Movie-Made Jews

Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only.
 
With incisive analysis, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews. 
 

Movie-Made Jews focuses on American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, and through unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. While it’s a truism that Jews make movies, this book demonstrates how movies make Jews. 
 

HELENE MEYERS is Professor of English and McManis University Chair at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. She is the author of Femicidal Fears: Narratives of the Female Gothic Experience, Reading Michael Chabon, and Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness.

1 Introduction: Making Jews Onscreen and Off
2 Looking at Antisemites and Jews
Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
School Ties (1992)
The Believer (2001)
Protocols of Zion (2005)
3 Looking at the Shoah from a Distance
The Pawnbroker (1964)
Enemies, A Love Story (1989)
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
Barton Fink (1991) and A Serious Man (2009)
4 Focusing on Assimilation and Its Discontents
The Way We Were (1973)
Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976)
Crossing Delancey (1988)
Avalon (1990) and Liberty Heights (1999)
5 Assertively Jewish Onscreen
Whatever Works (2009)
Fading Gigolo (2013)
Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish (2010)
Keeping Up with the Steins (2006)
Wish I Was Here (2014)
6 Queering the Jewish Gaze
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007) and Kissing Jessica Stein (2001)
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) and Milk (2008)
Treyf (1998)
Trembling Before G-d (2001)
Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School (2005)
7 Cinematic Alliances
Heart of Stone (2009)
Crime after Crime (2011)
Zebrahead (1992)
Arranged (2007)
David (2011)
8 Epilogue: Cinematic Continuity and Change through a Feminist Lens
93Queen (2018)
RBG (2018)
Acknowledgments
Filmography
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

"Behind this eminently readable survey of American Jewish film is a very smart intervention. Meyers broadens the well-worn examination of Jews in film to include not just Jewish representations or Jews in the production process. She makes a solid case for adding the Jewish audience as part of the equation for what makes Jewish film Jewish."

"A significant and lively testament to the vitality of American Jewish cinema and its relationship to Jewish life in America."

"An engaging, lively, and important contribution to Jewish film studies."

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