman demonstrates that although the male Hasidic costume has a long history in popular culture, from its vaudevillian appearance on the Yiddish stage in nineteenth-century Romania, to Woody-Allen-as-Alvy-Singer and again as Charney’s “Rebbe” and beyond, the meanings produced and cultural work done by Hasidic costume are continuous and ever-changing.

Hammerman’s book of film criticism, unusually, moves back and forth between American and French cinema. Hammerman justifies her choice at the outset, saying that France and America are both places where film plays a key role in culture, and also that the two countries offer a nice contrast to each other, with the United States touting a multicultural ideal and France promising national unity (the analyses do not necessarily fall along national lines, however). The readings of the five primary films hinge on different theoretical frameworks. To explore the question of “authenticity” in The Frisco Kid (1979), for example, Hammerman employs James Clifford’s “predicament of culture,” derived from the 1977 trial of the Mashpee tribe; just as Clifford used the trial to determine how we understand the “authenticity” of a culture, so Hammerman investigates the “authenticity” of the film’s Hasidic rabbi who is primarily defined against his cowboy sidekick, as well as the Native Americans he encounters, even as he is also compared to the secular Jewish actor, Gene Wilder, who portrays him. Authenticity, explains Hammerman, is “relative and dependent on performances of the inauthentic.” (23)

In her discussion of Les aventures de Rabbi Jacob (1973), Hammerman turns to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies to show how the diversity of multiculturalism is tempered by the universality of the “great family of man”; she also uses the concept of “drag” (in Butler, et al.) to read the costumed Hasidim as sites of ambivalence, which are ultimately neutralized in the film’s close, when the characters all return to their appropriate identities and ghettoized spaces. Deconstructing Harry (1997) is considered in light of Linda Williams’s porn theory; La petite Jérusalem (2005) in...