The New Jew in Film

The New Jew in Film PDF Author: Nathan Abrams
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813553431
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
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 territory—including bathrooms and food. Abrams’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.

The New Jew in Film

The New Jew in Film PDF Author: Nathan Abrams
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813553431
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book

Book Description
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 territory—including bathrooms and food. Abrams’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.

Movie-Made Jews

Movie-Made Jews PDF Author: Helene Meyers
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1978821905
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
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.

New Jews

New Jews PDF Author: David L. Reznik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131726438X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
"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.

The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema

The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema PDF Author: Lawrence Baron
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611682083
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An imprint of University of New England.

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature

The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature PDF Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316395340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1254

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Book Description
This History offers an unparalleled examination of all aspects of Jewish American literature. Jewish writing has played a central role in the formation of the national literature of the United States, from the Hebraic sources of the Puritan imagination to narratives of immigration and acculturation. This body of writing has also enriched global Jewish literature in its engagement with Jewish history and Jewish multilingual culture. Written by a host of leading scholars, The Cambridge History of Jewish American Literature offers an array of approaches that contribute to current debates about ethnic writing, minority discourse, transnational literature, gender studies, and multilingualism. This History takes a fresh look at celebrated authors, introduces new voices, locates Jewish American literature on the map of American ethnicity as well as the spaces of exile and diaspora, and stretches the boundaries of American literature beyond the Americas and the West.

Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick PDF Author: Nathan Abrams
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813587123
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Stanley Kubrick is generally acknowledged as one of the world’s great directors. Yet few critics or scholars have considered how he emerged from a unique and vibrant cultural milieu: the New York Jewish intelligentsia. Stanley Kubrick reexamines the director’s work in context of his ethnic and cultural origins. Focusing on several of Kubrick’s key themes—including masculinity, ethical responsibility, and the nature of evil—it demonstrates how his films were in conversation with contemporary New York Jewish intellectuals who grappled with the same concerns. At the same time, it explores Kubrick’s fraught relationship with his Jewish identity and his reluctance to be pegged as an ethnic director, manifest in his removal of Jewish references and characters from stories he adapted. As he digs deep into rare Kubrick archives to reveal insights about the director’s life and times, film scholar Nathan Abrams also provides a nuanced account of Kubrick’s cinematic artistry. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of one of Kubrick’s major films, including Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick thus presents an illuminating look at one of the twentieth century’s most renowned and yet misunderstood directors.

The American Jewish Story Through Cinema

The American Jewish Story Through Cinema PDF Author: Eric A. Goldman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292754698
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Like the haggadah, the traditional “telling” of the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt that is read at the Passover seder, cinema offers a valuable text from which to gain an understanding of the social, political, and cultural realities of Jews in America. In an industry strongly influenced by Jewish filmmakers who made and continue to make the decisions as to which films are produced, the complex and evolving nature of the American Jewish condition has had considerable impact on American cinema and, in particular, on how Jews are reflected on the screen. This groundbreaking study analyzes select mainstream films from the beginning of the sound era to today to provide an understanding of the American Jewish experience over the last century. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s movie moguls, most of whom were Jewish, shied away from asserting a Jewish image on the screen for fear that they might be too closely identified with that representation. Over the next two decades, Jewish moviemakers became more comfortable with the concept of a Jewish hero and with an overpowered, yet heroic, Israel. In time, the Holocaust assumed center stage as the single event with the greatest effect on American Jewish identity. Recently, as American Jewish screenwriters, directors, and producers have become increasingly comfortable with their heritage, we are seeing an unprecedented number of movies that spotlight Jewish protagonists, experiences, and challenges.

New Wave, New Hollywood

New Wave, New Hollywood PDF Author: Nathan Abrams
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501360388
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
As a period of film history, The American New Wave (ordinarily understood as beginning in 1967 and ending in 1980) remains a preoccupation for scholars and audiences alike. In traditional accounts, it is considered to be bookended by two periods of conservatism, and viewed as a (brief) period of explosive creativity within the Hollywood system. From Bonnie and Clyde to Heaven's Gate, it produced films that continue to be watched, discussed, analysed and poured over. It has, however, also become rigidly defined as a cinema of director-auteurs who made a number of aesthetically and politically significant films. This has led to marginalization and exclusion of many important artists and filmmakers, as well as a temporal rigidity about what and who is considered part of the 'New Wave proper'. This collection seeks to reinvigorate debate around this area of film history. It also looks in part to demonstrate the legacy of aesthetic experimentation and political radicalism after 1980 as part of the 'legacy' of the New Wave. Thanks to important new work that questions received scholarly wisdom, reveals previously marginalised filmmakers (and the films they made), considers new genres, personnel, and films under the banner of 'New Wave, New Hollywood', and reevaluates the traditional approaches and perspectives on the films that have enjoyed most critical attention, New Wave, New Hollywood: Reassessment, Recovery, Legacy looks to begin a new discussion about Hollywood cinema after 1967.

Reel Gender

Reel Gender PDF Author: Sa'ed Atshan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501394231
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Reel Gender is a groundbreaking collection that addresses the collective realities and the filmic representations of Palestinian and Israeli societies. The eight essays, by leading scholars, demonstrate how Palestinian and Israeli film production-despite obvious overlaps and similarities and while keeping in mind the inherent asymmetry of power dynamics-are at the forefront of engaging gender and sexuality. The scholars of this volume construct and deconstruct still and moving images, characters, and stories that create an entanglement of Palestinian and Israeli cinema. Together they portray the region's diverse but unexpectedly intermingled ethnic, religious, and national communities, framed or countered by various societal norms, laws, and expectations, while also defined by colonial realities. The essays draw methodologically from the fields of media and cultural studies, critical and postcolonial theory, feminism, post-feminism, and queer theory.

Cinema and Zionism

Cinema and Zionism PDF Author: Ariel Lionard Feldestein
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780853038955
Category : Jews in motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book examines the connections between the cinema of the Yishuv (Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine) and the Zionist idea. The book follows the plans to create the figure of the New Jew in Eretz Yisrael, as part of a personal, national, and universal revolution, and it explores the figure and traits of the pioneer. It also examines how cinema has presented the Zionist idea. Cinema and Zionism analyzes the plots, the modes of expression, the themes, and the ideological elements that typify these films, and it positions them within the structure of the Zionist idea. It also engages with connections between the Zionist idea and the cinema through a discussion on the cinematic endeavors and the relationships between the filmmakers and national institutions. The correlation between the two histories is revealed with all its complexity and depth. The book sheds light on a distinctive perspective in the narrative of Eretz Yisrael - that of the creation and consumption of a new culture. The tales of working on the films - how they were prepared and shot, and their ultimate reception - are interwoven with outlines of the films themselves. Together, they create a portrait of an ideological society that distilled events and incidents into myths aimed at forging the Zionist outlook and instructing Zionist settlers toward fulfilling its goals. "...explicit, enlightening, and, at times, even provocative. It deals with the complex and still relevant issue of Zionist leaders' relationships between the American-Jewish institutions and the latter's approach to what was to become the State of Israel, including their attempts to shape the destiny of the nation-in-waiting through the first Jewish films produced in Palestine". Yael Munk, H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews, November 2012