Defiance: How Jews Depict Jews Within a Larger Context

by Guest Contributor Matt Egan

Starring Liev Schrieber and Daniel Craig, directed by Edward Zwick, Defiance tells the story of the Bielskis, Jews who fought the Nazis in the woods of what is now Belarus. Zwick is Jewish. Schreiber is Jewish and has done a number of Jewish-themed projects lately, including the relatively unsuccessful adaptation of the novel Everything is Illuminated and starring on Broadway as Alan Berg in a revival of Talk Radio. I found Defiance moving, but also entertaining. It swells with action in the best tradition of Hollywood. For some people, this is a problem. The most commonly expressed fear of directors making films about the Holocaust is that they will trivialize and exploit the tragedy. Ralph Seliger complains about historical inaccuracies and that the Bielskis are cheapened as “the image of Hollywood heroes.” My concern is different. There were six Holocaust films out at one time, but given the history of how Hollywood has depicted Jews and the Holocaust – and the way in which I understand antisemitism as shaping that depiction – Defiance was the only one I had any interest in seeing.

Perhaps embarrassed by the number of Holocaust movies out at once, Humorist Joel Stein wrote a satirical column in December for the LA Times a short while back that parodies the common myth that The Jews run Hollywood:

As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day.

So I’ve taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that’s what we do best. I’m weighing several slogans, including: “Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!”; “Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible”; and “Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all.”

I thought that the piece was funny and subversively camp. However, I’m also concerned he’s playing with fire. It was no surprise to me when the top Google hit for Stein’s piece was a white supremacist website. The problem with such views, even when they seem pro-Jewish, is in the way it treats us collectively. That “we.” “The Jews.” It focuses on who is making movies at the expense of any discussion of the movies they actually make. I have never run a Hollywood studio, and neither has any Jew I’ve ever known. And those machers (that’s Yiddish) in Hollywood are more than just Jewish. No matter how tempting it is to attribute to them some sort of “Jewish worldview,” the way they see movie-making probably owes more to being Hollywood bigshots than to being Jewish. It owes at least as much to their American-ness. It certainly owes more than anything to the American-ness of their primary audiences, who still scream about the Unamerican “Hollywood agenda.”

But let me explain, instead, what’s true about what some antisemites say. Antisemitism has never completely relied on keeping Jews poor. Though excluded from respectability, there have often in history been outside routes to affluence open to at least some few Jews. Hollywood is a typical example. At the time of Hollywood’s founding, Jews faced difficulties working in many respectable professions. The world over, acting has always been mostly disreputable, associated with prostitution figuratively and literally. So many white Americans who could have competed in the founding of Hollywood avoided it. Other minorities lacked the resources to take the same risks.

At the same time, many Jews had an affinity for theater that came from a daily experience of “passing” as non-Jews. Actor Daniel Day Lewis once explained that his first acting job was to fit into his London neighborhood by hiding, among other differences, his Jewishness. (This is similar to the affinity for theater common in gay communities.) Jews also had an urge to contribute to American culture so we could prove our own American-ness. And so Jews really were dominate in the creation of Hollywood. Since it’s creation, there have always been lots of Jew in Hollywood at the highest levels. And as actors and directors.

The fact that there was a large Jewish presence in Hollywood may have kept us away from too many noxiously antisemitic depictions of Jews, but it hasn’t meant that Hollywood has been part of a real discussion on antisemitism. In the run-up to World War II, while the America First movement polemicized about Jewish power and “kikes in Hollywood” driving us to war, Jewish filmmakers avoided calling attention to themselves. They feared fueling stories of Jewish conspiracy and power. Only United Artists, owned by three of the most powerful actors in the business – Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford – dared with Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Because of the film, rumors persist today that Chaplin was Jewish. He himself tended to answer the accusations with a noble “it wouldn’t matter if I were,” but he was actually from a secular Christian background.

Despite a significant Jewish presence, or rather because of it, Hollywood shied away from anything overtly Jewish for a long time. A few films, like Gentlemen’s Agreement were entirely uncontroversial, and went overboard trying to erase differences to appeal to a majority audience. There wasn’t any acknowledgment that Jews have a right to be different without being viewed as Unamerican. And the film gives the impression, by the end, that it has solved the problem of antisemitism.

On the other hand, when Jews have appeared explicitly as Jews onscreen (big and small), they fit an over-determined mold. There’s a long history of viewing Jewish men as weak and feminine. There was even a belief at one time that Jewish men menstruated. This stereotype is still alive in Hollywood. Think Woody Allen: meek, timid, un-masculine, neurotic, intellectual. When I was growing up, L.A. Law was prominent. It might be hard to remember today, but for several years it was the biggest show on television. Unlike the other attorneys on the show –who were womanizers, who did criminal law, who were masculine, who were played by Jimmy Smits and Corbin Berson– the Stuart Markowitz character was a tax attorney who never had to appear in court. I don’t just remember his character – I also remember him a good foot and a half shorter than his wife. One of the few episodes I remember made fun of the idea of him having sex: after a heart attack, his doctor told him not to just avoid positions that would be too strenuous.

David Schwimmer, before Friends made him famous, was told he was “too ethnic” for leading roles, but he was certainly able to play nerdy and Jewish. Michael Cera’s character in Juno, Paulie Bleeker, is Jewish (note a Hebrew ABCs poster in his room). When Juno describes this guy who has almost no words in the entire script as the funniest guy she knows, I cringed.

And the real proof of the stereotypes Jews find themselves under in Hollywood is the complete absence of alternatives.

Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz) was too tough, so he played Italians. Henry Winkler, better known as the Fonz, played Italian for that role. Harvey Keitel played Italians. If at all assertive or aggressive, even actresses get the same treatment. Estelle Getty, with a comedy style straight from the borscht belt, played an Italian, Sophia Petrillo on The Golden Girls. Rhea Perlman played Carla Tortelli on Cheers, though she played “the nice girl,” as described in the episode title where she first appears, Zena Sherman on Taxi.

When the Jewish characters in Knocked Up started talking about Steven Spielberg’s Munich – “If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich” – that meant something to a lot of people who could relate to never seeing representations of themselves on screen.

The problem with analyzing these stereotype, though, is that the alternative is often silence. Speaking out about these representations could mean that filmmakers decide it is too much of a risk to put Jews in films. Simply removing Jews from screens might be worse than allowing these flawed images to stand – and the stereotypes sometime serves a purpose for Jews.

While the character of Wormser from Revenge of the Nerds wasn’t explicitly Jewish, that’s how non-Jewish actor Andrew Cassese thought of the character. I find Cassese’s perception of Wormser to be deeply offensive. On the other hand, the folks at Heeb magazine apparently appreciate the homage. Some Jews read some examples as stereotypes while others read the same example as signifying Jewishness from within the closet. I introduced the stereotype with Woody Allen, but I love his movies. It’s complicated trying to draw the line between the stuff that’s merely stereotype and the stuff that uses stereotype cleverly to create a double address. Actually, much of the best stuff is camp that’s beyond my ability to explain, but let me point you to Mel Brooks’s “Hitler Rap.”

Like gays in Hollywood, Jews made films that could be read from a Jewish perspective by those in the know, but which passed by most of America without comment. Forgetting Sarah Marshall offers an excellent, recent example. For many viewers, the names Rachel and Sarah (with an h) aren’t notable, but to me, these are very much Jewish names. I doubt many viewers ever noticed the last names of these characters – Jansen and Marshall. Those are very un-Jewish. Being aware of who made the film and of certain themes that are important to Jews in art, clues like the names of characters gave me a way of reading the film that probably never occurred to most viewers. Rachel, played by the Jewish actress Mila Kunis, has dark hair and skin. Sarah is blond and fair-skinned. So there is some ambiguity to both, but Rachel is ‘more Jewish’ than Sarah. Aldous Snow -marked as strongly white by his name and his English accent- is successful in many ways, despite being an idiot, because he is white. On the other hand, Peter’s problems relate to being Jewish. The Mormon newlyweds emphasize the relationship between religious background, social inclusion, and sexuality. The film becomes a commentary on the more common theme, found in Woody Allen movies and Philip Roth novels as well as There’s Something About Mary, where the Jewish male assimilates by embracing gentile women. Here, success is found in embracing Jewishness. This is often lost on audiences who miss the double address – the quiet nod to Jewish viewers of a mainstream movie.

But can -or should- there be a double address in a Holocaust film?

Of course, the Holocaust was a major event in Western History, and there are lots of stories to tell. The problem isn’t that any particular film decenters the Jewish experience, but that so many of them do while making a different set of claims. Though it had a Catholic protagonist, the media reports surrounding Schindler’s List were all about how Spielberg was Jewish and how Jewish audiences cried at screenings. Sinking further, both Valkyrie and The Reader decenter Jews to rehabilitate mass murderers. (More on those two films in a bit.)

The best Holocaust films, like The Counterfeiters, are anything but life-affirming. They refuse to present the Holocaust as a heartwarming story for the whole family. That has a lot to do with being European films. Europe has a strong history of public funding of film as art, and so European films are less pressured to turn a profit. Hollywood, by contrast, is addicted to sugary endings, and would never make a film quite like that. Additionally, while Europe experienced WWII as an unmitigated disaster, the US has always seen itself as the hero of the story.

Films like 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg with Spencer Tracy, about the trial of Nazi leaders, thus emphasized an American leadership role in the world. That film, because it showed documentary footage from the camps, was important for creating a sense of the atrocity that had occurred far away. It did not shy away from blaming the German people who were, with very few exceptions, at best (seriously, At Best), willfully ignorant of what it had done. It pushed for idealism over a pragmatism that shifted blame during the rebuilding of Germany. And it pushed powerfully for a moral and liberal America.

But there are no Jewish characters. There is no mention of Jews that isn’t among a larger list. If any group is singled out as a victim of the Nazis, it is the Communists. The least repentant of the defendents explains the necessity of what was done to protect Germany from Bolsheviks. In the wake of McCarthyism, it makes sense that this should be in the subtext of the film, but rather it replaces what should be the text.

Of the recent crop of Holocaust-based movies, two films stand out. Valkrie because of it’s big budget and marketing and The Reader because of its Oscar nominations and the award given to Kate Winslet.

Valkyrie, in keeping with Hollywood’s typical optimism, depicts the Good German. Who cares if the German heroes of the story weren’t actually such nice people? This parody of the trailer sums up many of the problems. The plot to assassinate Hitler was so that he could be replaced with a better military leader – not to stop the Holocaust, but to win the war. The Tom Cruise character, von Stauffenberger, was in reality as antisemitic and nasty as you would expect a high ranking Nazi to be.

The Reader, parodied here as The Hot Illiterate Nazi, is also about a Good German. Ron Rosenbaum’s excellent article, an impassioned plea against giving an Oscar to the film, explains the “essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution.” Historian Deborah Lipstadt calls The Reader pernicious. “This is a rewriting of history. It is, simply put, soft core denial.”

Against all this baggage, Defiance shines as something never before seen from Hollywood. It’s got Jews as action heroes. Daniel Craig, who also plays James Bond, stars as a Jewish character. It would be better if we could get a Jewish actor to play James Bond, but it’s pretty awesome that James Bond plays a Jew.

As for historical inaccuracies, Seliger complains that the historical Soviet commander Pachenko was quite kind toward the Bielskis. But the film has no other Soviets but Pachenko’s unit, and it’s appropriate to depict Soviets the Bielskis could not trust 100%. Stalin’s Soviet Union was deeply antisemitic. In fact, much of contemporary antisemitism in the West derives its form from Stalinist propaganda. The most common thing Jews said, around the world, in response to the Holocaust was “no one lifted a finger to help us.” It would be a mistake to exaggerate how much the Soviets helped by portraying Pachenko more accurately but still allowing him to stand for the Soviet Union. Instead the film sticks closer to a broader Jewish perception. But historical inaccuracy is just a small part of complaining about a Hollywood that tells rousing stories, one with genuine action heroes.

Unlike other minority groups, the problems with the way Jews have been portrayed in Hollywood don’t stem from a lack of Jewish filmmakers. The problem isn’t to get more Jews behind the lens or at the writers’ table. The problem isn’t even quite a lack of Jewish characters on screens. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem – one more analogous to colonialism than racism. There aren’t very many Jewish characters that are both positive and openly Jewish.

And in order to solve the problem, that is what needs to change.

