New Jews

Race and American Jewish Identity in 21st-century Film

David L. Reznik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781612050713
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317264385
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"New Jews'?" is the first comprehensive study of American Jewish identity in Hollywood movies of the new millennium. Despite the argument that we live in a "post-racial" society with supposedly "new" Jewish characters emerging on the big screen, this book details how traditional racial stereotypes of American Jews persist in popular films from the first decade of this century. In clear and readable prose, the book offers an innovative and penetrating look at dozens of American Jewish "meddling matriarchs," "neurotic nebbishes," "pampered princesses," and "scheming scumbags" from 21st century film, whether Hollywood blockbusters like Meet the Fockers and Sex and the City or indie favorites like Garden State and Kissing Jessica Stein. Throughout the book, famous American Jewish characters played by the likes of Jim Carrey, Tom Cruise, Anne Hathaway, Kate Hudson, Scarlett Johansson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller are discussed, with the ultimate conclusion that movies today are marked less by the emergence of "new Jews" than by the continued - but dynamic and transformed -- presence of the same old stereotypes.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

We increasingly hear that the United States is a “postracial” society in the 21st century. Barack Obama’s ascendance to the presidency is heralded as evidence of just how profoundly race relations have transformed since the enacting of civil-rights legislation several decades ago. Obama’s biography is thought to symbolize the seemingly boundless opportunities now available to racial minorities in this country and therefore the needlessness of affirmative-action programs and racially focused social-justice movements today. Indeed, colorblindness seems to have become the new progressive position on race, as racial consciousness is deemed irrelevant at best and racist at worst.

These widespread ideological shifts about race in the United States parallel recent changes in the study of American film. The longstanding academic tradition of identifying and analyzing racial stereotypes on the big screen has been replaced by research that views movies through a “postracial” lens. And while newer “postracial” conceptions of identity, like “multi-culturalism,” “hybridity,” and “ethnicities-in-relation,” are helpful in many ways, they suffer from a blind spot when it comes to seeing the ways race still operates in 21st-century movies.

Nowhere are these trends more obvious than in the study of American Jewish¹ identity in contemporary Hollywood cinema. The 1980s and ’90s featured several important works on American Jewish stereotypes, detailing the ways that American Jews have been historically racialized on the big screen as “the nitpicky, overbearing mother who wants her son or daughter to marry Jewish; high maintenance daughters interested in shopping and material pleasure as opposed to pleasure in the bedroom; and men who possess a neurosis or avarice that overwhelms any other positive character trait” (Baskind 6). However, these racial stereotypes have largely, if not completely, been ignored by film scholars since the beginning of the new millennium.

One possible reason for this is the conventional wisdom in the United States today that American Jews are so assimilated as to be just another bunch of “white folks.” Another explanation could be the “postracial” notion that American Jewish identity, like that of all other minority groups, should be seen as cultural and/or ethnic rather than racial. Along these lines, it has become increasingly popular in Jewish Studies circles to argue that 21st-century film is filled with “new Jews,” or American Jewish characters who defy all the traditional stereotypes of American Jewish identity. These characters are supposedly defined less by insecurity about their identity and overall dysfunction than by their unabashed self-expression and healthy normality; they are thought to assert their “Jewishness” with a mixture of confident swagger and understated subtlety, reflecting the postmodern times of the 21st century when identity itself is thought to be constantly fluid and dynamic.

Given the lack of research about American Jewish stereotypes in 21st-century film, as well as the growing “postracial” consensus developing out of this void, I set out to discover if and how American Jews are still racially stereotyped in contemporary cinema. What I found upon screening more than fifty films released since 2000 was that traditional American Jewish stereotypes from 20th-century film actually persist quite prevalently on the big screen today. In fact, in the sample of films I screened, I found dozens of American Jewish characters who were defined by the same old racialized traits of American Jewish identity, including codependency, deceit, impotence, and materialism. These “meddling matriarchs,” “neurotic nebbishes,” “pampered princesses,” and “scheming scumbags,” as I call them, are the subject of this book.

And yet I also found important differences between the 21st-century representations of American Jewish racial identity in film and their 20th-century predecessors. In particular, the age groups, genders, sexualities, and social classes traditionally associated with each of the more-traditional American Jewish racial stereotypes have diversified and expanded to reflect shifting family dynamics and identity politics in the United States. For instance, I found a significant number of American Jewish “meddling matriarch” fathers and sons, gay and lesbian “neurotic nebbishes,” “pampered princess” young boys, and working-class “scheming scumbags” in 21st-century movies.

