Why Harry met Sally: coupling narratives and the Christian-Jewish love story

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Content WHY HARRY MET SALLY: COUPLING NARRATIVES AND THE CHRISTIAN-JEWISH LOVE STORY by Joshua Louis Moss A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (CRITICAL STUDIES) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Joshua Louis Moss ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Introduction: Christonormativity and Jewish Alterity 1 Chapter One: Disraeli’s Page: Jewishness, Modernity, and The Cosmopolitan Body 1860-1920 29 Chapter Two: Jackals, Apes and Jazz Singers: Technology and 73 Metaphor 1905-1935 Chapter Three: Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Israel, Masculinity, and “Retroactive Diaspora” 1947-1967 125 Chapter Four: Power and Portnoy: Sex, Jews, and Literature in the 1960s 181 Chapter Five: Historiography of the World Pt. 1: Counterculture and the Comedic-Erotic 1967-1980 231 Chapter Six: Meet the Fockers: Christian-Jewish Coupling at the Millennium, 1990-2010 302 Conclusion: Rethinking the Coupling Narrative 384 Bibliography 397 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation is a broad historical, cross-disciplinary examination of how Christian-Jewish coupling narratives have served as sites of ideological, political, and cultural contestation in numerous American and European contexts. Through a broad sampling of texts from cinema, literature, television, theater, and radio from the 1850s through the 2000s, this project argues that the emancipatory solution for the crisis of modernity transmuted into the erotic realm in the form of “the coupling narrative.” The transformations brought about by the global media landscape produced both emancipatory and reactionary configurations of the “Christian” and the “Jew” as representations of ideological contestation. In the early twentieth century, American mass media responded to European fascism and eugenics theory by producing Christian- Jewish couplings as a progression narrative in the emerging, and then dominant, Hollywood film industry. Through both detailed cross-disciplinary textual readings and an engagement with a broad spectrum of critical analysis, this project argues that the “coupling narrative” has used representations of gender, sexuality, class, race, and eroticism to thematize the legacies of historical trauma. Chapter one traces the roots of this configuration to European politics in the late nineteenth century. Political figures such as Benjamin Disraeli and Alfred Dreyfus, informed Jewish representations in literature by Proust, Kafka, and Joyce, and the cinema of Méliès. In the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, the three periods of American film and television focused on in this dissertation, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives became important cultural sites of political arbitration. In politically iv liberal climates, Christian-Jewish couplings formed emancipatory tales of multiculturalism. This was seen in films such as The Jazz Singer (1927), The House of Rothschild (1934), The Graduate (1967), and Dirty Dancing (1987). In conservative and nativist climates, such as the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, Jewish alterity, along with a more general ethnic visibility was denied through absence. This structure is defined as “Christonormativity.” In tandem with the historical nature of this research, this dissertation also theorizes the role of Jewish and Christian bodies as competing archetypes. Jewish bodies functioned in numerous historical eras as destabilizing and disruptive forces. This can be read through coupling narrative iconography. Chapters three, four, and five trace how Jewish identity and Christian normativity developed as a relational erotic expression of youth culture and avant-garde resistance in the postwar era. These chapters argue that the Christian-Jewish coupling was a privileged mode of resistance to ethnic, gender, sexual and racial classifications that had emerged in the wake of World War Two and the HUAC investigations of the 1950s. The political and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s produced a second wave of Christian-Jewish couplings in which the “Jew” became an emancipatory signifier of both the counterculture and the sexual revolution. Chapter six concludes with an examination of the function of Christian-Jewish erotic unions in both Holocaust dramas of the 1980s and 1990s and the American romantic comedy of the 1990s and 2000s. 1 INTRODUCTION: CHRISTONORMATIVITY AND JEWISH ALTERITY “Mel Brooks is Jewish??” -- Homer Simpson 1 This dissertation begins with a simple question: Why have there been so many Christian-Jewish love stories? From the immigrant “ghetto” comedies of the 1910s and 1920s through recent films such as Meet the Parents (2000) and Knocked Up (2007), the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative has recurred across an enormous spectrum of 20 th and 21st century American media. When the quintessentially sheltered Jewish American Princess, “Baby” (Jennifer Grey), jumped into the raised arms of the uneducated, working-class Catholic, Johnny (Patrick Swayze) in Dirty Dancing (1987), it marked a moment of generational nostalgia for the lost world of the 1960s Catskills. When Jack Robin, an immigrant cantor’s son, put on blackface to win the heart of the non-Jewish Mary in The Jazz Singer (1927), American assimilation was celebrated. The love affair between Kitty Fremont (Eva Marie Saint) and the Israeli Jewish settler, Ari Ben-Canaan (Paul Newman) in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960) ushered in new understandings of Jewish masculinity and Israel in the 1960s. Dustin Hoffman’s cross-swinging liberation of Katherine Ross in The Graduate (1967) and Barbra Streisand’s affair with Robert Redford in The Way We Were (1972) crystallized new understandings of sexuality and beauty in the late 1960s and early 1970s. From Woody and Diane to Harry and Sally, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives form some of the most iconic representations in American culture. 1 The Simpsons, “Like Father, Like Clown,” The Simpsons video, October 24, 1991. 2 The question for this dissertation is why? What are the ideological, representational, cultural, and philosophical ideas contained within the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative? Why do these couplings resonate so profoundly in so many different historical and cultural configurations? I use the term “coupling narrative,” and not “intermarriage,” here deliberately. It is a central premise of this dissertation that the issues introduced through the coupling of “Christian” and “Jew” are not simply about the problems of Christian-Jewish intermarriage. To paint in broad strokes, the “Christian” often signifies normativity, hegemony, and the nation-state, while the “Jew” signifies opposition, resistance, and cosmopolitanism. In many cases, the “Jew” functions as a culturally acceptable proxy for other ethnic, gendered, and sexual formulations. Christian-Jewish couplings have dealt with stories as diverse as generational transformation, pro-immigrant multiculturalism, and sexual liberation. But the Christian-Jewish coupling is not always utopian. In the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, the three historical periods focused on in this dissertation, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives functioned as sites of emancipatory political and cultural power contestation. Beneath these texts lie the codes of historical trauma. They function as tales of historical events transmogrified into individual stories of romantic longing. Jewish sexuality often plays a liberating function, an answer to issues of repression and containment signified by the Christian. The coupling narrative, specifically the Jewish body as a disrupting force within that coupling narrative, functions as a site for historiography itself. 3 Intermarriage has long been a source of intense polarization in the Jewish community. In deciding to include “intermarriage” as one of the three key subthemes of the Labyrinth Project’s Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity, Intermarriage, Marsha Kinder argues that intermarriage narratives are an essential component in understanding how immigration and identity formulated in the American Jewish diaspora. 2 Kinder’s database project creates an organic record of how individuals have recorded, and remembered, historical periods through the narrative of family events. The historical record of intermarriage has formed one of the central issues of debate in American Jewish history. However, this dissertation is not a study of the historical record. Instead, this project will examine how fictionalized Christian-Jewish coupling narratives represent a different form of memory. American Christian-Jewish coupling narratives are a distinct ritual of American storytelling. They both evoke a progressive American future, while at the same time signifying the legacies of historical traumas of the ethnic immigrant past. An example of this distinction can be seen in Fiddler on the Roof (1971). The top box office film of 1971, Fiddler portrayed the end of European Jewish shtetl “tradition” as occurring at the precise moment when Chava (Neva Small) marries the non-Jewish Fyedka (Raymond Lovelock) against her father Tevye’s (Topol) wishes. 3 The iconography of Fiddler hints at telling an historical tale as remembered by the first- person media accounts surveyed in databases such as Labyrinth Project, the Shoah 2 Marsha Kinder, “Jewish Homegrown History: In the Golden State and Beyond,” A Cultural History of Jews in California,: The Jewish Role in American Life, Vol. 7, ( California: Purdue University Press, 2009), 96-97. 3 Fiddler grossed over $38,000,000 in 1971, making it the runaway box office success of the year. Susan Sackett, The Hollywood Reporter Book of Box Office Hits (New York: Billboard Books, 1996), 216. 4 Foundation, or testimonial films such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). But fiction requires a different form of analysis. Chava and Fyedka are signifiers of an imagined history, not an actual one. The box office success speaks to the appeal of the story well beyond its Jewish specificity. This pulls as much from the popular imagination and media culture as it does from history itself. It is here, in the construction of the “coupling narrative,” that this dissertation will begin. HISTORICIZING THE COUPLING Christian-Jewish coupling narratives in American media produced three distinct historical waves. The first wave of Christian-Jewish coupling narratives represented a utopian assimilation narrative. These mostly took the form of immigrant comedies and ghetto love stories of the 1910s and 1920s. The second wave was represented by the highly sexualized Jewish schlemiels of the 1967-1980 periods. The third wave was nostalgic in nature. Christian-Jewish couplings of the 1990s and 2000s recalled the first two waves while reconfiguring them for a far more explicit and confessional era. Together, these three waves of Christian-Jewish couplings in American media will provide the central structure of this dissertation. Chapter one traces the impact of Benjamin Disraeli and Alfred Dreyfus on privileging the Jewish cosmopolitan as a key signifier of modernist art, literature and cinema. Much has been written on both Disraeli and Dreyfus as political actors in Britain and France, respectively. Chapter one will consider how their identities were negotiated in tandem with the role of their wives. The self-aware Disraeli married a non-Jewish British noblewoman aristocrat, Mary Anne Lewis, in 1839. The stoic Dreyfus married 5 the Jewish Lucie Hadamard, in 1890. Disraeli used Christian-Jewish intermarriage to blunt his cosmopolitan Jewish identity in England and he triumphed politically. The Jewish Dreyfuses found no such relief. Disraeli and Dreyfus offer opposing templates for the function of the coupling narrative at the birth of the mass media age. Both figures showed how the cosmopolitan Jew negotiated the shifting political and cultural tides of the late 19th century. Both figures became icons for the performative function of the “Jew” on the political stage. But for Disraeli, a dandy and a raconteur, the performance of “Jewishness” became an agency of triumph. For the unbending Dreyfus, it led to his destruction. Chapter two considers the legacy of the Dreyfus/Disraeli binary on American cinema of the early 20th century. Méliès’s fictional reenactments of the Dreyfus Affair, produced in 1899, were the first to demonstrate the impact of these configurations on the cinema. The American immigrant Christian-Jewish coupling narratives that followed continued a modernist progressive point of view. This marks the first wave of Christian- Jewish coupling narratives in cinema. These stories challenged the reactionary nativism of European anti-Semitism and American xenophobia seen in the anti-immigrant political movements of the time. Films such as The Cohen and the Kellys serials (1905-1933), Private Izzy Murphy (1926), The Jazz Singer (1927), Abie’s Irish Rose (1928), and Surrender (1928), followed. These films, mostly Jewish-Irish love stories, were enormously popular among urban ethnic immigrant Americans. Collectively, they formed an American narrative of multicultural inclusion in stark contrast to the emerging anti-Semitism in Europe. 6 Chapter three examines the postcolonial impact of Israel in sexualizing representations of Jewish diaspora in the 1950s and 1960s. In the wake of the Holocaust and subsequent paranoia of the McCarthy years, a postwar process of decoupling Jewish representation from Jewish identity took place. The period from Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) to Exodus (1960) worked to both universalize and desexualize American Jewish identity. This reformulation of Jewish identity begins with what I’m calling the “Garfield/Peck Dialectic” in Gentlemen’s Agreement. Peck’s well-intentioned performance as the non-Jew “passing” successfully as a Jew introduced a postwar American “Jewishness” untethered from biological or familial requirement. The opposite to Peck was the Jew-as-Jew, as embodied by future HUAC target John Garfield. Overt Jews had became aligned with the socialist Jewish labor movements and were driven underground by the early 1950s. It wasn’t until Otto Preminger’s Exodus, in 1960s, that a potent postwar Jewish sexuality, linked to colonization, was produced. In chapter four, I examine how a sexualized, urbane, and comically neurotic Jewish cosmopolitan youth culture began to form as a site of political and ideological resistance in the late 1950s. This process of recalibration of American Jewish identity in the wake of Israel operated as a “retroactive diaspora” a rewriting of traditional diaspora chronology. To locate how this sexual alterity began outside of mass media, this chapter will venture outside of cinema and television to examine literature by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, and the stand-up comedy of Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Joan Rivers. These young, urban writers and performers 7 introduced a ribald Jewish sensibility as a form of political resistance to 1950s-era desexualized conformity. Chapter five examines the impact of these avant-garde Jewish writers, performers, and comedians on cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s. By 1968, movie stars such as Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, Richard Benjamin, George Segal, and Dyan Cannon represented a wave of Jewish performers overturning the beauty standards and gender norms of the 1950s. Beginning in 1967 with The Graduate, these highly sexualized Jewish movie stars codified political resistance of youth culture in the realm of sexual expression. Throughout the 1967-1980 period, Jewish performers performed a comedic take on ideological and cultural upheavals in the form of comedic neurotic love stories. Yet in nearly all of these examples, the ideological threat of Jewish sexuality continued to be mitigated through union with the Christian partner. Collectively, chapters three, four, and five trace how Jewish identity and Christian normativity developed as a relational erotic expression of youth culture and avant-garde resistance throughout the postwar era. These chapters argue that the Christian-Jewish coupling was a mode of resistance to ethnic, gender, sexual and racial classifications that had emerged in the wake of World War Two and the McCarthy years. The revelations of the depth of the holocaust, and the anti-Semitic underpinnings of HUAC and the Army-McCarthy investigations, informed a new layer of historical trauma onto the Jewish body. The political and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s ultimately produced 8 that Jewish body in cinema as an emancipatory signifier of both the counterculture and generational revolution. I conclude in chapter six with an examination of the function of Christian-Jewish erotic unions in both Holocaust dramas of the 1980s and 1990s, and the American romantic comedy of the 1990s and 2000s. While the 1967-1980 era had been led by Jewish movie stars, the 1990-2005 “third wave” was led predominantly by television. Shows such as Seinfeld (NBC 1990-1998), The Nanny (CBS 1993-1999), Mad About You (NBC 1992-1999), Dharma and Greg (ABC 1997-2002), and Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO 1999-) centralized Christian-Jewish love stories as a marker of Clinton-era political liberalism, as well as a nostalgic reminder of late 1960s-era schlemiel comedy. In film, a new generation of Jewish stars such as Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Paul Rudd followed. They introduced neurotic Jewish sexuality through a hybridization of nostalgic romantic configurations with an explicit “gross out” sensibility. To cover the broad sampling of texts, historical periods, and theoretical frameworks explored in this dissertation requires a chronological and linear structure. Material from American film, television, stand-up comedy, Broadway Theater, literature, music, and the construction of star personas is surveyed. In each of these historical eras, the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative will be contextualized within the political and cultural climates of their production and reception. This requires a consideration of exactly what structure the Christian-Jewish binary was challenging. This structure is one 9 that I am calling Christonormativity, and is the central theoretical intervention in this dissertation. CHRISTONORMATIVITY Philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy argues that Christianity has always defined itself relationally, not holistically, in an ongoing and perpetual dialectic defined by what it is not (Jewish, Islamic, polytheism, etc.). Nancy describes this incomplete doctrine as a “subject in relationship to itself in the midst of a search for self.” 4 Without the ability to define what it is not, Nancy argues, Christianity cannot define what it is. This project will define “Christonormativity” as a racialized and ethnic hierarchy informed by Nancy’s incomplete doctrine. 5 Christonormativity presents a cohesive, often nativist notion of idealized, white, usually chaste/virginal, Teutonic purity. Yet Christonormative body hierarchy contains the embedded flaws and absences that Nancy speaks of. To assert normativity, Christonormativity produces a relational dialectic with the very “Other” it seeks to deny and repress. In this understanding, Christonormativity privileges whiteness, heterosexuality, light hair, blue eyes, and un-neurotic calmness but only in opposition to what it is not. Within the seemingly cohesive body of Aryan Christianity, there is a desire for that which is not like it: The neurotic and fractured Jewish Other. 4 Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 38. 5 Dyer traces “Christian whiteness” back to the “gentilising” of images of Jesus and Mary that was done to draw a distinction from that of the Jewish/North-African Orientalist origins of Jesus’ historical past. The Western binaries between light and dark, innocence and sexuality were tied to the European circulations of the origin story located in the Christ myth. Dyer argues that this process of Europeanizing the icons of Christianity, a Nordic whitening of skin tone, blue eyes and blonde hair, was produced through centuries of medieval and Renaissance art. Richard Dyer, White, (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 17-28. 10 This relational dialectic emerges from the contradictory signifiers of the myth structure of the biblical Christ story. Christ is both human and God. Christ is eternal but can be crucified. Christ is a Holy Spirit who suffers bodily pain. Christ was born from a virgin. Christ is also the both the “last-Jew” and “first-Christian,” a transformation between identities expressed at the moment of corporeal death. Jesus Christ cannot become God without the tensions of identity taking place in his contested corpus. These binaries inform the relational status of Christonormative power structure. Just as Jesus contained dichotomies of identity between polarized understandings of good/evil, man/God, and Christian/Jew, the legacy of Christonormative structure are the narrative echoes of these tensions. The political residue of this relational form of myth structure can be seen in across a wide spectrum of African, Asian, and American regions. The recording of historical events such as The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the legacy of 17 th -20th century colonialism embed strands of the Christian narrative structure. Concepts such as the “afterlife,” the desire to “go to heaven,” and even notions of sinning and repentance have become so normalized it is easy to forget that they contain a distinct ideological and historical echo of European Christian legacy. Christonormative structure can also be located through historical absence. 6 Narratives that contain virgin/whore binaries, notions of the Immaculate Conception, and images of crucified prophets appear across an entire spectrum of world art. Visual iconography of angels, the devil, a beatific, blond 6 Historical records that record violent historical acts as nationally motivated rather than religiously might offer the historian one area to explore the Christonormative reading on history. The Spanish Conquistadors of Mexico, for example, are often presented as the violent legacy of European colonialism. Less consideration is paid to the Christian understanding of “manifest destiny” used to dehumanize, and massacre, non-Christian Mayans. 11 haired, blue eyed, white, male God, and the entirety of the afterlife are all a direct violation of the Jewish prohibition on other-worldly images. 7 Yet contained in this imagery is a reminder of that which has been sublimated. Christonormative structure in 20 th and 21 st century media is, ultimately, a legacy of this colonial hegemony. In American cinema and television, Christonormative patterns recur ubiquitously across numerous genres, national cinemas, styles, and techniques. Films as diverse as A Place in the Sun (1951), Bad Lieutenant (1992), and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), to pick three disparate examples, each utilize iconography from the Christ myth under very different genre, style, and historical conditions. Even cinema positioned as ideologically revolutionary can still produce a Christonormative framework. The imagery of the dead Che Guevara framed Che as a Marxist Christ figure in Solanas and Getino’s Hour of the Furnaces (1968). Third Cinema’s call for an aesthetic revolution to symbolize Marxist resistance to dominant systems of ideological power still produced a Christonormative image in the form of the crucified Che. These are just a few examples of how broadly the notion of Christonormative structure can extend. But it is beyond the scope of this dissertation to examine every thread of the Christonormative myth structure. This dissertation will focus primarily on how the Christonormative framework has informed the development of the Western culture industry since the late 19 th century. The represented Jewish body functions as a rupturing agent to these assumptions. Jews are a reminder of European trauma, and also a signifier of multicultural American 7 Gertrud Koch, “Mimesis and the Ban on Images” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent De Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 158-159. 12 progress. Beginning in the 1890s, popular media in both Europe and the United States produced the “Jew” as a proxy for numerous other forms of alternatives to white Christonormativity. The Jew eventually became a proxy for representations of Islam, Hinduism, blacks, Hispanics, secular cosmopolitanism, Buddhist, and queered representations. This can be seen as a continuation of the relational ethnicity explored by Edward Said in his 1979 book, Orientalism. 8 But unlike more overtly represented ethnic identities, Jewish Otherness is produced in a liminal stasis from the Jew’s distinct role as a late 19 th century signifier of cosmopolitan modernity. This identity was rooted in the biological realm and produced by the pseudo-science of eugenics. Matthew Frye Jacobson notes the irony that Jewish cosmopolitanism became reconfigured by the very scientific philosophies it had championed. Jacobson, building off Sander Gilman, argues that the “un-Christian” was identified by a physiognomy supposedly detectable by scientific method. 9 The Jew became marked as a biological deviant and sexual neurotic in early 20th century Europe. The Americanized Jewish body became Western Culture’s response to this form of regressive European nativism. The erotic coupling of Christian and Jew brought discourses of European nativism and American multiculturalism into conversation. This expectation is often satirized by Jewish performers. In a sense, the “Jew” remains liminal even in our current historical moment. The “Jew” signifies a flux state defined between the binaries of the clearly articulated sites of power contestation – 8 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 9 Matthew Frye Jacobson,. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 171. 13 masculine/feminine, ethnic/white, nationalist/globalist, adult/child, powerful/powerless, queer/normative. The Jew problematizes these binaries, and thus is seen as funny. Christonormativity offers these tensions a corporeal resolution. Together, these figures seek resolve through a key structuring device; erotic resolution. From Jerry Lewis to Seth Rogen, Jewish “un-heroes” comically address their presumed gentile audience by acknowledging the disruption of casting expectations their presence causes. When a Jewish performer appears in a role destined for a Christian-normative archetype (and all the gender and racial hierarchy that comes with it), it is funny. Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers (1930), Woody Allen as a Russian revolutionary in Love and Death (1975), Bette Midler as an unlikely superstar in The Rose (1977), Ben Stiller as an action star in Tropic Thunder (2008) and Seth Rogan in The Green Hornet (2010) are each examples of subverting audience expectations. Jewish performers satirize the hierarchies of gender (and genre) roles by presenting Jewishness as an unlikely, and therefore comic, alterity to Christonormative expectation. Jewish performers remind both Jewish and non-Jewish spectator of the essential role that Jewish identity plays in defining the Christonormative structure. DIALECTICS: A LOVE STORY Christonormativity is a concept that I intend to both build off of, and reconfigure, the concept of heteronormativity. Heteronormativity was first introduced by Michael Warner in the early 1990s and quickly adopted by many gender and queer theorists. 10 10 Michael Warner, “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet” Social Text, 29 (4) (1991), 3-17. 14 Heteronormativity refers to the systemic biases at work that sublimate queer, oppositional, and asexual perspectives on sexuality within an assumed template of normativity and deviance. Since the early 1990s, heteronormativity has been seen as a seminal concept for expanding queer understandings of gender, sexuality, and the social fields that define normativity and deviance. However, by the late 1990s, heteronormativity had become so expansive, theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler began to critique the neologism as an incomplete framework. 11 Much like “postmodernism,” heteronormativity began to be seen as overused, overdetermined, and assuming a single binary when a complex spectrum was needed to account for audience studies and spectatorial perspectives. In introducing Christonormativity, I am aware that the term carries with it the same potential for oversimplification found in heteronormativity. This problematic must be considered. But it cannot be denied that Western art, regardless of the specificities of its varied and complex relationships to fields of power, produces a distinct framework of normativity rooted in Christian tropes that must be accounted for. Christonormativity is also located in the deviant binaries it defines itself against. It is a concept that I intend to unpack how numerous symbolic fields of power such as sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and deviancy, are connected within a broad historiographical Benjaminian perspective of European-centric art tradition. This binary migrated from Europe and transformed into the American assimilation myth of the early 20th century. 11 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) 15 Martin Buber, a leading German-Jewish intellectual of the 1910s (and the first publisher of Kafka), was one of the first thinkers of modernity to demonstrate this fragmentation. Buber explored the embedded biases of language in his seminal book, I and Thou. Buber wrote, "The basic words are not single words but word pairs. One basic word is the word pair I-You. The other basic word is the word pair I-It; but this basic word is not changed when He or She takes the place of It.” 12 Buber argues that the seemingly singular expression is not isolated, but relational. “I” implies “I-You.” In Buber, some of the first seeds of challenge to systems of control embedded in language are located. Buber’s exposure of linguistic fractures set the stage for the semiotics of Peirce and Levi-Strauss, the cultural industry interrogations of Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, and, eventually, Derrida’s deconstructionism. The fact that all of these thinkers were Jewish reminds us that the entire fields of cultural studies and media studies emerged from a distinct European Jewish intelligentsia. These scholars challenged the structures of “cohesiveness” produced within normativity and hegemony. This dissertation will locate the “I” and “Thou” that Buber insists are entangled in the realm of narrative coupling. The “Christian” and the “Jew” show how the language of mass media, like Buber’s critique of language itself, implies the singular without acknowledging the embedded entanglement. There is no “Christian” and “Jew” in Western Media. There is only “Christian/Jew.” Daniel Boyarin coined the term Jewissance to define how an abstract, liminal, and denatured Jewish identity emerged in modernity. 13 Boyarin defines an ephemeral Jewish 12 Martin Buber, I and Thou, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), 53. 16 presence that operates outside of the national or the racial/ethnic definition, “rooted somewhere in the world, in a world of memory, intimacy and connectedness.” 14 Boyarin’s project was to locate “Jewishness” beyond the more clearly demarcated race, class, gender, and national configurations. Boyarin argues that there is a psychoanalytic component to the formulation of Jewish identity in the diaspora that locates outside of physical or religious markers (being born “Jewish” or practicing the Jewish religion). Jacques Lacan famously introduced the notion of sexual desire at work in the indeterminate field. Lacan argued that there is “an affinity between the enigmas of sexuality and the play of the signifier.” 15 In Lacanian terms, Boyarin’s Jewissance finds its resolution through Christian-Jewish coupling. The subject (Christonormative) locates the lack in the Other (Jewish Alterity), the objet petit a, as an erotic signifier. 16 This desire expresses itself as what Woody Allen and Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy mark as the fulfillment of their desire: the “beautiful upturned nose” of the white, shiksa female blonde-haired blue-eyed ideal. 17 The cosmopolitan Jew, the privileged 20th century fracturing agent of national hegemony, locates deviancy as an expression of erotic desire. The coupling of Christonormative and Jewish Alternative produce affects as diverse as the Primal Trauma, the Mirror Stage, and the erotic function of the lack. These traumas emerge in the flaws located between masculine and feminine tropes found in the act of 13 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), xxiii. 14 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, xxiii. 15 Ibid., 151. 16 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI, (New York: Norton, 1981), 194. 17 Barry Gross points out how the Jewish fixation on 1950s Aryan beauty in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint culminates with Portnoy’s obsession with the “upturned nose” of actress Debbie Reynolds. Barry Gross, “Seduction of the Innocent: Portnoy’s Complaint and Popular Culture,” MELUS, Vol. 8, No. 4, (Winter 1981), 82-85. 17 performative masquerade. 18 The Jew can perhaps be thought of by Lacanians as an “objet petit oy.” THE JEWISH BODY A central problematic of this work is what is meant by the “Jewish Body?” Woody Allen provides us with a starting point. Allen once described his central filmmaking philosophy as playing with “the inherent contradiction that an intellectual rationalist is also an animal who lusts after women.” 19 Throughout his career, Allen’s iconic Jewish schlemiel produced a neurotic, libidinal desire as an expression of a distinctly Jewish paradox, an unresolvable doubling of identity located in the sexual realm. Allen’s “Jewishness” was not simply determined by his ethnic background. It located in the comic tensions of an urbane intellectual suffering from an animal-like carnal desire for the “Shiksa,” the non-Jewish female, as Allen’s total opposite. 20 Allen performs Jewishness as neurotic dissonance, with an idealized “Christianity” as its alternative. Allen’s Christians are cartoonish clichés of calm, confident, fully at-ease people. 