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Comments

Ruchama wrote:

One of the more interesting depictions of Jewish male sexuality on film, I thought, was Sal Mineo as Dov Landau in Exodus. In the novel Exodus, Dov stays alive through the Holocaust essentially by his wits — as a kid, he’s a message boy in the Warsaw Ghetto, learning all the paths through the sewers and able to hide and race through the outside world because he’s a kid and can fit in small spaces or blend into crowds. As a young teenager, he’s sent to Auschwitz, and manages to survive there as a forger — the guard at the check-in sends him to the death line, and he steps up and says, “No, you don’t want to do that. I can help you.” And then he shows that he can easily copy any handwriting and forge official seals, and the Nazis decide that he’s right, they do have more use for him alive than dead. And he spends the rest of his time in Auschwitz making fake papers for the Nazis.

In the movie, though, none of this happens. The movie doesn’t catch up with Dov until he’s in the refugee camp, but when we see him try to join the Irgun, the officers keep asking him about how he survived Auschwitz, why he wasn’t killed. He stalls and gives half-answers, then finally breaks down in tears and shouts, “They used me! Like you use a woman!”

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 9:33 am ¶
emfole wrote:

BRAVO!!! thank you so much!!! thank you thank you!

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 9:38 am ¶
Ike wrote:

Oh great! It’s ANOTHER movie on the holocaust… (yawns).

I guess it’s a Hollywood tradition to put out at least one holocaust film every year.

***Good topic, btw

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 9:47 am ¶
Hilary wrote:

Thanks for posting this. Despite being Jewish, I’ve been realizing lately how oblivious I am to things like this. I’ve internalized stereotypes to the point where they don’t stick out to me unless they’re really egregious. It’s really great to read something like this.

An addition to the sexy-Jewish-men-playing-sexy-gentile-men list: David Duchovny as Fox Mulder on The X-Files. Duchovny’s Jewish, Mulder is not. There was even an episode where some suspects were men who published anti-Semiti conspiracy fliers and one of the men commented to Mulder “why should we listen to you? From the looks of it you could be one of them!” (or something along those lines).

Mulder is not a religious character (in contrast to Scully’s Catholic faith), and his ethnic/religious background is never a focus in the show, so it wouldn’t have made a difference had he been Jewish. Yet the creators gave him a Christian background.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 9:49 am ¶
Lawson wrote:

A very thoughtful post, but I wish we (I’m black and Latino) had you all’s problems.

You want to have your cakes and eat it too? Jews DO run Hollywood the way brothers dominate the NBA. Come on. Of course, do brothers own the teams? Does David Stern eat prok on Passover? So what movie execs and producers (and actors) have to hide in plain sight. We had to plain hide!!

Even tho Jewish Hollywood could not fully express itself and bud out of stereotypes, it STILL made alots of cash on peddling stereotypes of Jews and other folks since the 1920s, I’d say. If things are complicated, blame Jeremy Piven’s portrayal of Rahm Emmanuel’s brother.

Finally, I saw Defiance and it was just another WWII film. Not many “resistence” or “partisan” films, period have been made, and you can count on one had the number made about the Russian Front. That’s Hollywood’s fault, Jewish or otherwise.

As for a mirror, I’ve seen more courageous, self examining. stereotype-busting films coming out of Israel than any produced by “The Tribe” here. Even ones showing the
suffering of Palestinians.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:28 am ¶
E.M. wrote:

I don’t think Mulder was given a Christian background, though. In an interview (somewhere . . .) I’m sure I read that David Duchovny, since Mulder’s religious background was never dealt with on the show, just assumed Mulder was Jewish.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:49 am ¶
Ruchama wrote:

Mulder and his father both had funerals with Christian ministers. There were some lines that made it kind of ambiguous, though.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:53 am ¶
Lola wrote:

Someone pointed out that Friends was a Jewish show, which I never noticed because A. I don’t watch that show and B. I know nothing about Jewish American culture. But Friends does seem to be a good example of what this article is describing.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:57 am ¶
emfole wrote:

Lawson,

Every group has it’s own complicated mix of privilege and oppression. And for those of us with white privilege (Ashkanazi Jews), the issues are going to be very different than those who have not had the problematic privilege of assimilating. I don’t think playing the Oppression Olympics benefits dialogue. And, as a Jew, I really found the above a welcome, interesting and refreshing conversation about American Jews. It means a lot to be included on Racilicious and benefits ALL of us to learn about each others’ struggles.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:03 am ¶
Lawson wrote:

I figured you’d retreat to that–what’s the term you all use now? “Oppression Olympics?” You all invented that, not us. We want you to acknowledge something, you retreat to Oppression Olympics. No, it isn’t a contest, as if it’s contest between the Pittsburgh Steelers and a Pop Warner team. I stand behind what i said. I do think it’s been tough for U.S. Jews generally and Jews in power positions in Hollywood to find a vehicle for showing everyone’s story and complex people, and it has been for decades. But Jews in Hollywood have been making a lot of $$$ off pat characters even among their own people.

Mod Note – Lawson, please review our comment moderation policy before commenting again. There is no us and them dynamic on this site and we’ve had a couple of different discussions around the oppression olympics and use of the term. You can argue that Jews in Hollywood were partially the architects behind this situation, but please keep in mind that there are many Jews of color who read this site, and they do not appreciate being erased from the conversation. – LDP

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:26 am ¶
Hilary wrote:

@Lawson: I want to second emfole and say that I think a lot of the problems of representation in Hollywood can be traced more to the hold on the industry by white men than to how many Jews there are.

@ EM: Second Ruchama. My source is a fansite, and I think it was confirmed with the creators by fans that Mulder’s background is Christian. So someone up top made a conscious decision that the character would have that background, may or may not be “canon” depending on your interpretation. Not 100% sure on that though and I don’t recall the exact source, sorry.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:44 am ¶
Whit wrote:

Uh, Woody Allen has carved out a masculinity for himself (at least on screen, and arguably in his personal life) that very much revolves around his ability to “get” women, especially attractive, young, apparently gentile women, and then once he’s got them, discard them like a used rag. The only exception I can think of is Scarlett Johannsen, who is half jewish. He portrays himself as a womanizer, despite his effeminate stature and neuroticism. Or maybe because of it.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:45 am ¶
Ruchama wrote:

Lawson, the reason that the Oppression Olympics accusation was brought out isn’t because you’re asking people to acknowledge oppression of blacks and Latinos, but because you seem to be saying that, since blacks and Latinos have it “worse,” anything Jews face doesn’t really matter. Of course there are lots of issues with how blacks and Latinos are depicted in movies and TV, but that’s not the topic of this post.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:48 am ¶
spice wrote:

yes! thank you

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:50 am ¶
Ras wrote:

Mods, I’d like to point out that not only do Lawson’s remark erase Jews of color, but they also stick all Jews into the category of Having Power In Hollywood. It’s deeply offensive and untrue. As though the majority of us regular Jewish folks have the slightest bit of control over what Warner Bros. does. It really feeds into myths of Jewish power, and it’s hugely problematic.

Great post, Matt, though I think there are some distinctions between movements focusing on the Holocaust as opposed to WWII movies, Nazi movies, etc.

This also seems like an appropriate thread to bring up a line from House a few weeks ago that bothered me a fair bit. Taub, the Jewish character, was trying to defend the idea that Jews can be good at sports by mentioning Sandy Koufax. House responded by saying, “that’s all you Jews ever talk about, Sandy Koufax. Well, that and the Holocaust.” Although House makes deeply offensive remarks all the time, I do think it’s potentially problematic and reinforces some really pernicious stereotypes about Jews talking about the Holocaust all the time. And of course Taub himself is very much a stereotypical Jewish male character.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 11:58 am ¶
Ruchama wrote:

I just had to google David Stern (I really know nothing about basketball), but in answer to “Does David Stern eat pork on Passover?” I don’t see any indication anywhere that he keeps kosher. I know plenty of Jews who will eat pork but not bread during Passover. And some who’ll eat bread. Not all Jews are religious, and those who are follow the rules to different extents.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:00 pm ¶
Fiqah wrote:

I really enjoyed this piece, and for the most part, I’ve really enjoyed reading the comments.

For the most part.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:01 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

@Hillary- Please be careful about how you quote people, I didn’t say what you are claiming I said. Many Jews use their white privilege as viciously as any gentile.

@Ruchama, yes, this is precisely what I mean

I think it’s very important to acknowledge the ways that Ashkanazi Jews have used our white privilege to oppress ourselves as well as other minorities.

To get back to the article, I am really tired of seeing movies with “the good German”. I don’t have any desire to see “The Reader”. It reminds me of “Cold Mountain” where none of the main characters are asked to take responsibility for the enslaved people around them. Like when Nic Kidman goes out into the rain to bring the enslaved people root beer.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:02 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

House is interesting in its portrayal of Jewish characters. Three of the main characters — Taub, Wilson, and Cuddy — are Jewish. And it’s been treated in different ways.

With Wilson, his Judaism is rarely mentioned. For Cuddy, it’s a bit more often — she had a simchat bat for her daughter a few episodes ago, and I remember one line when she was looking at sperm donors and was leaning toward donor number 613, and House said something like, “Of course you’d pick the Jewish number.” (There are 613 commandments in the Torah.)

We’ve seen Taub talk about and think about his religion a bit more, especially in the episode with the Orthodox woman who collapsed at her wedding. Taub is also much more stereotypically Jewish than Wilson, and so he gets more of those comments from House.

In terms of portraying the religion and rituals accurately, the show House is much better than a lot of other shows, but seems to have a tendency to get minute details perfectly right and then some huge thing totally wrong. Like for Cuddy’s daughter’s simchat bat, they got most of the stuff about what a simchat bat is and what happens there right, but then had it at Cuddy’s house on a Friday night, which just wouldn’t happen. (Also, someone on the House writing team is very proud of knowing that there are 613 commandments, since that’s been mentioned, usually at entirely random moments, several times.)

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:09 pm ¶
gatamala wrote:

Thanks Matt. I do appreciate your perspective and contributions.

I definitely picked up on the non-Jewish savior tones to films on the Holocaust.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:13 pm ¶
Hilary wrote:

Though I haven’t seen Defiance and can’t properly comment on it, I’d like to say that as a Jew who’s not “Jewish-looking”, I appreciate that someone like Daniel Craig is playing a Jewish protagonist. Hopefully someday soon we’ll see more Sephardim, Mizrachim, and/or Jews of color in film.

And thanks again for posting this and bringing Jews into the mix. I enjoy reading about issues in the representation of many different groups here, but I feel really included in the conversation by this one (not that I don’t normally, I just relate to this especially).

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:25 pm ¶
Phrone wrote:

I found this post really interesting and informative, but the way masculinity got covered here made me uneasy, although I can’t pinpoint why. I know it also happens a lot in conversations about Asian American men, and to a lesser extent other men of color; there just becomes this stress on how the men are “emasculated”, “feminized”, etc. As a woman and a feminist, I don’t think this sort of rhetoric should just pass by unchallenged. (It just seems like “Oh noes, we don’t want to be like the women, now do we?!” A lot of people claim that white feminists sort of try and challenge gender dynamics while maintaining white supremacy — which is true — but I think this is a bit like trying to change racial dynamics while maintaining patriarchy.) But I’m still mulling it over in my head as well, and I don’t want to say much more than that before I’ve really thought it over.

I think a female Jewish perspective might be more insightful than mine, though.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:55 pm ¶
Medea wrote:

One question I have: can you call “Valkyrie” a Holocaust movie? I haven’t seen it, so for all I know it does focus partly on the genocide, but if it doesn’t–wouldn’t it just be a Third Reich movie or WWII movie?

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 12:56 pm ¶
A.D. Nix wrote:

Really interesting.

I haven’t seen ‘Defiance’ but since ‘Munich’ (which isn’t perfect) I’ve been hopeful about the widening of portrayals of explicitly Jewish men and women(!) on screens large and small. I won’t reduce it to “positive” vs. “negative” (I wouldn’t characterize portrayals of ‘feminized’ men or ‘nerds’ as essentially negative, for instance nor Tough Dudes as essentially positive) but variety. Variety would be nice and humanizing.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 1:03 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

Though I haven’t seen Defiance and can’t properly comment on it, I’d like to say that as a Jew who’s not “Jewish-looking”, I appreciate that someone like Daniel Craig is playing a Jewish protagonist.

Well, Paul Newman played the main character in Exodus. (And looked completely ridiculous in one scene where he was sneaking through an Arab neighborhood, and just put on an Arab head scarf and “blended in,” even though he had those famous bright blue eyes and was at least a head taller than all the extras in the scene. In the book, I’m pretty sure that the character in that scene was David, a Mizrahi Jew, and not Ari.)

