Synopses & Reviews
Jewish film characters have existed almost as long as the medium itself. But around 1990, films about Jews and their representation in cinema multiplied and took on new forms, marking a significant departure from the past. With a fresh generation of Jewish filmmakers, writers, and actors at work, contemporary cinemas have been depicting a multiplicity of new variants, including tough Jews; brutish Jews; gay and lesbian Jews; Jewish cowboys, skinheads, and superheroes; and even Jews in space.
The New Jew in Film is grounded in the study of over three hundred films from Hollywood and beyond. Nathan Abrams explores these new and changing depictions of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism, providing a wider, more representative picture of this transformation. In this compelling, surprising, and provocative book, chapters explore masculinity, femininity, passivity, agency, and religion in addition to a departure into new territoryandmdash;including bathrooms and food. and#160;Abramsandrsquo;s concern is to reveal how the representation of the Jew is used to convey confidence or anxieties about Jewish identity and history as well as questions of racial, sexual, and gender politics. In doing so, he provides a welcome overview of important Jewish films produced globally over the past twenty years.
Review
andquot;Thorough, insightful, and solidly theorized, The New Jew in Film more than picks up where Erens and Friedman left off. Besides its international reach, the book opensandmdash;especially in its religion, food, and toilet sectionsandmdash;significant new areas of ethnic-based investigation.andquot;
Review
andquot;Providing a comprehensive and engaging investigation of the new American Jewish cinema, Nathan Abrams builds upon previous studies to broaden the spectrum of and#160;both cinema and Jewish cultural scholarship.andquot;
Review
andquot;Abrams adds fresh perspectives on emerging global film depictions of Jews in an investigation of how old, fixed categories of stereotypes have been subverted since 1990. This is a brilliantly conceived study of representation. Abrams shows how cinema has become the vehicle for normalizing Jews, generally stereotyped and mocked but now framed in ordinary ways. Highly recommended.andquot;
Review
andquot;Friedman illuminates the brief profusion of African American musical features and shorts at the dawn of sound cinema, showing how these films emerged out of their era and set the stage for Hollywood treatments of Black images and sounds for years to come.andquot;
Review
andquot;Hollywood's African American Films is a compelling explorat
Review
andquot;What a wonderful project! This book magnificently centerstages how dance in Hollywood constitutes a cultural space in which Latina stars turn their performance into the ultimate expression of/for agency and empowerment. Let the rhythm take you over! Go girls!andquot;
Review
andquot;A well-researched, engaging book that expands our understanding of the shaping of the Hollywood Latina, and of Latinas in the national imaginary, through analysis of dance and embodiment in these dynamics.andquot;
Review
andquot;In this fresh examination, Priscilla Peandntilde;a Ovalle convincingly probes the racial dynamics and sexual politics that shape the paradoxical figure of the dancing Hollywood Latina.andquot;
Review
andquot;A good resource for those interested in dance, film, and media studies and in gender, race and sexualities studies. Recommended.andquot;
Review
"A fascinating and meticulously documented history."
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"Shneer’s book challenges the accepted rhetoric that came out of the Cold War's distortions of Soviet history. In particular, Shneer examines previously neglected work to show that the often-repeated claim that the Soviet Union’s attempt to cover up Nazi atrocities is not only untrue, but completely the opposite. Jewish photojournalists in Russia were able to keep Nazi atrocities on the front page and continually emphasized the Jewish aspect of Nazi violence."
Review
"Shneer has written a fascinating and ambitious book that deserves a wide readership among scholars of twentieth-century Jewish, Holocaust, East European, and Russian history. His pioneering chapters on the war years enhance substantially our understanding of the complex ways that Jews and non-Jews responded to the Holocaust."
Review
"Focusing on an area of Holocaust representation largely overlooked in the scholarly literature, this meticulously illustrated volume provides a wealth of information about individual Soviet Jewish photographers and their work. Shneer’s analysis integrates the work and the complex identities of photographers who documented both the construction and devastation of Soviet society, Axis atrocities against Jews and other Soviet civilians, and the Soviet defeat of the invaders"
Review
"An excellent history of Jewish photographers in the Soviet Union from the Bolshevik revolution to the post-Stalin decades following WWII. Shneer not only traces the essential role Jewish photographers played in the creation of photojournalism in the Soviet Union, but also chronicles the manner in which these elite artists photographed the war against Nazi Germany (the book includes many rare photos). Highly recommended."
