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19 Lester D. Friedman A Forgotten Masterpiece Edward Sloman’s His People As a popular, visual medium, the American cinema appeals to vast and diverse audiences and thus provides unique opportunities for the study of popular cultural attitudes. These mass-market films possess the inherent ability to translate social viewpoints into clearly discernible pictorial representations . From this perspective, American movies form a valuable index to any historical period’s deepest thoughts and fears, its predominant beliefs and feelings, its aspirations and defeats, its dreams and its nightmares. Indeed, Hollywood has helped create, define, and promote the mythology of the American dream and has itself become an integral part of that national fantasy. “Hollywood, the American dream, is a Jewish idea,” says Jill Robinson, daughter of a former head of MGM. In a sense, she continues, “it’s Jewish revenge on America because it combines the Puritan ethic with baroque magnificence. The happy ending was the invention of Russian Jews designed to drive Americans crazy” (Friedman vi). Historical Background America became conscious of its films and its Jews almost simultaneously. From flickering one-reelers through Hollywood’s golden age and up to contemporary films, moviegoers who may never have met or even seen Jews in daily life encountered them on local movie screens. The evolving image of Jews in films constitutes a rich and varied tapestry woven by generations of moviemakers responding to the world around them. Their works dynamically depict Jews’ profound impact on American society and forcefully illustrate society’s perception of the Jews within its midst. Some films are 20 Lester D. Friedman lamps that help extinguish the darkness of ignorance. Others simply mirror long-held prejudices. But whether they explain or exploit their Jewish characters , all these films—either implicitly or explicitly—illustrate how Jews affect American life and how American life influences Jews; it is a two-way process inherent in the first Jewish American movie, as well as in recent ones such as A Serious Man (2009) or Greenberg (2010). In 1881, a series of pogroms and anti-Jewish decrees in Russia forced waves of east European Jews to emigrate to the United States. Although small groups of east European Jews inhabited America as early as 1852, millions more streamed to her shores from 1881 to 1924, when a series of restrictive immigration policies stemmed the flood of refugees. By 1926, there were 3,111 congregations, 1,782 synagogues, and 4,100,000 Jewish people in the United States, and modern historians estimate that eighty-five percent of all Jews living in America today trace their roots back to these immigrants . This extraordinary period of intensive immigration forced a growing American awareness of this entity called “THE JEW,” much to the embarrassment of the 250,000 well-established German and Spanish Jews already here, who had slipped into American life with little fanfare. So the quest and orderly process of assimilation ongoing since the Spanish Inquisition of 1644 ended in the confusion of Ellis Island and the noisy din of city streets. These east European Jews came mostly from small Jewish towns, villages , and self-sufficient little enclaves as isolated as possible from surrounding Christians. But despite their seeming unpreparedness to adapt to well-established social, economic, and cultural values of American life, these “greenhorns” leaped from alienation to assimilation in a remarkably short time. Unlike some groups, they had not emigrated simply to improve their lot financially; they came to save their lives and they came to stay. There was no safe place to which they might return, so they brought with them, whenever possible, their entire families. After time had dimmed bad memories, some looked nostalgically backward, but few wanted to return to those harsh lands whose peoples had hounded and murdered their kind for centuries. The eagerness of immigrant Jews to fit into American life is understandable given the contemporary social and intellectual trends of the early twentieth century, particularly so for those embodied in the uniquely American concept of “the melting pot.” In Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot, David, an immigrant Jewish composer in love with a gentile girl, speaks of his vision for this new land: “America is God’s Crucible, the Great Melting Pot where all races of Europe are melting and reforming. . . . God is making the American” (95). Nowhere is Zangwill’s message more evident than in the lives of those immigrants who harnessed the immense power of [3.149.233.97] Project MUSE (2024...

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