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 1:27 pm ¶
RainaWeather wrote:

@ Hilary: There’s also an episode when a guy asks if he’s Jewish and points to his nose.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 1:31 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

The “feminized” or “emasculated” question is interesting. I think that what we’re seeing there is stereotypes of Jewish men and Jewish women interacting. A controlling Jewish mother has a weak, obedient Jewish son, who marries a controlling Jewish wife, and spoils his JAPpy Jewish daughter. These stereotypes really reinforce each other through images of family dynamics.

Like, Rachel on Friends, a complete JAP stereotype, is shown in the first episode with a wallet full of credit cards paid for by “Daddy.” The JAP stereotype makes no sense without the father who caters to her every whim, and that father makes no sense without a history of obeying women, especially his mother and wife. Or even Cher’s father in Clueless, who we see as a high-powered attorney, able to exert power over a lot of other people, is still shown as doing whatever his daughter wants.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 1:42 pm ¶
eap wrote:

Very interesting piece. I am curious about how, if at all, Mels Brooks’ “The Producers” fits into your analysis? (I am thinking of the original, not having seen the remake.)

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 2:05 pm ¶
Ryan wrote:

Wow, very insightful article. The racial metaphors in Forgetting Sarah Marshall went right over my head when I saw that film, but now it seems so obvious (Aldous Snow?!!?).

I hope this doesn’t come off as crude, but do you think that the scene in which we first see Peter – with unabashed, full frontal male nudity – speaks to this narrative as well? Maybe it’s not just about gross-out humor, or even just a commentary on how male vs. female sexuality is accepted by film audiences, but perhaps it’s also a “subtle” reminder that this character is a jewish man, stripped of pretense, with no false-image or stereotype (self imposed or otherwise) with which to cover up his jewishness.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 2:06 pm ¶
JC wrote:

This a great post about some of the questions I have forever about Jews and Hollywood. How can an industry ran by a persecuted minority be so racist against non-white minorities and sometimes itself? Although this is about more about Jewish treatment on the big screen, it also helped me understood of the racist decisions (casting/scripts) made against Asian men as well. There’s some parallel to the treatment of Jewish men and Asian men on screen (the kind of characters), the difference being that some Jews can find roles as Italians and other better accepted ethnic groups but Asians can’t.
In this day and age, I just wish the Jewish decision makers in Hollywood cut themselves and other minorities some slack. White males can’t hog all the good roles forever.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 2:11 pm ¶
atlasien wrote:

@Phrone: “there just becomes this stress on how the men are “emasculated”, “feminized”, etc. As a woman and a feminist, I don’t think this sort of rhetoric should just pass by unchallenged.”

I don’t like it either. I prefer to deal with it by using the word “desexualized” instead… that encompasses the intent without the implication that being likened to a woman is the worst thing that could happen to a man.

Desexualization (or the opposite, hypersexualization) can be done to men and women, straight and gay, or anyone in between.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 2:24 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

@Ruchama way to break it down!! I know Silverstone is Jewish but is Cher supposed to be Jewish in Clueless?

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 2:24 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

I know Silverstone is Jewish but is Cher supposed to be Jewish in Clueless?

Cher Horowitz, daughter of Mel Horowitz? I assumed so.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 2:28 pm ¶
Sadface wrote:

I didn’t see The Reader, because I read the novel years ago and didn’t find it that great that I’d read it again, well, or watch it as a movie. What is interesting to me is that the media reports around the movie focused entirely on what is supposed to be a twist: that this nice (?) woman was involved in the Holocaust in no small way. I remember that it came as an unexpected revelation in the novel.
This is probably why my take on the character’s past is entirely different. The story does not reveal the human side of a murderer, but reveals the murderous side of a human. The character is introduced and only after you get to know her, and maybe like her, you learn what she has done. I’ve no idea how this comes across in the movie, but I didn’t get the impression that the book was trying to clear her of her guilt, not that it could if it tried.
The situation that the main character finds himself in is very much the same that any German of his generation (and later) found himself in at one point: the realization that their parents (and other adults) were guilty in the Holocaust and WW2 in one way or another, even though they are now loving parents, friendly neighbours, etc.
This is reality, and it confuses me to see people call it categorically wrong and revisionist.
The knowledge that it was friendly people like my aunt and sensitive people like my grandmother who made the Nazi regime thrive is deeply unsettling, true and important to keep in mind. It’s a warning that we cannot consider ourselves morally superiour and pretend we wouldn’t possibly do the same…
Is this really that different in the movie?

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 3:24 pm ¶
Jess wrote:

@JC– power dynamics are complicated.

As a Jewish person, I have the privileges that go with being white and male even though 25% of my genes are Japanese. (I’m one of those people who always gets a lot of questions about my ethnicity, because I don’t quite fit. It used to annoy the hell out of me).

But at the same time many Jews — myself included, I think — are acutely conscious that that privilege can be taken away.

The Holocaust has a lot to do with this. Jews aren’t the only group to suffer genocidal policy — Native Americans come to mind.

But in the case of the Holocaust, the people it was visited on were, in many cases, relatively closely integrated in to the larger societies they lived in (unlike Native people in the US or other groups that were more directly conquered). And one day you woke up and you weren’t human anymore.

Add to that the success of the Holocaust program in one respect– the entire culture of Jews in Europe was essentially wiped out. There was a whole Yiddish theater, literature, music, customs — all those things that make up a culture. It’s gone.

Not just in Poland and the east, but everywhere. The dislocation of people all by itself was so damaging. Jewish populations all over Europe were reduced so much, the only place where anything survived was Russia, I suppose. Even in places like France, Belgium and the Netherlands, so many were killed or just left after the war. That old Jewish community can never be rebuilt, nor can the culture it produced.

On top of that, it’s within living memory. I mean, you can go out and meet people who survived it. and who perpetrated it. I think there are few Ashkenazi Jewish kids in America who never thought about “what if it happened here?” and the ADL exists for that reason.

This doesn’t mean such fears are realistic — I mean, I don’t fear that the Christian Identity movement will elect a president or something.

But think of the fact that here in NYC, with the biggest Jewish population in the freakin’ world, (2 million Jews here, which is 40% of the entire population of Israel) has a big concrete barrier in front of the local synagogue on the Upper West Side (one of the more Jewish neighborhoods in the city) — that says a lot.

How many times have I been silent when someone made a racist joke because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself? How many times have I made such jokes to fit in? Write that large and you get the idea of how to answer your question, just a little bit.

This doesn’t mean Jews always go along to get along. Jewish people have been more reliably liberal on a host of issues than the general public — I’d argue precisely because of the history as a persecuted minority. But there’s another current that is always just under the surface, something that I think will take another generation or two to fade. And that’s the nagging question, “when will these people turn on us?”

It isn’t rational or logical, but it exists. It’s that deep part of your brain where the chimp socializing happens. It’s the reason so many Jews are willing to support Israel even when they wouldn’t support any other country doing the same thing. I can’t deny that a deep and horrible part of my psyche responds to the concept of Israel with “Now we get ours. Screw the rest of you, you want us all dead anyway.”

Logical? No. A good thing? No. But it’s the old problem of what happens when you battle monsters for too long.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 3:26 pm ¶
Mammith wrote:

I think that even though there is a huge number of Jewish producers in Hollywood, the depictions of Jews hasn’t been very varied in most Hollywood cinema.

There are a few possible reasons I could imagine, the most likely to my mind would be the producers would expect the white majority wouldn’t be comfortable with, say, a very macho Jewish male character. Probably why Jewish charecters tend to be relegated to the dorky best friend sort of role.

On a separate note if I have to see one more holocaust movie I’m going to scream. Seriously, I think we get the point.

Oh and Willow Rosenberg = the greatest Jewish character in anything ever.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 3:36 pm ¶
Beth wrote:

@Ruchama
Exactly; it’s used as a way to “other” gender relations, and thus a society.

While it may be an insult in patriarchal culture, it can also be a form of resistance to that culture. Much like “nerd”, it simultaniously condemns that expression of masculinity and exempts the person so insulted from some of the assumptions of behavior (for example, by still being able to attract women or achieve financial success despite a “failure” to be masculine.)

Coming from a cultural background with different, but still oppressive, gender roles, I’m particularly sensitive to the idea that masculinity other than white-american-hyper-masculinity is either immediately derogatory or somehow liberating to women. In this case, for example, women may nearly always handle the money, but my upper-middle-class family still carried on the tradition of giving the first, largest portion of food to the eldest son.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 4:04 pm ¶
Liz wrote:

As a Jewish woman, I am sometimes frustrated by the often-flat nature of openly Jewish characters in film. I’d consider myself a pretty typical American Jew in that being Jewish is important to me, but it’s not necessarily stamped on my forehead. The range of Jews I’ve known is in no way reflective of depictions of Jews in major films. We certainly can be overly communicative but not shrill and whiny. Perhaps Jewish decision-makers in Hollywood don’t back stereotype-breaking Jewish roles because as American Jews, most of us define how Jewish we are and since most of us are white, we are usually primarily perceived as being white, then as being Jewish. Another fun thing about American Jews, we tend to believe certain stereotypes about ourselves, like that we’re all good with money (I wish) or that we’re all shackled to our Jewish families (not at all the case for many American Jews) or that all our women love to shop and our men love watching sports but can’t play them (my grandfather was an awesome basketball player in high school as were my cousins at hockey, wrestling, soccer, volleyball, and rhythmic gymnastics).
Hollywood isn’t about creativity or being progressive, it’s about making money. Like many minority groups, typical Jewish roles stay that way because it’s made Hollywood money in the past, and they hope it continues to do so in the future. If decision-makers in Hollywood took more risks with more dynamic roles for people of differing backgrounds, they might find audiences to be responsive.
As for the abundance of Holocaust-themed movies lacking major Jewish protagonists, it’s not terribly important to me. I don’t feel that I’ve been deprived of Jewish perspectives on the Holocaust. There’s a wealth of literature and scholarship on it that I’ve been exposed to since I was a little kid. I saw the Reader and found it interesting, but I’m not buying the DVD. World War II was a major historical event and there are many fascinating aspects of it outside of the experiences of Jews who were annihilated (or came close). i.e. the 20 million people who died in the Soviet Union during World War II and Hollywood decided to tell an exciting part of that story in Enemy at the Gates.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 6:01 pm ¶
Minotaar wrote:

I love how “The most commonly expressed fear of directors making films about the Holocaust is that they will trivialize and exploit the tragedy” but you never hear that about any other sensitive story about other minorities. If only these directors could feel that more often.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 6:14 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

Minotaar, which movies are you thinking of with that comment? The only recent “tragedy” movie that I can think of right now is Hotel Rwanda, which seemed to be handled pretty sensitively. (I’m sure there are a ton of other movies about tragedies that I can’t think of right now.)

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 7:10 pm ¶
WestEndGirl wrote:

I have a rather personal comment to make on this. My mother’s family (the Ashkenazi side, my father’s family are Sepharadi) were Bielskis and Tuvia Bielski and his brothers were if I get this absolutely correctly her great great uncles and my great great great uncles.

Interestingly enough, the Bielski family were all very dark and Semitic looking (according to all the pictures we have), so the casting of blond Daniel Craig on this one was way off. Though, as Matt says, the potrayal of a Jewish male as a robust, good-looking, tough character comes as a blessed relief.

I haven’t yet seen the movie – I am planning to with my mother and sister altogether – but, despite this, any movie, Holocaust or otherwise, that portrays as Jews as normal people capable for regular human and *gasp* physical agency is long overdue. I have frankly had it up to here with the portrayals of Jews as verbose, nervy, weak, pathetic, overly-intellectual, money-obsessed wealthy people.

We’ve talked about Jewish identity before on Racialicious and the portrayal of Jews in the media. I second Jess with the feel that it is the pervasive and historically proven fear of overnight upheaval, betrayal, persecution and death that has driven and continues to drive the negative stereotypes.

Those Jewish TV execs were and are scared of portraying Jewish people as real, normal people, in case of being accused of wielding too much power and bringing calamity down on their own heads. There is just no other logical reason for the invisible/visible Jews in Friends or Seinfeld or, if they must be visible, the ever more obvious nerviness, neuroticism, JAPness etc. It’s like the Jewish producers/writers are saying ‘we’re here, but look at the state of us, we’re no threat to you and your White, male power’!