21 It is in Allen’s dichotomy between rationality and animality, a neurotic tension that drives his Jewish schlemiel to pursue the idealized Christian female that my definition of the Jewish “body” will reside. 22 But this body will be configured in 18 Ibid., 193. 19 Roger Ebert, “The View From Woody Allen’s Window,” Chicago Tribune, July 16 1982. 20 As Akira Lippit has argued, the search to articulate a difference between the “animal” and the “human” was a central project for many early 20th century philosophers. See Akira Lippit, Electric Animal: Towards a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 21 A distinction should be drawn here between Allen’s comedies and his dramas. In films such as Interiors (1978) and September (1987), WASP families are presented as profoundly dysfunctional repositories of repression and angst. 22 There is an example of this in Allen’s Sleeper (1973). When Allen’s Miles Monroe is converted to Christianity through brainwashing, Miles loses all neurotic worries and settles comfortably into a middle class life. Miles speaks in a calm, rational tone, and no longer struggles with self-hatred and spasmodic 18 relationship to its opposite; the singular and cohesive Christian Other. If Christian men are virile, powerful, strong, and brave, Jewish men are feminized, weak, cowardly, and frail. In other words, Jewish men are the very alternative form of masculinity that Allen performs as part of his “Woody” persona. This perspective brings with it an immediate problematic. Inherent in these assumptions is that the “Jewish body,” especially in terms of Christian-Jewish couplings, is primarily referring to a masculine body. This is a valid critique. The Jewish body may be flawed and incomplete, a queered alternative of hyper-masculine Christian idealization, but in most of the analysis in this dissertation, Jewish men and Christian women are the dominant coupling formulation. The masculine Jewish body operates as a stand-in for a doubling of gender roles. Male Jews can be read as both an alternative masculinity, as well as feminized in relation to their Christonormative male counterparts. This leaves little room for the Jewish female in this work. This stems from an historical inevitability. Jewish men maintained a privileged visibility that Jewish women, with two notable historical exceptions (the 1910s and 1990s) did not. Other than the Jewesses of the 1910s, and Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, and Bette Midler in the 1960s and 1970s, Jewish women were either completely absent from American film, or performing in Gentile code. But there were two notable exceptions. Both the erotic Jewess in the “Ghetto Love Story” films of the 1910s and the unruly Jewish housewife in television sitcoms of the 1990s play important roles in this dissertation. In the 1910s, the Jewish female was able to embody sexuality in a way the hysteria. As a Christian, Miles no longer even desires Luna (Diane Keaton). It is only when he is converted back to his original Jewish state that Allen’s libidinal spasmodic nature returns. 19 chaste, Christian Victorian-era female could not. In the 1990s, Jewish women returned as a nostalgic recall of the “Genie” magicoms of the 1960s. In both cases, Jewish women were paired, almost exclusively, with Christian partners. Therefore, it is imperative that this work also consider how Jewish women and Christian men formulate the Christian- Jewish coupling narrative. I did not feel that this work would be complete had I limited it to only the study of Jewish men and Christian women. Scholars such as Judith Plaskow, Joyce Antler, Judith Baskin, and Hasia Diner, among many others, have addressed the reasons for Jewish female absence, while arguing for the role of Jewish women in both historical, cultural, and sociological contexts. 23 Their important correctives have foregrounded the often glossed-over function of Jewish women in both media and culture throughout the 20 th and 21 st centuries. It is the very instability of Jewish gender roles that is necessary to understand the liminal signification of Jewish identity in this project. Scholars have long struggled with precisely this problematic. Richard Dyer, building off Michael Lerner, argues that Jews have occupied a unique role in both American and European culture as a signifier of “structural instability.’” 24 Omer Bartov argues that the central foundational belief of anti- 23 See: Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America (New York: Schoken Books, 1997), Judith Plaskow, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003 (Random House (Boston, Beacon Press, 2005), Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson, editors, A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010), Judith R. Baskin, ed. Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Michigan: Wayne State University, 1998) 24 Dyer observes that, in rejecting Jesus, the Jew had been offered entry into whiteness and, through this rejection, has a racial visibility inscribed on the Jew’s body as punishment. This “non-white” marking would not appear in the form of visible skin darkening (although the new sciences of the early 20th century would seek to prove biological difference). Richard Dyer, White, (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 53. 20 Semitism locates in the fear of the Jew as “master of transformation.” 25 It is the inability to “fix” a Jewish identity that informs its construction. Vincent Brook argues that the fragmented bodies and indeterminate texts of the postwar era have privileged the ambiguous Jewish figure as a “decentered, destabilized, postmodern subject par excellence.” 26 Citing David Biale’s work on erotic configurations of Jewish identity, Brook posits the following conundrum: “What may be the most defining characteristic of postmodern American Jewish culture and identity is the increasing inability, yet persistent necessity, to define it.” 27 This elusiveness has produced a number of critical methodologies. In his survey of Jewishness in post-1990s cinema, Nathan Abrams describes three central academic discourses for locating Jewish identity. First, there is the explicit identification of the Jew, in which the Jew is located either by an overt textual reference or a clear cultural context (living in New York, or selling bagels, for example). Academic surveys of Jewish cinema written in the 1980s and early 1990s by authors such as Patricia Erens, David Desser, and Lester D. Friedman locate Jewish identity this way. 28 Second, there is the implicit Jew, what Abrams calls “sub-epidermic,” that conceptualizes Jewish identity around cultural or historical rubrics. The rise of a critical historiography attempting to read history through Benjaminian frameworks in the 1990s prodded scholars such as Hasia Diner, Deborah Dash Moore, Ella Shohat, and Karen Brodkin, among many others, 25 Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From “The Golem” to “Don’t Touch My Holocaust” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 16. 26 Brook, Vincent, You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 4. 27 Ibid., 6. 28 Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Lester Friedman, Hollywood’s Image of the Jew, (New York: Ungar, 1982). 21 to explore what Ella Shohat describes as “permeable bounds of identity.” 29 Finally, there is the coded Jew, a Jewish identity that requires active spectator agency. 30 . Scholars such as Henry Bial and Joseph Litvak argue for a Jewish identity located in the signifiers of performance. Bial argues that Jewish performers are masters of “double coding.” 31 Litvak, in his study of Jews hiding in plain sight during the McCarthy years, describes Jews performing an archaic “Comicosmopolitanism.” 32 These scholars suggest Jewishness as a performance doubling. To Jewish-savvy audiences, these performers are announcing their Jewishness. To others, unable to read the signs, they are not. Postcolonial scholars have gone one step further. They locate an entirely corporeally-absent Jewish framework in which actual Jews, and/or Jewish references, are not even present. Aamir Mufti opened up the “protean Jew” into a larger postcolonial context by examining how minorities in India function as a variant of the Jewish diaspora. 33 British novelist Zadie Smith argues that Kafka’s exile narratives expand into numerous transnational contexts, yet maintain Jewish specificity through the very act of recontextualization. 34 Ruth Ellen Gruber has explored how “virtual” Jewishness informs 29 Ella Shohat, "Ethnicities-In-Relation." Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. ed. Lester D. Friedman (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 216. Also see: Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998), David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991) Hasia Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 30 Abrams, Nathan, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 16-17. 31 Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2005), 16. 32 Litvak, Joseph. The Un-Americans: Jews, The Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 30-31. 33 Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony, The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007). 34 Zadie Smith, “F. Kafka, Everyman,” The New York Review of Books, 7/17/2008. 22 a variety of 20th century European art and culture even in the absence of a significant Jewish presence. 35 Erin Graff Zivin argues that “Jewishness” exists as a wandering signifier across the entirety of the Latin American literary imagination, occurring in numerous South American countries with little to zero actual Jewish presence. Building off Žižek, Zivin describes the signifier of the “Jew” as a “symbolic container that is always embedded in the historical and the ideological… (a) negotiation between presence and absence.” 36 Each of these areas of scholarship are attempting to locate Jewish identity in global media. Some locate it textually. Others seek to define a coded or performative signification. Why is the “Jew” so hard to codify? Judith Halberstam argues that many of the roots of 19th century monstrous creatures such as Dracula and Frankenstein evoked anxieties over European Jewish identity. 37 Foucault described the need for containment of the sexual body in the 19th century as producing both systems of control, as well as linking biology with sexual deviancy. 38 In the late 19th century, the discovery of germs transformed the “wandering” element of Jewish identity into a metaphor for biological contagion. The Jew was both seen but also unseen, a signifier of a threat beyond the human eye, in the realm of the microscopic. The Jewish body of modernity resisted fixed racial, sexual, ethnic or gendered containment. Connecting Foucault with Halberstam, 35 Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 36 Erin Graff Zivin, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008), 176. 37 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 84. 38 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Vol. 1. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 103-105. 23 this dissertation will argue it could only be in the 20th century erotic realm that Jewish alterity could ultimately be contained. In considering the challenge of defining the amorphous nature of Jewish representation, this project will make the following argument: Jewish representation cannot be theorized without understanding that it exists in a relational dialectic with Christianity. Building off of Abrams’s three groupings, this project will present a fourth discursive framework for reading Jewishness. This is “Jewishness” that cannot be read as simply textual, symbolic, nor spectral. It is instead defined relationally, a signification that produces “Jewish/Christian.” Allen’s paradoxical dialectic of the tensions found between animal sexuality and human rationality suggest a Jewish identity not as a singular configuration, but as a hybrid. Together, Jewishness and Christianity become defined not in isolation, but between Normative and Other as produced by the entanglement of both. 39 CONCLUSION I am hardly the first to observe a relational dialectic between Jew and non-Jew. In examining how an alternative Jewish masculinity defined itself in the face of these biology-based classifications of the early 20 th century, Daniel Boyarin introduced the term Jewissance. Boyarin defines Jewissance as an ephemeral Jewish identity produced outside of national, racial, or ethnic specificity, “rooted somewhere in the world, in a 39 John D. Caputo argues that Jewish philosophy so informs theories of deconstructionism that Derrida himself had to eventually bring his “Jewish prayer shawl out of the closet” despite Derrida’s resistance to such a categorization. John D. Caputo and Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, (USA: Fordham Press, 1997), 177. 24 world of memory, intimacy and connectedness.” 40 This project will follow Boyarin’s lead, locating a “Jewishness” that resists singular definition. Frantz Fanon, building off Sartre’s seminal 1949 definition of anti-Semitism (created between Jew and non-Jew), equated how Jew and non-Jew were the originary template for the tensions of the postcolonial subject. 41 Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew builds its entire analysis through the relational interplay between Jewish identity and Christian power. 42 Deleuze and Guattari observed that “becoming-Jewish necessarily affects the non-Jew as much as the Jew.” 43 Jewish-Christian binaries of power convey an enormous historical record of entanglement and affect. Christian Europe’s manifest destiny, and the Jewish resistance that it provoked, informed everything from the Crusades to the Holocaust. To bring this theory into conversation with the historiographical nature of this project, this dissertation is organized into six chapters that examine six distinct historical configurations of the Christian-Jewish coupling. While following a chronological structure to this work, a theoretical discourse will also emerge. This theoretical perspective will consider the function of eroticized bodies, in relationship, as a distinct mode for negotiating power, deviancy, and alterity. 40 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), xxiii. 41 Fanon observes the relational roles that Negro and Jew played in threatening the colonial Western hegemony, writing, “The Negro symbolizes the biological danger; the Jew, the intellectual danger.” Fanon’s concept of a relationship between anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism is a foundational concept of Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Queer Theory. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 165. 42 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, (USA: Schocken Books, 1948). 43 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 291. 25 Karl Marx famously critiqued the entire framework of Christian power and Jewish resistance as a fraud that perpetuated bourgeois structure. Marx argued that emancipation of the individual requires “the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general.” 44 Marx’s critique of Judaism as a false form of resistance to Christian power argued that Christian/Jewish entanglement was, in and of itself, a form of hegemony. Enlightment could only come when both perspectives were entirely discarded. Marx’s polemic offers us an interesting starting point. The pairing of Christian and Jewish representations in 20 th and 21st century media conveys Marx’s power conflict in the realm of the erotic. In this understanding, Christonormativity is a homogenizing process located in both racial hierarchy and class status. The Jewish body, in counterpoint with Christonormativity, is a destabilizing force. It is a liminal body, able to scramble gender, racial and class hierarchies and serve as a dialectic counterpoint to the singular hierarchy of Christonormativity. Christian art scholars such as Miriam Rubin and Caroline Walker Bynum have done an exemplary job bringing art history into conversation with cultural theory. 45 These scholars have examined how the iconography of Jesus, Mary, and the Apostles, informed understandings of nature, sexuality, humanity, and identity for over a millennium. Following Rubin and Bynum, my intervention is to examine the legacy of this impact in 20 th and 21st century American media. I will do this by attempting to offer a unique 44 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2 nd Edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972), 32 (emphasis his) 45 For an excellent overview of the impact of Christian art on culture, identity, and the body, see Miri Rubin’s Mother of God XXX and Caroline Walker Bynum’s Fragmentation and Redemption, Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992). Bynum’s Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001), expands on this work to examine how wonder with the natural world emerges from the Western Christian tradition. 26 discursive read on the historical, ideological, and cultural role of the Christian-Jewish love story. Because the multiplicity of these formulations cut across so many different discourses (gender, physiognomy, performance), I have kept this dissertation focused only on widely disseminated and well known film and television texts. The examples cited in this work have also been chosen on the assumption that one could reasonably infer a majority-audience understanding of Jewish identity in one of the main protagonists. Actors who have made Jewish identity central to their persona, such as Al Jolson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, and Adam Sandler, will be examined as Jewish performers regardless of the textual specificity of their roles. I have mostly excluded the work of Jewish-born performers who did not made their Jewish backgrounds well known. Jewish-born actors as diverse as Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Harrison Ford, Natalie Portman, to name a few examples, rarely identify as Jewish characters. Outside of the occasional Jewish fan magazine or interview, these performers did not publicize their identities as Jews. For the purposes of not complicating my larger argument, I have avoided texts in which the Jewish background of one of the performers could be argued to not be a well known element of their persona. This requires an element of subjectivity. Whether or not the performers I have excluded still produce a coded Jewish identity within their work is certainly debatable. Other scholars can, and should, challenge my work for these absences. However, as my goal is to define the parameters of a new methodology for considering the political, ideological, and cultural function of Jewish alterity and Christonormativity as a specific framework, this project 27 sticks to clearly identified Jewish characters or well-known Jewish performers, and widely disseminated material. 46 By starting at the beginning of cinema, and tracing the historical entanglement between “Jewishness” and “Christianity” throughout political, historical and cultural events of the 20 th and 21 st centuries, this project aims to produce an academic framework of interrogation defined not by two figures in isolation, but in relation. 47 My goal is to bring Jewish studies, cultural studies, and historiography into conversation to produce a new discursive framework for reading material history. To do this, I engage a broad range of theoretical disciplines. This includes Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Jewish studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis, Postcolonial theory, and theories of the body. From Jewish studies, I rely on the work of Deborah Dash Moore, Hasia Diner, Yuri Slezkine, and Jonathan Sarna. I engage Jewish body and gender theory in the work of Sander Gilman and Daniel Boyarin, canonical studies of sexuality by Foucault, Bataille, and Marcuse, and gender studies theory from Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Ella Shohat, among many others. By bringing these fields together, I will argue for an interdisciplinary methodology in examining how history, media, and culture generate meaning within the coupling narrative. By engaging these coupling narratives as stories that communicate cultural signifiers through both performance and text, my hope is to build off the theoretical work 46 Examples such as the Yiddish theater and Yiddish films of the 1920s, because of their obvious exclusion of most non-Jewish audiences, are less explored, as are works from the avant-garde, Israeli cinema, and independent film movements. 47 This intersubjective modality is what Marjorie Garber argues lies at the heart of gender and sexual binaries and triangles across the modern media spectrum. For more see Marjorie Garber, Vice-Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 80-83. 28 defining reception strategies that scholars such as Brook, Bial, Biale, Boyarin, Shohat, Litvak, and many others, have produced in recent years. The three areas of study that are beyond the scope of this dissertation are auteur studies, industry studies, and gender demarcation. I do not define broad differences between Christian-male/Jewish-female and Jewish-male/Christian-female formulations. Nor do I attempt to speak to intent on the part of the writers, directors, and producers of the material being studied. Questions of gender, authorial intent, and industry awareness remain important ones, and ones that I hope to address in future work. 29 CHAPTER ONE DISRAELI’S “PAGE:” JEWISHNESS, MODERNITY, AND THE COSMOPOLITAN BODY 1860-1920 “I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New.” -- Benjamin Disraeli Yuri Slezkine famously stated that the entire 20th century is the “Jewish Century” and the modern age is the “Jewish age.” 48 Slezkine believes that it could only be through the modernist construction of the “Jew,” with all its inherent contradictions, that Western culture could perceive its transformation from the Victorian period into the complexities of the modern era. The Westward drift of both political power and immigrant waves from Europe to America brought reactionary and xenophobic responses to Jews on both continents. The legacies of European trauma, soon to reach its apotheosis in the tragedy of the Holocaust, produced a modernist Jewish identity as a “blank” signifier, a body caught between old and new, Christian and secular, national and cosmopolitan, and normative and deviant. Slezkine’s location of Jewish identity at the center of the modern sensibility explains the enormous backlash that European Jews faced from nativists and xenophobes. Jews signified an emerging culture industry that would reshape the lives and cultures of the Western world. But this notion of a pernicious, hidden Jewish influence in the nascent culture industry did not begin with American Jews creating Hollywood in the 1910s. The first accusations of a global conspiracy by Jews to control the emerging 48 Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-3. 30 “media” industry can be traced to the enormous popularity of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgery in the 1860s and 1870s. 49 European Jews of the second half of the 19th century became a flashpoint for the tensions of a Europe caught up in the rapid transformations of the machine age. By the 1890s, the decade of cinema’s invention in France, Jews were already seen as cosmopolitan transgressors, interlopers working to break down the racial and ethnic cohesion of the European nation-states through the seductive power of fiction. By the time Otto Weininger wrote his notoriously anti- Semitic book, Sex and Character, in Vienna in 1906, the Jewish body began to be seen as biologically deviant, a feminized manifestation of anxieties of viral contagion. 50 Weininger’s obsession with Jewish sexuality influenced the young Adolf Hitler, then an art student in Vienna. The new sciences had produced anxieties of what the late public intellectual Christopher Hitchens described as, “the Jew as possessor of arcane erotic skills,” an “under-emphasized trope of anti-Semitism.” 51 Biological fear manifested as sexual threat. The Jewish body was not only seen as deviant according to eugenics, but also suspected of deviant sexuality. Hitler summarized this fear in Mein Kampf, writing “The religious teaching of the Jews is principally a collection of instructions for maintaining the Jewish blood pure and for regulating intercourse between the Jews and the rest of the world...” 52 49 Steven Eric Bronner, A Rumor About the Jews: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 45-46. 50 Otto Weininger, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles, (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1906), 22. 51 Christopher Hitchens, “The 2,000-Year-Old Panic,” The Atlantic, March 2008. Via the web: < http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/the-2-000-year-old-panic/6640/> 52 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (USA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 422. 31 For the modernists and multiculturalists, assuaging fears of the nativists could only take place by contesting understandings of Jewish sexuality. Those modernist Jews willing to marry Christians contested the anti-Semitic notion of Jews as a covert biological “nation” apart. They could affirm their status as unthreatening members of the larger and cohesive nation through two gestures; Baptism and intermarriage. Those Jews who did not, who chose to marry other Jews, perpetuated the notion of biological difference, and faced only mistrust and fear. To understand how these competing configurations of Jewishness expressed themselves through the act of coupling, this chapter will examine two of the most prominent political Jewish figures of late 19th century Europe, Benjamin Disraeli and Alfred Dreyfus. The British Disraeli’s reassuring marriage to the much older widower and British aristocrat, Mary Anne Lewis, helped clear his path to become the first Jewish Prime Minister of the British Empire. Disraeli’s choice stands in stark contrast to the persecuted French Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who suffered exile after accusations of betraying the French government to Germany. Dreyfus’s Jewish wife, Lucie, argued publically for her husband’s innocence to no avail. The Dreyfus’s Jewish identity doomed them, even as the Left Bank modernists fruitlessly tried to transform Lucie into a grieving Mary Magdalene figure. It is here, in the notion of producing a pre-cinematic form of “coupling narrative,” that we will begin to examine how European Jewish men negotiated entrance into modernity. For both Disraeli and Dreyfus, the function of the coupling operated as a key site for contested discourses over the role of the Jew in the nation-state. Disraeli’s deft 32 navigation of modernist sensibilities allowed him to prosper. Dreyfus’s stoic, unbending refusal to join the modernist sensibility resulted in his destruction. Disraeli was the exception. Dreyfus was the rule. Yet what each of these public figures tells us about Jewish identity in the emerging culture industry establishes the template that would inform representations in the emerging film industry. Disraeli found success and acclaim through deft navigation of the burgeoning culture industry. Dreyfus faced over a decade of imprisonment and isolation on Devil’s Island, in spite of enormous support from France’s intellectual and artistic elite. While Disraeli found a solution for acceptance that Dreyfus did not, it was a pyrrhic victory. By the time of the Holocaust, European Jewish emancipation proved no match for nativist forces. In the end, no assimilation was possible. Herzl and the Zionists were tragically proved right. But in the emerging Hollywood, just a few decades later, the patterns established by Disraeli and Dreyfus would inform an understanding not just of the signification of the Jewish male, but of that male in dialectic with a Christian female. Brought together through the coupling narrative, Christian-Jewish couplings would eventually present an American progression narrative that would follow the path Disraeli had blazed, and shun the threat that Dreyfus represented. THE DANDY ISRAELI Benjamin Disraeli was the first, and only, Jewish Prime Minister of Britain, serving for a brief time in 1868, and again from 1874-1880. Disraeli was also the most flamboyant, a near total inversion of the clichéd British aristocrat. In his youth, Disraeli became famous as a theatrical raconteur, a dandy, and, perhaps most intriguingly, a 33 romance novelist. Disraeli’s penchant for fiction informed the entirety of his career. Michael Flavin argues that it was in his novels where Disraeli first developed the ideas that “informed his political creed.” 53 Disraeli’s abilities as both a dandy and a theatrical romantic fiction author led Disraeli to view politics as a dramatic extension of fiction. As the unlikely leader of 19th century British Empire during a time of rising anti- Semitism and the first fractures in the colonial British Empire, Disraeli’s often paradoxical persona came at a key moment in Europe’s lurch towards modernity. Disraeli was the first major political figure to crystallize the fragmentation of European Jewish diaspora in the later part of the 19th century. In just a few decades, millions of European Jews would flee to America. As a result, the shtetls would give way to the urban landscapes of the major cities of the United States. American Jews would split into competing secular and religious formations in the late 19th century. 54 Hasia Diner suggests that much of the tensions of American Jewish identity stemmed from the fact that European Jews were a rural configuration, while American Jews reinvented themselves as urban city dwellers. 55 Disraeli was the first to perform these transitions, and he did so through the employment of his theatrical and fictive gifts for storytelling. Disraeli took the complex discourses of Jews in the machine age, and he told the story of that crisis through the story of himself. 53 Michael Flavin, Benjamin Disraeli: The Novel as Political Discourse (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), 1. 54 Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 128-129. 55 Hasia Diner, The Jews of the United States: 1654-2000 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004), 74-75. 34 Many historians have been fascinated by Disraeli, an enigmatic figure who rose to the heights of British power without any of the pedigree of a British nobleman. Scholars have produced academic works on everything from the quality of the young Disraeli’s romance novels to the ambiguities of his sex life. Serving in Parliament for decades, the Jewish-born Disraeli’s lifelong dream to be Prime Minister, once seen as preposterous, was improbably fulfilled with his ascension for a brief time in 1868, and then for a six year period beginning in 1874. Disraeli’s persona, a remarkable mix of theatrical dandy and cultivated Jewish eccentricity, was antithetical to traditional British proto- Churchillian stiff upper lip. It made Disraeli’s election seem like some random quirk of history, an unlikely electoral happenstance. How was it possible this strange, short, unattractive, second generation immigrant Jewish dandy with an odd last name, rise to the top of the colonial British Empire? The answer to this question locates in Disraeli’s preternatural awareness, and exploitation, of the emerging culture industry. Disraeli realized the unique signification the cosmopolitan Jew could now play to combine politics with popular entertainment. His seemingly impossible rise to the pinnacle of British power offers one of the first examples of how Jewish identity could serve as a harbinger of transnationalism itself. Facing daily attacks from the press for years, Disraeli was called everything from a money grubber to an ugly, queer “Jewboy.” 56 Disraeli responded, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft describes it, “by irony and hauteur, by constructing a persona which was also 56 Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “What Disraeli Can Teach Us,” The New York Review of Books (December 4, 2008): 27. 35 a defense, by exaggerating rather than downplaying his singularity and unlikeliness.” 57 Disraeli’s embrace of the very stereotypes of Jewish alterity thrown at him by the press offers one of the earliest examples of a political actor reclaiming, and reconfiguring, his identity through interaction with the rising power of the national media. While Disraeli had been baptized as a child, and frequently spoke out as a Christian, Disraeli also did not run from his cultural identity as a Jew. ”Jewishness,” and all its inherent stereotypes, became the source material for Disraeli’s long and varied theatrical political performance art. Adam Kirsch notes that Disraeli’s fictive flights of fancy about his Jewish identity extended to his own murky family background. 58 Disraeli claimed that he was a descendant of the famed Spanish Sephardim, the legendary Jewish scholars of the 11 th - 14 th centuries who had produced the great Moses Maimonides among others. The fact that Spain’s anti-Semitic hysteria had led to the persecution, and eventual expulsion, of the Spanish Jews in 1492 at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, cloaked Disraeli in a dramatic and heroic historical narrative. In reality, and fairly obvious to many Brits, Disraeli was Ashkenazi Jewish (Eastern European) and not Sephardic. These fictional back stories cannot be dismissed as simple flights of fancy. Disraeli was the first highly visible Jew in European politics to use cosmopolitan Jewishness to his advantage. The exotic appeal of painting a swarthy Spanish back-story of North African roots gave Disraeli a theatrical and playful agency. It also gave Disraeli the power to rewrite his own past. Disraeli’s choice of Spain for his family origins had historical resonance. The Spanish Conversos offered the Jewish diaspora a tragic 57 Wheatcroft, “Disraeli”, 27. 58 Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli (New York and Canada: Schoken Books, 2008), 17-19. 