David Reznik
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―I USUALLY KNOW A JEW WHEN I SEE ONE‖: RACE, AMERICAN JEWISH IDENTITY, AND 21ST CENTURY U.S. FILM By DAVID REZNIK A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 David Reznik 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... 4 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 6 Theoretical Assumptions and Conceptual Frameworks ............................................................. 9 Racialization and American Jewish Cinematic Stereotypes..................................................... 12 Methodology................................................................................................................................ 20 Chapter Outline ........................................................................................................................... 27 2 AMERICAN JEWISH RACIAL IDENTITY POLITICS OFF- AND ONSCREEN ............ 30 American Jewish Racial Identity Politics Off-Screen .............................................................. 30 American Jewish Racial Identity Politics Onscreen ................................................................. 50 3 ―MEDDLING MATRIARCHS‖ ................................................................................................ 61 4 ―NEUROTIC NEBBISHES‖...................................................................................................... 87 5 ―PAMPERED PRINCESSES‖ ................................................................................................. 119 6 ―SCHEMING SCUMBAGS‖ ................................................................................................... 144 7 CONCLUSIONS ....................................................................................................................... 174 The Dialectics of 21st Century American Jewish Cinematic Racialization ........................... 175 21st Century American Jewish Cinematic Stereotypes: Racialization or Not? ..................... 185 Study Limitations and Future Research Directions ................................................................ 194 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................... 197 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................................... 206 3 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ―I USUALLY KNOW A JEW WHEN I SEE ONE‖: RACE, AMERICAN JEWISH IDENTITY, AND 21ST CENTURY U.S. FILM By David Reznik May 2010 Chair: Tamir Sorek Cochair: Hernán Vera Major: Sociology While a newer, ―post-race‖ theoretical lens has emerged in film studies to help expand notions of difference, there are questions regarding its ability to address whether racialization persists in movies, particularly in the form of cinematic stereotypes. A poignant example of this issue is the question of American Jewish racial identity in U.S. film, as recent studies of American Jewish onscreen representations have steadily dropped explicit reference to race, opting instead to use the conceptual frameworks of culture and ethnicity in their analyses. In my study, the results of a qualitative content analysis of 125 American Jewish characters from more than 50 movies released in the U.S. since the year 2000 reveal that four of the most highly racialized stereotypes of American Jewish identity from 20th century U.S. cinema persist in post- Y2K American Jewish onscreen portrayals: the ―meddling matriarch‖ stereotype of American Jewish over-involvement, the ―neurotic nebbish‖ stereotype of American Jewish ineffectuality, the ―pampered princess‖ stereotype of American Jewish hyper-materialism, and the ―scheming scumbag‖ stereotype of American Jewish deceit. While the newer versions of these stereotypes appear to include a wider diversity of characters with regard to age, class, gender and sexuality, the overall cinematic racialization of American Jewish identity embodied in these characters 4 seems to have changed relatively little in films from the new millennium. At the same time, a highly disproportionate number of the filmmakers whose work was included in my study are American Jewish, indicating the importance of identifying these persons‘ possible interests in proliferating such imagery of American Jewish racial identity. Overall, my study‘s findings reveal the importance of adopting a dialectical approach to studying race in film, recognizing the mutual reinforcement of structure and agency as well as material conditions and ideology, in producing particular onscreen forms of racialization. Future research along these lines may branch out beyond the study of stereotypes to include textual analyses of the racialization in these films, institutional ethnography of those filmmakers involved in producing these films, as well as focus group research with spectators of these films. 5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Barack Obama‘s 2008 presidential election victory has been heralded across the U.S. as the culmination of a profound historical shift in this country‘s race relations. For many, Obama‘s biography symbolizes the seemingly boundless opportunities now available to racial minorities in the U.S. This change in American conventional wisdom about race appears to parallel, temporally speaking, changes in the study of race at universities around the country. Specifically, the structurally oriented, philosophically materialist interrogation of race within a ―black/white‖ binary is being increasingly challenged by the ―post-race‖ theoretical paradigm of a new anti-foundationalist generation of scholars. This theoretical debate with regard to race is highly visible in scholarship of American mass media, especially cinema. Film studies have not only been important to understanding race because of the seeming ubiquity of movies in the U.S.,1 but because of the relatively unique way Hollywood leads the American public ―to misrecognize the nature of the racial divide in which [we] live‖ (Vera and Gordon 2). A major part of ―the culture industry‖ (Horkheimer and Adorno) propagandizing the media consumption-based society in the U.S. today as well as an ideological opiate offering an escape from reality through the supposed safety and anonymity of cinematic spectatorship (Metz), film produces a ―reality effect‖ which leads viewers to feel that ―they can penetrate the veil of superficial appearances and see the hidden structure of reality itself‖ (Black 62). In this manner cinema has helped proliferate, perpetuate, and reinforce racial identity politics since the very beginning of the movie industry in the U.S. (Parenti). Interestingly, though, the longstanding disciplinary tradition in film studies of identifying and critiquing visible representations of race onscreen, exemplified by voluminous scholarship on cinematic stereotypes in U.S. film, has been surpassed by a new ―interethnic‖ research agenda 6 that subsumes racial identity within a ―de-centred, poly-vocal multiculturalism‖ now thought to exist here (Wiegman 165). In other words, systematic interrogations of how ―the logic of race [becomes] visually discernible [through] the production and circulation of the stereotype‖ (Wiegman 159) in American movies are becoming less popular, replaced by more anecdotal, textual analyses of ―ethnicities-in-relation‖ (Wiegman 164). While this newer scholarship seems to expand theoretical notions of difference, especially vis-à-vis narrower understandings of race posited by overly structural analyses, ―post-race‖ theory may suffer from a blind spot when addressing the question of whether racial stereotypes persist in U.S. cinema, and if so, what such ongoing imagery says about race, race relations, and racism in broader U.S. society. A poignant example of these developments in the study of race in film is the case of American Jewish persons.2 Historically identified as immigrant ―Others‖ in the U.S., American Jewish persons are thought to have undergone a process of assimilation during the 20th century which culminated in their widespread acceptance as a culturally diverse group of ―honorary white ethnic‖ individuals (Goldstein; Brodkin). In fact, most contemporary scholars of American Jewish identity declare that antisemitism,3 as an institutionalized form of racism, has become virtually non-existent in the U.S., and that, ironically, the most significant threat to American Jewish survival in this country are American Jewish person individuals themselves through their high intermarriage rates and relatively low birthrates (Dershowitz). Not surprisingly, this ―post-race‖ narrative regarding the evolution of American Jewish identity parallels closely the historical changes in the research on American Jewish portrayals in U.S. film. Even though American Jewish cinematic representations have consistently been ―predicated on nineteenth-century racialized notions of Jewish identity,‖ scholarship of American Jewish imagery in film offers ―the most extreme example‖ of the disciplinary shift 7 away from the systematic study of filmic racial identity in its