From the other side of the Pond, I can say that Jews are even more invisible, with very very few openly Jewish characters – positive or negative – in the media. Many Brits have absolutely no idea, as a result, and also due to the very small community here, what a Jew is supposed to be or look like. On balance, I think this is a good thing as at least it means that people have less chance to get embedded with the negative stereotypes that pervade American pop culture about us.

Frankly, it’s because of American TV/films that I view Jewish women (I am one) as ineherently unattractive JAPy etc, whereas in UK cultural history Jewesses were exoticised as beautiful and seductive. I’m not saying that that’s good, not at all, it’s still essentialist, sexist and racist. But it does at least demonstrate how the spectre of Janice and her ilk have managed to obliterate x hundred years of UK cultural stereotyping and not in a good way. G-d bless America indeed for that one – that’s one cultural import that I could have done without for sure!

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 8:32 pm ¶
Matt wrote:

Wow! I’m really grateful for all the responses. I think I can address only a small number.

Ruchama in comment 1: you mention Sal Mineo. I compared being Jewish to being gay (closeted). Interesting that Mineo played Jewish, and probably a lot to explore there.

Someone mentioned Mel Brooks. I think he’s great (and there’s a small link in the article), and stuff like The Producers is probably some of the best anti-antisemitism out there. Of course, not everyone in the audience gets that Bialstock and Blum are Jewish names and the heightened contradiction between Jewish stereotypes and the myth of Jewish conspiracies. But mostly I’d say it’s acceptable to mainstream audiences because of the humor. And the camp renders the humor difficult to attach politics to. On the whole, I’d call it exceptional.

As for buying into gendered oppressions by complaining about how Jewish men are feminized: I think we can recognize how fucked up the stereotypes about Jewish men are without necessarily buying into “traditional” notions of masculinity. At the very least, start by recognizing that the notion that Jewish men menstruate is so amazingly bizarre. “Feminized” describes the depictions more than the ideal we’d like to see.

Lawson, of course oppressions are different. Jewish oppression today doesn’t look like the oppression you experience – and I think it would be unhelpful to expect it to. On the other hand, Jewish oppression today does look like the oppression Jews have experienced in the past. I think it’s worth considering whether there’s a relationship between what I’ve described and the more obvious cases of oppression in Jewish history. I think there is. In fact, I’m fascinated by the fact that Jewish oppression has seemed to come in waves, separated by periods of tolerance. So I’d like to examine that “tolerance” and see how it contributes to the genocides and ethnic cleansings that have occured repeatedly throughout Jewish history.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:05 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

I had somehow managed to completely block Janice from my memory until you mentioned her. I just watched a video of Janice “highlights” on YouTube, and couldn’t stop cringing.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:07 pm ¶
Moni wrote:

altasein and phrone, thank you so much for giving me language to articulate my dislike for the use of “feminization” as an insult….I tried to explain to my Chinese-American bf once how I thought his usage of the term in regards to Asian issues was problematic…he just told me that I did not “get it” cause I am a black woman…if confronted with this again I will be able to better explain my position…

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:08 pm ¶
eustatic wrote:

contemporary antisemitism in the West derives it’s form from Stalinist propaganda.

“its form” because it’s the possessive.

good article!

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:12 pm ¶
Abu Sinan wrote:

Excellent article.

I would like to point out that someone pointing out “Exodus” is a poor example.

As a supporter of Irish Republicanism, I used to like Leon Uris. But when I read his “Hajj” it introduced me to the graphic racism the man had towards Arabs and caused me to even rethink my appreciation of his books on Ireland that were so supportive of Irish Republicanism. If he could be SO racist against Arabs, maybe his works on Ireland were similarly tainted.

Anyway, Jews were often limited by law to the jobs that they could have, ie jewlers, bankers, merchants and the like. It is ironic and sad that their successful businesses in these areas were used against them.

I think, to a certain extent, it is the same with Hollywood.

Posted 31 Mar 2009 at 10:39 pm ¶
NancyP wrote:

Woody Allen may have played the stereotype of a homely not-too-masculine Jewish member of the Manhattan Chattering Class, but he always had the best-looking woman character in his character’s bed.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 2:15 am ¶
Rchoudh wrote:

This was a really interesting and informative article about the depiction of Jews in Hollywood, particular Jewish ment. This is the first time I’ve actually learned about the negative depictions of Jewish men in Hollywood (I was somewhat more familiar with the stereotypical JAP/harpie descriptions of Jewish women). And it’s a bit disheartening to learn that even when minorities do wield some level of power in Hollywood, they still have to conform with depicting the same negative stereotypes about their culture/religion for the benefit of closed-minded mainstream audiences.
As for movies made about the Holocaust, I do understand the importance behind bringing to life the stories surrounding that tragedy. However, I keep thinking that the Holocaust in general is constantly used by America to frame World War 2 as the “good war” with clear cut distinctions made between good and evil. While there is no doubt that Nazi/fascist dictatorships were nefarious in their purpose, we must not lose sight of the fact that America and its allies were not completely “good guys” either, since they still possessed their colonies thereby depriving their colonial subjects the same freedoms they proclaimed to be fighting for!

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 2:20 am ¶
Jehanzeb wrote:

This was really interesting and informative. Thank you, Matt.

Although I don’t recall a film in which Jews are vilified, I have noticed the stereotypes you mentioned. I have a friend who is Black and Jewish, for example, and I don’t think I’ve seen a film portraying a Black Jew. I think we often think of Jews as being White and/or Israeli, but ignore the fact that Judaism is NOT an ethnicity. As pointed out by other readers, there are Jews of color too.

Maybe I find it so difficult to articulate my thoughts because I’m Muslim and I never see a Muslim protagonist in a mainstream Hollywood film, but I would like to ask if seeing Jews as heroes and relatively positive characters provides Jewish individuals with a sense of relief and comfort from stigmatization that they may experience or feel? I know that having a lot of representations of Jews creates important issues and topics to discuss (which is pointed out in Matt’s article), and I know anti-Jewish sentiments still exist, but I was wondering if having so many Jewish actors, directors, writers, and producers serves as a way for Jews to cope with whatever prejudice they may experience in their lives?

I ask because I couldn’t but think of how, many times, (especially after hearing/seeing something Islamophobic) it would be such a relief to go home and pop in a movie where I can see a Muslim character portrayed in a positive light. I admit that when I watch “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” I’m always happy with the portrayal of Azeem, however stereotypical he is. At least he’s not the “enemy,” enslaving women, or slaughtering innocent people.

@ Matt,

You wrote: “Defiance shines as something never before seen from Hollywood. It’s got Jews as action heroes.”

But didn’t we see that in “Munich” too?

@ Minotaar # 39

You wrote: “I love how ‘The most commonly expressed fear of directors making films about the Holocaust is that they will trivialize and exploit the tragedy’ but you never hear that about any other sensitive story about other minorities. If only these directors could feel that more often.”

Actually, when the Palestinian film, “Paradise Now,” was nominated for a Golden Globe and Academy Award, there were organizations that accused it of “promoting terrorism” and even went as far as trying to convince the Academy to remove it from the nomination list. Other minority groups may not be accused of exploiting tragedies, but I feel that they have struggles that are worth mentioning.

And I also just wanted to add that I refuse to see anything directed by Edward Zwick. He directed “The Siege,” which is considered to be one of the most anti-Arab and Islamophobic films ever produced by Hollywood. Not only did Zwick portray Arabs and Muslims in a negative light, but he also ignored the suggestions and concerns of Arab-American organizations and representatives, including Jack Shaheen (author of “Reel Bad Arabs”).

I’m surprised no one mentioned that.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:10 am ¶
Micah wrote:

I guess my question comes from my own (mis)understanding of the Jewish identity. I’m black and view white jews as white first, jewish second. So when I hear that there aren’t enough positive openly Jewish characters on tv and in movies, I am somewhat confused. While I do know the history pre-1945, I also know the history post-1945 and the assimilation of Jews into American society and how they too were deemed white. So based on my framing, I find it difficult to grasp what you mean. When I see jewish actors on screen or characters that seem to have “jewish-sounding” ie ashkenazi names, I naturally assume that the person is jewish. What does it mean to be openly jewish? Is it the same as being openly black or latin? In which case, I wouldn’t want to see more characters wearing dashikis oradhering to what one may consider a stereotype. So I’d just appreciate more clarity in what you mean because to me, I feel like there are a number of positive jewish characters on screen already.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:15 am ¶
Rchoudh wrote:

@ Jehanzeb

Oh yeah I remember “The Siege” and the controversy it caused.

@Matt

Just wondering how you would characterize the Adam Sandler movie Don’t mess with the Zohan? Would you say it also revelled in Jewish stereotypes?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 5:03 am ¶
Sobia wrote:

Thanks Matt for writing this. It was quite eye opening for me.

@Jehanzeb:

co-sign, co-sign and co-sign!! I was wondering the same things but couldn’t have articulated it as well as you. Those are excellent questions. And I too would love to hear an answer from Matt as well as other Jewish readers. As a Muslim I too struggle to find protagonists in Hollywood films. We’re almost always the bad guys and being portrayed as such makes one feel more vulnerable to hate.

I haven’t seen The Siege but have heard terrible things about it from other Muslims.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 7:29 am ¶
Jess wrote:

@Jehanzeb–

It’s a complicated set of feelings you bring up.

First, there’s a ll kinds of identity issues with being Jewish from the get-go. I mean, the shades of identity vary — I never really identified as such when I was a kid, for instance, because my family wasn’t religious and their political leanings kind of pushed it by the wayside. But later on I started to think about it more (and I must say it was precisely because of many things my parents told me, ironically enough).

I don’t know where you live, bu tin New York City, for instance, where so much of the population is Jewish anyway, people are less worried about it, whereas in say, Nebraska, I can see it being a bit more tense and raw.

As to seeing depictions of Jews on TV and the like, the thing is, the stereotypes sometimes get so pervasive you don’t notice anymore. I mean, look at it this way: a Jew as action hero is pretty rare, even in Holocaust films (which are a whole genre unto themselves).

This may be different for Israeli cinema, by the way, I don’t know enough about it to say for sure. I have seen some Israeli films but none were the equivalent of an Arnold Schwarzenegger flick. Maybe they exist and I haven’t seen them — I mean, I’ve probably seen a dozen Israeli films in my life, hardly a meaningful sample.

Anyhow, it isn’t like I feel any particular relief per se at seeing a positive character, more surprise at seeing anything but nebbishy ones. Munich was, weirdly, sort of groundbreaking that way.

I mean, I’d even say my feelings are more complicated than that, and I have a tough time articulating them all that clearly.

(Anyone know if Jeff Speakman is Jewish? He’s be the first real Jewish action hero actor I can think of).

I think a lot about how group history shapes identity and perception at the group, family and individual level. Jewishness is an interesting sort of laboratory to look at these things, with the complicated dance between ethnicity, religion, acceptance and bigotry. Take the idea that “Jews are not an ethnicity” or “Jews are an ethnicity” — I’d say both are wrong, and both are right, because it sort of depends on what context you are asking the question in.

And when you get to issues of Jews in the media industry, those kinds of issues start to come out. Matt noted that one reason Jews are in that industry in the first place is that it’s what we were allowed to be in with less interference, like diamond selling or lending or any number of craft industries.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 7:33 am ¶
Ruchama wrote:

@Micah – Like Jess just wrote, my answer would be, “It’s complicated.”

As for “openly Jewish” characters, some of it on TV might have to do with holiday stuff — sitcoms that have a menorah somewhere on a shelf and no Christmas tree, for instance. There was one episode of Friends where Ross tried to convince his five-year-old son (whose mother was Christian) that Chanukah was just as cool as Christmas. Even without specifically talking about it like that, there are plenty of subtle ways to let the audience know that a character is supposed to be Jewish.

There’s actually a somewhat interesting character on 90210 now, Naveed. He’s been a somewhat minor character, and we learn a bit more about him each episode — in the first episode, we found out that he’s Persian and his father is a porn producer. Later on, we found out that he has a bunch of younger siblings and an enormous extended family who all want to know everything that’s going on with him, overbearing but in a caring way. Later on, we find out that he’s a virgin. When one of the other characters (a girl that he’s been hopelessly in love with since about sixth grade) ODs, he borrows money from his parents to pay for her rehab. It wasn’t until about six episodes in that it was mentioned that he was Jewish, when he started dating a girl and commented that his parents love her because they go to the same synagogue as her parents.