Whether these augmentations to the traditional American Jewish stereotypes are indeed “new Jews,” however, remains quite unclear, as these characters do not call into question the underlying racial logic of the stereotypes themselves. Additionally, I did not find that American Jews are exuding a newfound self-confidence about their racial identity on the big screen, for, as this book will highlight, the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish characters I studied in 21st-century film were ambivalent about their identity, with a significant percentage not even explicitly identified as Jewish in the movies themselves. In this sense, I agree with a Jewish Studies film scholar who writes that 21st-century film simultaneously features “‘too much’ Jewishness” and “‘not enough’ Jewishness” (Itzkowitz 237), pathological extremes that reflect the degree to which American Jewish identity is still racialized in contemporary cinema.

Ultimately, then, I cannot subscribe to the “postracial” idea that American Jewish racial identity has fundamentally changed or disappeared in 21st-century film. Instead of pretending that American Jewish racial stereotypes no longer exist on the big screen, or buying wholesale into the notion of “new Jews” in movies released since 2000, this book addresses how and why the traditional stereotypes of American Jewish identity still persist in Hollywood film. I explain how the historical social structures of antisemitism² and assimilation inform American Jewish identity on the big screen today, and at the same time discuss the possible motives for American Jewish creative teams (including directors and writers) who are disproportionately responsible for producing these stereotypical representations of American Jewish identity in Hollywood.

Before listing the films and characters I studied for this book, it is important to outline the traditional American Jewish racial stereotypes from movies in the 20th century, characterizations of American Jewish identity that I found to be just as prevalent in 21st-century film:

The “meddling matriarch” stereotype derives from the archetypal figure of the “Jewish mother,” racialized as dark in appearance (especially hair, eyes, and complexion), domineering (both in physical stature vis-à-vis her husband as well as through her behavior), overprotective, loudmouthed, and pushy. Historically, such racialized imagery of child-rearing, middle-aged American Jewish women owes to the Jewish experience of diaspora, particularly the need for a tight-knit family amid the struggle for survival in often-hostile environments (Antler). As one study of this stereotype explains, Jewish women were often structurally burdened with the sole responsibility of family management, a task that required the development of a strong personality and hyperbolic sacrifice of personal well-being for that of the children (Stora-Sandor). And while other immigrant groups in the United States have also been racialized through onscreen depictions of extraordinarily strong familial bonds, what ultimately defines the “meddling matriarch” as a uniquely American Jewish racialization are the codependent “excesses of nurturance and pressures of guilt” American Jewish maternal characters use to manipulate their family members, most notably their children (Prell 75). A perfect example of this American Jewish cinematic stereotype is Sheldon’s mother (Mae Questel) in Woody Allen’s vignette “Oedipus Wrecks” from the film New York Stories (Touchstone, 1989), whose overbearing nature is comically literalized through her physical augmentation to the size of Manhattan, with her larger-than-life head spanning the entire horizon in a ceaseless quest to meddle in Sheldon’s personal affairs.

The “neurotic nebbish” cinematic stereotype of American Jewish identity owes a great deal to the longstanding rendering of “nonwhite” male characters in film with “an opposed symbolic pair” of racialized traits, specifically sexual over-aggressiveness that threatens white womanhood juxtaposed with emasculation and symbolic castration (Wiegman 161). However, the American Jewish manifestations of this stereotype can also be traced to the intersection of racial and sexual categories in European constructions of Jewish identity historically (Johnston). In particular, the traditional Yiddish theatrical character of the “schlemiel,” a hapless, insecure, physically undesirable, romantically ineffectual, and sexually impotent male upon whom the “neurotic nebbish” stereotype is based, reflects the European Gentile–inspired historical discourse linking the Jewish circumcised penis with the female clitoris (Biale; Gilman; Stratton). These characters are often racially marked by physical appearances that play to the worst antisemitic stereotypes about the “Jewish body,” including large pronounced noses, eyeglasses, dark and/or curly hair, frailty, short stature, and so on. These “neurotic nebbishes” have an exaggerated penchant for lusting after Gentile women, a direct result of “the homology [of] Jew-as-woman, [in which] the Jewish female body goes missing” (Pellegrini 17–18). In other words, there are no American Jewish women, symbolically speaking, for the feminized “neurotic nebbish” to lust after; hence the proclivity to long for a Gentile woman. Another Woody Allen film, Zelig (Orion, 1983), exemplifies the “neurotic nebbish,” with the title character so unsure of his own identity and so eager to please given his pathologically low self-esteem that he literally adopts, in a chameleon-like manner, the identity of anyone with whom he interacts.

