Jewish Image in American Film, The

By Friedman, Lester D.
Carol Publishing Corporation, 1991, Paperback, Out of print, Winner of the National Jewish Book Award, ISBN: 0806512199

The driving thesis behind this book is the metamorphosis of the immigrant Jew.

Excluded from America’s professional, business and social world, Jews found their chance for gentility and power in a new technology which had no social barriers or racial impediments. At the turn of the 20th century movies were considered disreputable and shunned by mainstream entrepreneurs. Into this void stepped Jewish acumen and talent.

The general pattern moved entrepreneurs from exhibition to distribution to production, from East to West and from opportunity to finance to artistry. There is an eerie parallel to the ghettoized Jew becoming a money lender because he could.

America became conscious of its films and its Jews almost simultaneously. Because so many Jews controlled Hollywood, movies about Jews were different from those about other minorities: Hollywood Jews had the power to decide how the entire group would be presented to Christian society. Their movies reveal by reflection or distortion the role of Jews in the US at any given time, their anxieties and their securities. The moving picture image of Jews becomes frozen in time and bolsters the picture of America as a nation of immigrants.

Friedman offers celluloid examples, arranged by decade, which chronicle Jewish adjustment to an alien society, first assimilating, then returning to ethnicity. For example, fear of war mongering in the thirties produced movie characters who were nationless, raceless and religionless, while the sixties discovered Israel and probed the definition of Jewish American to face television competition.