Another show that I loved was State of Grace, where the main character’s family was definitely explicitly Jewish. It’s set in South Carolina in the early sixties — the main character is Hannah Rayburn, a 12-year-old girl, whose family has just moved to South Carolina from Chicago. Her first day of school, she meets a girl named Grace, a very upper-class Southern girl, who becomes her best friend. Grace comes over to dinner at Hannah’s house, and one of the first things she says is, “So, y’all are Jewish? Wow, I would love to be persecuted for my faith.” (Grace isn’t malicious, just somewhat clueless, and prone to saying whatever comes into her head without really thinking it through.) Later on, when Hannah and Grace are helping Hannah’s father wash the dishes, Grace notices the number tattoo on Hannah’s father’s arm and asks about it, and Hannah immediately kicks Grace in the ankle, in a clear, “Shh! We don’t talk about that!” signal.

As for Jews being “deemed white,” in my experience, depending on where in the country you are and who you’re talking to, that’s really a “yes, but..” sort of thing. I grew up in the NYC suburbs, and never questioned that I was white. Then I went to New Orleans for college, and was explicitly put into “maybe white, but not quite” in a lot of conversations about race with other students. Sort of, if the only choices were black and white, I was white, but if the question was, “Are (Ashkenazic) Jews white?” the answer was, “Sorta, maybe, kinda, I don’t know?”

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 10:40 am ¶
Disappointed wrote:

I can’t believe someone is on here praising ‘Munich’ as some sort of advancement in Jewish representation (”it’s not perfect” is the biggest understatement I’ve ever read about this film)

Wow, Racialicious, really?

I guess if Arabs were considered human we could talk about the representations of Palestinians within Jewish cinema, but let’s just gloss over the political context of these films, yeah?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 12:00 pm ¶
A.D. Nix wrote:

@ ‘Disappointed’
“which isn’t perfect” is meant to be an understatement.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 12:55 pm ¶
Ras wrote:

For me, growing up I always identified myself as Jewish first, though I did know that I was white. (Though I had no clue what whiteness meant. The public schools I went to were about half Black and half white, and for a while I honestly believed that was representative of the entire country. And that 25% of Americans were Jewish like me. That’s childhood ignorance for you.) I wouldn’t consider my immediate family to be that religious, but I guess we were in comparison to a lot of other people, and I have a lot of relatives who are quite religious. And even growing up in a town which was 25% Jewish I got the occasional “you look Jewish” comment. Between everything, I’ve always felt very Jewish, and my family is less assimilated than a lot of others, I think. (Which I believe is a very good thing.)

And I don’t assume that Jewish actors always play Jewish characters at all. For me the default is generally Christian until proved otherwise. When I was younger I didn’t always pick up that a character was Jewish. It never would have occurred to me that Cher from Clueless was Jewish, because she was blond and it wasn’t exactly as though she ever went to a Shabbat service in the movie or something. Finding out that she was “Cher Horowitz” was incredibly disappointing because of the JAP stereotype, which I constantly hear men (including Jewish men, and my own father) *and* Jewish women promoting.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 12:57 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

Interesting. I’ve never seen Munich, so I can’t really comment on the movie itself, but in terms of people’s reactions to it, I’ve heard people complaining that the Palestinians were portrayed as monsters and people complaining that the Jews were portrayed as monsters. (In at least two cases, I heard both complaints from the same person.) I’m not sure how these break down along religious or ethnic lines — I’ve seen both views in Jewish newspapers and websites, and from Jewish people.

From the Jewish people that I’ve talked to, it seems like the younger people are more likely to see the portrayal of the Palestinians as problematic, and the people who are old enough to actually remember 1972 are more likely to see the portrayal of the Israelis as problematic — I’ve heard, from people in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, a lot of frustrated, “But we were right and they were wrong, so why is this movie making the Israeli assassins look just as bad as the Palestinian ones?”

(Like I said, I haven’t seen the movie, so I don’t really know what I think of it, but this is what I’ve heard other people saying.)

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 12:59 pm ¶
ART wrote:

@15 hits the nails on the head imho – just FYI to anyone that cares – referring to a group of Jews as “The Jews” as if they stand for all Jews is really _really_ offensive. It hearkens back to slanders like the Protocols of Zion and the idea that “The Jews killed Jesus” and Jews 2000 years later are guilty for that.

I think it takes a certain sort of integrity and honor to break ranks and refuse to play into the roles and stereotypes the American audience wants and seems to reward (Dave Chapelle). For Jews I think the most insidious of these is suffering Holocaust victims as backdrop or secondary characters.

There was this great David Mamet interview that touched on the Holocaust being emotional porn. My favorite excerpt:

I: Why is a movie like this that feeds into the audience’s need to feel good about itself pernicious?
DM: I thought it was especially pernicious in the case of “Schindler’s List” because, as a Jew, I don’t like the fact of the Jewish people being exploited, whether in the name of good or ill . . . Just so, attempts to picture Jews going to the gas chambers are exploitative, even if they’re done for the best reasons in the world.
I: The only response is silence?
DM: I think so. ”

http://www.salon.com/feature/1997/10/cov_si_24mamet.html

The self-congratulatory books and movies like The Reader, The Book Thief, or Valkyrie are just ridiculous when one does a little digging and sees that opinions of Jews have not changed much — if anything they’ve become more widespread and gotten worse. 1/3 of Europeans think “The Jews” are responsible for the economic collapse 74% of the citizens of Spain.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1233304741844&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

There’s been a ton of Holocaust, WWII, and Nazi movies — but the end result doesn’t seem to be worldwide resolve of Never Again. It just seems to normalize dislike of Jews and makes people comfortable with their persecution and suffering.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 1:41 pm ¶
Disappointed wrote:

So, what about the political context of Holocaust films and why we are constantly bombarded by them? Is it really about “Never Again”? And why the same people actively try to censor Palestinian films?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 2:22 pm ¶
Haley wrote:

This is a great article. Thank you for posting it!

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 2:34 pm ¶
ART wrote:

And who would those same people be?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 2:52 pm ¶
jvansteppes wrote:

Matt, I’m curious about the comment you make about the guy in Juno. I’ve been told he was emasculated by his silly shorts but I think he was constructed simply as sweet and desirable because of that. I took it as a move outside of gender normative norms.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:26 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

@Disappointed- you are seriously doing a “you people” thing- WHO are you talking about that censor Palestinian films and WHAT does that have to do with films about the Holocaust? What are you implying? Also, what’s your background? Most everyone here has identified their ethnic background to provide a context for their comments- don’t you think you should do the same?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:31 pm ¶
Jess wrote:

@ART– I’d say Mamet is right about some things and wrong about others.

I don’t buy that the only response to the Holocaust is “silence” — that smacks too much of “I’m Elie Wiesel and only I can talk about this” thing. If you want to understand something you have to talk about it by definition.

I do understand and agree that too damned often the “Holocaust film” glosses over some very real things. There aren’t many that I think do justice to it — and yeah, I’ve heard that you can’t, but you could say that about any other terrible event, too. But I’d say that Mamet is responding to the wrong question.

I’d argue that a gigantic elephant in the room is treating the Holocaust as unique. Well, it is in the sense that every historical event is not really just like any other. But it is depressingly commonplace when you look at the idea of genocide as a whole, you know? The Germans just hit on a more efficient method. I’m sure if you had a conversation with a Cheyenne about genocide Chivington’s name might come up, and he was trying to do the same thing. He just wasn’t as successful.

If railroads had had greater reach and people like Chivington ran the BIA, and poison gas had been invented, I don’t doubt that some enterprising soul would have hit on the idea for use in the USA (in fact, Hitler quite explicitly modeled his treatment of ethnic minorities on the US treatment of Native people).

My big issue is that the damage the Nazis did was to the psyche of Jewish people everywhere in the Western world. So many who identify as Jews do so in relation to the Holocaust, especially when discussing Israel. That is, it’s almost like it becomes the ultimate justification for anything and everything. Even to the point where the Israeli government uses the same definition of Jewishness the Nazis did in the law of return.

When I see that I think, “They won. The Nazis won — they made us take on their definition of who we are.” It’s a scary thought.

Which is one big reason so many Holocaust films are structured the way they are and why “Defiance” is something of a departure. I wonder if too often many Jews have taken on what other people’s ideas of who we are should be, in a way that wasn’t the case as much when there was a thriving Jewish culture outside the US. (When you think about it, Jewish culture suffered what an evolutionary biologist would call a bottleneck, with a consequent loss of total diversity).

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:37 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

@jvansteppes I think that the below racilicious post offers an answer to your question about Jewish forms of masculinity offered by pop culture:

http://www.racialicious.com/2008/08/22/judd-apatow-and-the-art-of-white-masculinity/

The fact is that the main character in Juno might be a male challenging gender norms if we weren’t reassured that his lack of gender normalcy can be explained by the fact that he’s Jewish and that we see this SAME stereotype over and over in pop culture of Jewish males.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:41 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

@jvansteppes: One scene that sticks out in my mind for Paulie in Juno is when Juno tells her parents that she’s pregnant and that Paulie is the father, the first response is a sort of, “Really? That guy?” And Juno’s father, before she tells him who the baby’s father is, is sort of getting into protective “Who violated my baby?” mode, but then when he finds out that the father was Paulie, his reaction is sort of like, “Oh. Then of course the sex was Juno’s idea.”

Also, Paulie’s bedroom still looks like a little kid’s room, and he’s still both relying on and obeying his mother in just about everything.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:46 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

“So many who identify as Jews do so in relation to the Holocaust, especially when discussing Israel. That is, it’s almost like it becomes the ultimate justification for anything and everything. Even to the point where the Israeli government uses the same definition of Jewishness the Nazis did in the law of return.”

huh?? I identify as a Jew because of who my family is…not because of the Holocaust…maybe you misworded? And what definition of Jewishness is Israel using that the nazis used?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:52 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

About Holocaust films — I think the main common thread in most American Holocaust films is Jews as victims, Christians as saviors. Schindler’s List is of course the big example, but it’s a very rare Holocaust film that shows Jews fighting back. Has there ever been a film about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? I’ve never seen one, and google is just giving me a few documentaries and one TV movie.

It’s similar to something I noticed about the Holocaust Museum in Israel and the one in DC. The one in DC focuses on the tragedy — the people killed, the people who suffered, and the American troops who liberated them. The one in Israel, while it has information about all that, has much more of an emphasis on people who fought back — the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, people sneaking through the British blockade to get European Jews into Palestine, and so on. (There’s actually been some controversy in Israel lately, where some of the more religious groups want people who went to the gas chambers still proclaiming their faith in G-d to be honored as heroes and resisters just like the people who fought back with weapons. For a long while in Israel, until the Eichmann trial, being a Holocaust survivor was often considered somewhat embarrassing — it was seen to mean that you were weak, that you didn’t fight back, that you just went to the camps like you were told and had to wait around to be rescued. The phrase “like lambs to the slaughter” was used a lot. A lot of that changed after people actually heard survivors’ stories during the Eichmann trial.)

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 3:58 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

“And what definition of Jewishness is Israel using that the nazis used?”

One Jewish grandparent. To qualify for immigration to Israel under the Law of Return, you just need one Jewish grandparent, even if you yourself are not Jewish.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 4:00 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

thanks, Ruchama. Also, where’s your blog? I want to read more of your writing.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 4:05 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

Thanks, emfole. And I don’t have a blog for now — I’m already spending way too much time commenting on other people’s blog when I should be writing my dissertation, so I know that a blog of my own would just be way too much of a timesuck.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 4:08 pm ¶
Disappointed wrote:

@emfole
Why do you need to know my ethnic background?

I’m Palestinian, so you can nod to yourself how all Palestinians are “anti-Semitic” now instead of actually responding to my post. Would you like me to send you a DNA report as well?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 4:24 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

For a perfect example of the Jewish stereotype, check out Jenny from the L word. Especially this last season. Jenny is a total archaic Jewish racist stereotype- she is a calculating, manipulative, sneaky, backstabbing and self-absorbed. She was even referred to as a witch and that she has the uncanny ability to get into peoples’ heads…controlling. In the last episode of the last season, the main characters are sitting around discussing how Jenny has snaked into and manipulated their relationships and lives as well as stealing Alice’s film idea. Then someone kills her and all over the blogosphere, people are happy that Jenny the witch is dead.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 4:27 pm ¶
emfole wrote:

@Disappointed, I did respond to your post and you didn’t respond back with anything except your ethnic background (thank you) and an assumption that I’m racist as well as putting Anti-Semitic in quotes, which makes the word inside the quotes unreal and silly to you. Thanks so much for saying Jewish oppression is make-believe. I would never do that concerning the Palestinians or any other group of people.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 4:31 pm ¶
Lauren wrote:

Having read the book on which Defiance is based and seen photos of Tuvia Bielski, he does seem to have been less traditionally “Jewish-looking” than other members of his immediate family (his son has, I believe, commented that this helped keep him alive), though not to a Daniel Craig-esque extent. I didn’t mind watching him for a couple of hours though .

