The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema

by Nathan Abrams

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.

Genres: Film

272 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2011

About the author

Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film at Bangor University in Wales. He is founding co-editor of Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal, as well as the author of The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema and Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual.

Reviews

[Ben Vos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vacillating between ratings. A justifiably narrow chronological focus. But I feel like the new freedom to show Jewish people in new but positive ways - which Abrams appears to see as entirely positive, and well, anything's better than the meek and weak stereotypes we had before - is limited to films made primarily for Jewish audiences. Even 'A Serious Man' and other major movies can be called this, I feel. But for the 'new Jew' in thoroughly mainstream films such as 'Independence Day," the apparent cost of a new portrayal is 'the end of Jewishness', in this case assimilation. The cultural background is therefore not entirely positive. I would have liked a little less media studies language, which I find not particularly helpful, and a little more political comment on the culture which gives us these films.