36 warning. Even a full and complete Catholic baptism was not enough for a Spanish Jew to be seen as a full citizen of the feudal European nation-state. Disraeli’s self-identified alignment with 14 th Century Spain, the legendary center of intellectual Jewish thought, and the tragedy for Jews that ensued there, allowed Disraeli to speak to a reconfigured and entirely modernist British identity. Britain was struggling with its own colonial breakdown in an increasingly fragmented global hierarchy. The historical parallel Disraeli invoked was clear. Disraeli’s (fictional) ancestors were Sephardic intellectuals who had suffered persecution and expulsion from a nation (Spain) unable to appreciate the gifts of emancipated Jewry. Spain decided to expel or kill its Jews, and subsequently declined in power. England, clinging to power on the global stage, should not make the same mistake. Both Jewish and British, queered dandy and married nobleman, Disraeli successfully navigated the conflicts between modernity and nativist backlash. Rather than have others classify him, a form of intellectual ghettoization, Disraeli demonstrated his political power in the Anglo-Saxon world he operated by expressing this agency over his personal biography. By performing a mysterious and flamboyant Orientalism, Disraeli reconfigured his identity from that of a problematic and fraudulent British nobleman into a dramatic spectacle. 59 Disraeli’s folkloric fantasies of his own past offered a hopeful multicultural tale for a future British Empire. Disraeli not only represented the modern Britain politically, Disraeli embodied the Modern Britain. 59 Christopher Hibbert. Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister (New York and Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 48. 37 Disraeli did this by being both Christian and Jew, aristocrat and immigrant, dandyish and heroic. Disraeli performed modernist Jewishness as a doubling. Adam Kirsch argues that this act of performance was also the central philosophy of Disraeli’s father, Isaac. Isaac D’israeli wrote, in 1833, “In Judaism we trace our Christianity, and in Christianity, our Judaism.” 60 Kirsch argues that Disraeli, just like his father Isaac, sought a new modernist framework for his Jewish identity that resided in conflating Jewish and Christian tropes. The goal was to create a relational dialectic, one that could not be reduced to simple either/or tribalism of Jewish versus Christian, and thus exclude Jews through a British-Foreign binary. Instead, both Isaac and Benjamin performed their identities as a relational dialectic between Christianity and Judaism in which neither could fully be extricated from the other. Benjamin took this entanglement even further by embracing his role not only as a performative Jew turned Christian nobleman, but as a Jew, turned Christian, turned dandy. The rise of the dandy in the urban milieu of the mid to late 19th century has been a source of great scholarly interest. Baudelaire’s seminal definition of the dandy, written in 1863, described the style as a performance of “opposition and revolt,” and a complex signifier of global transformation 61 Baudelaire, a dandy himself, defined dandyism as a reactive body. The dandy used clothes, style, and mannerism to demonstrate how taste culture could be used to challenge gender, class, and national distinctions. The dandy 60 Kirsch, Disraeli, 17-19. 61 Charles Baudelaire The Painter of Modern Life: And Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (USA: Phaidon Press, 1970), 27-28. 38 presented cynicism and period-piece nostalgia, while also looking entirely to the future. The dandy thus both embraced, but also satirized, modernity’s contradictions. Andrea Gogröf-Vorhees points out that Foucault traces “Baudelairean modernity” as the pivotal moment at which modern man began to invent and perform his persona. 62 The kernels of constructed identity that would define 20th century mass media begin with the performative status of the dandy. Disraeli used dandyism to both embrace, but also satirize, the queered masculinity of the Jewish male that Daniel Boyarin notes as a central construction of Jewish masculinity in the late 19th century. 63 Disraeli’s dandy persona did not hold back his political career; it empowered it. Philip Rieff observes how Disraeli even fictionalized the story of his last name, claiming the choice of “Israel” was intentional on the part of his brave Jewish ancestors so that no one would forget their lineage. 64 Rieff points out that the overwhelmingly Jewish themes and characters found in Disraeli’s romance novels presented a “New Israel” located not as a place, but as a body. 65 When Disraeli shifted his lineage from Eastern Europe to Spain, Disraeli connected the contested and transitional status of dandyism that Baudelaire describes with the ambiguity of cosmopolitan Jewry. Rather than hide his Jewish identity, Disraeli celebrated it. Only Disraeli coded it in the performative codes of queered, liminal, dandy theatricality. Disraeli exemplified Baudelairean modernity by reclaiming his “Jewishness” not as biology, but as performance. 62 Andrea Gogröf-Vorhees, Defining Modernism: Baudelaire and Nietzsche on Romanticism, Modernity, Decadence, and Wagner (New York and Canada: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 53. 63 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic conduct the rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3-5. 64 Philip Rieff, The Jew of Culture: Freud, Moses, and Modernity (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 15. 65 Ibid. 22-23 39 Nearly a century later, in 1964, Susan Sontag would align Jewishness with homosexuality as the twin forces defining the camp sensibility. Sontag famously declared that “Camp is the modern dandyism.” 66 The theatricality of the dandy and the camp aesthetic both pull from the same Jewish cosmopolitan ambiguity that Disraeli exploited. By utilizing the tropes of performance, gender queering, and masquerade, the dandy codes itself as cosmopolitan, performative and complex. It is no surprise that the most successful Jewish politician of the 1860s would so cleverly adapt Baudelaire’s understanding of dandyism as a form of ironic revolution. For Disraeli, conflating theatrical Jewish identity with dandyism became an act of self-reflective comedic pantomime. It was also an act of Jewish reclamation through code. Gogröf-Vorhees argues that this duplicity and theatricality produced “a complex public image that allowed him to remain a Jew, even while enjoying the legal rights of a member of the Church of England.” 67 When asked by the British press if he was more Jewish or Christian, Disraeli famously responded, “I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New.” 68 This statement of ambiguity, Disraeli’s “blank page,” pinpoints the liminal construction of the reconfigured Jewish body of modernity. Disraeli, a novelist and playwright (like Herzl), utilized the metaphor of the body as page, inscribed by meaning depending on the agency of the spectator. This seemingly paradoxical act of self-inscription, articulated 66 Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (USA: Picador, 2001), 288. 67 Andrea Gogröf-Vorhees, Defining Modernism: Baudelaire and Nietzsche on Romanticism, Modernity, Decadence, and Wagner (New York and Canada: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 22-23. 68 As with much of his theatricality, this was also unoriginal. Disraeli was actually reusing a quote from a play by Richard Brinsley, as noted by Adam Kirsch, Benjamin Disraeli (New York and Canada: Schoken Books, 2008), 23. 40 through absence (blankness) rather than presence (the written word), was the new cosmopolitan Jewry in the machine age. For Disraeli, this was an act of inscription- through-negation. The holes in the narrative, the absence of fact, the incongruence of persona, the “lack” (for the Lacanians among us), became the signifying objet petit a. Decades before Freud introduced psychoanalysis, Disraeli presented himself as a “blank page,” a dandy cipher for the masses to project their own versions of British history rooted in the romantic global myth of the ancient Jew. During England’s rapid transition from agrarian economy to urban industrialization, Disraeli’s “blank page” allowed him to be many things to many people. Disraeli’s carefully performed identity positioned himself neither as ancient Jew nor modern British. Disraeli was liminal, oscillating between a mythic past and a future globalism. As a raconteur and dandy turned powerful politician, and eventual Prime Minister, Disraeli offers the first template of the Jew as performative alterity in the mass media age. The positioning of modernist Jewishness as a bridge between old and new offered the template for the function of Jewish representation in cinema just a few decades later. In challenging the single read of history by destabilizing his past, Disraeli called on England to reframe their national understanding from singular to complex. In so doing, Disraeli ushered in the new configurations of late 19th century modernity. This new body, a “blank page,” brought together the dandy, the power of myth, the theatrical performance, and the cosmopolitan Jew. 41 DISRAELI’S “MARY” Disraeli’s first major political decision of his career was not apparent to many outsiders, at least not obviously so. Struggling with his political career and already in his early thirties, Disraeli made the choice to begin to court the much older, wealthier aristocrat and widow, Mary Ann Lewis, in 1839. Lewis was forty five at the time of the marriage, twelve years older than Disraeli. Of all of Disraeli’s attempts to counter the inherent anti-Semitic mistrust of his loyalty during his early career, he had finally hit on a solution. It would be in his marriage to a widowed English noblewoman that Disraeli would find his political career legitimized. Disraeli’s role in Parliament was solidified upon his marriage to Lewis, and this marriage (and funding) helped clear his long climb towards Prime Minister. Disraeli’s pursuit of the childless widow was a calculated a career move, and Disraeli openly acknowledged it. In a letter during his courtship year, Disraeli wrote to a friend, “I was influenced by no romantic feelings… I was not blind to worldly advantages in such an alliance.” 69 Disraeli’s use of the word “alliance” demonstrates his awareness that his alterity in Parliament could only be blunted by union with the non-Jew. This was the final act that would allow British society to fully embrace Disraeli. Disraeli understood that if his past was liminal and fictive, his identity could only be fixed through intermarriage. This coupling event would anchor Disraeli to the stability of the British aristocracy. Whatever mythic stories Disraeli had invoked for himself, Mary Anne Lewis, and by proxy to England itself, could not be denied as central to his life. 69 Kirsch, Disraeli, 2008. 103. 42 Baptism had only mitigated Disraeli’s Jewishness, but it could never deny it. For Disraeli’s dandy to congeal, the acquisition of the British wife became as central to his career as his conversion had been. It was intermarriage that allowed Disraeli to become the first major figure of the newly reconfigured and “emancipated” Jewish male. In considering how Disraeli’s persona circulated in the popular press not in isolation, but connected to Mary Ann Lewis, we can follow Berlin’s argument to locate Disraeli’s “page” outside of the singular biographic or individual. This is not to say the British popular press paid much attention to Mary Anne Lewis either way. Only that by choosing to marry a British noblewoman, Disraeli mitigated his Otherness. This relational dialectic operated not only within Disraeli’s performative paradoxes of his origins, but the resolution of these paradoxes in the clear act of negation – the male Jewish selection and union with the non-Jewish fully white, fully Christian, female. We can no longer think of Disraeli as a single figure, but of Disraeli/Lewis; the Christian and the Jew. In this coupling we find a key solution to Jewish identity as a representational signifier of modernity’s fragmentation. The Jewish cosmopolitan could never resolve his paradoxes on his own, but could seek mitigation through coupling with the Christian normative Other. In this way alone, the Jew could reassure the nation-state. Or, the Jew could reject this path, and reject the nation-state itself. This was signaled, most prominently, through the selection of the Jewish partner. While Disraeli successfully reassured the masses of his own theatrical Jewish paradoxes via his marriage with Mary Anne Lewis, another important figure of 19th century European modernity did not. Married to a Jewish wife, and with a stoic refusal to 43 perform in any theatrical way for the masses, the unbending figure of Alfred Dreyfus offers a stark contrast to Disraeli’s successful career. Between them, Disraeli and Dreyfus offer us an articulation of the dichotomy of tensions for cosmopolitan Jews throughout the Western world. As nations transitioned into the machine age, would Jews successfully be able to assimilate? Or would it end in Holocaust? If Disraeli offered hope to the emerging cosmopolitan Jewish thinkers on the global stage, Dreyfus offered only despair. AFFAIR AND L’AFFAIRE The trial, prosecution, conviction, and eventual exoneration of the French Captain Alfred Dreyfus were, at the end of the 19th century, events of profound transnational resonance. The Dreyfus Affair, as it is now known by, is positioned by scholars as the moment marking the first crisis of anti-Semitic anxieties in the mass media age. The only Jewish Captain in the entire French army, Dreyfus’s conviction on the charges of treason and betrayal of the French Nation was a flashpoint for tensions between nativism and modernity well beyond his control. Dreyfus’s secret military trial had used obviously faked evidence. Dreyfus’s Napoleonic-esque exile to Devil’s Island in 1894 and absolute refusal to defend himself in the popular press of the time presented a dramatic and iconographic figure. For liberals, Dreyfus was the unwitting victim of xenophobia and hysteria born out of ignorance. For nativists, Dreyfus was the Jew who refused to perform. Dreyfus’s unbending solitude offered two important reading strategies that defined the conflict in the popular imagination of the time. Dreyfus could be seen as a 44 tragic figure of heroism, betrayal, and honor in the face of unfair persecution. Or Dreyfus could be seen as the unapologetic cosmopolitan Jewish betrayer of French-Christian society, an exposed mole who felt no loyalty to France, no remorse, and no guilt for his actions. These competing narratives became the first politically charged focus of the power of storytelling to influence political theater in the mass media age. The Dreyfus Affair quickly became a cause célèbre among the Left Bank intellectuals who had already been arguing for a modernist sensibility in art, media, and culture. For these artists, writers, poets, and scholars, Dreyfus offered a flashpoint for the clashing sensibilities between the new cosmopolitan flâneur against the reactionary French nativism. The innocent, stoic and nearly silent Dreyfus became a cipher; a body template of Jewish alterity standing against the collective forces of Christian French nativism. Cartoonish imagery of Dreyfus’s figure appeared throughout the many French newspapers debating the facts of the case. Dreyfus became the repository for a media frenzy of gossip, spectacle, and political rants. Dreyfus’s polarized story allowed no middle ground. In 1898, the public intellectual Emil Zola published his clarion call for justice, J’Accuse!... 70 The idea of utilizing the newspaper as a site for ideological contestation in the public sphere represented a distinct moment for the emerging French culture industry. That Dreyfus emerged in the wake of the nascent eugenics pseudo-science of ethnic and race based biological classification is not incidental. Weininger’s, Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter) had shocked Vienna in 1903 with its accusations of 70 Emile Zola, “J’Accuse!...” L’Aurore, 13 January 1898, 1. 45 Jewish sexual deviancy. 71 The rapidly spreading anti-Semitic French forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, had taken root in Russia. It is no surprise that the body of the Jew would become the nexus point for anxieties of the transformation of the nation-state. As the political charge of the case increased, Dreyfus’s incarcerated absence only increased the contest between the Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards to define what he represented. Dreyfus was banished to Devil’s Island for over twelve years until his eventual retrial and exoneration. The media debate not only focused on the specifics of the case, but on the body of Dreyfus himself. The reach of the Dreyfus trial’s influence on the arts, the political, the cultural, and the beginning of French cinema, was enormous. Dreyfus’s body became a complex site of contest between shifting understandings of “French” and “Jew.” The Harvard Law Review’s summary of the trial and subsequent uproar, published in 1899, summarized this tension in its very first summary sentence, noting “Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, captain of the French artillery, in December, 1894, was convicted of a charge of treason by a court- martial, proceedings of which were not made public.” 72 The famous Left Bank cause célèbre had inspired the non-Jewish Emile Zola, to risk his career penning his savage critique of the French government, and many other intellectuals would follow. The conviction so shook the young playwright, Theodor Herzl, that he reversed his previously inclusive assimilationist ideology. Herzl became the leading proponent of the Zionist movement. Max Nordau’s 1897 address at the First Zionist conference in Switzerland drew an overt connection between the Dreyfus crisis and the movement. 71 Weininger, 1906. 72 “The Dreyfus Case,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Nov., 1899): 214. 46 Nordau described the crisis of the post-Ghetto “emancipated Jew” as a tension of “mimicry,” in which the Jew “was allowed to believe that he was only German, French, Italian, and so forth.” 73 Nordau’s position was that a Jew who believes he is part of Christian nations, but in which Christian nations make it clear “he has not acquired their special characteristics,” could never assimilate. 74 Dreyfus had become the central contested site at the turn of the century that Nordau described as an irreconcilable tension between an emerging post-ghetto Jew eager to join a cosmopolitan Europe, and a Christian society that would not only never view him as a full citizen of the nation-state, but saw him as a contagion, a virus within the body-politic akin to a medical disease. As Foucault points out, the transmogrification of medieval tropes of anti- Semitism into that of the pollution of the French “body” reconfigured the Jew both as a totem of contagion/disease as well as both corporeal and incorporeal, a specter marked by absence and invisibility, and, thus, a signifier of irreducible anxiety. 75 Foucault describes the expression of the crisis of Jewry at work in the larger nation-state. The subsequent need to articulate a distinct biology of Jewish body became a function of state control through containment. Foucault notes that European states accomplished this by marking the Jew as “a race that was present within all races, and whose biologically dangerous character necessitated a certain number of mechanisms of rejection and exclusion on the part of the state.” 76 When the Jew claimed this ambiguity as a form of 73 Nordau, Max. “Address At the First Zionist Conference,” Basle, 29 August, 1897. P.4 via: <www.mideastweb.org/nordau1897.htm> 74 Ibid. P.4 75 Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1975-1976. trans. David Macey, (New York: Picador, 1997), 89 76 Ibid. 47 agency, as Disraeli had done, they could reclaim power. When they were silenced by banishment and isolation, as Dreyfus had been, they could not. Unlike Disraeli, Dreyfus was incapable of political performance and theatrical dandyism even had he been given a voice in the popular press. Disraeli’s performative dandy and his background in literature gave Disraeli what Dreyfus lacked – the ability to tailor performance for the proverbial peanut gallery. But then why wasn’t the stoic Dreyfus seen as more “masculine” than the dandy performances of Disraeli? Dreyfus displayed all the tropes of masculine bravery throughout his trial. Yet the more normatively masculine Dreyfus acted, the more he was loathed by France. This suggests an intriguing understanding of Jewish masculinity in modernity. For Jewish masculinity to assert itself, the performance of masculinity had to be inverted. Scholars such as Christopher E. Forth and Venita Datta have seized on this concept. They have reexamined the Dreyfus case as a site for contested representations of masculinity through the lens of the emerging discourses of science and the body in the early 20th century. Forth describes Dreyfus as reconfiguring history through the signifiers of Jewish alterity. Forth notes that the liminal status of Jewish masculinity operates as a “dialectic between visibility and invisibility” in which “the Jew can either be criticized for refusing to merge into mainstream culture or condemned for having assimilated so completely as to become invisible.” 77 Forth cites Daniel Boyarin’s work on the deliberate oppositional development of a Jewish masculinity set up as a response 77 Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004),38-39. 48 to the Diaspora’s marginalized subculture. 78 Building off Forth, there is another way to locate Dreyfus. Dreyfus was not simply a singular figure in the public sphere. Many of the newspaper accounts of the trial prominently featured Dreyfus’s wife, Lucie Dreyfus, as part of the drama. Disraeli’s political calculation to marry a much older spinster of the British aristocracy class had demonstrated a methodology for mitigating accusations of disloyalty to the Nation. Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus present a tragic counterpoint. The choice of one’s spouse offers an intriguing perspective on how public figures were contested in the emerging culture industry. Dreyfus’s stoic inability to reassure the French nation of his loyalty operates in stark contrast to Disraeli’s success overcoming his Jewish identity in Britain a few decades earlier. The success of Disraeli and failure of Dreyfus is even more striking when considering their respective depiction of masculinity. Dreyfus was a brave, stoic, conventionally masculine Jewish soldier with a Jewish wife. Yet Dreyfus was easier to suspect of disloyalty than Disraeli, the foppish Jewish dandy with the widowed and much older Christian wife. Given the many historical and cultural differences between the two examples, (French vs. British, 1860s vs. 1890s), no simplified or overdetermined conclusion should be drawn. It is implausible that the figures of Mary Anne and Lucie were the most important influence on the reception of Disraeli and Dreyfus in the popular imagination. But nor can the functions of their respective spouses, the Jewish Lucie and the non-Jewish Mary Anne , be discounted. Contested notions of Jewish masculinity by the institutions of European media were built around notions of Jewish sexual deviancy. If the Jewish body was a signifier of 78 Ibid. 36-38 49 modernity’s fracture, an “anti-Trinity” challenge to of the cohesive hierarchies of Christonormativity, then the act of coupling could be read as a mitigating factor. The Christian wife, Mary Anne, reassured a skeptical public of Disraeli’s loyalty. The Jewish Lucie did not. Richard Forth and Ruth Harris both point out that attempts by the Left Bank press, led by Emile Zola, tried to “de-Jewify” both Alfred and Lucie by turning them into Christ figures. 79 They were portrayed as Jesus and Mary figures being subjected to a modern Crucifixion. This reframed the Jewish couple as an updated version of the Passion Play. 80 The well meaning Dreyfusards, in spite of helping eventually exonerate Dreyfus, ended up participating in a mass-media posthumous baptism of the Dreyfuses. This media-led “Christianizing” process made Lucie acceptable to non-Jewish France by casting her as an innocent and loyal Mary who waited in vain for her resurrection of her true love. Lucie was both the “Virgin” as well as suffering in pain under the “‘Christian’ model”. 81 Dreyfus had originally been described as a French Judas by his enemies, the betrayer of the Christian “body” of the French Nation. The response by the Left Bank sought to turn the metaphor inside-out. They recast Dreyfus as Jesus. Sander Gilman observes how the political issues of Dreyfus frequently crossed over into a debate about whether the Jewish body itself could ever be French. When the 79 Ruth Harris, “Letters to Lucie: Spirituality, Friendship, and Politics during the Dreyfus Affair, French Historical Studies, Vol. 28. No. 4, (Fall 2005), 603. 80 Forth, 66-70. Harris, 609. 81 Harris also noted that this recasting of Lucie as silent, heroic sufferer may have echoed the extremely popular 19th century opera of the time, La Juive, which told the story of a martyred Jewish lover, Rachel, who refused to convert in spite of her love for a Christian nobleman. Ruth Harris, “Letters to Lucie: Spirituality, Friendship, and Politics during the Dreyfus Affair,” French Historical Studies, Vol. 28. No. 4, (Fall 2005). 609 50 Grand Rabbi of Paris, J. H Dreyfuss (no relation), defended Dreyfus, it was the tonality of his Yiddishe accent that was mocked in the French press by the anti-Dreyfusards. The Yiddish voice was seen as a signifier of not being fully French. 82 Michael Marrus notes that Hannah Arendt was one of the first to begin to draw a linear connection between anti-Dreyfusard hysteria in France in the 1890s and the rise of Hitler in Germany as early as the 1940s. Marrus argues that Arendt, a cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual, believed “(t)he modern Jewish experience… was at the very center of the Dreyfus crisis, just as it was at the center of Nazism.” 83 When Arendt, writing in The Origins of Totalitarianism, argued that the Dreyfus Affair was “a huge dress rehearsal for a performance that had to be put off for more than three decades,” the role of modernity and anti-Semitism clashing across the form of a single body was presented. 84 The emancipated post-ghetto Jewish body, a cosmopolitan configuration on the 19th century European stage, would begin to find contest in the characters and representations of literature, art, and most notably, the emerging medium known as cinema. “DREYFUS” THE MOVIE In the late 1890s, Georges Méliès, the most inventive of France’s first cinematic innovators, produced dozens of Dreyfus Affair short films which combined to form a thirteen minute episodic that Méliès titled, L’Affaire Dreyfus (1899). Unlike the more famous trick films and magic-infused imaginative landscapes of cinema he is now famous for, Méliès’s Dreyfus films were literal recreations of historical events produced 82 Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (Great Britain: Routledge,1995), 71. 83 Ibid., 161 84 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Meridian, 1958), 45,93. Michael R. Marrus, “Hannah Arendt and the Dreyfus Affair,” New German Critique, No. 66, (Autumn 1995), 153. 51 in a German Expressionist style. Banned in France for nearly two decades, Méliès’s goal with L’Affaire Dreyfus was not to entertain but to both educate and inspire, and his attention to historical detail has been noted by historians. They were political polemics in which key events from the trial and Dreyfus’s life were reenacted in theatrically stylized one and two minute sequences. In 1899, just over four years after the Lumière Brothers’ first cinematic exhibitions, the first rumblings of the power of cinema to advocate political perspective was introduced in service of building sympathy for Dreyfus through the cinematic medium. Méliès’s passion for championing Dreyfus’s cause suggests how the cosmopolitan Left Bank’s strategy of recasting Dreyfus influenced the new medium of cinema. Méliès followed Zola not by presenting not documentary footage of Dreyfus, but by recreating Dreyfus. In so doing, Méliès introduced the first political use of the represented body in cinema. Méliès cast an unknown non-actor (rumored to have been an iron worker) to play Dreyfus for no reason other than the actor resembled Dreyfus physically. 85 Emphasizing Dreyfus as a persecuted body, without agency and put upon by systemic and institutional forces around him, Méliès used cinema to portray Dreyfus as a victim, a Jesus figure in which the sins of the nation were inscribed. 86 In Méliès’s Dreyfus recreations, Stephen Bottomore locates the transition from single reel storytelling to the first multi-reel multi-scenic narratives told episodically. These films also show how the special-effects trick films of Méliès were not the only 85 Stephen Bottomore, “Dreyfus and Documentary,” Sight & Sound, (Autumn 1984) 1-3 86 “L’Affaire Dreyfus, La Dice du Bordereau, 1899, 1m06s, Star Film Catalogue No. 206, May 29, 2008. <http://filmjournal.net/melies/2008/05/29/dreyfus-court-martial-arrest-of-dreyfus/> 52 filmmaking Méliès took part in. The Dreyfus recreations show how Méliès found a realist method to express political concern, and the need for factual detail and historical accuracy in his recreations when doing so. 87 Méliès demonstrated a new understanding of cinema to express political influence. Méliès’s ability to position Dreyfus as fictive protagonist within an emerging narrative storytelling technique is noteworthy for both the formal development of narrative language, but also the production of the represented body. Dreyfus no longer meant the absent actual body of the real person banished to Devil’s Island. Dreyfus became “Dreyfus,” a figurative identity at work in the cinema. The Dreyfus films are one of the earliest examples of cinema’s power to transform the contested state of the body through fictive recoding. Max Nordau had warned the First Zionist Conference in 1897 that “racial anti- Semitism denies the power of change by baptism, and this mode of salvation does not seem to have much prospect.” 88 But Nordau had not yet considered the power of the emerging medium of cinema to perform its own kind of “baptism.” Méliès had reconfigured Dreyfus not as absent criminal, but as a present protagonist of the cinema. For Méliès, “Dreyfus” became a specter, a narrative device in which both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences could decode as they say fit. What Disraeli had done for himself via the folkloric tradition, Méliès did for Dreyfus. Disraeli used the language of fiction and the performance of dandyism. Méliès used the power of cinema. 87 Bottomore, “Dreyfus and Documentary,” 2 88 Nordau, Max. “Address At the First Zionist Conference,” (August 29, 1897), 4. <www.mideastweb.org/nordau1897.htm > 53 PROUST AND DREYFUS Méliès’s early use of the cinema to argue for Dreyfus suggests an understanding of the burgeoning medium as an ideological tool of mythic reinvention. Marcel Proust would echo this in French literature. Proust transmogrified the complexities of the national crisis of the Dreyfus Affair within the complex and contradictory fractures of language and the body. Proust did this by sublimating the political in the realm of the erotic coupling. Méliès had introduced the Jewish body as a site of political contestation in cinema. Proust would introduce the Jewish body in an entirely different configuration in literature: the erotic. Sander Gilman argues that Proust’s desire to remain apolitical was irreparably damaged by the Dreyfus Affair. Gilman cites how Proust’s ambivalence regarding his role in the upper echelons of French culture came about as a direct result of the highly charged polemic environment that Dreyfus created in which all French Jews were forced to speak up, or be complicit in their silence. Gilman argues that Proust, like Kafka, saw his own body as “the object of contestation” in a world of emerging eugenics that claimed to mark a scientific proof of Jewish corporeal otherness. 89 Edmund White notes that the rarely political, half-Jewish Proust was a convert to Catholicism and considered to have little Jewish identity. Yet Proust found his support for Dreyfus made him seen as retroactively, and quite suddenly, Jewish in the eyes of the French public. 90 White argues that Proust addresses this in his distinctive Proustian fashion, by reading for the absences 89 Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities (England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 127. 90 Edmund White, Marcel Proust: A Life (Penguin Books: New York, 1999), 9-10 54 and subjectivities of memory and sublimation. In Remembrance of Things Past Vol.1: Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), Proust’s famous protagonist, the assimilated Jewish aristocrat, Charles Swann, becomes obsessed with the French beauty, Odette de Crécy. 91 This love affair, posited as a novel within the novel, suggests a conflation between the problematic constructions of the emancipated role of post-Ghetto Jews in France. 92 Proust, at the forefront of literature’s modernist shift towards the limitations of subjectivity, locates the universal and the political by invoking the sensorial evocative and the subconscious. Proust represents Dreyfus-era Jewish anxiety through the codes of a protagonist, in this case, the half-Jewish Charles Swann. Swann’s confusions and feelings of inadequacy engage not the political events of Dreyfusard politics, but instead transition into the realm of the sexual, focused on the cipher Crécy, the normative French female object of his gaze. Proust, famously caught in a world of contradictions of identity between his Jewishness and Catholic conversion just as Disraeli had, found his uneasy assimilation among the intellectual and cultural elite, his closeted gay sexuality and his asthmatic and sickly body a corporeal paradox. The subjective fractures of modernity mapped onto the singular male Jewish body, and resolved through the gaze towards the normative female. For Swann, identity is in crisis. Swann hopes that Crécy’s love will help him resolve his paradoxical understanding of himself. 91 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Vol. 1 Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (Hetfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2006) 92 Proust’s use of Swann to express a crisis of Jewish identity expressed the same anxieties that troubled Herzl and Nordau in the First Zionist Conference in 1897. The issues for both Zionists and modernist Jews were the same: could the emancipated Jew fully integrate into non-Jewish Europe in the age of eugenics and the scandal of Dreyfus? 