Expressions of Jewish Identity in French Cinema: The Total Jew

From 1950 to 2010, French films expressed threetypes of Jewish identity: hidden, paradoxical, and total.This article focuses on films of the total Jew, which depict the “authentic” Jew seeking his own identity outside the gaze of others. While these films do not address an internal Jewish dialogue, they are part of a segment of French cinematic production dealing with identity and Frenchness. French films today seem to have displaced this onscreen questioning of French identity from Jews to Muslims.