Another “opposed symbolic pair” of character traits informs the racialized American Jewish “pampered princess” cinematic stereotype. In this case, it is the stereotypical “nonwhite female” oscillation between a “de-sexualized figure” and “a woman of exotic, loose, and dangerous sexuality” that undergirds the racialization of American Jewish nonmaternal women on the big screen (Wiegman 161). What makes the “Jewish American Princess,” or “J.A.P.,”³ stereotype unique, though, is its connection to a constellation of socio-historical factors in the United States over the latter part of the 20th century. Specifically, the defining features of this American Jewish racialized representation onscreen, namely obsessive materialism and a heightened aversion to sex, can be linked to the assimilatory process whereby American Jews entered into the Gentile-dominated middle-class economy of “manipulation rather than manufacture” and “consumption rather than production” (Prell 84). Within such a political-economic context, the bodies of younger American Jewish women become “the site of [material] adornment” (Prell 78) par excellence, and their psyches become totally consumed with “no object of desire other than the self” (Prell 80). In this sense, “pampered princesses” are racially marked by their hyper-flashy physical appearances, including fashionably loud attire, hairstyles, and makeup. The overindulged daughter emerging from a newly suburbanized American Jewish populace, Lenny Cantrow’s wife Lila Kolodny (Jeannie Berlin) in The Heartbreak Kid (20th Century Fox, 1972) exemplifies the racialized “nouveau riche” physiology and personality of the “pampered princess” stereotype in U.S. film; on their honeymoon, her newlywed husband ultimately abandons her for a Gentile woman.

Finally, there is perhaps the oldest racialized stereotype of American Jewish identity, namely the “scheming scumbag.” This cinematic representation reflects a centuries-old European Gentile projection of their own alienation and authoritarianism onto Jews, the latter being the subject of antisemitic myths claiming Jewish conspiratorial designs for societal domination through political deceit and commercial miserliness (Bronner 5). Dating back to the medieval times and emerging most prominently in the political-economic context of the shtetl pogroms and Nazi Germany, the racist caricature of an adult Jewish male as a luftmensch (“air man”) agent, banker, broker, or investor who uses manipulative scheming to “live on air” and salivates at the sight of money, has survived through the 20th century in cinematic form (Brook 3). Specifically, male American Jewish movie characters have often been portrayed using stereotypical imagery of “the misanthropic miser or slimy social climber” (Bronner 144), harkening to the literary canon of antisemitism that includes Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Several characters from late-20th-century Hollywood blockbusters were racialized, even if subtly, as American Jewish “scheming scumbags,” including “greed is good” stock broker Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street (20th Century Fox, 1987) and the title character Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty) in Bugsy (TriStar, 1991). In these and many other cases, the characters’ self-interest and personal profit are shown as superseding all moral and ethical imperatives, a clear tip of the hat to the American Jewish “scheming scumbag” racial stereotype.

The following is the list of fifty-three 21st-century films that featured these American Jewish stereotypes (these movies were selected using boundary conditions that are described in the “Methodology” section of this book’s appendix). The films are listed here in alphabetical order (with studio and year of release in parentheses) alongside the characters in each that comprised this book’s “data set” (I analyzed 125 American Jewish characters in total):

• 25th Hour (Touchstone, 2002)—Jacob Elinsky (Philip Seymour Hoffman)

• The 40-Year-Old Virgin (Universal, 2005)—Cal (Seth Rogen); Seth at Health Clinic (Loren Berman); Seth’s Father at Health Clinic (Jeff Kahn)

• 50 First Dates (Columbia, 2004)—Henry Roth (Adam Sandler)

• Adaptation (Columbia, 2002)—Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage); Donald Kaufman (Nicholas Cage)

• Along Came Polly (Universal, 2004)—Reuben Feffer (Ben Stiller); Lisa Kramer (Debra Messing); Stan Indursky (Alec Baldwin); Vivian Feffer (Michele Lee); Irving Feffer (Bob Di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 American Jewish Racial Identity Politics Off- and Onscreen
• Chapter 3 Family Dynamics and the Stereotype of the “Meddling Matriarch”
• Chapter 4 Cinematic Portrayals of American Jewish Romance and Sexuality
• Chapter 5 The Myth of “Pampered Princess” Material Consumption
• Chapter 6 American Jewish Political Economy at the Movies
• Chapter 7 Race, Film, and 21st-Century American Jewish Identity
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author