55 In Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust again finds Swann grappling with the complexities of the Dreyfus Affair by “tempering the burning conviction of the Israelite with the diplomatic moderation of the man about town, whose habits he had imbibed too deeply to be able this belatedly to shed them…” 93 The first novel where Proust confronts the problematic nature of homosexuality with the crumbling of the aristocracy, it is notable that the tensions of dual identities at work in Charles Swann. Swann finds himself caught between the “burning conviction” of the Israelites of his ancestry and the performance of aristocracy that he had “imbibed.” Proust’s point is clear. It was when discussing the Dreyfus Affair, whether on either side of the cultural divide between the pre-modernist atavism and the emerging cosmopolitanism, that the tensions between Swann’s French and Jewish identities found irreconcilability. Lynn Wilkenson provides another example. In Volume 3 of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way, Proust’s non-Jewish Robert de Sant-Loup finds his position on the Dreyfus affair “brought about by his infatuation with the Jewish courtesan Rachel.” 94 Wilkenson notes that the narrator’s childhood friend is the Jewish pro- Dreyfusard, Bloch. Bloch serves as an alter-ego for the Proust/narrator character, as Bloch accompanies Robert de Sant-Loup to the “Palais de Justice to watch one of the trials related to the Dreyfus Affair.” 95 Wilkenson argues that Proust located Jewish difference by projecting a litany of “rejected Jewish characteristics” onto Bloch as well as 93 Proust, Marcel, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Struck, (New York: Viking Adult, 2004) 94 Lynn R. Wilkenson. “The Art of Distinction: Proust and the Dreyfus Affair,” MLN, Vol. 107, No. 5, Comparative Literature, Dec 1992, 980. 95 Ibid., 982 56 Swann. 96 In Wilkenson’s reading, Proust locates Dreyfus as a body of absence at work mediating the various couplings of Proust’s narratives. Dreyfus forced to the surface the hidden Jewishness of those French Jews struggling to remain assimilated in the wake of the scandal. Proust’s notion of Jewish difference occurs, in both examples, as a distinction not only of Jewish alterity, but also of Jewish-Christian coupling. The half-Jewish Charles Swann and his non-Jewish fully French object of desire, Odette, are the cleared example of Proust’s use of Christian-Jewish coupling to negotiate fractured European identity. But it is also apparent as the increasingly pro-Dreyfusard non-Jew, Robert de Sant-Loup, uses his support for Dreyfus in an attempt to gain the Jewish Rachel’s interest. Both stories align politics with the erotic coupling. The Christian-Jewish coupling is, for Proust, an act of modernist transgression. Proust’s construction of the act of erotic desire as a tool of resistance to state power hints at work to come by Bataille, Marcuse, and, eventually, Foucault. Proust’s fractured storytelling technique not only introduced narrative subjectivities during the breakup of French political cohesion, but did so through the sexualized and eroticized interplay between Jew and Christian. 97 Proust was not the only modernist writer to use Dreyfus with modernist sensibilities about subjectivity, fragmentation and coupling. A wave of modernist 96 Ibid., 992 97 In his analysis of language in Proust, Daniel Karlin argues that Proust’s fracturing of national identity can also be located in Proust’s deft interweaving of English and French. Karlin describes Proust as intentionally producing a merging of the two languages, “Franglish,” as a key demonstration of French fragmentation at the turn of the 20th century. Proust perhaps saw the play between English and French understandings of the word L’Affaire/Affair itself as his inspiration to map political anxieties onto the sexual “affair” between Charles and Odette and Robert and Rachel. See Daniel Karlin, Proust’s English (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3-5. 57 Jewish authors and artists began to emerge in the flurry of creativity of 1900s-era Left Bank Paris. Benjamin Ivry describes a movement of what he terms “Jewish Symbolists,” artists, writers and intellectuals who “had social and political activism that was allied with dreamlike literary fantasies.” 98 Ivry cites writers such as Bernard Lazare, Marcel Schwob, and Gustave Kuhn, as examples. Non-Jewish French modernists were just as united in pro-Dreyfusard support, led by Zola and poet Stéphane Mallarmé, among many others. Ivry notes the profound impact that the wave of anti-Dreyfus hysteria in France had on the work of these modernists, who, like Lazare, used symbols, fragments and evocations to comment on the political through the lens of the emerging sensibilities about subjectivity, impressionism and the subconscious. This dialectic between Jewish alterity and Christonormativity informed the entirety of the modernist art and literature movement in France for decades. By the 1920s, long after Dreyfus’s exoneration and full pardon by the French government, French artists and intellectuals still grappled with the schism Dreyfus had opened. The tension between emancipated global Jewry and the reactionary response of French anti- Semitic paranoia continued to play out. Paul La Farge notes that the hugely successful French novel of 1922, Silbermann, tackled exactly this fracture in post-Dreyfus French life. Written by Jacques de Lacretelle, Silbermann is a novel narrated by a Protestant schoolboy that, as La Farge observes: “…falls under the spell of a Jewish student, David Silbermann, a sort of boy genius, precociously endowed with literary and artistic sensibilities.” 99 98 Benjamin Ivry, “Finding Rabbis and Wandering Jews: French Jewish Symbolists Rediscovered,” The Forward, (May 07,2010) <http://www.forward.com/articles/127592/> 99 Paul La Farge, “School Ties,” Tablet Magazine, (Nov 4, 2005). <http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/837/school-ties/> 58 Silbermann’s talents are seductive for the French schoolboy. Together, they form an intense homosocial friendship. This fraternal love story allows the non-Jewish protagonist/narrator to serve as empathetic witness and confidant to the troubles of Silbermann’s family as they are hounded by French anti-Semites. Silbermann’s family becomes so persecuted that they eventually flee to America. The novel’s conclusion, in which the Silbermanns must move to America to become diamond merchants, is a grim reminder of the hopelessness of the post WWI France to successfully integrate. 100 Silbermann, like so much of 20th century depiction of Jewry, creates a relational dialectic between Jew and non-Jew. In this case, a friendship between childhood boys in which the Protestant serves as the subjective witness and the Jew, the object of his gaze. This relational dialectic, echoing Proust’s Jewish/Christian couplings in the age of Dreyfus, resounds loudly across much modernist work of this period. Neil R. Davison traces similar national anxiety and Jewish alterity in the most famous work by the Irish writer, James Joyce. 101 In his examination of Joyce’s Ulysses, Davison argues that this eruption of Jewish crisis in European discourse of the late 19th century was a key formation for the young Joyce. Joyce himself was not Jewish. But Davison argues that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, the half-Irish, half-Jewish protagonist of Ulysses, was likely inspired by Joyce’s visit to Paris in 1902 during the height of the anti- Jewish hysteria over Dreyfus. 102 Joyce’s witnessing of the irrational and explosive French rage over suspicions of Alfred Dreyfus’s “dual loyalty” directly connected 100 Ibid., 1. 101 Neil R. Davison and Anthony Julius. James Joyce, Ulysses, and the Construction of Jewish Identity: Culture, Biography, and 'the Jew' in Modernist Europe. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91-94. 102 Ibid., 94. 59 European anti-Semitic nativism with a rejection of modernism itself. Joyce’s (anti)hero protagonist symbol of Irish modernity, Leopold Bloom, directly echoes Dreyfus. Bloom is Jew but also not-Jew, Dubliner and not Dubliner, heroic Greek-myth adventurer and wandering antihero. Davison argues that Bloom’s neurotic construction was informed by Joyce’s take on the “European Jew” as rootless, intelligent, cosmopolitan, and a key emblem of modernity. 103 Davison also notes the role Disraeli may have played in the young Joyce’s understanding of colonialism, empire and the dandy configuration, citing Joyce’s father, John Joyce, as active politically in the Irish Parnellites movement of 1880, a direct response to Disraeli’s policies towards Ireland. 104 The notion that the Irish and Hebrews shared common cause is, of course a common folkloric tradition. A long historical myth suggests that the Celts of Ireland were actually one of the ten lost tribes of Israel. 105 As Joyce grew up, the manifest anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair in France as well as Matthew Arnold’s concept of “Hebraism and Hellenism” operate, according to Davison, as the twin discourses that were seen as bringing European society into balance. These influences informed Joyce’s understandings of alienation, otherness and normativity in European culture. 106 Joyce’s revolutionary act was to introduce the key central figure of Irish alienation not as an Irishman, but as an Irish Jew. In Leopold Bloom, Joyce configures an identity without reducibility, just as Proust had. Joyce did this by locating Bloom 103 Ibid., 100. 104 Ibid., 17. 105 Ashel Grant, The Nestorians: Or the Lost Tribes (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1843), 162. 106 Davison, James Joyce, 62, 106-107. 60 within the fractured corpus of liminal Jewish cosmopolitan identity. Bloom is half Jewish and half Irish, yet by virtue of a Jewish father and not a Jewish mother, is not Jewish according to Halakhic (orthodox) law. Bloom’s Hungarian half-Jewishness is commented on when Bloom enters the Hungarian Jewish butcher shop, owned by Dlugacz, the Hungarian Jewish Zionist who sells treyf (pork). Bloom is a Jew who eats non-Kosher and an Irishman who does not drink. Davison argues that Bloom’s lack of ability to participate in the pub culture of Ireland and his timid “feminized” Jewishness renders him a fragmented outsider, perfectly encapsulating the fragmenting identities at work in the new modernist literature. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom echoes a new eroticized Jewish archetype that David Biale traces as emerging in European Jewish literature at the time in which eroticism and enlightenment were linked. Jewish identity was eroticized of a complex process of reclamation of the diaspora. 107 This conflation between a hybridized and eroticized Jewish fracture and the new bodies of modernity would continue to produce a sexualized Jewish body throughout the 20th century. Yet, in keeping with the modernist tradition, this identity would frequently be produced through code and absence. MODERNISM AND “ANTI-TRINITY” Nearly a hundred years later, in the 1960s, Isaiah Berlin began to outline the parameters of locating this sort of performed and coded “Jewishness” in figures of the late 19th century. Berlin argued that the relationship between Jewish identity and modernism occupied a space neither overtly textual, nor entirely absent. Because of the 107 David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press Berkeley, 1997), 7. 61 threats of modernity, Jewishness became coded in biography, located between the tropes of nativist European Christendom and the new sciences of modernity. 108 Berlin drew this connection by placing the seemingly disparate figures of Disraeli and Marx into conversation. 109 Berlin argued that Disraeli’s Sephardic Jewish past was a fictionalized satire of the often aggrandizing histories proclaimed by the braggart English nobleman. For Marx, Berlin noted that an account of his historical Jewish lineage is nearly completely absent from his work Berlin problematized the notion of reducing Marx, Disraeli, or any of the other key figures of the period as “Jewish” thinkers simply because they were born Jewish. Berlin writes, “(w)e do not speak of Francis Bacon or John Stuart Mill or Russell as Christian thinkers, however dissident; should we, nevertheless, look upon Husserl or Bergson or Freud as Jewish thinkers in some special sense?” 110 This question continues to challenge scholars. Berlin realized that Marx and Disraeli are intellectually incongruous and philosophically disparate; Disraeli sought entrance into bourgeois society; Marx sought its overthrow. Yet Berlin argued that there was a shared act of self- inscription found in the work of both thinkers. The secular Disraeli invented a lavish Jewish back-story to describe his family’s origins. Karl Marx, a descendant from a long line of orthodox rabbis, left behind a large body of work in which his Jewish lineage and childhood are nearly completely absent. Berlin terms Marx’s absence of Jewish 108 Isaiah Berlin, "Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity." Against The Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), 252-255. 109 Berlin first introduced this perspective in a lecture entitled “Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity,” delivered to the Jewish Historical Society in 1967. 1967 was a key year in transforming understandings of the role of Jewish identity in Christian society, as I will argue in chapter four. 110 Berlin, Against the Current, 254 62 references a “systematic omission.” 111 Berlin pinpoints this mythic (re)invention of one’s past as an act of coded Jewish agency. Berlin argues that Marx’s absent biography echoes the entanglement of identity that Disraeli’s father posited about Jews and Christians in the 1830s. Locating Jewishness within code, rather than presence, can be seen as an act of protection. Marx may have simply feared rejection of his manifestos by anti-Semites. But for Berlin, these acts of biography by Marx and Disraeli, the former absent, the latter fictive, were not simply about anti-Semitism. They were a distinct articulation of identity on its own terms. In this understanding, Disraeli’s modernist “blank page” is actually not blank at all. It is simply folkloric, not textualized. This “blank” identity, forcing us to read between the lines, defines the liminal Jewish coded identity that would operate throughout much of the first half of the 20th century. In an article in The Atlantic on the reissue of Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, Christopher Hitchens noted that a central component of 20th century anti- Semitism was the “notion of the Jews’ lack of rooted allegiance: their indifference to the wholesome loyalties of the rural, the hierarchical, and the traditional, and their concomitant attraction to modernity.” 112 Hitchens’s link between anxieties of Jewish loyalty to the nation-state and the inherent threat of modernity is, of course, nothing revelatory. But Hitchens introduces an underexplored component of these anxieties that locate in the collective signifier of Jewish intellectualism as an assault on Christian 111 Ibid. P. 279 112 Christopher Hitchens, “The 2,000-Year-Old Panic,” The Atlantic, March 2008. 63 cohesion. The Jew was not just seen as carrier of biological disease, as eugenicists of the time were arguing, but also a carrier of the threat of modernist thought. Hitchens quotes from the memoir of persecuted Argentinean Jewish newspaper editor Jacobo Timerman to note how Freud, Marx and Einstein, the three most famous scholars of the late 19 th and early 20 th Centuries, were received in places such as Argentina. Timerman argued that the ideas produced by these thinkers, in toto, no matter how different they were on the merits, collectively fueled a rise of anti-Semitism in Argentina which saw Christianity itself under assault. Timerman suggested why: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space. 113 The notion of thinkers as diverse as Freud, Marx, and Einstein collectively representing a Jewish assault on Christonormative hierarchy reminds us that reception is not always tied to the merits of thought. Hitchens describes Timerman as invoking the “three cosmopolitan surnames” which, together, form what Hitchens terms the “anti- Trinity.” 114 The circulation of the impact of the ideas of Freud, Marx and Einstein can be parsed distinctive of the particulars of their scholarship. The “anti-Trinity” concept suggests how a discourse circulates based not on thought, but of Jewish thinkers as harbingers of a modernist assault on Christonormativity itself. Together, Freud, Marx, and Einstein form a Jewish intellectual colonization in response to the spatial colonization of the Christian colonizers of the 17-19 th Centuries. Citing ethnographer 113 Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (London: University of Wisconsin Press: 1981), 130. via Hitchens 2008. 114 Ibid. 64 Rebecca West, Hitchens quotes Lamb’s statement that “primitive peoples” could “know only the fortifying idea of religion,” and that Jews were, collectively, introducing the “disintegrating ideas of skepticism.” 115 In 1919, Einstein himself acknowledged the undeniable fact that his own identity was impacting the reception of his work. Einstein quipped, “By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers; today in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be represented as a bête noire, the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!” 116 In his joke, Einstein makes an interesting double entendre. By appropriating his own use of the concept of “relativity” to “the taste of readers,” Einstein makes light of the relative nature of Jewish identity in the wake of the new sciences he represented. Einstein connects the destabilizing shift in modern physics with his own destabilizing role as a Jewish figure on the national stage. 117 To Einstein, his identity cannot be aligned with a nation-state. Instead, “Einstein” becomes as much a contested and relative construction as are his theories of the universe. For the intellectual Jews emerging on the global stage, this entanglement between identity and nationality was marked precisely by destabilization. With the rise of Hitler in the early 1930s, Freud and Einstein’s struggles with Jewish identity expelled them from Europe, and led them into expatriate status. When 115 Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Journey Through Yugoslavia (London: Penguin Books, 2007) xxxvi. via Hitchens 116 Albert Einstein, The London Times, (November 28, 1919), via The New Quotable Einstein, Ed. Alice Calaprice, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) 117 For more on Einstein’s understanding of masculinity and biography informing the reception of his work, see Three Winters in the Sun: Einstein in California, Labyrinth Project: Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California, 2005 65 the eighty-two year old Freud was forced to leave Vienna for London, the Vienna Nazi Party criticized the entire field of psychoanalysis as a “pornographic Jewish specialty.” 118 Founders of the Frankfurt school, including the Jewish-born intellectuals Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, spent the Hitler years struggling to come to terms with Herzl’s Zionist movement and its call for all European Jews to move to Palestine. As academics and scholars, their hopes for a universal acceptance of their critical theories regarding the ideologies of the culture industry found itself caught in oscillation between a Jewish essentialist discourse and a universal multiculturalism. Some, such as Benjamin, had positioned his work only along Marxian class critiques. Others, such as Arendt, Buber, and Scholem, wondered aloud if Max Nordau was right. European Jews wondered if they would ever be able to resolve their status in an emerging modernity led by the rise of Hitler. Since Berlin’s important work theorizing the reading of Jewish identity in absence, scholars have continued to explore the work of Jewish intellectuals of the 18 th , 19 th and early 20th century for systematic omission of Jewish identity. About Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Walter Kaufmann notes that it is a book “steeped in Judaism” without once explicitly mentioning the Jewish religion, yet frequently mentioning Buddha, the Gospels, and numerous other references to non-Jewish religions. 119 Like Marx, Buber’s intellectual work so clearly avoids any mention of his Jewishness, it becomes a form of structuring absence. The fact Buber’s seminal work focused on the 118 “Freud Leaves Vienna for London Refuge, Declaring He Plans to Come Here Later” Associated Press, 5 June 1938. <http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2026386/posts> 119 Walter Kaufman, introduction to I and Thou by Martin Buber (New York: Touchstone, 1970), 32. 66 constructions of distinction within identity speaks even more to the necessity for scholars to read Jewish identity on the coded level. The specific relationship between a scholar’s intellectual output and his Jewish identity is, of course, varied and complex. Marx may genuinely have not seen his Judaism as relevant. Disraeli’s playful flights of fancy may simply have been his inner romance novelist continuing to ply his trade on the political stage. But, at least for Berlin, there is a historical lineage of Jewish thinking that connects precisely through textual absence. It is an understanding of the Jew of early modernity who hides in plain sight, using the culture industry as his cloaking device. 120 Berlin argued that Marx and Disraeli did not find common cause in the specifics of their ideas. Instead, the connection is located in each figure’s efforts to manipulate and reinvent their familial back-stories in service of the credibility of their work on the global stage. This act of historiographical reinvention rewrites their past with an eye towards their future. Those scholars who choose to carry on in their name, either biologically, in terms of children (via their choice in a partner/spouse), or academically in terms of their anointed successor, would be affected by the proverbial Jewish question. Marx’s selection of a non-Jewish German, Friedrich Engels, to be his intellectual heir, can be seen as an effort to universalize his work so it would transcend ghettoization. 121 The act of proactive expansion, the idea that one’s work can be the “blank page” between 120 For many centuries of European persecution, this is how Jews operated. Conversion to Christianity, usually a formality, was mandatory for acceptance into European culture. But the emergence of the “cosmopolitan Jew,” the Jewish flâneur, in the late 19th century, was very much a distinct concept produced at the vanguard of intellectual and artistic dandyism. 121 Marx’s efforts went for naught. The notion of Communism as a Jewish movement has fueled may anti- Communist movements for over a century. 67 worlds, requires that the work not be marked as singularly “Jewish.” This occurs when the work is advocated by non-Jewish “heirs,” either familial or intellectual. In Vienna, from a Fin de Siècle filled with Jewish scholars, we find another example. Rejecting his many Jewish practitioners of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud sought out the Swedish Carl Jung to anoint as his successor, before their subsequent falling out. Were these thinkers practicing a form of Jewish/non-Jewish coupling to position their work for a more universalized reception? Berlin argues that this type of overdetermined reading may not be fair, but nor can it be completely ignored. We cannot simply assume Freud’s embrace of Jung was due to Jung’s non-Jewish identity. But nor can we dismiss it as a possibility. Coupling, whether intellectual or sexual, was a key configuration for the European Jew of the late 19 th and early 20 th Centuries. Benjamin Disraeli, arguably the first major European Jewish figure of modernity, implicitly understood this. Unlike Marx and Freud, Disraeli’s key partner during his political rise was his wife, Mary Ann Lewis. THE JEWISH VAMPIRIC What is the connection between Jewish identity and the sexual body? Judith Halberstam has traced the centrality of medieval anti-Semitism as a foundational myth structure of 19th century gothic horror in texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Citing Kristeva’s work on anti-Semitic fantasy, Halberstam distills the psychology of Gothic horror as responding to anxieties of a supernatural Jewish body. 122 Frankenstein’s new-science monster and Dracula’s bloodsucking predator both pull from classic Jewish stereotypes including the Blood 122 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 18. 68 Libel, the Golem myth of Prague, and understandings of European Jewry as rootless, diseased and parasitic upon the nation-state. Building off Sander Gilman’s work on race-based anxieties of physiognomy, Halberstam articulates a distinct erotic/exotic alignment within these horror narratives. Halberstam writes that “technologies of monstrosity are always also technologies of sex.” 123 The Jewish body, as with Dracula and Frankenstein, was able to “condense many monstrous traits into one body.” 124 Sexually predatorial Jewish figures appeared throughout 19th century literature. Daniel Pick describes George Du Maurier’s hugely successful 1894 novel about a hypnotic Svengali, Trilby, as similarly expressing an eroticized and fetishized fear of supernatural Jewish mind control. 125 But perhaps the most famous invocation of this stereotype is seen in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838), in which the amoral Jewish sewer dwelling Fagin recruits Christian children and corrupts them to do his will. David Hirsch, like Halberstam working off Sander Gilman, notes that the perversion of Fagin’s interest in young Christian children is a barely coded sexual metaphor. Hirsch argues that Dickens likens Fagin to the prostitutes who trade sexual favors for money. Only Fagin’s deviancy focuses not on adults, but the amoral and sexualized corruption of innocent Christian children. 126 By the time of Mein Kampf, written in 1922, Adolf Hitler rejected Proust and Joyce’s modernist reframing of Jewish cosmopolitanism by reviving the Jewish 123 Ibid., 88. 124 Ibid., 88. 125 Daniel Pick, “Svengali and the Fin-de-Siècle,” Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 107. 126 David Hirsch, “Dickens’s Queer ‘Jew’” Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 318-320. 69 stereotypes of the Gothic Horror tradition. Hitler likened Jews to a vampiric biological national blood poison. The solution to the “Jewish problem” became what Hitler euphemizes as the “elimination of the Marxist poison from our national body.” 127 Hitler’s metaphors of the “national body” presented Marxism as “Jewish” thinking, a form of corporeal corruption via a Dracula metaphor of blood poison. Hitler invoked the ancient notion of Jewish sexual deviancy rending the fabric of society from within, but did so by invoking Gothic Horror traditions, and rejecting the literary figures of Proust and Joyce. Hitler also aligned modernism as a Jewish contagion using technology, and particularly the cinema, to spread its disease sexually, writing, “(o)ur whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and stimulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters…” 128 Hitler equates Jews with sexual deviancy. Mein Kampf marks Jews as an army of Fagins and vampires, sexual perverts and prostitution peddlers. The monstrous Jewish sexual pervert/predator no longer needed to literally prey on Christian children. He did so via the new mass media of cinema. Modernists such as Proust and Joyce used Jewish sexuality to challenge this demonization. As Hitler understood, positioning Jews as sexual deviants signified the encroaching dangers of technological voyeurism offered by the cinema by aligning technology with the Jewish body. The response, by the modernists, multiculturalists, and progressives, was to reclaim Jewish sexuality in the realm of Christian-Jewish coupling. The battleground over the cosmopolitan Jewish body of the early 20th century was 127 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 680. 128 Ibid., 254. 70 established through centuries of anti-Semitism. To reclaim the Jewish body, the response would also have to take place in the sexual realm. CONCLUSION So how did the modernist construction of the European Jew influence early Hollywood? The Jewish moguls were quite aware of suspicions of Jewish influence in mass media. Their response manifested in a collective desire to produce Hollywood films bathed in pro-American patriotism. 129 The Jewish backgrounds of Adolf Zukor, Carl Laemmle, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Sam Goldwyn, and the Warner Brothers can be read as influencing the “Jewishness” of the films they produced. Apocryphal tales of Jewish studio heads rejecting actors for looking “too Jewish” inform the legend. 130 Hollywood’s Jewish founders were seen as either afraid to sell overtly Jewish stories to non-Jewish America, or self-hating Jews who wanted nothing to do with their diaspora past. 131 But, as Neal Gabler points out, the most notable connection found among the Jewish moguls was not located in their European Jewish background, but in their “absolute rejection” of this shared past. 132 Gabler describes Hollywood moguls desperate to prove their worth as Americans through the abject rejection of both their Jewish identities and their European roots. 133 129 Neal Gabler, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (USA: First Anchor Books, 1988), 129. 130 David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers, 2 nd Edition (USA: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 1-2 131 It is important to draw a distinction between Hollywood cinema and the thriving Yiddish theater and film industries, that operated in their own spheres of production and reception. For more see J. Hoberman’s Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds, (New England: Dartmouth College Press, 1991) 132 Gabler, Empire of their Own, 36. 133 Ibid., 37 71 Accusations that Hollywood was a place for Jews to influence, and corrupt, Christians remained a tension point for the entirety of the 20th century. As recently as 2004, Catholic League president Bill Donohue stated on national television that Hollywood is “controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity.” 134 Donohue’s verbalization was shocking in its blunt brevity, but it was certainly nothing new. Fears of “Jewish” Hollywood informed everything from the creation of the Production Code by the Catholic League in the early 1930s to the McCarthy investigations of the 1950s. The fact that the most powerful mass communication tool of the 20th century subsequently became controlled by a single American minority group, and specifically one that wasn’t Christian, simply ratcheted historical anxieties to new levels. In Hollywood cinema (and eventually in television), the Christian-Jewish coupling was a response to these sorts of accusations. Just as Disraeli had selected Mary Anne Lewis to prove his British bonafides, and Proust and Joyce privileged Jewish protagonists as figures of a multicultural modernity, the Hollywood moguls followed suit. Jewish representations in cinema of the 1910s and 1920s first appeared in escapist and progressive ghetto love stories, as well as slapstick and hopeful immigrant comedies. Jews on film were rarely overtly religious (unless performing in comic stereotype), and always assimilationist. By the late 1920s, the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative had become a celebrated framework in Hollywood. Films such as The Jazz Singer (1927), Surrender (!927), Private Izzy Murphy (1928), and Abie’s Irish Rose (1928), told comic 134 “Scarborough Country,” MSNBC, 8 December 2004. < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6685898/ns/msnbc_tv-about_msnbc_tv/t/scarborough-country- dec/#.T4oFr6tSSSo> 72 love stories that defined the American assimilation myth in a multicultural context. This configuration was able to challenge European boundaries placed around the national- historical, the sexually normative, and the traditional gender roles of the Victorian era. Following Disraeli, these films of immigrant assimilation became acts of self-inscription through myth-making. Collectively, they served as Hollywood’s response to European eugenics-based hysteria over Jewish biological deviancy. They also responded to the spike in American nativist xenophobia of the 1920s. In Hollywood, Christian-Jewish coupling would become not only multiculturalism’s dream of generational healing through the power of Hollywood myth making, but also an invocation of the specters of nativist European trauma. Zola’s championing of Dreyfus in 1898, like Oskar Schindler saving the Jews for Spielberg in Schindler’s List (1993) nearly a century later, offered the coupling of Jew and Christian as a united force for modernity’s best hopes for global reconciliation. This coupling framework resolves the dangers posed by the new thinkers, the Freud/Marx/Einstein Anti-Trinity that had provoked so much anxiety in Christian nations. It is here, in this configuration, that Hollywood cinema of the early 20th century found its emancipatory coupling narrative not in isolation, but as an entangled construction with the Christonormative power structure. The European Jew challenged, desired to be a part of, and was ultimately exiled from this world, only to be reborn in the hopeful myth-making factory created by the immigrant diaspora that had left to reinvent themselves in America. 73 CHAPTER TWO JACKALS, APES AND JAZZ SINGERS: TECHNOLOGY AND METAPHOR 1905-1935 “But still I often sit and think, what would this country be, if we hadn't men like Rosenstein and Hughes. You'd surely have a Kingdom, there'd be no democracy. If it wasn't for the Irish and the Jews.” – “If it Wasn’t For the Irish and the Jews”, 1912 135 Siegfried Kracauer observes two conflicting and paradoxical perspectives that emerged in the earliest days of cinema in the 1890s. The first is cinema’s ability to capture the real, as seen in the “actualities” presented by the Lumière Brothers in their travelogue films of 1895-1897. The second is a cinema of the imaginative, as seen in the magic-trick shorts of Méliès in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The contrast of the Lumière and Méliès perspectives combined to form what Krakauer describes as a Hegelian dialectic between “thesis” and “antithesis.” 136 This tension continues through cinema today: Is cinema a tool for capturing life as it is? Or transforming life into what we wish it could be? If we accept Krakauer’s contention of dialectic between indexicality and the imaginative, then the cinematic body, both indexical and performative, becomes a key negotiation point. A performer’s body can perform. It can occupy a space of artificial construction. But a body can also remain as an indexical object, a body-as-body. For the cinematic performer of the 1910s, these issues became foregrounded by the developing narrative language. Performers first emerged as “types,” easily identified and often 135 Song lyric from the 1912 hit song, If It Wasn’t For the Irish and the Jews, performed by Billy Murray and written by Tin Pan Alley partners William Jerome and Gene Schwartz. 