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

Hollywood’s Chosen People brings together thirteen essays by established film scholars to consider some of the many ways that the Jewish experience has shaped Hollywood filmmaking. While some of the contributors (notably Vincent Brook and Lester Friedman) have published extensively on Jewishness and film, most are “authors with powerful insight into the Jewish experience but who do not typically write about the subject” (13). The result is a volume that doesn’t so much expand the field of Jewish film studies as deepen it, offering a variety of useful models for how to understand Jewish movie-making in the broader context of Hollywood’s aesthetics, economics, and politics.

In their introduction, the editors note the relative dearth of scholarship on Jewish movies that would build on the foundation laid by Neal Gabler’s essential An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988), and issue a call for film historians and critics to “join together with scholars of American Jewish experience, who shed light on the political, religious, social, ideological, and cultural aspects of American Jewish life, if we are to better understand the Jewish experience in American cinema” (18). While one might wish that a few more such “scholars of American Jewish experience” had been invited to contribute to the present volume, Hollywood’s Chosen People nevertheless offers a useful starting point for such an interdisciplinary conversation.

Following the introduction, the chapters follow a more or less chronological ordering of films and persons under consideration (with considerable historical overlaps). Friedman offers a close reading of Edward Sloman’s His People (1925), “an almost totally overlooked film” (23) that nevertheless bears revisiting as an exemplar of film’s ability to turn both the difficulties and triumphs of the immigrant experience into art, and in so doing to establish the melting pot view of Americanization as an important theme in cinema. Catherine Portuges picks up the immigration theme with a consideration of the hundreds of central European Jewish refugees who found their way to Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, suggesting that their immigrant experience (and the films that were shaped by it) had as profound an effect on the medium as did the previous generation’s. Writing about the same period, Wheeler Winston Dixon comes at the struggles of Jewish filmmakers from a unique angle. Dixon’s chapter “‘A Rotten Bunch of Vile People with No Respect for Anything Beyond the Making of Money’: Joseph Breen, the Hollywood Production Code, and Institutionalized Anti-Semitism in Hollywood” explores how Breen, a Catholic and a noted antisemite, reined for nearly two decades as the enforcer of Motion Picture Production Code, giving him de facto censorship authority over virtually all studio productions.

In one of the most enjoyable and innovative chapters, “Stardom, Inter-marriage, and Consumption in the 1950s,” Sumiko Higashi explores the web of publicity and scandal that surrounded the love triangle between Jewish crooner Eddie Fisher and actresses Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor. The author’s close reading of the archival record, especially the fan-magazine Photoplay, suggests persuasively that Fisher’s Jewishness gave him an exotic quality that made him an attractive to the non-Jewish actresses, who (in different ways) treated him as a commodity to be acquired. Conversely, to Fisher, the decision to marry not one but two of America’s sweethearts symbolized his desire for acceptance. William Rothman offers an appreciation of director George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib). Though Rothman describes Cukor as “an assimilated Jew,” he suggests that the Emersonian worldview embodied in Cukor’s films can be considered a product of his experience as “an insider who is also an outsider” (103). Sarah Kozloff offers “Notes on Sontag and ‘Jewish Moral Seriousness’ in American Movies.” Puzzling over a passage in Sontag’s vastly influential essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” in which the critic identifies “Jewish...