The film takes some pretty serious liberties with the historical record as far as plot goes (Asrael was not a teenager, for a start), but I thought the Russian characters were representative enough. The bigger issue that has affected the film’s reception in Europe is the Bielskis’ putative involvement in a Russian-led massacre of Poles in 1943 and their reputation for a certain amount of casual brutality. This didn’t make it into the cinema.

The problem as I see it is this: that Defiance already turns preconceived notions of Jewish victimhood on its head with the idea of Jewish resistance fighters; how far can/should one go in also suggestioning that on the odd occasion they may also have perpetrated atrocities in a WW2 context? (This debate is alive and well in reference to Israel, but hasn’t often been discussed for the Holocaust, in part because it’s so rare outside the Bielski Otiad and the Sonderkommandos in various camps.)

Certainly the real-life characters were rather less saintly (particularly in matters sexual) than the movie version, even if the central alligations about the extent of the Bielksis’ involvement in the massacre of Poles are highly fraught. On the one hand, it’s wartime; the White Polish resistance was generally very anti-Semitic; and the Russian partisans both shot people who disagreed with them or who didn’t follow orders and weren’t too enamoured of non-combatants so the Bielski group needed a lot of goodwill to stay alive. It’s very ugly, but logical, and a story worth telling. Concentrations camps weren’t pretty, and survival wasn’t either. On the other hand, while I’d *like* to be all for authentic portrayals of Jewish experience, I’m also uncomfortable with exposing misdeeds and human frailities in a context where portraying the odd Jewish scoundrel could also be a slippery slope to blaming other Holocaust victims for their own fate. Particularly when there’s a tendency for people to extrapolate backwards from the Middle East today. (On both sides.)

BTW, I don’t agree with Deborah Lipstadt that The Reader (have read the book in German and seen the film) is merely soft denial, I do think that by giving the main character a very unusual characterstic for a German of that period – illiteracy – the story drastically underplays the culpability of German society in general.

Apologies for length – it’s a topic which interests me a lot.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 4:48 pm ¶
Jess wrote:

@emfole — I mean that the Holocaust has become a kind of weird touchstone — think about how any discussion of Jewish oppression immediately gets mired in it and you see what I mean. Or discussions of why Israelis are ustified in doing what they do to the Palestinians. I’m not saying it isn’t important. Just that it’s like, I dunno, this thing that a part of me wishes would go away even though that’s like wishing an amputated limb would grow back.

Ruchama explained the definition issue w/r/t law of return. The single grandparent was enough to get you put into Auschwitz. And if you are using the Nazis’ definition of what it meant to be Jewish when building a Jewish state, what the hell are you internalizing here? I understand the logic, but it still bugs me to no end.

And I already wrote about the fear that permeates so many aspects of Jewish culture, even in the US. Else why do we have a Jersey barrier in front of a synagogue, in what is arguably the safest place on earth to be a Jew? Even safer than Israel?

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 5:06 pm ¶
Ras wrote:

I think some people on this thread might be interested in reading “The Holocaust in American Life” by Peter Novick. There’s a lot of really fascinating stuff about how views of the Holocaust from Jewish and non-Jewish Americans have changed over the years. It’s fascinating, if a bit outdated. (written about 20 years ago.) His argument is controversial, but he makes it extremely well. When I read it for a college course I found myself agreeing with his argument that victimization and the Holocaust should not be the “touchstone” of Jewish American identity. I feel fortunate that the Jewish communities I’ve been a part of have offered so much else in terms of culture and community.

At the same time, I cringe when I hear non-Jewish people telling us to “get over it” or complaining that we talk about it “too much.” That’s not really up for non-Jewish people to decide.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 5:51 pm ¶
Disappointed wrote:

@emfole
you said: “as well as putting Anti-Semitic in quotes, which makes the word inside the quotes unreal and silly to you.”

Trust me, it’s real to me. I’m Semitic.

“I would never do that concerning the Palestinians or any other group of people.”

The thing is – not being white European, I don’t have sense of guilt around saying that I think accusations of anti-Semitism are usually used as a political tool to suppress criticism of Jewish institutions and Israel. As for Jewish oppression, on a visit I got treated like an animal by Jewish people in my own homeland, where I’m forbidden return, by Jewish people, and a Jewish military kills my people on a daily basis….I’m not sure how much Jewish oppression you think I actually ever see.

Anti-Jewish sentiment exists in a lot of places, but I don’t think Hollywood is one of those places, nor do I think it means Jewish people lack institutional power. Of course, it’s hard to say that in a climate that is silencing of these concerns.

It isn’t a conspiracy theory to say that many Jewish people in powerful positions have used those positions to silence Palestinians, and this goes for Hollywood where there have been active campaigns against every Palestinian feature in recent memory. Look up the “controversies” regarding Divine Intervention and Paradise Now, and tell me if you still think I’m on some “you people” thing, or whatever you called it.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 5:56 pm ¶
Lauren wrote:

Ras, thanks for the reference. I’m interested in seeing Novick’s view, and, as I’m not American, in how those experiences relate to my own.

I also had an upbringing in which knowledge of the Holocaust was ever-present but not defining. There’s a lot of literature out there in several languages about second-generation trauma and guilt, and my overwhelming reaction when I encountered it was confusion – I’d never had any sense of such emotions among family and friends. (My father looked at me like I’d grown a second head when I suggested certain elements of his background could be connected to trauma about the Holocaust. Maybe they are, but he’d never spared it a second thought in fifty years.)

So it’s tricky to try and view these events at a remove with relation to Jewish identity…and it’s even trickier to find something else to hang one’s identity on, particularly if you’re neither Zionist nor highly religious/orthodox. (Even food is problematic when you’ve got chefs in the family – it’s a job, not a uniting force.) Maybe this becomes easier the larger and more diverse the Jewish community is, and if (back on topic) media portrayals can run a wider gamut than A to B.

And then there’s the fact that I study German and my German citizenship is pending – is trying to find a sense of Jewishness that doesn’t privilege the Holocaust in this context hopelessly naive? Impossible? A betrayal of those who died? I desperately don’t want to spend every day of my personal and professional lives framing everything in relation to my Judaism, especially in situations where it’s really not relevant (the form of the German women’s handball team, for example), but it’s that elephant in the room, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

On the other hand, pushing the Shoah to the fore can also have the unfortunate affect of marginalising other racial debates in (German) society. I have immigrant friends who justifiably hate being simultaneously blamed for events of the past when they weren’t there, and being forced into the shadows now that they are.

These are the challenges I deal with, and I don’t see an awful lot in the media that resonates. Even in ‘less commercial’ (hmmm) Europe. Grrr.

Oh, and to cast back to the article for a moment, Judgement at Nuremburg isn’t a bad reflection of the actual trial, where Jewish voices weren’t heard that much either. (The whole thing was a legal mish-mash of a compromise.) The process was problematic from the start, however, worthy it tried to be. And Valkyrie even manages to screw up twice. I could conceivably live with sidelining the Final Solution to a certain extent if the film actually told the quite complex and morally skewiff story of the July plotters, who had a wider range of motives than the original post admits. Instead, we have no Jewish presence AND a bunch of white-washed, meaningless Hollywood heroes with silly accents who can provide a handy and completely false national alibi. ARGH!!

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 6:49 pm ¶
Ruchama wrote:

Disappointed, you’re conflating individual Jews, the Jewish community, and Israel.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 6:51 pm ¶
Disappointed wrote:

“Disappointed, you’re conflating individual Jews, the Jewish community, and Israel.”

Funny, no-one on Racialicious ever gets accused of conflating individual white people, the white community, and George W. Bush.

C’mon, are you for real? Why do you need me to spell out those differences. It’s obvious I’m talking about institutional power, I even used the term. And when it comes to the U.S./Israel – that power is intimately connected .

Wow, U.S.A. – the only place on earth this reactionary when it comes to criticizing Israel. Even the anti-racist folks, huh

Mod Note –

Okay, I’ve allowed the derail to go on far enough and I haven’t seen anything productive come of it. Disappointed, it is very obvious that you want to talk about something that is not covered in Matt’s original piece. Please review our comment moderation policy, particularly 8, 10, and 12. I can understand your frustration, but this thread is not the place for it. In the same way Fatemeh should be able to write about Muslimah issues without commenters asking what about oppression in Saudi Arabia, Matt should be able to write about Jewish representations in Hollywood films without hearing questions about Palestine. So, you have a few options:

1. You can get angry, complain that I am censoring you and generally act all huffy until I ban you. See the example from EcoSocialist on the Israel/Palestine post. Racialicious covers items about the intersection of race and pop culture, and news only as it pertains to race. Attacking me about what we aren’t covering on the blog normally doesn’t help sway me toward your cause. And I am not concerned with insults – as a direct result of hosting the thread I linked you to, I was called “a gleeful anti-Semite” (anti-Jewish, in this sense), “terrorist colluder,” “Israeli apologist” and a couple other choice things.

2. You can actually write and submit a piece. I offer this option all the time to people who have an issue with what we are covering/not covering and I can count the number of people who actually follow through and write something on one hand. [For the record, Matt is one of the people who did follow through - after I told him to shut up and write me something on this thread, he actually did. And I believe this is the third piece he has pitched me that I have published. Key word: pitched.] A piece on Palestinian films would be quite welcome, as I am sure my readers are curious. And if you don’t feel comfortable writing it, I suggest you contact Jehanzeb Dar over at Broken Mystic. He’s actually on this thread and he is a wonderful writer who understands what Racialicious is looking for in a piece.

3. You can provide tips. The last relevant tip I received on Palestine was back in 2007 about a rap artist who was raising awareness and building schools. That tip was sent to me by a fellow hip-hop fan. More information on how to provide tips to Racialicious is here. If you provide tips, remember that we are not a political blog and we don’t really cover world events. If you can find a pop culture hook, whatever you send has a much higher chance of being featured on the blog.

So there you are. Those are your choices. Further comments derailing the thread will be deleted. – LDP

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 7:13 pm ¶
Evan Carden wrote:

@Disappointed

“Trust me, it’s [anti-semitism] real to me. I’m Semitic [Palestinian]. ”

Please don’t do that. I know that you’re trying to draw a distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Jewish sentiment, and on the face of it that makes sense, Semitic does not equal Jewish, but that’s the way English works and we all know it (otherwise why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?).

Perhaps you don’t intend it this way, but every time I hear that argument I hear it as either a defense mechanism (eg I can’t be anti-semitic, I’m a semite too) or as a means of appropriating the power that the word has.

Also, the two examples of censorship you give are…odd.

If I’m reading the sources correctly, Israel’s complaint was that those movies were nominated for foreign language academy awards (which are supposed to be nominated by the country they’re from) and Palestine isn’t a state.

There are problems with this, as they’ve (the Academy Awards) accepted nominations from Puerto Rico, Hong Kong and Taiwan, which is why Paradise Now was accepted in 2006. Paradise Now lost the academy award, but won a golden globe (for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Now#Controversies) and isavailable for sale at (among others) Amazon.Com as is Divine Intervention.

How exactly have they been censored?

A final point, the people who objected to Paradise Now’s nomination seem to be mostly Israeli, while the Holocaust films we’re talking about are almost solely American made (Hollywood), so this:

“So, what about the political context of Holocaust films and why we are constantly bombarded by them? Is it really about “Never Again”? And why THE SAME PEOPLE [emphasis mine] actively try to censor Palestinian films?”

doesn’t make any sense to me.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 7:41 pm ¶
Matt wrote:

@Micah #50, who writes

While I do know the history pre-1945, I also know the history post-1945 and the assimilation of Jews into American society and how they too were deemed white. So based on my framing, I find it difficult to grasp what you mean. When I see jewish actors on screen or characters that seem to have “jewish-sounding” ie ashkenazi names, I naturally assume that the person is jewish. What does it mean to be openly jewish?