136 Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960), 30. 74 stereotypical bodies. But as performance and narrative developed into long-form storytelling in the 1910s, the film body became increasingly complex, an expression of the tensions of modernist thought and biological theory. The early appearances of Christian-Jewish love stories in American media speak to Krakauer’s dialectical framework by negotiating just such eugenics-based anxieties. Jewish representations in early 20th century cinema begin with this dialectic. As narrative language first formed, and sound eventually became introduced, Hollywood cinema of the 1910s and 1920s produced a Jewish “body” caught between worlds; old and new, fictive and truthful, European and American (or Israeli). The construction of the “Jew” of early cinema was a body caught between identities in the age of eugenics (animal and human). Michael Rogin argues that Jews performed this tension through blackface minstrelsy, a process that externalized the liminal status of American Jews into a comic satire of the black/white binary. In so doing, American Jews were able to leave the imposition of European eugenic classification behind, emerging fully Americanized. 137 This chapter will trace how American cinema negotiated, and solved, the tension of Jewish alterity through these Christian-Jewish coupling narratives. As Franz Kafka satirized in his first short stories, European Jews had become singularly privileged as the performing Other, the “animal” mimicking the “human” while unable to shed the deviant body imposed in a European context. European Jewry was facing increasing anti-Semitic backlash from a biological perspective as deviant bodies. Kafka’s solution was to code 137 Michael Rogin, Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), 112. 75 the Jew in modernist cloaking. American Jews found a different solution through the transformative power of the new medium of cinema. In the speaking, singing, dancing and joking comedic Jewish-American performers of the early 20th century – Al Jolson, George Jessel, George Burns, Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, et. al. -- we find Kafka’s Ape performing not as an academic, but as entertainer. The Ghetto Love Stories of the 1910s and 1920s introduced Christian-Jewish couplings became the central methodology of transformation, an American assimilation myth template. Films as diverse as The Yiddisher Boy (1909), Judith of Bethulia (1914), The Cohens and the Kellys serials (1905-1936), and the personas of the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin presented the Jewish immigrant transformed, via the apparatus of cinematic reinvention, into the American. By the late 1920s, in the films Surrender (1927), The Jazz Singer (1927), and Abie’s Irish Rose (1928), the Christian-Jewish love story peaked as the central narrative framework ushering in the transition from silent cinema to sound. But this journey contained a central caveat; the American Jew could only shed his alterity at the moment he chose the Christian partner. Whether Jackals, Apes, Jazz Singers, or Ghetto Jewesses, the first cinematic voices of modernity would be the voice of the American body liberated from the paradoxes of European crisis. Kafka’s Ape, Insect, Jackal and Accused, freed from the Penal Colony and Castle became transformed, in the mythical and imaginative Amerika, into the fully cinematic and completely Westernized American. This tension between European antiquity and American modernity roots most distinctively in the crises and metaphors of the eroticized and exoticized coupling: The Christian/Jewish love story. 76 TALKING JACKALS In 1917, at the age of twenty four, Kafka enjoyed his first major publishing success when Martin Buber published two of Kafka’s short stories in Buber’s German language periodical, Der Jude (“The Jew”). In A Report to the Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie) and Jackals and Arabs (Schakale und Araber) Kafka satirized the arbitrary borders constructed between humanity and animality, identity and language, by featuring the metaphor of the talking animal. Like Joyce, Proust, and many other modernists of the era the stories explored the subjective constructions of identity. While Joyce and Proust used the “half-Jewish” protagonist to signify nationalist versus cosmopolitanism, Kafka introduced the parable of the animal-human hybrid. In A Report to the Academy, Kafka introduces a talking ape named “Red Peter.” After being captured from his native habitat in Africa and educated by his captors, Red Peter had acquired language, culture and self awareness. Yet Red Peter’s Enlightment came at the cost of realizing his own fixed biological alterity as an ape. Red Peter delivers this tragic revelation in the form an academic lecture to a room full of scholars. Red Peter explains what he has learned, as both a mimic and an eternal outsider, to the human condition. Theodor Herzl’s Zionist movement, gaining steam at the time throughout Europe, offered a similar corrective in the political realm. Kafka’s parables located this crisis as metaphor in the notion of the talking animal. Could the modern Jew survive in modern European nation-states? Herzl argued that they could not. Herzl believed that European Jewry, no matter how assimilated, was fundamentally incapable of surviving in an increasingly hostile, nativist and anti-Semitic Europe and must look to the imagined 77 landscape of Palestine/Israel for true emancipation. 138 The alignment between the Zionist project and modernist literature of the time was unmistakable, so much so that it became a central thesis of Hitler’s critique of the culture industry. Buber probed this by championing works of modernist literature that thematized the Jewish question within larger frameworks of fragmentation and identity crisis. 139 For Buber and Herzl, this shift in Jewish identity was rooted in both a spatially geographic move (from Europe to Palestine or the United States), but also, as Daniel Boyarin points out, a transformation of Jewish masculinity from its status as passive and feminine. 140 Post-Dreyfus 20th century Europe, with its emergent race-based biological determinations found in the pseudo-science of eugenics, had begun to view the Jew as an inhuman contagion; an alien within the body-politic of the nation. This central tension of the Zionist movement was rooted in the solving of the unsolvable, a Jewish Paradox, what Sander Gilman describes as the “desirable but inherently impossible” location of Jewish normativity. 141 Kafka’s stories reflect these tensions of Jewish identity by mapping the transnational doublings of Zionism (the Jew as both European and Palestinian) onto the biological doublings of the body. Specifically: Kafka’s animal/human hybrid. 138 For more on this see Eyal Chowers, The political philosophy of Zionism: trading Jewish words for an Hebraic land. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 139 Ramar Garb notes that painting and sculpture of the period similarly played with “disguise and display,” producing meaning in what is unseen as much as what is seen. Tamar Garb, Bodies of modernity: figure and flesh in fin-de-siècle France (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 111. 140 Daniel Boyarin argues that confronting masculine Jewish passivity was as central to the Zionist project as the desire to form an actual homeland in Palestine. See Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct. 141 Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient, (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 13. 78 Red Peter is the satirical embodiment of the anti-Semite’s image of the Jewish animal. Fears of Jews “hiding” in the academy saw Jews as a form of intellectual pathogen. This concept is crucial to understanding Red Peter. Sander Gilman argues that Kafka engages a complex European biological framework in which a “Jewish fin de siècle writer’s modernity is inseparable from his allegedly diseased nature.” 142 Walter Sokel agrees, arguing that the privileged status of Red Peter exists precisely because Red Peter is a “member of an alien species, showing an eager willingness to become human.” 143 The dual status of Red Peter as ape/man is what Sokel terms “the simultaneity of two identities – one original and one acquired.” 144 The tensions between alterity and normativity embodied the crisis at the heart of emancipated European Jewry. Red Peter demonstrates a desire to emulate (and educate) his human captors, yet it is by remaining as an ape, as the Other, that Red Peter finds applause and appreciation on behalf of his human audience. 145 In Jackals and Arabs, Kafka presents a story of desert confrontation about to take place between sleeping Arabs and bloodthirsty desert jackals being witnessed by our anonymous (presumably fully human) narrator. The jackals make an appeal to the human witness/narrator for help with their situation. However, just as for Red Peter, whatever benefits language might offer to the jackals, bestial qualities ultimately betray the Jackals. The Arabs trick them into feasting on a camel carcass, an animal impulse they are unable to resist. The duplicitous nature of the Arabs and confused appeals of the hapless Jackals 142 Ibid. P. 12. 143 Walter Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 281. 144 Ibid., 282. 145 Ibid., 283. 79 are self-reflexive stereotypes of the relational Orientalist Otherness that exoticized both Jews and Arabs in early 20th century Europe. They are also barely coded critiques of the confusion of the Zionist movement. For both Red Peter and the Jackals, Kafka shows how language itself isn’t enough to overcome the bestial nature. But these stories are not universal parables. They are distinct commentaries on the crisis of European Jewish identity. In both stories, the inalienable corporeal otherness of the animal prevents ascension into a fully human state no matter how many attributes of “being human” the animal mimics. 146 While neither story textually identifies these characters as Jewish, Kafka invokes ancient Jewish stereotypes of the Blood Libel (Jackals) and cosmopolitan intellectualism (Red Peter) to ground his metaphors in a distinct iconography. Red Peter is the ape-man deviant masquerading as modernist intellectual in the academy. Red Peter mocks the stereotypes of The Protocols of Zion forgery circulating in Europe. The fear of hidden Jews spreading Jewish-Marxist thought in higher education is, for Kafka, rendered absurdist in the form of a talking ape. Likewise, the Jackals parodied the cliché of the predatory Jewish animal hunting non-Jews when they’re asleep. Kafka was not alone in musing on the animal as metaphor. The uncanny function of the animal was a central precept of modernist art and literature throughout the early 146 According to Gilman and Sokel, Kafka plays out these tensions through three discourses: 1) Spatially/Geographically: For the Jackals, as a European-to-American/Palestinian trajectory engaging the tensions of Zionism, and for Red Peter , as an incomplete and flawed colonial progression narrative from savage African to civilized European. 2) Performatively: In both stories, the utility function of the observed other/alien/animal who is privileged to perform to help the observer understand his own humanity. 3) Linguistically: As a commentary on the emerging philosophical and literary understandings of the limitations of language, a crisis highlighted by the non-human or partial-human seeking linguistic agency where corporeal agency has been denied. 80 20th century. Akira Lippit describes this period as philosophy’s “last stand against the swelling tide of psychology and technology.” 147 In Lippit’s study of Heidegger’s interrogation of the world of the animal, Lippit notes that Heidegger’s central precept separating the world of the human and the animal was located in the role and function of speech. For Heidegger, the moment of speaking conjures not only an awareness of death, but an awareness of the self as distinctive from that of the worldless (and deathless) animal. 148 Walter Sokel argues that the only resolution Kafka provides for this paradox is outside of a European context entirely. The solution for the hybrid European body is emancipation into the liberated framework of an imagined “America” as seen in Kafka’s Der Verschollene (Amerika). 149 Sander Gilman has shown how centuries of anxiety in Western Christendom focus on the power of language, both written and spoken, as possessing mystical Jewish power. Christian fears of Jews using hidden or double language spoke to anxieties of Jewish infiltration into Christian society. The Jew, as Gilman summarizes, was seen as “possessing all languages or no language of his or her own.” 150 For Kafka, talking animals function as the modernist response to Heidegger’s binary between human and animal located in the power of the voice. Kafka’s animal-voice, a Jewish double-voice, provides the very solution for European Jewish identity cloaked in the tension it describes. Sokel describes the centrality of this paradox to Kafka’s work as Kafka’s “two 147 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 55. 148 Ibid., 57. 149 Ibid., 280. 150 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 12. 81 selves.” 151 In the speaking animal, both human and not-human, Kafka rejects any singular Nietzschean concept of binaries between human and animal as part of the ascension to an enlightened state of purity. Instead, Kafka positions the fractured, liminal and hybrid animal/human paradox, as a paradoxical body; the new body of modernity. Kafka’s Red Peter configuration would emerge in American cinema not as an ostracized animal, but as the celebrated and eroticized ethnic. The “bestial” sexuality that held Red Peter back became, in cinema, the erotic component of an immigrant progression narrative. We see this in the “animalized” sexuality of the exotic ethnic lover. THE “LATIN LOVERS” In Hollywood cinema of the 1910s and 1920s, the ethnic male performed for American mass culture as Red Peter had for the academy. Exoticized ethnics performed an unbridled primitive sexuality that white, normative Victorian-era Americans could not. The ethnic male became the embodiment of immigrant alterity, a figure that marked the limits of cultural containment in an effort to teach the spectator about the boundaries between normative and deviant. We see this play out nearly a decade after Kafka’s apes and jackals in the most famous eroticized and fetishized body of the silent era, Rudolph Valentino. Valentino was one of a number of erotically charged ethnic stars of the silent era, including the African-American Paul Robeson and the Japanese-American Sessue Hayakawa. Valentino’s famous shirtless torture scenes in The Sheik (1921) codified the voyeurism of the exotic ethnic male body. Valentino became the first truly international silent film sex symbol after starring in films such as The Four Horsemen of the 151 Walter Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 69. 82 Apocalypse (1921), The Sheik (1921) and Son of the Sheik (1926). The power of Valentino’s erotic pull was seen when Valentino suddenly died, in 1926. Valentino’s death, just before the release of The Son of the Sheik in 1926, gave the film a necro-erotic charge that make it a box office sensation. 152 Valentino’s funeral, in 1926, mere months before Son of the Sheik was released, created newspaper images of thousands of hysterical women throwing themselves on the coffin as the young movie star was laid to rest. Miriam Hansen argues that Valentino’s entire career “became a function of the discourse on female sexuality, compounded by the transgressive appeal of his ethnic otherness and deviant masculinity.” 153 Valentino’s hold on the American public’s imagination had been a complex and mediated construction, as his French and Italian heritage were removed from his biography, replaced by the vague title, “The Latin Lover.” Valentino’s death at the age of thirty-one became the first major national media event to demonstrate the visceral and spontaneous cultural power of the new medium of cinema to unleash a collective societal sexual frenzy. Nearly one hundred thousand mostly female spectators swarmed Valentino’s funeral procession in New York, a collective outreach unseen in pre-cinematic America. 154 The eroticization of Valentino stemmed from the highly cinematic construction of his multi-ethnic and indeterminate nature. Valentino was an ambiguously non-white movie star in Orientalist cloaking. 152 Ray B. Browne and Pat Browne, ed. The Guide to United States Popular Culture (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 867. 153 Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) 18. 154 Elizabeth Guider, “Showbiz swooned over Valentino's demise,” Variety, Sep. 18, 2005. 83 Valentino’s eroticized visage, a dreamlike phantasm of the cinema made suddenly real by his premature death, became the first impactful example of the potency for the erotic cinematic body to negotiate the tensions between Victorian mores and the exotic/erotic liberation of the ethnic immigrant other. Neal Gabler argues that this was the central tension of silent-era Hollywood cinema. An industry founded by first generation Jewish immigrants, the themes of early cinema focused on assuaging the anxiety of an American Anglo-Saxon culture that felt undermined by the twin forces of immigrant urbanization and the new technologies of modernity. Gabler describes this as a “combat between these two Americas – one new and ascendant, the other old and declining.” 155 Valentino’s Jazz Age liberation of Victorian-era repression codified this erotic power of ethnic body to liberate, through the act of voyeurism, the power of libertine sexual mores. The sadism of The Sheik’s torture scenes and Valentino’s half naked display spoke to the power of the erotic cinematic body, as a body, to define the other along an ethnic/white dialectic. In 1926, Valentino’s “body” existed in two states simultaneously. It was cinematically spectral and alive, as the “Sheik,” and also dead and buried. This dialectic between the body and the “body,” reflected the emerging tensions within the medium itself. And it was in Valentino’s ethnic otherness, his uncontainable sexuality, that Valentino’s erotic function negotiated these tensions. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the attempt to stabilize and control male sexual desire as a form of protection of the chaste white female became the central signifier of Victorian-era nostalgia for a pre-cinematic, pre-ethnic white American past. The first to 155 Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. (New York: Doubleday, 1988) 43-44. 84 realize the entanglement between the eroticized/exoticized ethnic and Gabler’s tensions between modernity and the Victorian era was, of course, D.W. Griffith. Griffith would conflate these tensions via the ethnic body and the nostalgic past in the first massively successful feature length film, Birth of a Nation (1915). Six years before Valentino embodied the swarthy icon of libertine sexual freedom, Griffith’s depiction of the virtuous, chaste, white female under attack from the uncontained sexuality of the African- American “savage” had marked its inverse. Historian Lary May points out that Cecil B. DeMille, as well as Griffith, featured anxieties of sexual control as central to the development of early narrativity, noting that DeMille often played up “the inability of the hero to control (his) sexuality.” 156 May argues that, for DeMille, if sexual expression did take place it would inevitably lead “to the loss of will and the fall of civilization.” 157 Both Griffith and DeMille exploited the power of the voyeuristic impulse to witness the deviant sexual nature of the ethnic, primitive and sexualized male. Yet each filmmaker purportedly condemned this sexuality in interests of preserving the purity of the nation-state. Yet while the racial miscegenation anxieties of Birth of a Nation remain the most iconic remnant of ethnic sexual deviancy on display in silent cinema, Birth of a Nation was an outlier. Very few films either before or after featured such intense demonization of African-American or ethnic sexuality. Instead, complex mappings of the national- historical regarding the threat of sexual congress between “white” and “ethnic” shifted 156 Lary May, Screening Out The Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 213. 157 Ibid., 213. 85 into more palatable configurations. By the late 1910s, these discourses would codify not in the racial polemics of black/white couplings, but instead in the inter-ethnic Irish- Jewish ghetto love story. Here, erotic and exotic bodies would find transmutation in the interplay between ethnicity and whiteness within a more socially palatable framework. This was seen most famously in the minstrel performances of stars like George Jessel and Al Jolson. But it also took place in less pantomimic configurations. These ethnic love stories transformed Griffith’s and DeMille’s anxieties of the sexual ethnic into a far more palatable and less racially charged iteration. The formulation that achieved the most success of the period: the Jewish/Irish marriage comedy. THE COHENS MEET THE KELLYS Valentino was the most famous “oriental” eroticized ethnic of the 1920s. But the most popular, at least in a comic mode, were the love stories between Irish and Jews. With the explosive popularity of nickelodeons in the urban environments of major cities like New York, Boston and Chicago, it is no surprise that both Irish and Jewish stereotypes became a staple of the earliest silent film one-reelers. While many of the first filmmakers (Edison, Méliès, Smith, Porter) were developing the aesthetic potential of the medium, character depictions and/or performance beyond a simple “type” remained mostly absent. As a result, ethnicity, gender, class and race were signified through visual codes; dress, facial hair and casting. The body, and not performance or narrative, was the primary dictate of cinematic representation. By 1907, “nickel madness” was taking place in major cities like New York and reports were that one nickelodeon was generating nearly two thousand dollars in a week, the vast majority of it presumably from the 86 teeming first generation immigrant hordes who lived there. 158 As a result, overtly stereotypical Jewish characters appeared in numerous shorts of the early 1900s as the characters of Jewish vaudeville made their way into the emerging picture shows. These films included Levi and Cohen, The Irish Comedians (1903) Cohen’s Advertising Scheme (1904), Cohen and Coon (1906), and the D.W. Griffith scripted Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker (1908). By 1904, the Conniving Jew was the central example of this form of ethnic stereotype. Cohen’s Advertising Scheme (1904), presented the immigrant Jew as a clownish and greedy shop owner. Cohen tricks a passerby to purchase a large coat and, when the customer is distracted, Cohen hangs a sign advertising his store on the back. This would be the first of many “scheming merchant” comedy shorts to play in the urban markets. 159 In Cohen’s Fire Sale (1907) the now hat selling Cohen nearly goes bankrupt when his hats aren’t selling, so he creates an “accidental” fire in his shop to collect insurance money. 160 This notion of the immigrant Jewish shopkeeper as amoral and willing to do anything for a “buck” would find much traction. In 1913’s Cohen Saves the Flag, Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company embarked on a lavish civil war spectacle that rivaled D.W. Griffith’s work of the period. This time Cohen, played by pre-Chaplin Keystone star Ford Sterling, finds himself a sergeant in the Union Army. While Sterling’s portrayal of Cohen continues the stereotypes of the period, Cohen’s heroic role in saving the infantry marked the first of an emerging complexity of depiction found 158 Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A history of Movie Presentation in the United States (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 21. 159 The National Center for Jewish Film, <http://www.jewishfilm.org/Catalogue/cohenseries.htm> 160 J. Hoberman, J., and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, movies, and broadcasting. (New York: Princeton University Press, 2003), 32. 87 outside of crass stereotype. The “Cohen” character would appear in three more films, including the sound films Cohen on the Telephone (1929), Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood (1932) and Cohens and Kellys in Trouble (1933), the latter two cashing in on the highly lucrative Jewish-Irish pairings that would come to dominate the immigrant genre of the late 1920s in the wake of the smash hit play and subsequent film, Abie’s Irish Rose (1927). The Cohens and the Kellys serials played with the most basic of Jewish and Irish stereotypes. A standard American assimilation myth, Both families are brought together when their children decide to get married. These comedies of intermarriage played off culture clash not only along the Jewish/Irish axis, but that of Old World vs. New World. Two ethnic groups marked by both similarities (immigrant status) and differences (religion) allowed the humor of “odd couple” pairings to set up classic Vaudevillian shtick and set pieces. Just as for Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, the Jewish/Irish coupling combined the discourses of a declining British Empire’s Irish outsider with the western arrival of the Wandering Jew. Together, their exiles as ethnic outsiders in Europe had led them to America. But rather than assimilate into whiteness, the Cohens and Kellys find themselves quarantined by the foolish choices of their children to intermarry. The comedy of manners and riffs on stereotype only further brought into relief that even when faced with the freedom to cast off their ethnic status in the New World, the Cohens and Kellys would still find a way to screw it up. 88 The Yiddisher Boy (1909) marked a discursive shift. 161 The story of a boy named Moses who works to support his family by selling newspapers, The Yiddisher Boy describes a generational tale of Jewish/non-Jewish friendship. When another newsboy tries to rob Moses of his money, another boy, the non-Jewish Ed, helps to save him. To thank him, Moses invites Ed over for Shabbat dinner in one of the most overt cinematic sequences of the Jewish life of the early immigrants. Twenty five years later, the adult Moses, now a successful merchant, runs into Ed, now down on his luck, and offers him the best job he has. The film ends with Ed and Moses, non-Jew and Jew, going into a successful business venture together. 162 While crudely produced, The Yiddisher Boy was one of the first films to demonstrate non-stereotypical representations of Jewish immigrant life to compete with the more popular Cohen/Kelly serials of the period. The Yiddisher Boy also represents one of the first examples of successful immigration stories in which the “American dream” is achieved through hard work, loyalty and assimilation. But, just as for the Cohens and Kellys, the assimilation progression narrative was directly aligned with the relationship forged between Jew and non-Jew. In addition to the release of The Yiddisher Boy, 1909 marked a year of two key critical developments for the nascent movie and nickelodeon industries. The first was a political event, beginning on Christmas Day of 1908, in which New York mayor George B. McClellan Jr. shut down over five hundred and fifty movie theaters and nickelodeons. McClellan described this as a moral pushback against the spreading moral decay shown 161 a three minute short produced and directed in Philadelphia by Sigmund Lubin 162 The National Center for Jewish Film. <http://www.jewishfilm.org/Catalogue/cohenseries.htm> 89 in cinemas, what McClellan called “vice.” 163 Lary May notes how news of the shutdown of the mostly Jewish owned Nickelodeons, and specifically the arrest and prosecution of theater owner Jacob Weinberg for defying the order, quickly spread among the Jewish immigrant class. McClellan’s actions were seen as a Catholic-led reaction to the perceived amorality of Jewish-owned and Jewish-produced product. Griffith and DeMille’s aesthetic developments just a few years later would offer just the sort of nativist cinematic response that reflected Mayor McClellan’s concerns. McClellan’s actions were the first to position the generative function of the new cinema’s influence as sexually and defiantly at odds with Christian values. Whatever deviancy and eroticism offered by the new medium of cinema offered, it would thereafter frequently be framed as produced and distributed by an amoral and deviant Jewish merchant class. The notion of the Jewish merchant as global peddler of sexual filth was, of course, an anti-Semitic trope grounded in hundreds of years of Shylock and Fagin stereotypes. The Blood Libel, the infamous European anti-Semitic myth that Jewish families would kidnap, kill and use the blood of innocent Christian children to bake their Matzo was one of the central underpinnings of centuries of pogroms and massacres. 164 With the emergence of the exploding success of nickelodeons, vaudeville and cinema, the Jewish owned and Jewish produced proto-Hollywood infrastructure meant an alignment between anxieties of technology and anxieties of anti-Victorian sexual perversity. Considered in 163 Lary May, Screening Out The Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 43-44. 164 Ronald Florence has written a compelling book on one such example, an incident in Damascus in 1840 in which the Jewish community fell under attack after accusations they’d sacrificed a Priest as part of secret religious rituals. See Ronald Florence, Blood Libel: The Damascus Affair of 1840 (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 90 context with The Yiddisher Boy and the comedic celebrations of Jewish/Irish marriage in the Cohens and Kellys serials, the representation of Jewish sexuality in early cinema can be read as a distinctly economic, political and cultural response. The notion of Jewish sexuality as “safe” for America was also a commentary on the role of the erotic potential of cinema itself. The second major development of 1909 was the massive success of playwright Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot. Zangwill’s immigrant drama not only popularized the metaphor of America as a mixing of many European cultures, but did so through by aligning the American assimilation journey with the Christian/Jewish love story. Zangwill’s story featured a Russian-Jewish immigrant, David Quixano, hoping to write a distinctly American musical. David’s talents as a composer, and his desire to create a new “American” music, parallel the assimilation love story that drives most of the narrative. David falls in love with Vera, also Russian, but Christian and the daughter of a hateful anti-Semite. In Zangwill’s configuration, the alignment between immigration, intermarriage and the transformative nature of art to produce a new, distinctly American identity directly aligned the multiculturalist American Dream with an interfaith romance story. Vincent Brook notes that The Melting Pot quickly became the iconic popular culture text to template “the ideology upon which America’s grand narrative of assimilation was built.” 165 In Zangwill’s play we see the beginning of the distinct ideological shift in Jewish representation in theater, vaudeville and the rapidly developing early cinema expressed, very clearly, as intermarriage. The romance between the 165 Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003) 22. 91 Christian and Jew could “melt” the differences of European ethnic ghettoization and embody the new American myth. Whether a direct response to McClellan and early Catholic League suspicions of Jewish perversion and alterity or not, Zangwill’s play introduced the Christian/Jewish love story within the Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet narrative structure as a challenge to earlier cinematic tradition of vaudevillian ethnic stereotype ghettoization. Historian Patricia Erens observes this same representational shift took place in movies, mere months after Mayor McClellan’s shutdown of the Jewish-owned New York nickelodeon halls. Erens positions 1909 as the key year in which Jewish-themed films began to “juxtapose old moral and religious values, which have held Jews together for two thousand years, with the modern customs and attitudes held by the Gentile majority.” 166 Beginning with The Yiddisher Boy (1909) and carrying through the 1930s, Jewish/Christian love stories veered away from stereotype and became complex narratives about a protagonist caught in historical, cultural and romantic triangles. The resolution, the sexual “union,” marked America’s path to an ideologically inclusive “melting pot” of multicultural modernity. Erens notes that while “this choice affected entire life styles” for millions of immigrants in real life transition, “on film it was confined to selecting a suitable marriage partner.” 167 In light of McClellan’s vice squad shutdowns, the Christian/Jewish intermarriage story also worked to counter notions of Jewish sexual deviancy by reframing Jewish sexuality in the context of a romantic cinematic hero. While some of the earlier films of 166 Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 30-34. 167 Ibid. Pp. 32-33 92 this period featured Jewish-Jewish love stories, creating narrative tension along class lines, by the mid 1910s the iconography solidified as a response to McClellan’s nativist anxieties in the form of the Christian-Jewish love story. Yet it would not be the Jewish male that would combat Mayor McClellan’s fear of Jewish influence. The representation that would come to define Jewish identity in cinema in an era of increasingly hysteric Victorian-era fears of corruption would be in the form of the new icon of eroticized ethnic beauty: The “Jewess.” THE JEWESS “SURRENDERS” Valentino may have been the defining male ethnic sexual star of the silent era, but it was in the figure of the “Jewess” that eroticized female sexuality first found agency in the burgeoning medium. If cinematic deviancy was aligned with the perversity of the male Jewish merchant class, as McClellan’s war on “vice” had shown, then the cinematic response inverted the framework along gender lines; the introduction of a highly sexualized, but also noble and virtuous, Jewish female. This early genre of silent cinema is what Miriam Hansen and Patricia Erens term the “Jewish Ghetto Film.” 168 Hansen notes that Jewish Ghetto Films operated as dilemmas between an old world culture of arranged marriage and a new world desire for romantic love in which “Ghetto films emphasized a break with the anti-Semitic clichés familiar from the vaudeville stage.” 