Review
"In this handsomely produced volume, David Shneer offers a compelling and nuanced analysis of how photojournalists plied their craft as photographers of the early Soviet experience.
Through Soviet Jewish Eyes is as much about photojournalism as a profession as it is about documentation of the Holocaust and Soviet Jewish identity. A first-rate book that is intellectually ambitious, cogently argued, and analytically sophisticated."
Review
"
Through Soviet Jewish Eyes is in a class all its own. Shneer’s sophistication in dealing with visual culture, in Jewish Studies and contemporary history, has few if any equals. In addition, it is one of the only studies of photojournalism that seriously engages ethnic difference and religious origins that often played significant roles in the evolution and life of the field. It is one of the most brilliant books, ever, in the immense field of media studies. It is difficult to think of any single work on photojournalism, in any national setting, that rivals Shneer’s deep archival forays, expert use of memoirs and interviews, and sharp analysis."
Review
"With this book Shneer has created a worthy tribute to these courageous photojournalists and to the survival of their legacy under extraordinarily difficult conditions."
Synopsis
The New Jew in Film is grounded in the study of over three hundred films from Hollywood and beyond. Nathan Abrams explores these new and changing depictions of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism, providing a wider, more representative picture of this transformation. Chapters explore masculinity, femininity, passivity, agency, and religion as well as a departure into new territoryandmdash;including bathrooms and food.and#160; Abrams reveals how the representation of the Jew is used to convey confidence or anxieties about Jewish identity and history as well as questions of racial, sexual, and gender politics.
and#160;
Synopsis
In 1929 and 1930, during the Hollywood studios' conversion to synchronized-sound film production, white-controlled trade magazines and African American newspapers celebrated a "vogue" for "Negro films." "Hollywood's African American Films" argues that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of "talking pictures" and, at the same time, to appeal to the white "Broadway" audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white "slumming" in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and "natural" acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Ryan Jay Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies--arising most clearly in the movies' treatment of African American characters' decisions to migrate. Regardless of how the films represent these choices, they all prompt elaborate visual and narrative structures of containment that tend to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.
Synopsis
Dance and the Hollywood Latina asks why every Latina star in Hollywood history, from Dolores Del Rio in the 1920s to Jennifer Lopez in the 2000s, began as a dancer or danced onscreen. While cinematic depictions of women and minorities have seemingly improved, a century of representing brown women as natural dancers has popularized the notion that Latinas are inherently passionate and promiscuous. Yet some Latina actresses became stars by embracing and manipulating these stereotypical fantasies.
Introducing the concepts of andquot;inbetween-nessandquot; and andquot;racial mobilityandquot; to further illuminate how racialized sexuality and the dancing female body operate in film, Priscilla Peandntilde;a Ovalle focuses on the careers of Dolores Del Rio, Rita Hayworth, Carmen Miranda, Rita Moreno, and Jennifer Lopez. Dance and the Hollywood Latina helps readers better understand how the United States grapples with race, gender, and sexuality through dancing bodies on screen.
Synopsis
Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert,
Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust.
These wartime photographers were the first liberators to bear witness with cameras to Nazi atrocities, three years before Americans arrived at Buchenwald and Dachau. In this passionate work, David Shneer tells their stories and highlights their work through their very own images-he has amassed never-before-published photographs from families, collectors, and private archives.
Through Soviet Jewish Eyes helps us understand why so many Jews flocked to Soviet photography; what their lives and work looked like during the rise of Stalinism, during and then after the war; and why Jews were the ones charged with documenting the Soviet experiment and then its near destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
About the Author
DAVID SHNEER is associate professor of history and director of Jewish studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His books include Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Negro Talking Pictures
1. andquot;Black Became the Fadandquot;: White Highbrow Culture and Negro Films
2. andquot;The Negro Invades Hollywoodandquot;: The Great Migration, the Studios, and the Performance of African American Social Mobility
3. On (With the) Show: Race and Female Bodily Spectacle in Early Hollywood Sound Film
4. The Unhomely Plantation: Racial Phantasmagoria in Hallelujah
5. Blackness without African Americans: Check and Double Check and the Dialectics of Cinematic Blackface
Conclusion: andquot;The Required Negro Motifandquot; after the Transition to Sound
Notes
Index