I think both Jewish history before 1945 and Jewish history after 1945 need to be seem as more complicated. In fact, we didn’t become white after ‘45. We were White, then we weren’t, then we were again. And sometimes Black or Asian. And then – hey, actually some of us aren’t white at all. And even when we’ve been seen as White, that hasn’t meant there haven’t been problems – largely because we had to keep Jewishness somewhat closeted.

Some of those same problems from before 1945 have continued to the present without interruption. Some of them changed only in form – like the Stalinist antisemitism I referred to in the post. (Start with the Doctors’ Plot.) The notion of Jewish conspiracy is still very much with us, but it seems to me that very few people recognize it in these new forms.

Right now, things are getting better in Hollywood; but they’re also getting worse in other places. And so we need to think more about what antisemitism really is. Why has it come in waves separated by periods of tolerance? (In fact, pre-Nazi Germany was, in some ways better than Jews had ever been treated in Europe. Judenhass was viewed with contempt as a thing of the past. But then…) What does the oppression of Jews look like when it isn’t at its worst? Where does it hibernate, so to speak?

A lot of the academic work that underlies the way we (in these special places like Racialicious) talk about race -critical race theory- started as a reaction to the Holocaust by Jewish scholars like Adorno and Horkheimer. And yet, it’s only rarely and recently been applied to studying the oppression of Jews. We really don’t have as understanding of antisemitism that’s as deep as we have for other kinds of racism.

So first I wanted to say, hey, there’s still a problem. In fact, I think that lack of understanding is part of the same pattern from before 1945. Second, I wanted to point to some ways of describing the problem, and I think that’s there in the post.

Also, don’t assume that people with “Jewish names” are necessarily Jewish. Other people have commented on the inappropriateness of reducing Jewishness to simply Judaism. This is the other side of the coin.

@ #51, Zohan is pretty neat (and falls short, but I won’t harp on that) in a lot of ways. It deals more in stereotypes of Israelis than of Diaspora Jews, but sure it’s got both. And it does it with a lot of love. In truth, Israelis are only a little less preoccupied with hummus than what was depicted.

And in response to a few people: I’d love to see more minorities represented in Hollywood. Only, please don’t put that in the language of “the Jews have too much power in Hollywood.” That’s a whole different topoi. And I can promise that depictions of minorities other than Jews would be a whole lot worse if there was any other White demographic in charge.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 8:58 pm ¶
ART wrote:

Oh yay!!! Let’s argue about the middle east conflict and who’s right and who’s wrong. If everyone puts on their thinking caps I’m sure we can reach consensus by comment 100. Once we figure that out all this nuance about Jewish identity will be moot anyway.

Posted 01 Apr 2009 at 9:22 pm ¶
cathy wrote:

Have you seen the film The Pianist? I thought that movie was one of the best I have seen dealing with WWII, but I am not Jewish, so I might have missed some things there.

Someone asked if their was a film dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There was a made for TV movie (starring Hank Azaria and David Schwimmer). I’m no expert on the uprising, so I can’t say if it is very accurate as to events, but it does depict the Jewish people as actively resisting the horrible nazi regime.

Okay, so I watch too much TV. As someone who is not Jewish, I tend not to be as focused on depicitions of Jewish people, but on the complete erasure of other groups affected by the holocaust. Of course there are many stories of Jewish people in the holocaust that aren’t being told, but I have never even seen a mention in a film about the mass gassing of mentally disabled children and murder of the mentally ill and disabled people. We don’t talk about communists, disabled, queer people, feminist groups, etc. in the holocaust at all. It’s not that I’m saying we should not be depicting and discussing the fact that Jewish People were persecuted, that the Nazis tried to exterminate them, and the loss of culture, but why can’t we ever have the same kind of conversation about the dynamic queer community in Berlin that was also destroyed or how institutionalized disabled children were so devalued by society that they could be gassed with impunity? I think these sterilized, distanced depictions of Jewish experience are not unrelated to the fact that American audiences want to see German oppression as somehow completely unrelated and disimilar to oppression with America. We can have stereotyped versions without having to address the fact that the US engages in the same kind of propaganda and dehumanizing that Germany did leading up to the holocaust. We can talk distantly about non threatening stereotyped Jews without having to address issues of institutionalization of the disabled or America’s involvement in perptrating horrors on gay people at the end of the holocaust (because the American government and the Allies thought that jailing, torturing and murdering gays was a legitimate public policy, so many gay men in the camps were sent to prison to die instead of being set free) or even our own country’s antisemetic history.

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 12:50 am ¶
Nathan wrote:

“Ruchama explained the definition issue w/r/t law of return. The single grandparent was enough to get you put into Auschwitz. And if you are using the Nazis’ definition of what it meant to be Jewish when building a Jewish state, what the hell are you internalizing here? I understand the logic, but it still bugs me to no end.”

I don’t really see what other option there was. No one wanted to be the one to say “you were slated for the same chopping block in the same camp but we don’t really feel any solidarity to you so byebye”.

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 1:04 am ¶
Matt wrote:

cathy, one thing about The Pianist is that it wasn’t an American film. I was focusing on Hollywood which, ironically, is where Jews are more dominant — hoping in part to point out how Jewish power can be compromised in the few, highly localized places where it exists.

As for other victims of the Holocaust: yes, there were many. And Jews weren’t the first killed. Gays were. On the other hand, it appears the 5 million figure was just made up.

Thing is, everything the Nazis did, from starting wars to committing genocide was about Jews. Jews were always at the center of everything the Nazis did. We, as a society, don’t really get that. We don’t recognize the lies the Nazis told about Jews or how antisemitism in German society enabled them to do what they did.

“However much I resisted it, the Jew is in every respect the center of the language of the Third Reich, indeed of its whole view of the eopch.” –Victor Klemperer, taken from an epigraph.

And, in fact, the decentering of Jews in Holocaust films goes way beyond merely recognizing other victims – it’s only the occasional Holocaust film that really pays attention to Jews. It’s amazing how few Holocaust films actually feature Jews. That’s deeply wrong.

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 8:55 am ¶
Jess wrote:

@Nathan–(87)

that’s the problem — to some extent it gets into the creation of a Jewish state to begin with.

Zooming out for a minute, I don’t on principle like the idea of ethnically-based state creation, because by definition it essentializes citizenship. Yugoslavia broke up because two fascists– Tujdman and Milosevic — had this idea of a ‘pure’ state of Croats or Serbs. That did not turn out well. And it is espcially disturbing when you think about the fact that they are probably not really separate ethnicities at all, strictly speaking. What is different is their religion and the alphabet they use, but they married each other routinely for centuries.

And while I understand the impulse to create a Jewish state, and the idea of a safe haven, I reject it as buying the very argument the Nazis made — each state has to be some kind of pure expression of the volk. The idea that one could be a citizen and not a pure German (or Pole, or whatever) is sort of absent.

Now, I don’t equate here the Jewish state project with the Nazi one of exterminating everybody. But I do think that the idea of the ethnically-based state, even within the context of self-determination of peoples (which was the driving force for creating a Jewish state pre WW II) is problematic at best.

After all, in Israel they worry about what happens if the Jewish population were to become a minority just because of birth rates and such. And given what happened in Lebanon, where a former majority refused to share power, I’d say that you have a problem if you are going to have a ‘Jewish’ state — I mean. what is that, anyway? there are loads of answers and few match up well.

As to books — Novick’s The Holocaust and Collective Memory is a good one and Norman Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry is another, though I get the sense tat Finkelstein is just pissed off that his own relatives got screwed. (He goes off the rails in a few places but the thrust of his argument is a good one).

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 9:45 am ¶
emfole wrote:

I would just like to say how much I appreciate this post. As mentioned by others, because many people either dismiss or are ignorant of the concerns of white Jews, I often feel very frustrated and misunderstood. It is a huge relief to read this post and comments by those who are more articulate than I and helpful in organizing my own thoughts. So, thank you.

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 10:31 am ¶
Matt wrote:

Jess, I really kind of want to stay out of the Israel/Zionism debate here. Of course, in a way this article is leading up to it. But right now I want to talk about Hollywood as a space of Jewish power and colonization.

However, I do have to point out that the vast majority of nations in the world today are ethnically-based. There are pseudo-exceptions like Great Britain, which is a union of several ethnic-substates. And there are situations like Jordan, where a minority unjustly rules over a majority of a different ethnicity. But the US is the only real exception to a world of ethnically-based states. So I don’t think it’s at all fair to say that Israel is buying into a specifically Nazi-style thinking. Rather, it just deals with the way power is structured in the world as it is.

If you want to be an anarchist, that’s fine with me. In fact, this morning I was looking at a blog post by one of my favorite bloggers, who is a Bundist and anti-nationalist. (For me, I was revisiting my disagreements with Bundists.) The post involves in a small way Bob having been mistaken for a Zionist. The person who assumed he was a Zionist responded to a request, “I just assumed that you are one, that’s all.” I think that points to how debates over nationalism can become poisonous when they center on Israel. What makes Israel an attractive target for anarchists is merely that Jews are particularly vulnerable. I think that’s a terrible basis for action.

Personally, I’d happily be anti-nationalist, but I don’t see that as a realistic position at this time.

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 12:43 pm ¶
Jess wrote:

Matt– sorry, I was just trying to explain why I saw it as problematic — and while I understand that most states in the word trace their origins to ethnically-based communities (duh) in the modern world you can’t do that. People travel, they move, and Yugoslavia showed what happens when you try to ignore that.

I mean, take, say, France. To be a French citizen you needn’t be a certain percentage of French blood, you can be an Algerian (or Algerian-descended). Countries that do otherwise are roundly denounced — like Japan which still denies full citizenship rights to Korean minorities (and in some cases full citizenship). There are plenty of other examples.

I’d say the opportunity for Israel to take the route of elevating citizenship over race/religion/ethnicity was lost a long time ago, so I’m with you there that some things aren’t necessarily realistic, but some changes can be and are — and are not only realistic, but perhaps necessary.

Which actually does relate, in a way, to Hollywood and the Jewish experience there. In the US, as Jews, we’re allowed to do things and at least on paper be citizens. Heck, we’ve had a lot of success in the media industry. No doubt.

And that would, ordinarily, offer a space for Jews to define themselves, but in many ways Jewish writers/actors/whatever end up defining themselves according to stereotypical images imposed from outside.

Which returns us to the thinking behind aliyah qualifications to go to Israel, They didn’t say “two grandparents,” or “your mother must be Jewish” (the biblical requirement) or any of a dozen other possibilities. I mean, some countries used (for government record-keeping purposes) the religion of the father (sometimes over the objections of local Jews, I might add).

No, they used the one the Nazis cooked up. Like I said, I understand the logic and the reasons. But it still sticks.

I guess I am seeing it as more than just Israel/Zionism — a whole other discussion, yes– and more in line with issues of nationalism and how you negotiate that without devolving into repeating oppressive patterns.

Which again brings us to Hollywood. A space that one would think is ’safer’ — but really isn’t, and where an action hero is a departure, in a way that it isn’t for other ethnic groups.

(OK, I suppose we get Steven Seagal — his dad is Jewish )

Sorry, I hope this wasn’t too convoluted.

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 1:52 pm ¶
jvansteppes wrote:

Emfole and Ruchama, thanks for your points, I appreciate what you’re saying.
I did read the Apatow piece and I still read Paulie differently. But I went to see Juno with a friend’s teenage brother and he really liked seeing a shy boy who got the girl, which has skewed my perspective. Maybe the lack of alternative masculinity in film is what gives me a certain fondness for characters who others might call mama’s boys even when those boys are cast that way to fulfill stereotypes. And perhaps I’m living in a dream world when I say that I’d like Jewish boys to get laid because they’re cool for whatever reason, rather than because Eric Bana was tough in Munich.

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 5:34 pm ¶
ART wrote:

“In the modern world you can’t do that” ummm, how inconvenient for Israelis and convenient for everyone else. All land’s legal claim of title will eventually find it’s source in the land having been conquered (including whatever land you are living on right now.)

“Graffiti on History’s Walls” is hands down the best article I’ve ever come across on this subject (or any subject for that matter). I would really recommend it to anyone, especially those who are brave enough to consider whether there is a connection between Antisemitism and holding Israel to a far higher standard than any other country.

These are it’s concluding lines:

“The insight of Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he said, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read, “Jews to Palestine,” while today it has been changed, to “Jews out of Palestine.” The message to Jews, Oz says, is simple: “Don’t be here, and don’t be there. That is, don’t be.’”