169 The tensions of these narratives were also marked along class lines as much as ethnic ones. 170 By 1910, nearly every studio was producing highly lucrative 168 Hanson, 71. 169 Ibid., 71. 170 Ibid., 72-73. 93 Jewish ghetto love stories. However Hansen observes another shift, beginning in 1913, with The Jew’s Christmas. Here, intermarriage, the generational casting off of old world Jewish values in the form of romantic interest in the non-Jew, becomes the defining staple of the Ghetto film love story. As Erens notes, it is the Jewish patriarch who must accept his daughter’s intermarriage in which the narrative tension hinges. 171 If some of the Ghetto films had an ultimate rejection of intermarriage as part of their denouement, as in A Passover Miracle (1914) and Faith of her Fathers (1914), the temptation of the non- Jewish love interest for the young Jewish female suggests an agency of Jewish female to determine the male object of beauty. The scopic female of the silent era determines her normative male beauty, just as the audience, Jew and non-Jew, gazes at the Jewish female as their object. By placing a Romeo and Juliet love story framework on the Jewish female and the non-Jewish male, audience appeal could be doubled, but a powerful progression narrative also takes place. The willingly assimilating Jewish partner belied any notion of vaudeville, the nickelodeon halls, or even early Hollywood, as a Jewish conspiracy meant to corrupt and exploit non-Jewish audiences. The reasons for this shift were also box office driven. Both Romance of a Jewess (1910) and A Child of the Ghetto (1910) negotiate a dual target audience, the urban Jewish market and the increasingly suburban non-Jewish market. Erens and Hansen explain the erotic coupling of Jewish/non-Jewish as a product of rapidly shifting modes of audience reception as cinema expanded from the coastal cities to the rest of the country. As cinema moved from the urban Jewish markets of New York and Boston to 171 Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, 30-34. 171 Ibid., 49. 94 the suburban non-Jewish rest of the country, the Jewish/Christian love story doubled spectatorial interest. Hansen notes that Jewish/Christian coupling, presented as a rejection of old world European values and a celebration of American immigrant assimilation, was a complete fiction that had no statistical bearing in audience makeup. Intermarriage rates in 1912 between Jews and non-Jews was 1.17 percent, and “scarcely exceeded that of interracial marriages at the time.” 172 Yet while Jewish/Christian marriages were as infrequent as black/white marriages statistically, their cinematic representations could not have been more starkly at odds. The sheer volume of Jewish “Ghetto Stories” far outweighed any other ethnic representation of the time. In 1913, Sidney Goldin directed two of the most complex portrayals of immigrant Jews on film, The Heart of A Jewess and The Sorrows of Israel, both for Universal. Goldin also directed perhaps the most successful Jewish Ghetto love story of this period, Bleeding Hearts or Jewish Freedom Granted by King Casimir of Poland (1913). Each of these films was successful at the box office, primarily in the lucrative urban Jewish box offices of New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Each film also featured the figure of the eroticized “Jewess.” Her coupling with non-Jewish male lovers were both voluntary and involuntary, and often in the form of a sexual sacrifice done to save the Jewish village from persecution. The Jewess became one of the defining eroticized female archetypes of cinema of the 1910s. The white female remained chaste, virginal and pure. But the “Jewess” could express an ethnic sexuality and expressively erotic body just as Valentino would in the early 1920s. 172 Ibid., 73. 95 Outside of Goldin’s work, the most notable eroticized cinematic “Jewess” of this period was depicted in D.W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914). Griffith’s first significant foray into the biblical epic tested the grounds for the multi-narrative complexities that would reach an apex in Griffith’s Intolerance just a few years later, in 1917. Judith Of Bethulia tells a Biblical-esque Esther narrative in which a young Jewish woman in a shtetl under siege must use her sexuality to seduce the Assyran general, Holofernes, to save her town from annihilation. 173 Set in a romanticized Biblical past, Judith’s sexuality aligns what Miriam Hansen terms a “fiction of erotic reciprocity.” 174 The tensions of exchange, threat of death and self sacrifice all inform the erotic tantalization of the onscreen coupling. D.W. Griffith’s famous “woman under assault” narratives from films such as Birth of a Nation (1915) exist in the popular imagination as defining Griffith’s regressive nostalgia desire for antebellum. Yet in Judith of Bethulia, female sexuality is not only empowered, it is expressed in service to a noble, self- sacrificial goal. This suggests Griffith did not hold objections to the notion of the sexualized female seeking at least a variation of miscegenation coupling. Griffith was not the first to invoke the Jewess figure as erotic in nature. The “Jewess,” as a sexual figure of beauty and longing, traces back to the stereotype appearing in many of the dime novels of the 1850s and 1960s. 175 Denatured of any alignment with the crisis of American modernity, the Jewish female seems to offer Griffith what the Christian female could not; the ability to perform sexual acts to save 173 Edward Wagenknecht, The Movies in the Age of Innocence (New York: Ballentine Books, 1962), 84. 174 Miriam Hansen, Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in the American Silent Film, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991) 229. 175 Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 335. 96 one’s life. In just a few short years, the stereotype of Jewish cliché had been replaced by complex romantic love stories. This relocated the cinematic Jew from the realm of “stereotype” into more complex representations just as cinematic structure itself began to develop a more coherent narrative language. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, produced just a year later, seemed to counter this alignment between formal innovation and melting pot progression narrative. But in Judith of Bethulia, Griffith had presented a more emancipated view of female sexuality in which the Jewess figure operated as a sort of mid-point between the Birth of a Nation binaries of white, Christian chastity and African- American primitive bestiality. The Jewish female, unlike Griffith’s southern belle, was neither passive nor acquiescent. Judith’s self sacrificing decision to seeking out sexual congress with the white, Christian male in power was not seen as defiling, but as heroic. Griffith’s use of the Jewess as exhibiting a sexual freedom denied to the Christian female had pre-cinematic roots in American entertainment. Karen Brodkin notes that the raunchy, highly sexed up Jewess was a staple of Yiddish theater and Yiddish throughout the 1910s and into 20s, with celebrated in stars like Fannie Brice, Frances Marion, Vera Gordon, Molly Picon and Sophie Tucker as a sort of “red hot mama” Jewish parallel to “African American mothers of the blues.” 176 Brodkin’s framework positions the sexualized Jewess as a privileged coded signifier invoking and subverting the tropes of the stereotypical African-American female. This aligns the Jewess stereotype with the Al Jolson and George Jessel minstrel act, and places Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia and Birth of a Nation in an even more interesting racial and gender counterpoint. 176 Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America, (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 126. 97 The seductions of non-Jewish men by Jewish women continued to play a complex cinematic role into the 1920s. In his analysis of Pail Wegener and Carl Boese’s 1920 silent film The Golem: How He Came into the World, Omer Bartov observes the complex portrayal of the Jewish seductress as a modernist liberation fantasy. After noting the Golem’s tender scene picking up a young, blond Aryan child in the playgrounds of Prague, Bartov points out that the character of Miriam Loew, the daughter of Prague’s rabbi, is caught by the Golem after having seduced the Aryan knight, Florian. As Bartov notes, “(s)ex and the Jews, the threat posed by Jewish women and men to the natural order of things and the transformation that sexual intercourse with gentiles entails, are at the center of cinematic imagination from its very cradle…” 177 The fact that Miriam Loew, daughter of the famed Prague rabbi who invented The Golem that saved the Jews from annihilation, seeks out Florian, the pinnacle of non-Jewish masculinity, suggests the power of eroticized Christian/Jewish couplings as metaphor for the American assimilation myth. Many of these films were also taking on the growing global anti-Semitism. By 1918, the Bolshevik revolution in Russian had inspired a new round of mistrust for eastern European immigrants, specifically the Jewish “intellectualism” of which the Russian revolution was seen as spawning from. Michael Slade Shull points out that the rage and fear directed at the Bolsheviks in Russia quickly took on a more localized focus. In late 1918, the national quarterly The Literary Digest published an article entitled “Are Bolsheviki Mainly Jewish?” during the rise of what Shull terms the “Red Scare Period” 177 Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005) 6. 98 from 1918-1920. 178 Eric Goldstein notes that anxieties about the Jew able to “pass” as white took root at this same moment, just after the Irish had begun to construct their own whiteness claims in the 1910s. Goldstein points out that this anxiety aligned the notion of the cosmopolitan Jew with the spread of Communism as the new “nationless” ideology, what Goldstein calls the “popular image of the Jew as communist… when both Jews and African Americans were conspicuous in American communist circles.” 179 Anti-Semitic publications like Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, which republished the infamous Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgery, denied it was an attempt to persecute Jews. Ford and many of the anti-Semitic publications of the time positioning the ‘outing’ of Jewish identity in Hollywood as, what Goldstein describes, simply a benevolent effort to “help them find the proper path to assimilation” by virtue of purging their European, presumably Marxist, past. 180 The alignment between Jew and Communist made the function of cinematic intermarriage even more of a politically charged representational response to American anti-Semitism. During this rabid period of fear of communism, the stereotypes of the cinematic Jew became associated with hyper intellectualism, shysterism and a general betrayal of Christian mores. 1919’s The Volcano featured such overtly anti-Semitic casting that complaints forced the studio to belatedly change the name of the hero of the film from Captain Garland to Captain Nathan Levison. The titles were also revised to change the Bolshevik character’s name from Minsky to Minskiovich, a belated 178 Michael Slade Shull, Radicalism in American Silent Films, 1909-1929 (North Carolina, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000), 87-90. 179 Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006) 128. 180 Ibid., 132. 99 concession to the upset American Jewish lobby. 181 However, a nativist-Christian response to what was seen as a rapidly spreading network of urban Jewish “smut merchants” peddling a new sexual liberation under the guise of “art” has been traced by historian Jay A. Gertzman. Just as had happened in 1909 when Mayor McClellan raided the nickelodeon halls, Gertzman notes that between 1920 and 1940 a number of intense and well publicized prosecutions, raids and arrests of Jewish New York book merchants took place. These raids were engineered by self-proclaimed Christian government officials, most notably, “vice crusader” John Saxton Sumner. Sumner, an Episcopalian and “Son of the American Revolution,” led a decades-long series of prosecutions aimed at the predominantly Jewish bookstore owners and distributors who had begun to sell modernist European writers to American audiences via mail-order catalog. 182 Sumner’s prosecution of Samuel Roth for distribution of books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Joyce’s Ulysses eventually led to the lobbying power of the Catholic Lobby to pressure the post office to crack down on mail-order distribution methodology itself. 183 Sumner was likely not aware of the irony of his self appointed moniker of “Crusader,” but the notion of early 20th century American Jews as peddlers of a new modernist sexual deviancy that emerged from European art and literature contributed to the notion of the Jewish male as an emancipated, amoral sexual libertine. By the late 1920s, a number of prominent legal prosecutions of Jewish sexual deviancy cases had made headlines, giving new ammunition to the nativists who equated 181 Michael Slade Shull, Radicalism in American Silent Films, 1909-1929, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2000) 91. 182 Jay Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002) 105- 114. 183 Ibid., 206-207. 100 black, Jewish and Irish sexuality as the source for deviancy and corruption of the innocent. The lynching of the Jewish southerner Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915, falsely accused of molesting a thirteen year old Christian girl, Mary Phagan, was making headlines the same year of Birth of a Nation’s release. Frank’s conviction on specious evidence eventually led to the commuting of his death sentence. This set off outrage across Georgia, and resulted in the formation of a lynch mob that hung the Jewish factory owner in the middle of the night. The fact a likely innocent Jewish accused “sexual deviant” was lynched in the manner of so many African-Americans was not lost on the American public. Less than a decade later, in 1924, the supposedly Nietzsche inspired philosopher-murderers, Leopold and Loeb, became a salacious and fascinating gossip story of youthful amorality taken to its most frightening conclusion. 184 News of the teenage Leopold and Loeb’s crypto-gay relationship made headlines around the country, and with lurid accounts of their “beyond good and evil” Raskolnikov-like murder plot, Jews were increasingly marked as ideologically European, politically destructive and morally deviant. 185 For much of America, Jews were not only the peddlers and producers of the new moralities in mass media, but the carriers of a European-based modernist contagion of anti-Christian values rooted in a Marxist libertine framework. Gertzman and May note that much of the history of censorship in the early 20th century was driven by just this sort of nativist Christian reaction to what was seen dissemination of Jewish owned and produced cultural deviancy. Gertzman’s history of 184 The connection between Jewish and Queer anxieties by the Leopold and Loeb case were so pronounced, their names were changed to the far more Christian sounding “Shaw” and “Morgan” for Alfred Hitchcock’s’ 1948 adaptation of the events, Rope. 185 Paul Franklin, “Jew Boys, Queer Boys,” Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003) 135-158. 101 the prosecution of the New York Jewish booksellers and May’s analysis of the 1908 anti- Semitic hued shutdown of Nickelodeon “vice halls” suggest the Victorian push to contain the emerging sexuality of the new modernity was directly tied to fears of a Jewish-led sexual and intellectual revolution. Gertzman argues that there was a direct historical line from the prosecutions of Jewish bookstore owners of the 1920s and 1930s and the rebellious anti-establishment censorship challenging positions of counter-culture publishers of the 1960s and 1970s. This can be seen in the criminal prosecutions of such disparate work as Jay Gertzmann’s Mad Magazine, Lenny Bruce’s standup comedy in the 1950s and early 1960s, and Screw Magazine founder Al Goldstein in 1968. 186 If the anxieties of preserving white female chastity were enough to lynch Leo Frank in 1915, Jewish coupling stories, as they would emerge in Jewish/non-Jewish formulations of the 1910s and 1920s, offered a progressive counter-narrative that racial intermarriage stories could not. Deviant Jewish male figures such as Leopold and Loeb, Leo Frank, and the modernist writers of Europe were emblematic of the dangers of sexual liberation. It was the Jewish female, and her transformation from immigrant Jewess to married American (to a non-Jew), that offered cinematic emancipation to the immigrant audiences caught in this debate. This reconfiguration also began appearing in Vaudeville. This could perhaps most famously be seen in the massive success of the real life married couple comedy team, George Burns and Grace Allen. Historian Laurence Epstein notes that Burns and Allen simply reconfigured earlier tropes of Yiddish humor involving the idealization of the 186 Ibid., 287. 102 Yiddische mama, but updated these into a modern context by introducing the non-Jewish female as the site for adoration by the nice Jewish boy. 187 Epstein describes the Burns/Allen comedy team as both stylistic and literal mixing of DNA.” 188 Whether on stage or screen, the Jewish/Christian comedic and erotic pairings were proving to be a massive cultural phenomenon. The ethnic stereotype of vaudeville was inextricably linked to both the performer as well as the comedic framework of the performance. In the late 1910s, a pro-immigrant philosophy of American multiculturalism appeared in the work of New York Jewish academic Horace Kallen. This philosophy codified in Kallen’s theory of “cultural pluralism.” 189 Kallen’s argument, grounded in an acceptance of the new and destabilized subjectivities of European modernist thinkers and writers, argued that each immigrant ethnicity brought a unique contribution to American culture and that assimilation did not mean the abandonment of a singular national cohesion. Kallen, the son of a Rabbi, would go on to found the New School for Social Research and became one of the leading pro immigration voices of his time. Kallen’s Cultural Pluralism appeared the same year as the release of novelist Abraham Cahan’s massively successful novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, also in 1917. Written as if a first-person diary, the modernist style of Cahan’s alter ego narrator, David Levinsky, tells an immigrant success story about a German-Jewish bachelor who achieves material success. Levinsky escapes the ghetto and assimilates, while failing to find lasting love 187 Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001) 24-25. 188 Ibid,. 27. 189 Horace Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality.” The Nation, Feb. 25, 1915. 103 with a number of Jewish women he’s set up with by friends and family. The novel concludes, in its final chapter, with David’s admission that his one true love was Anna, a Christian woman he met on a business trip. 190 David expresses regret that society’s rejection of Christian/Jewish marriages prevented their getting together. This intermarriage tension quickly found its way to Broadway, informing the smash hit plays Abie’s Irish Rose (Broadway 1922) and The Jazz Singer (Broadway 1925). Yet even with the success of The Rise of David Levinsky, the Ghetto Love Stories and the massive Broadway success of intermarriage dramas and comedies, American anti-Semitism grew worse. These tensions between Kallen’s progressive multiculturalism and the Nativist backlash reached a crisis point by the late 1920s. Immigration and race laws began to be passed in Washington. Kallen himself pushed religious Jews to seek a more reformed and inclusive lifestyle. 191 The introduction of sync-sound in cinema, in 1927, offered a discursive transformation from the silent era positioning of ethnicities as corporeally distinct and fixed bodies into the new framework of body/voice sensorial consumption. This newly introduced “voice” of cinema operated as a form of transformation. Bodies that speak are no longer only bodies. The act of speaking, of addressing an audience was, as Kafka understood, also a gesture of agency. The body/voice of the new sound era not only problematized eugenics-based understandings of Jewish identity but also offered a template for the progression narrative of American assimilationism. The Ghetto Love Stories had responded to the crisis of immigrant 190 Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky, (Illinois: Book Jungle, 2011), 645-646. 191 Horace Kallen, Judaism at Bay: Essays Toward the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity, (New York: Arno Press, 1972) 104 xenophobia as well as targeted ethnic audiences throughout the 1910s. By 1927 the shifting demographics of spectatorship would find a newly codified assimilation narrative marked not by the body, but by the voice. This alignment between technology the body and transnational tensions with Europe marked a new American progression narrative signified by linguistic reclamation. From Kafka to The Jazz Singer, the reclamation of the body in modernist media was a direct response to the modalities of containment imposed by European biological and race anxieties. THE JEWISH “VOICE” In 1927, the year of sync cinema’s first successful dissemination, three Hollywood films, released within months of each other, would collectively mark a pinnacle of box office success for stories of Christian/Jewish love story; The Jazz Singer (1927), Surrender (1927) and Abie’s Irish Rose (1928). Each of these films followed the Cohens/Kellys and Ghetto Love Story genre conventions of vaudevillian roots. Yet it is particularly interesting to note that two of these films also marked a conflation between Christian-Jewish intermarriage with the new technologies of cinematic voice. Abie’s Irish Rose took the classic Cohens/Kellys framework into the sound era by utilizing the Yiddishkeit humor and wordplay of the stage and on Vaudeville. Surrender updated the Jewish Ghetto Love Story within the Griffith-like Judith of Bethulia (1914) Esther framework and would mark both the pinnacle and the end-point for the subgenre. Surrender offered a big budget, sweeping historical epic set in a 19th century Russian Jewish ghetto, and once again presented the archetypal young Jewess, Lea, who must 105 “surrender” sexually to Constantine, the non-Jewish Russian general obsessed by her beauty, and threatening to destroy her village unless she relents. The Jazz Singer famously marked a third, entirely new, conflation between Jewish assimilation, ethnic identity and the new technologies. The use of the cinematic sound, in the comedic doublings of the Jewish voice, found a thematic metaphor for a medium in transition. Al Jolson’s famous riffs to his Yiddishe Mama, playing up the Jewish boy with the mother fixation stereotype, presented an oedipal love triangle. Jolson’s transition from Jewish immigrant to American entertainer would not just take place in the realm of the ethnic performative via blackface, but in the shifting affection from his Yiddishe Mama to his non-Jewish love interest, Mary Dale. In the case of Abie’s Irish Rose and The Jazz Singer, the intermarriage story linked the textual and thematic entanglements of Jewish/non-Jewish coupling with the technological developments of image and sound. Jolson’s famous breaking of the cinematic sound barrier occurred as Jolson signified the Jewish immigrant caught between two worlds. Jolson’s voice operates in cinema just as Kafka’s talking apes and jackals did in literature a decade earlier. Jolson’s voice gave agency to the Jewish body. One of the central expansions of cinematic language that sound introduced was the ability to invoke what theorist Michael Chion describes as “doubles and ghosts.” 192 In Chion’s notion of the “acousematic voice,” what Chion terms the acousmêtre, the disembodied sound element can achieve a monstrous dimension by signifying a corporeal untethering, a foregrounding of the fragmentations and incompleteness between sound 192 Chion, Michael. The Voice in Cinema, Columbia University Press: New York, 1999. P. 136 106 and image. 193 Chion defines the acousmêtre as operating “neither inside nor outside the image” but in stasis, a place of “ambiguity and oscillation.” 194 For the American immigrant Jewish body of cinema, caught in paradox as the emblem of the cosmopolitan European attempting to become American, we find a linkage between acousmêtre and Jewish specter. These same doublings informed the work of the modernists in European literature. The American solution was clear; Jack Robin’s desire for the Christian Mary. Patricia Erens argues that 1927’s introduction of sound marked a key shift in Jewish representation. This transformation was as profound as the one signified by The Yiddisher Boy in 1909, the year of Mayor McClellan’s anti-Semitic tinged shutdowns of the Nickelodeon halls as centers of Jewish-spread vice and corruption. Erens argues that, outside of the continuing Cohens and Kellys serials, nearly all depictions of Jews after 1927 were those of acculturated and assimilated Americans, and that nearly all these films focused on the central narrative tensions of “romance and marriage.” 195 This tension would express itself through the pursuit, and acquisition, of the Gentile love interest. Erens cites the emergence of the stereotype of the “Shiksa” (a Yiddish word that means non-Jewish female) as fully forming for the first time in The Jazz Singer. 196 Given the rising anti-Semitic political climate of late 1920s, intermarriage narratives could be read as a direct refutation of the Catholic Immigration Restriction League. Since actual Jews could no longer immigrate to the United States with ease, cinematic Jews could represent the idealized Melting Pot myth of America as an inclusive, 193 Ibid. Pp. 17-20 194 Michael Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129. 195 Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, 96. 196 Ibid., 105. 107 welcoming and multicultural land. In 1927/28, each film would find narrative resolution at the point in which Jew and non-Jew transcend cultural and historical biases and congregate; Abie and Rose finally marrying in Abie’s Irish Rose, the rabbi’s daughter and the non-Jewish soldier in Surrender, and Jack Robin with Mary Dale in The Jazz Singer. In The Jazz Singer, a film that is only partially synchronized, ethnic transformation, via the complex use of blackface, operates in a similar state of ambiguity and oscillation. Michael Rogin argues that the loss of Jolson’s voice in the silent film sequences marks Jack Robin’s liminal status between white/black and Jewish/American, just as the film itself negotiates a world between silence and sound. 197 Jolson’s final reclamation of voice occurs, in the film’s penultimate scenes, as what Rogin describes as a “twin killing” in which “the death of silent movies and the death of the Jewish patriarch” are inextricably entangled. 198 In each of these three films, the Jewish protagonist chooses to couple with the non-Jewish partner. Together, they defined not only a technological transformation, but used Christian-Jewish couplings to signify a generational break with Victorian mores and European antiquity. Jack, Abie and even the Shtetl dwelling Lea mark the transition point between the European Jewish other and the full American. After singing Kol Nidre for his father in The Jazz Singer, the epilogue of the film resolves any questions of Jack Robin’s ultimate direction. Despite temporarily returning to his Jewish identity, Jack Robin will indeed return to the Broadway stage, his “Shiksa” wife and his entertainment career. 197 Rogin, Michael. Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. 1998. Pp. 82-83 198 Ibid. P. 82 108 The iconography of transformation is, Rogin argues, the metaphor of the minstrel performance. But Jack’s ultimate transformation is also occurring in the realm of the unborn future child. Whatever Jack chooses to do, his children, by virtue of Jewish law (requiring a Jewish mother), will not be Jewish. For Jakie Rabinowitz to become Jack Robin, Jewishness is lost at the moment it is performed. This process occurs through Jack’s singing voice, but also the new technology of sound cinema. Mary, the non- Jewish love interest, is the witness who completes the transformation. Jack performs, as for Kafka’s Red Peter, on state for the normative witness. Long before The Jazz Singer, or even The Melting Pot in 1909, intermarriage was a parable for the assimilation myth story. 199 But the intermarriage story also solved the paradox of Jewish cosmopolitanism in a distinct early 20th century configuration. Rogin notes how, in The Jazz Singer, when Jack loses the power of synchronized speech, “he splits in two.” It is Jolson’s voice that allows corporeal resolution, an act which codifies in the sexual desire for the white witness of this struggle, Mary Dale. 200 Jolson’s voice, although visible and distinct to an on-screen character, creates a variation of acousmêtre, or perhaps what we can think of as, “ajewsmêtre.” Here we can locate a Jewish as an aural representation of transition between identities, worlds, and technology itself. Sync- sound cinema, in both The Jazz Singer and Abie’s Irish Rose, became the aural negotiation for the same tensions of Jewish doubling that Kafka marked as transformative apes, jackals, and insects. 199 Michael Rogin, Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), 8. 200 Ibid., 116. 109 While The Jazz Singer offered a striking framework for a new and emerging Jewish-White love story between Jake and Mary, Abie’s Irish Rose marked what Patricia Erens calls “the definitive statement on intermarriage and assimilation. 201 The film was based on the surprise Broadway hit of 1922, and featured the pairing of two young children of immigrants, Abie Levy and Rosemary Murphy, who struggled for their parents to accept the union. As with Jolson’s play on words, the title suggests the comedic cadences of the emerging field of Jewish comic wordplay. Abie has found an “Irish Rose.” 202 While Abie’s Irish Rose may be less historically heralded than The Jazz Singer, it was also one of the first talkies. Its inventive use of sound similarly gave voice to Jewish song. A key synchronized sound sequence plays narratively as well as generationally, as Abie’s father chants the Kaddish for a non-Jew over the objections of other Jewish elders. 203 Surrender (1927) was the third massive box office success of this year of cinematic transition to feature an intermarriage love story. Set in Russia during the late 19th century, the story of a forced affair between a Jewish daughter of a rabbi and a non- Jewish Russian soldier depicted a nostalgic return for many first generation immigrants, but framed it in the context of the progressive intermarriage coupling. Surrender was not a love story per se, as the very title implies the sexual sacrifice made on the part of the daughter, who is forced to give herself to the non-Jewish general to save her village in 201 Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, 106 . 202 The playful foregrounding of linguistic ruptures and fractured meaning, through accents, Yiddishisms and puns, would become a staple of Jewish comedians as diverse as The Marx Brothers of the 30s, Jerry Lewis of the 50s, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Woody Allen in the 60s and 70s, through our current historical moment with the guttural screams of Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller. 203 Ibid., 106. 110 a parallel of the biblical Esther story. While not a talkie, Surrender offered many details of 19th century Jewish shtetl life. 204 As with Scholem Alecheim’s Tevye short stories that would eventually form the smash Fiddler on the Roof over a half a century later, the expulsion of the Jews from Russia and to America is directly aligned with the struggle to accept intermarriage between Jew and non-Jew. Surrender would mark the last of the box office successes of the silent film Ghetto Love Stories. The age of sound rapidly replaced the erotic Jewess with the fast-talking Clara Bow It-girl flapper. The Jewish female, with a few notable exceptions, would remain absent for the next seventy years. “YIDDISHISCEGENATION” The use of Yiddish in early sound film also demonstrates how Jewishness negotiated the technological transformation. Yiddishkeit, the comedy build around language puns, was a staple of much of early 20th century media. Andrea Most and Michael Rogin have both documented how the Broadway musical emerged from a distinct New York Jewish linguistic and musical tradition. 205 Vaudeville had developed an enormous volume of Jewish sketch comedy bits that revolved around Yiddishkeit, the misunderstandings and fractures of the Jewish immigrant’s attempts to speak English. Broadway successes of the 1920s were a massive influence on Hollywood, and Jewish characters, often in comedic disguise as other ethnics, were ubiquitous. Jewish characters on Broadway even turned up in Westerns as diverse as Whoopee (1929) and Girl Crazy (1930). Ted Merwin observes how Joe Hayman’s popular “Cohen on the Telephone” 204 Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, 98. 205 Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 42-43. 111 records of the 1920s played up the “ridiculous Yiddish accent,” and the misunderstandings that came about as a result. 206 Merwin describes this distinct comedic mechanism as “yidiosyncracies,” the marking of Jewish immigrants as distinct from other ethnic groups by virtue of their misuse of language. 207 Unlike most foreign languages, Yiddish was a direct result of a distinct linguistic miscegenation, the intermingling of Hebrew and German. Transitioning into English by way of the ghettos, the fractures and fragmentations of a language already fractured and fragmented becomes even more pronounced, and thus foregrounds the doubling necessary in comedic wordplay. 208 The fact these fractures were so successfully played as comedic on the stage speaks to a performed Jewish construction not simply linked to the Jewish body, but also to Jewish speech. “Yideosyncracies” were as emblematic of the fragmentations of immigrant American identity as the Jewish body, with all its suspicions of biological deviancy, was to European crisis. It is no surprise that it would be “Yideosyncracies” in the age of sound cinema, fractured and comedic, that would define the modern Jewish identity. 209 Yiddish became a marker of American aural miscegenation – the marriage of old world and new world language. That this language intermarriage comedy would emerge in the first days of sync-sound narrative cinema, targeting immigrant audiences, is not 206 Ted Merwin, “The Performance of Jewish Ethnicity in Anne Nichols’ Abie’s Irish Rose,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Winter 2001), 5. 207 Ibid., 27. 208 The comedic legacy remains today in words like “shmuck,” “putz” and “oy” are spoken to accentuate a joke, notably when delivered by non-Jewish actors. 209 Henry Bial argues that it through “double coding,” the linguistics and pantomimes of performance, that Jewish identity can be produced, requiring the agency of decoding by audience to decipher. See Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 112 surprising. What is surprising is how bold these three intermarriage stories were, especially in light of the political and cultural anti-immigration movements taking place at the time of their release. Coming off a wave of anti-Semitic and xenophobic mistrust in the early 1920s, Congress had passed the Emergency Quota Act, the first direct limitations placed on immigration and using ethnicity as the guideline. This bill, signed into law on May 19 th , 1921 by President Harding, caused a radical decrease in European immigration and especially Jewish immigration. To halt the influx of new ethnicities, the bill linked the number of new immigrants of any ethnic group to 3% yearly of the total population of that ethnic group already in the country. This had the practical effect of nearly shutting down Jewish, Italian, Irish and Asian immigration from that point forward. Still not satisfied, the Catholic-led Immigration Restriction League convinced Congress and President Coolidge to pass the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924, which altered the archaic percentages of the 1921 bill using a new breakdown -- quotas of “desirables” and “undesirables.” Immigrants from Western Europe (England, Germany, Dutch) were freed up to continue to immigrate to the United States, while Eastern European immigrants, the Catholics and Jews of Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia, were barred from entry in any meaningful numbers. Immigrants from Russia were reduced from 16,270 to 1,792 under the restrictive quota law. It is in this context that, as Cathy Schlund-Vials argues, The Jazz Singer offered a “compelling and possibly empowering 113 immigrant narrative.” 210 Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that the burnt cork of blackface not only works to “change the race of the Jew, but also to eradicate race from Judaism.” 211 Despite the restrictive quota laws, the seven year period, from 1927-1934, marked a high point for Jewish representation in Hollywood cinema. Max Davidson, a German born Jewish actor, found great success performing as a nebbishy Jewish schlemiel with a heart of gold in a series of two-reel comedies produced by Hal Roach’s studio, including Jewish Prudence (1927), Pass the Gravy (1928) and The Boyfriend (1928). Davidson’s success was so great his movies were promoted as “Max Davidson comedies” and featured numerous references to kosher food and Yiddish, along with some of the less complimentary stereotypes like cheapness and greediness. 212 As silent transitioned to sound, the Jewish voice became the de facto cinematic voice, not just for Al Jolson, but for Abie’s Hebrew hymns as well. Many of these films aligned the Horace Kallen progressive metaphor of the melting pot via the immigrant intermarriage love story with the emerging technologies of sound and color in films as genre diverse as Disraeli (1929) and The Kibbitzer (1930). In Street Scene (1931) and Private Izzy Murphy (1931), Jewish-Irish coupling narratives in the tenements continued to find success in the sound era. Only now, Christian-Jewish love stories used Yiddishkeit, the humor of the distinctive Jewish accent, to represent assimilation. The notion of acquiring the Christian 210 Cathy Schlund-Vials, “Fathers, Sons, and Symbolic Ethnicity: Considering Two Generations of The Jazz Singer,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (March, 2004) 211 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 121. 212 Donald W. McCaffery, and Christopher P. Jacobs, Guide to the Silent Years of American Cinema (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999) 102. 114 female was expressed through the loss of Yiddish accent. Christian-Jewish love stories concluded with the generationally marked shift in dialect from Yiddish to “American.” 213 By 1934’s Academy Award nominated The House of Rothschild, the transformation of film technology echoing the narrative tensions between old and new worlds shifted from sound (as seen in The Jazz Singer and Abie’s Irish Rose) to color film. The House of Rothschild, an historical biography set in the late 18 th and early 19 th Centuries, features a central plot point concerning the patriarch Nathan Rothchild (George Arliss, who also played Benjamin Disraeli in Disraeli) and his complex relationship with his Jewish daughter, Julie (Loretta Young). Julie is being courted by the dashing non-Jewish Captain Fitzroy (Robert Young). Nathan’s initial resistance to his daughter’s marriage to a Gentile changes as the political events of the Napoleon era unfold around him. Nathan’s eventual realization that the times are changing, and Jews must be allowed to marry for love, and intermarry if they choose, parallels Europe’s rocky transition from rigid class structure into a multicultural modernity. As with The Jazz Singer’s introduction of sound, the transformation of Jewish diaspora is reflected in the introduction of the new technology of color film. The final scene of The House of Rothschild is a grand ballroom celebration of Julie and Captain Fitzroy’s (inter)marriage, and features a four minute sequence shot in Technicolor. Nathan Rothschild directs his wife, Hanna, to observe how happy their daughter and her new husband are. Moments later, Rothschild is knighted as a Baron by British nobility. As for so many of the 213 Seeking blonde, white looking women as a sign of immigrant ascension was also seen in the emerging gangster genre of the early 1930s. Jewish actors playing Italians, such as Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, acquired beautiful, white, non-Italian “molls” as a sign of their rise up the economic ladder. Cagney’s Irish gangster in Public Enemy (1931) demonstrated that this formula was not limited to Jews or Italians, and included the Irish. 115 intermarriage stories of the time, the conflation between acceptance of Jewish/non-Jewish unions and ascendance into the nation-state is made clear. Nathan Rothschild must let his daughter marry the non-Jewish partner for his final acceptance into British aristocracy. This cultural transformation is signified as the technology of the cinematic apparatus transitions from black-and-white into color. As for Al Jolson’s voice, cinema’s technological transformation can only take place with the acquiescence of the Jewish elder to the child’s Christian-Jewish intermarriage. In an ironic (and tragic) footnote to this film, footage of the Rothschilds as moneylenders from The House of Rothschild, stripped of all context, would also end up as evidence of Jewish corruption in Goebbels’ Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) just as had happened with footage of Peter Lorre from Fritz Lang’s M (1931). 214 Paul Buhle points out that even the massive success of The Jazz Singer didn’t begin a long lived run of Jewish-themed films. The emerging paranoia by the P.C.A. and the HUAC investigations begun in the 1930s increasingly began to conflate Jews with labor leaders, communists and anti-Christian propagandists. 215 Steve Ross observes how studio mogul Louis B. Mayer led the Conservative Hollywood pushback against the liberal politics of so many Hollywood power players in the 1920s. 216 Jewish identity for stars like Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson began to become obfuscated between a more general “ethnic” classification that could include Irish, Italian or other ethnic 214 Ibid., 159-161. 215 Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (London and New York: Verso, 2004) 67-68. 216 Steve Ross, Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 82-83 116 identities. 217 Abie’s Irish Rose marked the peak of the Cohens/Kellys Jewish/Irish ethnic love comedy and Surrender marked one of the last of the Jewess Ghetto Love Story genre. With sound firmly ensconced in cinematic language, the Great Depression, the emerging censorship power of the Catholic run P.C.A. and the success of the I.R.L. to finally legally limit European immigration of “undesirables,” a profound shift in cinematic representations took place. The pinnacle of Jewish representations at the dawn of sound cinema, only a few years earlier, gave way to the new Hollywood movie stars; white, WASPY, and entirely free of ethnic identity. CHAPLIN, GROUCHO AND THE JEWISH “VOICE” By the mid 1930s, as the Great Depression worsened and anti-immigrant nativism took hold, Jewish identity in cinema began to recede. Jews shifted from the literal narratives of the late 1920s into a performative code. However, Jews still identified themselves through the Jewish voice. This was most famous in the “disguised” mayhem, and comic ethnic disguises, of the Marx Brothers. Groucho, with grease paint mustache and ill fitting clothing, satirized the very same cliché of hidden Jewish masquerade as Jolson did in blackface. Groucho would give his very own linguistically chaotic “Report to the Academy” in the opening scene of Horse Feathers (1931). Groucho’s deft weaving of Yiddishisms (“Hooray for Captain Spaulding! The African Explorer!” “Did someone call me Schnorrer?” 218 ) and sly references to the Jewish background of the 217 As Ross points out, Edward G. Robinson’s opposition to Nazism in the 1930s and his commitment to leftist labor issues in the 1940s made him both a target for HUAC and unleashed an avalanche of anti- Semitic hate mail. Ross, Hollywood Left and Right, 114-115 218 Victor Heerman, director, Animal Crackers, 1930. 117 Marx Brothers (“This program is coming to you from the House of David” 219 ) utilized the ruptures of language as cultural and institutional critique. Yet if Kafka’s Red Peter saw language as illustrative of the tools of the colonized to emulate (if unsuccessfully) the colonizer, Groucho positioned language as a tool of anarchical comedic destruction. The Irish actor James Cagney also played off this notion of Yiddishisms aligned with ethnic miscegenation in The Ladykiller (1931), when Cagney’s Irish gangster character, having hustled his way into playing an Indian in a Hollywood western, complains that his “tuchus” is hurting, a line Cagney delivers in perfect Yiddish inflection. Cagney’s Yiddish, delivered by a famous Irish actor playing an American Indian in a film-within-the-film, demonstrated the self-awareness Hollywood already had about how Jewish identity ruptured the constructs of cinematic masquerade as a form of ethnic interplay. But perhaps most notable performer to utilize the voice (or lack of voice) as a discursive marker for Jewish alterity could be seen in the long-running persona of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. In the 1910s, Chaplin’s screen alter ego was not originally intended to be an immigrant, and certainly not constructed as Jewish in the way that George Jessel or Al Jolson played off their Vaudevillian roots. A successful British vaudevillian who began to make silent comedies in Hollywood in the early 1910s, it wasn’t until 1917 or so that Chaplin’s biography began to be mythologized by the Hollywood publicity machine as that of a poor, working class immigrant who had come to America and found his fame and fortune. A magazine article of the time summarizes 219 The line is delivered to the on-screen audience by Groucho after an impromptu a cappella song by the Marx Brothers. 118 this fictional legend: “from a penniless immigrant stranded in New York – to a small- time comedy acrobat – to the highest paid movie actor – is the story of Chaplin’s rapid rise to success.” 220 Far from correcting the record, Chaplin would go on to use this mythos to expand the Tramp persona for the rest of his career. From 1917’s The Immigrant through 1940s The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s ideology was rooted in a multicultural pro-immigrant liberal discourse meant to challenge the nativist impulses of the Catholic League. 221 Even more distinctly, Chaplin embodied the immigrant schlemiel in the codes of Jewish identity. Only Chaplin performed the Tramp as generous, with a heart of gold, rather than the money-grubbing shyster stereotype. Chaplin’s life story was cloaked in so much rumor and legend that this only added to the notion of Chaplin hiding (or perhaps coding) his Jewish identity. Chaplin was rumored to be part Jewish, but he consistently, if often obliquely, denied it. Yet a Budapest Jewish periodical claimed to have traced Chaplin’s lineage to an Eastern European family named “Thonstein.” J. Hoberman notes that “Thonstein” was also, intriguingly, the last name of the fictional alias the FBI used for Chaplin in Hoover’s files, “Israel Thonstein.” 222 Many academics have argued that it was Chaplin, alone among the silent clown stars of the 1920s (including Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon), that adopted the specific and distinctive tropes of the Yiddish comic theater, a stereotype that Michael Alexander terms the “Eternal Jewish ‘shlemiehl.’” 223 The fact Chaplin himself was not Jewish doesn’t change this significance. Sig Altman 220 Motion Picture Magazine, 1915, 152 221 Claudia Clausius, The Gentleman is a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin’s Comedy (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1989) 57-60. 222 Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 36 223 Michael Alexander, Jazz Age Jews, (United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2001), 146. 119 argues that there is no other symbolic niche to place the Tramp than as having emerged from the European Jewish Diaspora. 224 By 1944, Hannah Arendt insisted that Chaplin’s Tramp was the quintessential Jewish artist, writing, “In Chaplin the most unpopular people in the world inspired what was long the most popular of contemporary figures.” 225 Chaplin, a leftist, an activist, and a mimic, had condensed the tropes of the American immigrant experience into the iconography of the American Jewish experience. . By the early 1930s, the Nazis were denouncing Chaplin as a “Jewish Communist millionaire.” Chaplin’s face would often appear in Nazi propaganda next to those of Albert Einstein and Max Reinhardt. 226 Yet Hitler’s mustache itself was a strange sort of Chaplin-esque homage. 227 Andre Bazin commented some fifteen years after The Great Dictator that the true site of ideological contestation between the Little Tramp and Adolf Hitler could be located in their struggle over their signification of their shared mustache. 228 Chaplin’s facial icon, claimed by Hitler, was subsequently reclaimed by Chaplin in 1940 in three distinctive ways. First, in Chaplin’s decision to “out” the Tramp as Jewish in the character of the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator (1940). Second, by having the Barber fall in love with an implied non-Jewish love interest (Paulette Godard). And third, by empowering the now fully Jewish Tramp, long silent, to finally be given voice. The Tramp finds his voice when he can remain silent no longer, 224 Sig Altman, The Comic Image of the Jew: Explorations of a Pop Culture Phenomenon. (New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1971),187-188. 225 Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition”, Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (April 1944): 111-113. 226 The fact of Chaplin’s eventual investigation and departure from America for suspicions of communist sympathies and being insufficiently loyal to the government only further cemented the powerful Jewish underpinnings of his most famous character. 227 Hoberman and Shandler. Entertaining America, 37-38. 228 Andre Bazin, “Pastiche or Postiche, or Nothingness over a Mustache,” Essays on Chaplin, ed. Jean Bodon (New Haven: University of New Haven Press, 1985), 16. 120 and his voice directly responds to Hitler. For Chaplin, when the visual signifiers of ambiguity and metaphor can no longer communicate, the final recourse for reclamation of the body (and mustache), occurs in the liberation of the long silenced voice. Regardless of Chaplin’s personal biography, whatever ambiguity of Jewishness remained in the persona of The Tramp was now cemented by Chaplin’s own authorial voice. Chaplin had satirized modernity and the crisis of technology from a working class perspective in the body comedy of the silent Modern Times (1936). But in The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s site of contest, as for Kafka before him, was in aurality. Just as we see in Kafka’s Red Peter (and Al Jolson’s Jack Robin), it would be in the act of speaking that the Jewish Other made his claim to separate himself from the animal and locate in the realm of the human. Chaplin understood the role of the Jewish voice as an antidote to Hitlerian eugenics. Jolson’s Jack Robin, Peter Lorre’s guttural cries, even Nathan Rothschild’s celebration of his daughter’s intermarriage at the moment The House of Rothschild switched into color, each produced an alignment between Jewish agency and technology. This should not be surprising. Jews signified the threat of modernity in regressive European eugenics theory. Hollywood cinema, a pro-immigrant and pro- modernist medium, responded to this by aligning Jews with two progressive ideas; technology and intermarriage. CONCLUSION In American cinema of the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s, Jewish-Christian coupling narratives were used to signify technological, ethnic, and generational transformation. This began in the Ghetto Love Stories of the 1910s and 1920s, and 121 reached its creative peak in 1927-1928 with the three box office sensations that helped usher in the sound era: Abie’s Irish Rose, Surrender, and The Jazz Singer. Each film featured a Jewish protagonist caught between worlds (European/American, Jewish/assimilationist) who resolved these tensions in the form of the Christian love interest. Further aligning Jewish transformation with modernity, the resolution of the barriers between Christian and Jew was frequently accompanied by technological transformation, as for sound in The Jazz Singer, and, a few years later, color in The House of Rothschild. In Europe, Kafka’s parables of talking animals had thematized the European crisis of identity they represented. Kafka warned of the impossibility of deviant bodies finding acceptance due to their savage, exotic, and perhaps erotic, nature. Fritz Lang’s M (1931) brought the monstrous Jewish sexual pervert to life through Lorre’s primal screams. Yet American cinema saw a more hopeful progression narrative through the reinvention of the Jewish immigrant into the full American. This reinvention took the form of the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative. By the increasingly conservative mid-1930s, things suddenly changed. In one of the most overt films of the era to discuss anti-Semitism in recreating the Dreyfus Affair, the Warner Brothers produced The Life of Emile Zola (1937), contained almost no overt references to Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus’s Jewish identity. Nico Carpenter points out that the real hero of the film is not Dreyfus, but Emile Zola, who is presented as a Christ figure. 229 In Hollywood of 1937, the barely-Jewish Dreyfus is fully redeemed, France is healed, and anti-Semitism is vanquished. Zola is the Christian hero as savior of innocent 229 Nico Carpenter, “Past and Present in The Life of Emile Zola” in The Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Lawrence Baron (Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 33-34. 122 Jew, a 1930s-era version of Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler. Narrative perspective had shifted away from the ethnic protagonist. Playwright Tony Kushner argues that Hollywood’s reaction to Nazism and rising anti-Semitism in Europe was to simply remove all textual Jewish references. 230 In France, the same year of The Life of Emile Zola, Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937) was released. The film presented a similar Christian-Jewish dichotomy. The friendship between the French implied-Jewish Rosenthal, (Marcel Dalio), and the Christian Maréchal (Jean Gabin) became the subject of much debate over Renoir’s use of Jewish stereotype to define Rosenthal. Maurice Samuels points out that explicit references to Rosenthal’s Jewish identity are not made in the film. 231 Instead, the film identifies Rosenthal through codes associated with Jewish stereotype. Renoir’s reasons for wanting to include a Jewish soldier among the prisoners of World War I were likely noble, a reminder of French-Jewish sacrifice for the nation. The motivations for not explicitly mentioning Rosenthal as a Jew may have related to fears of censorship during France’s rising fascism. By the time Hollywood produced another film on the life story of Benjamin Disraeli in 1941, The Prime Minister (1941), a total of zero references to Disraeli’s Jewish identity were made. Played by noted (non-Jewish) British actor, John Gielgud, The Prime Minister, as for both La Grande Illusion and The Life of Emile Zola, demonstrated how quickly Jewish identity began to vanish from the screen. Even in films 230 Tony Kushner, “One of Us? Contesting Disraeli’s Jewishness and Englishness in the Twentieth Century, “ in The Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Lawrence Baron (Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 33-35. 231 Maurice Samuels, “The Grand Illusion and the ‘Jewish Question’” in The Modern Jewish Experience, ed. Lawrence Baron (Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 41. 123 that portrayed life-stories of Disraeli, Dreyfus, and the issues of anti-Semitism in Europe’s transition into modernity. By the late 1930s, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives were effectively over. In Hollywood, a new, literate, and escapist form of romantic coupling narrative appeared, in the form of the Screwball Comedy. Fast talking dames and gold diggers became the new romantic comedy stars. Actresses such as Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rodgers, Irene Dunn, and Barbara Stanwyk became what Elizabeth Kendall describes as a vibrant and idealized notion of femininity as a response to the crushing realities of the depression. 232 For men, dashing ethnic-free whiteness ruled the day in the form of Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, James Stewart and Henry Fonda. Even Cary Grant’s swarthy hint of ethnicity was playfully hidden behind his highly constructed and affected persona. The success of the Screwball engineered what David R. Shumway, building off Stanley Cavell, describes as a shift in emphasis from the anticipated coupling to the “already coupled.” 233 Explicit Jewish performers would mostly leave cinema and return to the stage, theater, and radio on programs such as The Eternal Light, which sought to convey Jewish spirituality as no different from its Christian counterpart. 234 In spite of Chaplin’s act of political defiance with The Great Dictator in 1940, the Ghetto Love Stories and Jazz Singing comedian heroes of the 1920s were gone. They would remain primarily outside of Hollywood cinema for another thirty years. The anti-Communist 232 Elizabeth Kendall, The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930s. (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002), xiv-xv. 233 David R. Shumway, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2003) 80-83. 234 Jeffrey Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 2009) 56-60. 124 hysteria of the 1930s led into World War Two. Except for a brief revival in the late 1940s, the post-war HUAC years and the conformity of the 1950s continued a blanket of whiteness, contributing to a desire to forget the overtly ethnic stars of the 1920s and 1930s. It wouldn’t be until 1967, a seismic shift in cultural, historical and transnational identity, that Jews would emerge again as the singularly most celebrated, eroticized and iconic counterculture figures of the late 1960s. 125 CHAPTER THREE GENTLEMEN’S DISAGREEMENT: ISRAEL, MASCULINITY AND “RETROACTIVE DIASPORA” 1947-1967 “My unconscious was making this movie… it took me years before I got what I was doing, that I was turning Benjamin into a Jew.” – Mike Nichols on directing The Graduate (1967) 235 In 1967, two seemingly unrelated events occurred. In June, Israel achieved a surprising and dominant military victory over the combined forces of Jordan, Egypt and Syria in what is now generally referred to as The Six Day War. Israel not only survived its existential war for survival, but the nascent Jewish nation doubled its land size, taking control of the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. 236 Israel was only nineteen years old at the time but this powerful military triumph had profound global reverberations. Diaspora Jewry had been seen in the postwar era as passive, meek and acquiescent victims of the Holocaust. After Israel’s military triumph, Jews were suddenly recast as modern day Davids; heroic and powerful fighters willing to risk it all for their survival. Conversely, in the Arab world, Jews were reviled as violent colonizers, occupiers, and usurpers, the last occupying force left over from the legacy of British Empire. 237 Both perspectives, however, shared something in common: a completely new configuration of the Jewish people as geographically empowered by their ties to a distinct nation-state. 235 Quoted in Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of a New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 319. 236 Many Palestinians prefer to refer to the war by the name “an-Naksah” (The Setback) 237 Yoram Meitel, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 22, Number 4 (Summer 2004), 179-181. 126 The impact of these reconfigurations on world Jewry was immediate. Within Israel itself, an immediate change took place in Israeli textbooks that no longer felt the need to overstate, or mythologize, Holocaust-era European Jews as heroic resistance fighters. 238 The military potency of Israel had replaced the need for enhanced tales of Jewish resistance to Nazi ghettoization in the Holocaust era. In the United States, historian Lawrence Grossman describes an “unprecedented pride in being Jewish.” 239 This manifested as a sudden need for American Jews to “assert their Jewishness publicly.” 240 This sudden Semitic pride movement, emerging in tandem with the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements of the late 1960s, presented a cultural awakening for American Jews not seen since the first generation immigrants of the 1910s and 1920s. Six months after The Six Day War, in December of 1967, director Mike Nichols’s The Graduate was released in American movie theaters to wide critical and cultural acclaim. From the film’s first image, a long-take close-up of actor Dustin Hoffman’s passive and emotionally confused face, to the iconic final sequence when Benjamin breaks into the church to stop the wedding of Elaine, a thematic and representational reconfiguration had taken place in Hollywood cinema. Hoffman, as Benjamin Braddock, was seen as a new type of romantic leading man icon that would become the dominant American cultural representation of masculinity in the late 1960s and 1970s: the erotic schlemiel. 238 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993) 479-481. 239 Lawrence Grossman, “Transformation Through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six- Day War,” American Jewish History Vol. 86, No. 1 (March 1998): 27-54. 240 Ibid., 30 127 This chapter will argue that 1967 marks a key transformation for diaspora Jews in a circulation between Israeli militarism and representations of sexualized Jewish identity in Hollywood. These two events, one a military battle in the Middle East and the other a Hollywood art film about suburban wealth and generational crisis, may seem worlds apart. What could Israel’s war possibly have to do with an American film like The Graduate? Textually, thematically and politically, there is scant evidence to link the two. The Graduate’s discourses of gender, class, sexuality, alienation and generational crisis are presented through a classic oedipal love triangle narrative. While noteworthy as a film, there is nothing in the text, or even the subtext, to suggest any metaphor of Israeli or Jewish diaspora at work in either the screenplay or Charles Webb’s novel on which the film was based. The story of a bored and drifting college graduate having an affair with a much older friend of his parents seems rooted firmly in the American middle and upper- middle class tensions of postwar suburbia. We can locate the point of contact in these two events in director Mike Nichols’s decision to cast Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock. Hoffman-as-Benjamin, from unknown to movie star, was a transformation in Hollywood masculinity both unlikely and abrupt. The role of Benjamin, originally written as a privileged WASP pretty boy in the novel by Charles Webb, had been slotted for Robert Redford by the studio. Yet Mike Nichols, the young, Jewish, theater-trained director, refused to cast Redford, preferring the unknown Dustin Hoffman. The new face of ethnic/erotic masculinity was suddenly 128 recast in the iconography of the nebbishy, neurotic and passive Jewish schlemiel. 241 In a 1999 interview with Film Comment, Nichols explained his casting change: And yet the parts of me that did identify with Benjamin predominate in what I did with the movie. By that I mean, I didn't cast Redford. Dustin has always said that Benjamin is a walking surfboard. And that's what he was in the book, in the original conception. But I kept looking and looking for an actor until I found Dustin, who is the opposite, who's a dark, Jewish, anomalous presence, which is how I experience myself. So I stuck this dark presence into Beverly Hills, and there he felt that he was drowning in things, and that was very much my take on that story. 242 Hoffman explained in a 2008 interview that he initially resisted Nichols’s request to fly Hoffman from New York to Los Angeles for a screen test, telling Nichols, “’I’m not right for this part, sir. This is a Gentile. This is a WASP. This is Robert Redford’… And Mike said, ‘Maybe he’s Jewish inside. Why don’t you come out and audition for us?’ ” 243 After flying out to test with non-Jewish actress and former model Katherine Ross (Elaine), Hoffman recounted feeling even more resistant to playing the role, stating, “(t)he idea that the director was connecting me with someone as beautiful as her…. became an even uglier joke. It was like a Jewish nightmare.” (emphasis mine) After viewing the Hoffman/Ross screen test, Nichols became convinced of the necessity of the casting choice, explaining that he realized “(Benjamin) couldn’t be a blond, blue-eyed person, because then why is he having trouble in the country of the blond, blue-eyed people? It took me a long time to figure that out—it’s not in the material at all. And once 241 This archetype was already emerging in celebrated literature of the time by writers such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud, as we will further explore in chapter four. 242 Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose: Mike Nichols Interview” Film Comment (May, 1999). 243 Sam Kashner, “Here’s to You, Mr. Nichols: The Making of The Graduate,” Vanity Fair (March 2008), 6. via: < http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/03/graduate200803> 129 I figured that out, and found Dustin, it began to form itself around that idea.” 244 (emphasis mine) In these quotes it is apparent that both Nichols and Hoffman were acutely aware of the paradoxical signification that would result in the casting of Benjamin Braddock with a Jewish actor. For Hoffman, his unlikely appearance as Benjamin was counterpointed even more strongly opposite the “Shiksa” beauty of Katherine Ross. Yet what Hoffman saw as a “Jewish nightmare” and Nichols described as an “anomalous presence” would soon become the defining love story of generational transformation. Nichols’s use of the term “country of the blonde, blue eyed people” to describe the world film is also engaging, especially given Nichols was both blonde haired and blue eyed, but Jewish. Nichols did not see himself in Redford, but in Hoffman. This understanding , Hoffman-as-Benjamin, operates as a key metatextual and corporeally grounded incongruity within the framework of The Graduate. Read on this level, the film operates not only as an erotic and generational triangulation between genders and parents, but also a tension within the body(s) of Benjamin/Hoffman himself. Hoffman’s body, as not- Redford ,signified something that not only didn’t exist in the novel or screenplay, but was explicitly at odds with it. The previous two decades of post-war American masculinity, the Rock Hudsons, Robert Redfords, William Holdens, Jimmy Stewarts and Cary Grants, were replaced, seemingly overnight, by the unlikely face of a short, big nosed, nebbishy Jewish romantic leading man. Hoffman’s Jewish schlemiel is, in the final sequence of the film, able to find 244 Ibid, 7. 130 masculine potency, break into a church, and liberate the trapped Christian female from a forced marriage to the blonde haired, blue eyed, WASP. One major political influence on this shift is found in understandings of the Jewish body itself; both the Jew in American media, but also the “body” of the suddenly triumphant Jewish nation of Israel. When I speak of the Jewish body in this chapter, it will refer to these two entangled constructions; the constructed body of the outwardly Jewish movie star, and the militarized body of Israel. 