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/mort/zuckerman_new_anti_sem.php3

Posted 02 Apr 2009 at 7:45 pm ¶
Matt wrote:

Jess, I think there’s some interesting stuff in what you just wrote, though I see things a little bit differently..

With regards to France, a family can live in France for generations without being allowed to become citizens. And even though it is possible to become a citizen, French-ness is still pretty heavily guarded. And that’s France – we’re not even talking about many nations (including most of the Arabian peninsula) where there is no way to become a citizen except marriage to a citizen.

And in Israel there are ways to become a citizen that don’t involve being Jewish. It’s possible to emigrate and apply to become a citizen without converting. The Law of Return gets all the attention, but the only people actually barred from becoming citizens are those from states (or, non-states, unfortunately, with the Palestinians) that are openly hostile to Israel. And with the case of some Sudanese refugees recently, even that barrier was overcome.

I’m also personally kind of proud (in a weird way) that Israel was the first nation in the world to accept Vietnamese refugees.

With regards to your point that we’ve internalized an awful lot of stuff from people who hate us – I agree. And I agree that this is important. But I think I disagree somewhat on what it is we’ve internalized and somewhat more on the implications this has for anti-antisemitism.

(Certainly, I would love to just ignore Norman Finkelstein. Have you seen his website? He just called Phyllis Chesler a semi-literate cow, “Who would ever have thought that a cow could write the alphabet?” That sort of hatefulness, well.. it’s typical from him.)

With regards to the Law of Return, I see that in terms of a Jewish tendency to refuse to make definitive pronouncements. It’s very Talmudic. With regards to the settlements, that habit of putting off final decisions is terrible – the Talmud’s not always a great guide to governance. But with regards to the Law of Return, I think it’s fine.

Posted 03 Apr 2009 at 9:59 am ¶
Jess wrote:

ART– I am saying in a world where people travel, where many, many people do not stay within 10 miles of their homes (the norm for most of human history) and where people often marry each other without regard to ethnic background, you just can’t do a blood-quantum system of citizenship or one that says “I am X, therefore have rights, you are Y, and don’t.”

Let me pose the question. If the Jewish population of Israel drops below 50%, what do you do with everyone else? Deport them? Kill them? What?

What do you mean when you say “Jewish state?” The premise is little different than when people say they say Serbia is for Serbs, is it not? You’re privileging one group over others.

The very same question could be asked of every country in the world that claims to be an “X-ethnicity” state or “X-religion” state. And since the answers are often pretty damned ugly, I say people are citizens first — and that is the only way to work it out. Loyalty to nation is not predicated on your blood. If it were then you’d agree that interning Japanese Americans was OK. It wasn’t.

@Matt- I’d like to ignore Finkelstein as well, though you really can’t, ultimately. The guy is one angry dude. But that doesn’t change the thrust of his argument, which is unfortunately spot on in too many places. I just wish he’s not get carried away.

Posted 03 Apr 2009 at 5:47 pm ¶
ART wrote:

That’s your view, that’s fine I respect that. But it’s not the view of most Israelis and most Republican leaning Americans. I don’t have issues with privileging one group over another (mostly b/c anyone that claims they are capable of and don’t do it is trying to sell you something.)

There are 57 Muslim states. 1 Jewish state is fine and immigration policies that preserve that character are appropriate. They should be treated with the same deference to decide such policy as any other nation.

I think the issues most Liberal individuals have with Israel is that it seems to be a great scrim for the narrative of colonialism and since it’s not in the past, all the pent up sorrow and rage over the devastation of colonialism suddenly has an outlet.

But it’s simply wrong — the wrong set of facts to try and fit that on and morally wrong to do to them both b/c its effect is making peace that much more unattainable.

Mod Note – Okay, points made. We need to stay on topic and as Matt has indicated in his comments, we should be discussing what he wrote about in his piece. Further off topic comments will be deleted. – LDP

Posted 04 Apr 2009 at 10:55 am ¶
ART wrote:

Sorry and thanks for letting me respond.

Well, I’m looking forward to seeing Inglorious Bastards when it comes out this fall. It’s interesting that it was written and directed by Quentin Tarantino (who I love), since he put in that throwaway line by Michael Madsen’s character in Kill Bill II about how he doesn’t “Jew Down”. That caused a wisp of controversy, especially b/c it was otherwise such an ennobling moment for that character.

I took it to show that this was a flawed individual who even at his best was no one to root for. I fear that most people took it as face value. Apparently, Tarantino had already conceptualized and written most of Inglorious Bastards before doing the Kill Bills, so I’d argue, whatever they were, he had his reasons for employing that language.

Posted 04 Apr 2009 at 1:29 pm ¶
levi9909 wrote:

Sorry to come to this so late but I just noticed that this Matt chap has lifted a quote by me out of context.

Bob from Brockley came to my blog to ask What makes you say mine is “the blog of a zionist”? Where’s the Zionist content?

I responded thus:
I didn’t say your blog has zionist content.

Woops, I didn’t notice you asking what makes me say that yours is the blog of a zionist. I just assumed that you are one, that’s all. I can’t remember why and I can’t be bothered to check. I must have a notion that you think Israel is within its rights to be a state specifically for Jews and that Jews, their immediate descendants and dependants are entitled to more right to citizenship than the native non-Jewish population. If I’m wrong by all means let me know. I’m always happy to correct. In fact that used to be my USP.

It turned out that I wasn’t wrong at all and Bob didn’t even deny it. He did try to pass Israel’s state structure and citizenship laws off as being like India’s, Germany’s and Rwanda’s and those comparisons were exposed as bogus but to say I simply assumed he was a zionist a propos nothing in particular is simply dishonest. Sadly this Matt character has been as dishonest as this Bob that the former admires so much.

Posted 13 Apr 2009 at 6:35 pm ¶
eli wrote:

Hey,
I might be butting in a little late to this conversation, but I think what I have to say is a bit relevant at least. I’d like to make a comment on the ‘Judaism is a ethnicity’ thing some people have gone on about.

First of all, to get the fact straight, I am a Jewish teenager. I am very active in the reform Jewish community. I am also ethnically Jewish.

I personally consider there too be two categories:
Ethnically Jewish
and Religiously Jewish.
My dad is ethnically and religiously Jewish, but my mom is only religiously Jewish, for example, as her ancestors weren’t Jewish but she herself converted.

My dad’s family has always been Jewish. They came from Poland, but they were not Polish, as they immigrated there (from Israel). They immigrated there probably a thousand or two years ago, at least, but they did not intermarry with Polish people. They kept with their own people. They did not share in the Polish culture. They have their own culture seperate from Poland.

There are three main categories of ethnic Jews: Ashkenazi (Eastern European), Sephardic (Spanish, North African), and Mizrahi (Middle East). There’s also groups throughout Asia and Africa who claim they are descended from ethnic Jews, like in Ethiopia.

Ashkenazi Jews are Jews who went North when they got kicked out of Palestine by the Romans. They went up to Europe. They might mixed with the Turkish a bit (there was a great Jewish nation called the Khazars who were Turks who converted to Judaism). They settled in places like Poland, Germany, Ukraine, etc…
They look the most ‘white’ of all the Jews. ( Little interesting thing: I saw some pictures of a Jewish prayer book (the Hagadah) which had paintings in it from the 16th century. The Jews portrayed in these paintings (painted by fellow Jews) are all dark skinned. Maybe this is because it is a time closer to when they left Palestine, I don’t know)

Sepharic Jews have basically the same story, except no Turks and they went to places like Spain, Italy, Morocco etc…

Mizrahi Jews stayed closer to home. Some stayed in Palestine, some went to other Muslim ruled countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc… Some went all the way to India (I don’t think Indian Jews are classified as Mizrahi, but it makes in simpler).

Jews from Ethiopia are really interesting. They look ‘black’ but claim they are descended from the original Israelites like the rest of Jews. They practice an older form of Judaism, since they were cut off from the wider Jewish world a long time ago.

Then there’s Jews from China, etc… Who claim the same as the Ethiopians.

Basically, if you’re ethnically Jewish, your ancestors originated from Israel. They might mixed with other groups on the way, but they’re still related to the original tribes of Israel.

Me and an Iranian Jew can both claim to have common ancestors a millenium back.

It’s really weird be ethnically (Ashkenazi) Jewish, I feel. I look like an average ‘white’ person, but there’s still something different about me. This goes for many ethnically Jewish people. There’s just something about us that is different, a lot of the time. Especially with hair. Ever heard of a Jew-fro?
(half joking here)

That might sound Hitler-esque, what I just said, but it’s not. It’s just my identity. Even if I left Judaism, I still would be ethnically Jewish.

Muslims and Christians are not a race because they’ve branched out more, by conversion. Judaism is not a religion people convert to (as Jews do not try to convert others, or at least they’re not supposed to), so if you’re Jewish, you’re most likely to have at least one Jewish ethnic parent.

(Racially, we’re white, except for maybe the Jews from Africa. All Europeans and Middle Eastern people are considered White, at least in the U.S., which is where I’m from, so excuse me if I’m generalizing)

This ethnicity thing is slowly changing, especially in the U.S., as so many Jews (like me) come from mixed marriages. So who knows if there will still be a defined race in fifty years?

(No matter what your race is, you’re considered to be fully (religiously) Jewish when you convert, though)

(Sorry if I focus on Ashkenazi Jews too much. It’s what I am, so I know more about them.)

Sorry, I’m just really interested in race and ethnicity, so I get excited when I can show off (force) my knowledge on others, haha.

Alright, so on topic, Jews in the media…
I’m only 15. I haven’t experienced as much media as you people (I haven’t even seen Schlinder’s List) but from what I’ve see on T.V., the few times Judaism came up was someone having a Bar Mitzvah and getting money (Lizzie Maguire) (I was young, give me a break) and non-jews making jokes or snide comments about Jewish characters (like in House). I hate it when they portray Jewish characters, personally, because what they usually do is ‘hey, he can’t eat pork!!!’ and we never hear about it again. Being Jewish is a lot more then that. Sorry.

And for the Jewish-life in America: personally, I feel more comfortable around people who are not of Christian origin (I’m sorry to say, I’m not trying to be anti-christian). My best friends are Sikh and Muslim. A lot of other Jews I’ve met also are like this. It’s kinda strange, because where we live, there’s like 5 of us (Jewish teenagers) and maybe 5 non-Christians.

That’s my 2cents. I’m sorry for taking up so much space!

Posted 15 Apr 2009 at 1:15 am ¶
levi9909 wrote:

Eli, the idea that ashkenazi Jews are the direct descendants of people who inhabited biblical Israel is extremely dubious. For hundreds of years around the destruction of the 2nd temple, Judaism was a religion that moved from people to people and place to place.

You have completely ignored the fact that there have been many Jewish kingdoms and tribes that were nothing to do with Palestine. Yemen has been Jewish twice and when it was most of the people would have been Jewish. There have been Jewish Berber tribes. There have been Jewish kingdoms in what we now call Eritrea, Ethiopia and Tigré.

Certainly, this doesn’t negate the idea of there being such a thing as “ethnic Jews” but there is a pre-history to the multi-ethnic nature of the Jewish people that largely takes place between the destruction of the first temple and the tenth or eleventh centuries.

You appear to have confused history with Jewish mythology and zionist propaganda. It is highly doubtful that whole communities leapt from Israel to Poland two thousand years ago, in fact I don’t think I have ever heard that one before.

This chap, Shlomo Sand, is worth a look at if you’re genuinely interested:

http://mondediplo.com/2008/09/07israel

What he is saying isn’t actually new in principle but he supplies different details as to how it is that Jews came to be what you might call a multi-ethnic ethnicity.

Of course, politically it shouldn’t matter what Jews are in terms of origin. The issue is one of tolerance and acceptance. Even if all of the world’s Jews were the descendants of people that left Palestine 2000 years ago no political significance should flow from that. Nor should whether or not Jews were expelled or drifted away from both Judaism and the land, which according to serious scholarly opinion, they did.

Zionists tend to make an issue out of the idea that 2000 years ago Jews were expelled from Palestine and that the conquest of Palestine and the expulsion of most of its Arab population was a restoration of Israel to its original inhabitants. That is nonsense. The Palestinians are far more likely the descendants of the inhabitants of the land who never left than the people who came to conquer, displace and replace them in what is now Israel.

Posted 15 Apr 2009 at 8:20 am ¶

Defiance: How Jews Depict Jews Within a Larger Context

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