245 It would be Hoffman-as-Braddock that would most embody the new generational liberations and sexual freedom brought about by a resurgent diaspora Jewish identity. And this transformation in Jewish identity would be codified, just as it was for the first-wave immigrants of the 1910s and 1920s, within the reassuring template of the Christian/Jewish love story. EROTIC ISRAEL It may seem strange to think of the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel in 1948 as an erotic endeavor. Yet Jews were marked as biological and sexual deviants in the eugenics movement lead up the Holocaust. Erin Graff Zivin calls this “the scene of the transaction,” a rhetorical trope in which anxieties of sexual prostitution, financial transaction, and the “Jew” combined in the literary imagination. 246 Zivin describes how Jews represented anxieties of both the sexual and the financial transformations of the 245 Israel, and the Zionist movement more generally, were not simply as a colonizing geopolitical endeavor, but also an erotic transformation of the Jewish body. Israel can be read as a project of corporeal reclamation for the rootless and bodiless post-Holocaust Jewish diaspora. This understanding of Zionism, traced back to Herzl and Nordau’s first Zionist conference of 1897, saw Israel as a response to the Jewish body’s crisis in the age of the eugenics-based body classifications. See Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997). 246 Erin Graff Zivin, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 74-75. 131 nation, a liminal status between the normative and the deviant. 247 This, of course, predated modernity. Jews as sexual and financial predators can be seen everywhere from Shakespeare’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice to Dickens’s Fagin in Oliver Twist. By the time of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, published in 1922, the rootless, cosmopolitan stereotype of the sexually deviant Jew had become informed by biological constructions of a perverse, flawed, and highly sexualized Jewish body. The extension of this anxiety was to perceive the Jew seducing the Christian as either an attempt to alleviate the impurity of their body, or a way to make money. George Mosse argues that this is what first provoked the young Hitler in Austria, the fear of “Jews waiting to catch Aryan girls.” 248 Zionism operated as a collective response to these tensions. In Eros and the Jews, David Biale argues that at the pre-Israel Zionist movement’s core was the notion that “Jews lived a disembodied existence in exile” and it was only through the creation of a Jewish nation that Jews could “restore a necessary measure of physicality or materiality.” Biale argues that the national body as metaphor for the Jewish body positioned the imagined Israel as a sort of sexualized conquest of the Other to assert the self; an “erotic revolution for the Jews.” 249 In Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, Daniel Boyarin shows how eroticism and intellectualism were a long Jewish tradition that likened scholarly achievement to erotic interplay. Boyarin observes that the energy purportedly demanded by God to be spent on Torah study had been described for 247 Ibid, 75-76. 248 George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe, (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 134. 249 David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997), 176-177. 132 centuries by rabbis as a form of erotic intercourse, akin to a marriage, between the Jewish male and his academic study. 250 Traditionally, as Boyarin argues, male Jews found their virility not by physical accomplishment, but by intellectual achievement in Torah study. By the time of the Dreyfus Affair and the rising anti-Semitism of Europe, the Zionist movement realized that there must be an inversion of emphasis, from mind to body, for the Jew to survive in modernity. The physical act of land conquest in Palestine could reclaim male Jewish virility by aligning Jews with the conquerors and colonialists of Western Christendom tradition. For the originary diaspora, this was the only possible path to any response to accusations of femininity and perversion in the age of eugenics and biology theory. The first academic understanding of “diaspora” began in the 1930s. Diaspora was narrowly defined by historians as referring only to the 6 th Century B.C.E. Jewish diaspora, the network of refugees that had spread out across northern Africa and into the Roman Empire after the first fall of Israel. By the 1960s, however, diaspora studies had been expanded in a Fanonian context as a transnational study of imagined communities, subcultures and self described alterity at work in a number of postcolonial and neocolonial contexts. Arjun Appadurai, building off Frederic Jameson and Benedict Anderson, summarizes this shift in diaspora studies as a process of interrogating the generative and resistance practices within the global economy to reveal communities formed outside of spatial, geographic and historical linearity. 251 By the 1990s, as Braziel 250 Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 134-135. 251 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Australia: Blackwell, 2003), 26-29. 133 and Mannur have argued, the term “diaspora” began to break down as a problematic, criticized by scholars for its conflation of numerous distinct discursive culture formulations (migrants, political exiles, globalization, etc.) under a single rubric. 252 In response to this problematic, Hamid Naficy argued for the need to draw discursive distinctions between diaspora and exile, noting that diaspora does not necessarily invoke a necessary spatial desire for return, as would be found in actual geographic exile of displaced peoples. 253 The Jewish problematic at the heart of diaspora studies remains. William Safran argues that the Jewish diaspora remains discursively unique, even as the rise of Diaspora studies created a multiethnic diaspora reading across numerous global, transnational and displaced peoples and cultures. 254 Donna Robinson Divine argues that theorists following Edward Said often exclude Israel from neocolonial discussions, placing the occupation firmly into the realm of European and Western colonialism. 255 Divine argues that this fundamentally misreads Said. Said’s critical analysis of the notion of a relational Orientalism between both Arab and Jew in Orientalism (1978), present an entangled discourse that resist reading Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands along a simple colonizer/colonized binary. Said points out that what the western “Jew” gained in the new masculinities bestowed on him as a result of Israeli military success, the Arab lost, 252 Ibid., 6. 253 Hamid Naficy, Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 3-5. 254 William Safran, “Deconstructing and Comparing Diasporas,” Diaspora, Identity, and Religion: New Directions in Theory and Research, ed. Khachig Tölölyan, Carolin Alfonso and Waltraud Kokot, (New York and London: Routledge, 2004) 10-11. 255 Donna Robinson Divine, “The Middle East Conflict and its Postcolonial Discontents,” Postcolonial Theory and the Arab-Israel Conflict, ed. Philip Carl Salzman and Donna Robinson Divine (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 208-209. 134 arguing “the transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.” 256 For Diaspora studies to blur the distinctive discourses of Jewish diaspora within a larger rubric is, in effect, a form of critical and scholarly retroactive baptism. For contemporary scholars, Jewish diaspora, especially after Israel’s formation and military domination of its region, has become discursively distinct. 257 Israel’s control of Palestinian populations in Gaza and the West Bank have led many scholars to argue that Israeli power requires Jewish diaspora to no longer fall under the same rubrics as nationless diaspora cultures and communities. Sander Gilman marks the solution to this problematic in the reconfiguration of the post-Israel Jewish body. Gilman argues that Fanon’s psychoanalytic read of colonialism required Fanon to “’decorporealize’ the Jew, to remove the Jewish, male body from the category of the body at risk.” 258 In other words, once Israel existed, Jewish bodies could no longer read within the Fanonian double readings of the colonized other. For Gilman, bodies at risk define diaspora as much as dangers in the realm of psychoanalytic violence. Said notes how late 1960s Western images of the Arab inverted as well, noting their shift from exoticized and fetishized (The Sheik) to that of defeated, emasculated and militarily weak. 259 What Israel’s military victory accomplished for the diaspora Jew of the late 1960s, Said argues the cost was paid by popular culture depictions of Arabs as the new Jew. 256 Ibid., 286. 257 Lisa Anteby-Yemin. “Ethiopian Jews, New Migration Models in Israel and Diaspora Studies,” Bulletin du Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem, 15 (2004), 60-71. 258 Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998) 198-199. 259 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) 285. 135 Israel’s military victory in 1967 had a transformative effect on the Jewish diaspora. It marked the end of a two decade decorporealization process for world Jewry in the wake of the Holocaust. By this I mean an understanding of “Jewish” identity as distinct from a Jewish biological body. The passive, meek, stereotype of the post- Holocaust diaspora Jew lacked a “body” on two levels. First, with the defeat of Hitler and the regressive pseudo-science of eugenics, Jews were no longer perceived as biologically distinct. Second, the lack of “body” was a feature of cosmopolitan identity, the lack of a single nation. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin trace this decorporealization process all the way back to the writings of the apostle Paul. Paul’s Christianizing project was to universalize the distinctiveness of Jewish and Talmudic alterity found in the Christ myth by universalizing the Jewish body for consumption by non-Jews. The story of Paul himself contains this conversion process, as on the road to Damascus, Saul had his revelation and changed his name to Paul. The Boyarins note that “Paul is the vehicle of a certain distrust of corporeality that is characteristic of Christian culture as well as of the Western critique of ethnicity... things of the body are less important than things of the spirit.” 260 Saul, the Jew, was a body. Paul, the Apostle, spread the Gospel, the promise of reward in the afterlife. The journey from body to spirit, for Christ as well as his disciples, was also a journey from Jew to Christian. To remove the physical Jewish body from the notion of the Jewish male was, in effect, to both Baptize and castrate it. Israel’s military victory of 1967 was an antidote to this lack. It produced a new Jewish “body” that reverberated across the entire diaspora. 260 Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “The Jewish Diaspora,” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, (Australia: Blackwell, 2003), 86. 136 In a March, 2009 profile in The New Yorker, French playwright Yasmina Reza described a moment from her childhood in France in which her immigrant father, learning of Israel’s victory, “introduced the word ‘Jew’ into the house in an uncompromising, mythical way.” 261 Reza, eight years old at the time, was a first generation French Jew born to Eastern European parents who had emigrated from Hungary. Aware of her Hungarian background and French status, the young Reza did not know that she was Jewish until that moment. Reza’s father first spoke the word “Jew” to mark an identity linked not to a place of historical origin, but to a nation of both future abstraction and imagined past. This fractured the young Reza’s understanding of her historical identity as “Hungarian,” as well as transformed her current identity from that of “French” into that of “French/Jew/Israeli/Hungarian.” Reza describes feeling, from that point on, that she had “no roots, no native soil, no sense of place, no nostalgia for one.” 262 This became a central theme of both her literature and plays for the next forty years of her life. The fragmentation in identity that Reza experienced in 1967 exemplifies what Nurith Gertz describes as the “conflict between the two narratives – Israeli Zionist narrative and that of the Holocaust survivor raised in the Diaspora.” 263 The original body of diaspora, the cosmopolitan and transnational “Wandering Jew,” contradicted the imagined landscapes of the new Jewish diaspora produced in response to Israel’s military power. This tension produced two Jewish bodies in a paradoxical configuration. There 261 Judith Thurman, “Nowhere Woman: Yasmina Reza Returns to Broadway” The New Yorker, March 16, 2009. 62 262 Ibid., 62. 263 Nurith Gertz, “Holocaust Survivor’s Point of View,” Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001), 221. 137 was the hyper-masculinized Israeli settler, the “new Jew” that Reza watched her father transform into. This rippled across the diaspora, offering Jewish men a new back-story that previously did not exist. But the wandering Jewish schlemiel, the “old Jew” still remained in the collective imagination. Together, these two constructions formed a problematic. Israel’s militarism produced, but also challenged, how the Jewish diaspora redefined itself in places such as Europe and America. It is in this transformation of identity, a retroactive shift in diaspora identification, that Reza’s understanding of her family became fractured between two countries, one real (Hungary) and one imagined (Israel). The memory of hearing the word “Jew,” uttered for the first time with pride by her father, speaks to how 1967 became such a key moment for global Jewry. It is here, in the tensions between the European Jewish cosmopolitan flâneur attempting to assimilate (Proust’s Charles Swann archetype) and the new “salt of the earth” Kibbutz living Israel settler that informed the shift in Jewish representations that began in 1967. This shift became codified in American film with Benjamin Braddock’s quasi-liberation from his emasculated and rootless state in The Graduate. Benjamin empowerment was a form of Jewish remasculinization. Benjamin became empowered to literally break into a church and rescue Elaine Israel helped produce a new Jewish identity in which Jewish diaspora no longer felt the need to hide. 1967 was the point of transition for postwar and post-Israel diaspora Jewry. But this was a response to the 1940s and the 1950s, a period defined primarily by Jewish absence. In the wake of the Holocaust, a decorporealization of global Jewry began in Western media. This process was a well meaning, progressive attempt to respond to 138 Hitlerian eugenics by removing the notion of a Jewish “body” from representation. The start of this recodification of Jewish bodies is seen in 1947’s Gentlemen’s Agreement. GENTLEMEN’S DISAGREEMENT Before World War Two, the notion of the Jew as a fixed, immutable body, ethnically distinct and biologically codified, was not in dispute. Jewish performers played up their Jewish attributed as comedic stereotype, Other than a few notable exceptions (the Irish actress Irene Wallace often starred as the “Jewess” in the Ghetto Love Stories of the 1910s), Jewish performance and Jewish identity were inextricably linked. Stars such as Sophie Tucker, Jack Benny, Molly Picon, George Jessel, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice and many others celebrated their Jewish identity as part of the progression narrative of American assimilation. Those Jewish performers who did code their Jewishness, such as Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, did so by playing Italian or other ambiguously defined ethnic identities. For most of these early decades of American entertainment, Jewish characters were predominantly linked to the actual backgrounds of Jewish-born performers. The shock of World War Two and the Holocaust, however, caused a radical realignment in understandings of cultural representations of Jewish identity. The realization of the impact of biological theory in the form of eugenics now aligned notions of a fixed Jewish biological alterity with Hitler. Hitler, building off the Protocols of Zion forgery that had spread throughout Europe at the turn of the 20th century, presented the threat facing Germany not as coming from German Jews specifically, but from the far 139 more abstract “world Jewry.” 264 Responding to this in the postwar era, the concept of nationalizing Jewish diaspora became aligned with breaking the connection between “Jew” and Jewish body. This well intended recoding of Jewish identity is not hard to understand. The assumption of a fixed corporeal Jewish alterity was now seen as paranoia of the anti-Semite, and films could challenge this fear by marking it as damaging to the new postwar multicultural American framework. Those who now saw the “Jew” as fixed, as biologically different, were aligned with anti-American Nazi ideology. By 1947, with knowledge of the full scope of the Holocaust becoming more and more widespread, the cultural response was to universalize Jewish identity. Seeing Jews as simply a variation of Christians, those who celebrate Hannukah instead of Christmas, became aligned with patriotism. By denaturing Jewishness from genetics and codifying it within the realm of the universal and performative, Jewishness could be liberated from Nazi eugenics. 265 This decoupling between “Jew” and body was most clearly articulated through two frameworks of representation: 1. The empowerment and championing of non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters, as well as the converse. If the non-Jew could play the Jew and Jews could blend as “white,” then anyone could be “Jewish.” Jewish alterity as biological fact, Hitler’s eugenics argument, was therefore rejected. 264 Norman Cohn, Warrant For Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1996), 226. 265 Marsha Kinder suggested to me in a discussion that the notion of Jewish deviance as a biological and genetic difference suggests an interesting political alignment with the discovery of autism in the 1940s. Kanner and Asperger, two Jewish-born scientists working in the 1940s, worked to define the genetic disorders of autism at a time when Jews were being sent to the camps for biological “deviancy.” 140 2. The idea that Jewish bodies were not identifiable through physical or genetic difference, and any attempt to do so was a form of violence, bigotry and racism. Jewishness could not be seen, it could only be performed. 266 In 1947, two films, released mere months apart, would establish the template for these postwar reclassifications of the Jewish body: Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) and Crossfire (1948). In Gentleman’s Agreement, a non-Jewish journalist, Phil Green (played by non-Jewish actor Gregory Peck) researches the dangers of anti-Semitism by pretending to be Jewish. Judith Doneson points out that the central shift of Gentlemen’s Agreement is located in its ideological reframing of Jewish identity from self-defining (Jewishness defined by Jews), to an emphasis on the non-Jew defining the Jew from outside. Doneson notes that Phil Green’s ability to pass as both Jew and also as non-Jew, emphasizes that “religion is the only distinguishing factor between Jew and non-Jew.” 267 Jewishness was now configured as simply another variation of Christianity, neither biologically nor genetically fixed. A number of scholars, including Henry Bial and Lester Friedman, agree with Doneson, noting that Gentlemen’s Agreement produced a new, postwar understanding of Jewish identity as defined by the act of choice. 268 These scholars note this shift from biology to choice taking place in both performance and language, as demonstrated in the slippages exploited by Phil Green in the use of his own name. 269 Phil Green realizes his 266 Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). 267 Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 51- 54. 268 Bial, Acting Jewish, 33 269 Ibid., 33-34. 141 ability to pass as Jewish is rooted in his last name, “Green,” and the plausibility that it’s a liminal Jewish name, perhaps a shortened version of Greenberg. Jews that hoped to hide their Jewishness through name change, like Phil’s Jewish secretary, Elaine Wales, are marked as equally complicit in anti-Semitism. It is language, not the physiognomy of his facial or body characteristics, that allows Green to pass as Jewish to both Jew and non- Jew alike. Therefore it is also language that can liberate the Jew from his own self-made prison of otherness. 270 In contrast with Phil Green’s non-Jew-as-Jew, John Garfield’s Dave Goldman performed the pre-war counterpoint. John Garfield was the most famous “out,” or at least quasi-“out,” Jewish movie star of the postwar era. 271 The central representational binary of Gentlemen’s Agreement forms between these two competing notions of the Jewish body. The Jew-as-Jew of Garfield represents the pre-war understanding. A performance- based configuration of Jewish identity, the non-Jew-as-Jew as represented by Peck, was the answer to the postwar crisis of Jewish identity. Matthew Frye Jacobson describes this tension as the “warring elements of the narrative.” 272 Together, Peck and Garfield form a meta-textual debate on Jewish identity. Phil’s configuration, the non-Jew-as-Jew, offered a progressive vision of Jewishness as choice. Dave Goldman, the Jew-as-Jew, was the regressive understanding, the Jew as fixed Other. The Phil Green argument, as a 270 Ibid., 36 271 Garfield, born Jacob Julius Garfinkle, was reportedly not happy when Jack Warner requested he change his name to something less Jewish. As the first major movie star to perform the “method” acting style, Garfield’s persona called for authenticity, and his Jewish identity became central to both his choice of characters and acting style. For more see Thom Andersen in "Un-American" Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, ed. Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, Peter Stanfield (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 258-259. 272 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 130-131. 142 response to Nazi biological theory, rejected the John Garfield argument as an isolationist act, a voluntary gesture of exclusion that alienated the Jew. From the 1910s through the 1930s, numerous stars were constructed similar to Garfield. The pre-WORLD WAR II cinematic “Jew” was either literally identified in the script, as in the Ghetto Love Stories, or a performer brought Jewish cadences, linguistic signifiers, hand gestures and other tropes of Jewish code, mostly Vaudevillian-based, to communicate that the character was Jewish, as with Al Jolson, George Jessel, Fanny Brice and the Marx Brothers. Samuel Rosenthal observes that three roles Garfield chose at the height of his career were overtly Jewish characters: Paul Boray romancing WASP aristocrat Helen Wright (Joan Crawford) in Humoresque (1946), lower east side boxer Charlie Davis in Body and Soul (1947), and the watershed role of David Goldman in 1947’s Gentleman’s Agreement. 273 Garfield’s working-class ghetto persona introduced something unseen in the previous-era Jewish-born movie stars; feral ghetto sexuality. 274 Garfield became famous, both on screen and off, for numerous couplings with non- Jewish “shiksa” beauties in films such as Four Daughters (1938) and, of course, with Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). This was highly unusual. Other postwar Jewish-born movie stars like Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall and Judy Holliday, carefully avoided any overt Jewish identity in their roles. But Garfield felt no such concerns, playing Jewish roles without hesitation. By 1950, Garfield’s career would 273 Samuel J. Rosenthal, “John Garfield: Golden ‘Boychick,’” Entertaining America: Jews, Movies and Broadcasting ed. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 174. 274 Garfield’s persona contained a feral ethnic carnality. His massive popularity on both stage and screen would set the stage for Marlon Brando’s subsequent breakthroughs as the feral working class and sexually explosive Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a stage role originally intended for Garfield himself. 143 be over, cut short by the Army/McCarthy investigations of Hollywood Communism. Despite no evidence he had joined the Communist Party, Garfield was blacklisted in Red Channels and barred from working at any studio. 275 Garfield refused to name names before HUAC in April of 1951 and was an active participant in liberal screenwriter Philip Dunne’s Hollywood committee established to challenge HUAC, The Committee for the First Amendment. 276 Although married, Garfield was a notorious womanizer and, on May 21 st , 1952, he died of a heart attack in the apartment of a mistress. This was the day after Clifford Odets had refused to name Garfield as a member of the communist party during Odets’s HUAC testimony. Garfield’s star persona, his celebrated sexuality and explicit Jewishness, place him as a central signifier of the cultural crossroads of the late 1940s. Progressive, well meaning cinematic representations of Jews ironically shared the very same desire as did right wing nativist McCarthy paranoia to reduce the “hidden” threat of Jewish otherness at work in Hollywood. HUAC did this by naming names that would “out” Jews in Hollywood to expose their duplicitous nature. 277 Well intended multicultural progressives responded by endeavoring to separate Jewish identity from performance. If anyone could be Jewish, then Jews could be anyone, and Hitler’s eugenics would break down as a fraud. This framework is central to understanding Gentlemen’s Agreement’s metatextual star critique in the Peck/Garfield dialectic. 275 Robert Nott, He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield, (New York: Proscenium Publishers,2003), 261. 276 Neal Gabler, An Empire of their Own (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 369. 277 In the most explicit anti-Semitic example, Congressman John Rankin read a list of Jewish performers in Hollywood who had changed their names, stressing the original Jewish-sounding last names of each performer. 144 Gentlemen’s Agreement celebrates Garfield as a Jew at the moment it negates him, in the form of Gregory Peck’s postwar “Jew.” This representational shift can actually be traced to the pre-World War Two era, in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). While Chaplin himself was not Jewish, he was perceived by many as a Jewish figure, as I argued in the previous chapter. In 1940, Chaplin addressed this entanglement directly. Chaplin played a variation of his Tramp character as an unnamed Jewish barber living in a Nazi-like country, Tomania. The Barber is persecuted, chased, and eventually ends up in disguise being mistaken for the Hitler-like dictator himself, “Hynkel” (also played by Charlie Chaplin in a dual-role performance). This scrambling of Jewish identity and performance was one of the first films to argue that the denaturing of Jewish identity from the body had a progressive element Chaplin’s location of the “Jew” fully in the performative realm was Chaplin’s argument that Jewishness was universal. It was an answer to Hitler’s biology-based eugenics ideology. If Chaplin’s Jewish Barber could “play” Hynkel, just as Chaplin was playing “Jewish,” the removal of fixed identity from Jewish alterity was a patriotic anti- Nazi response. Chaplin was the first filmmaker to argue for this universal Jewishness. After the war, in 1947, Gentlemen’s Agreement would pick up the mantle of Chaplin’s argument. 1947’s other key film on the subject of anti-Semitism, RKO’s B-picture, Crossfire (1947), also echoed this framework. Crossfire was a noir thriller about an anti-Semitic crime of passion taking place between soldiers during the war, and the subsequent subjective recollections of those who witnessed the crime. The novel on which the film 145 was based, The Brick Foxhole, was about homophobia, not anti-Semitism. The script change from the murder of a gay man to the murder of a Jew suggested both the topicality of Jewish issues of identity in the post-war era as well as the continuing conflation between Jews and homosexuals (and communists). Both Crossfire and Gentlemen’s Agreement present anti-Semitism as a psychological disease, a pathological desire to lash out at people who are, in reality, no different than anyone else. The well meaning realignment was clear: Jewishness is no different than non-Jewishness. It is simply a choice. Postwar Jewishness was, in other words, performed. Gentlemen’s Agreement’s Peck/Garfield contest over Jewish identity would become even more solidified in 1951, when Peck was cast to play the title role of the Jewish King David in David and Bathsheba (1951). Pulling from the many classic Biblical Jewish/non-Jewish erotic adventures (Esther, Solomon and Joseph among others), the film was a melodrama about the Jewish king David and his lust for the shiksa goddess Bathsheba, played by Susan Hayward. The erotic charge of Jewish/Christian coupling is rendered explicit in the film’s dialogue when Bathsheba seductively tells the brooding David, “If the law of Moses is to be broken, let us break it with full understanding of what we want from each other.” 278 The shift in Hollywood representation of Jewish identity was increasingly clear; Peck’s aesthetic vanquishing of Garfield’s Jewish-Jewish movie star was complete. By 1951, the “Jew” could be played by the non-Jewish actor, while the tensions (and pleasures) of Jewish/Christian coupling narratives could be generated fully in the fictive, performative realms. By 1958’s The 278 Joel Samberg, Reel Jewish (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000), 44-45. 146 Young Lions, the first major film to confront anti-Semitism since 1947, the Jewish soldier was played by the unlikely figure of stoic, if feminine, male beauty, Montgomery Clift. Elizabeth Taylor played the crypto-Jewish character of Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1963). Charlton Heston was cast as Moses in The Ten Commandments. Even the remake of The Jazz Singer (1958) featured Lebanese comedian Danny Thomas in the role of Jack Robin. By 1951, the Peck/Garfield dynamic of 1947 had taken hold, leaving overt Jewish performers like John Garfield behind. The execution of another Julius, Julius Rosenberg, as well as his wife Ethel, in 1951, performed high drama in the mass media as a sort of Dreyfus Affair redux. Persecuted by Joe McCarthy and his top lawyer, the Jewish Roy Cohn, the Rosenbergs were portrayed as the embodiment of national betrayal hidden under the guise of suburban normativity. Their very invisibility, a seemingly typical suburban couple, provoked fears of the Jewish Other at work at undermining the nation from within. The Rosenbergs became Jewish faces to signify an alignment between communism and Christian godlessness in the encroaching postwar nuclear age. 279 The Rosenbergs, once executed, read as both a literal as well as imagined landscape of decorporealization. Julius and Ethel, Judas figures who had betrayed the Christian nation, were removed from the public sphere by execution. Other Jews in Hollywood simply went into hiding, attempting to blanket themselves under a veneer of whiteness, lest they be next. 279 Janet R. Jakobson, “Queers are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, Ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, Ann Pelligrini, Columbia University Press: New York, 2003. P. 76 147 THE DECORPOREALIZATION OF PHILIP LOEB The Garfield/Peck binary of 1947 was paralleled in the nascent but rapidly growing industry of television. Television shows of the late 1940s and early 1950s were dominated by Jewish Catskills comedians from both vaudeville and radio backgrounds. In the 1920s, it had been Jewish entertainers such as Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, George Jessel, and Al Jolson that had marked the transitions of the cinematic medium from the stages of Broadway and Vaudeville. The 1950s saw a similar use of urban Jewish comedy to enable the invention of a new medium. Catskills and Borscht Belt comedians like Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, George Burns, Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Molly Berg introduced Jewish-style comedy and shtick as the first representations on television between 1949 and 1951. Shows like Burns and Allen (1950-1958), The Texaco Star Theater (1948-1956), Your Show of Shows (1950-1954), The Goldbergs (1949- 1956), and The Phil Silvers Show (1955-1959) brought Borscht Belt, radio and Catskills comedy to the masses. By the early 1950s, however, a transformative ethnic whitewashing began to take place. This process, increasing throughout the 1950s, was what Neal Gabler describes as Hollywood’s attempt to turn “every ethnic into a white, middle-class American.” 280 As Gabler and Frank Rich have pointed out, Jewish New York personalities on television gradually became reconfigured from textual Jews into coded Jews. This shift de-Jewified the Jewish entertainers, a process meant to sell non-Jewish audiences on buying television sets. References to Christmas increased. A near total negation of 280 Neal Gabler, Frank Rich and Joyce Antler, Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (Los Angeles: The Norman Lear Center, 2000), 12. 148 Jewish specificity in relation to holidays and religious ceremonies were brought into otherwise Jewish scenarios and comedy frameworks. 281 Rich cites the moment on The Goldbergs when Molly Berg refers to the upcoming holidays of the season as Thanksgiving and Christmas but made no mention of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur or Hanukah. 282 This shift in post-Holocaust Jewish representations from the John Garfield peak in 1947 to the mid 1950s is startling. The political implications of HUAC’s investigation into television in the early 1950s played a large role in this transformation. In a live Q&A in 2010, Mel Brooks described the panic in the writer’s room of Your Show of Shows during the 1950s over HUAC’s investigation with the following quip: “We didn't know if they were after Communists, Jews, or just short people." 283 The impact of Joe McCarthy and HUAC on Jewish assimilation narratives produced a near totalizing absence of explicit Jewish identity by the late 1950s. A key example of this shift was seen on The Goldbergs. The Goldbergs, a massive radio hit that began during the Jewish heyday of the late 1920s (originally called The Rise of the Goldbergs), began airing on the nascent CBS network in 1949. 284 It immediately turned the already famous creator/writer/performer, Molly Berg, into one of the first television superstars. The Goldbergs was a show awash with Yiddishisms, puns, and stories of old world versus new world culture clash that embraced Jewishness as a vehicle for the story of American assimilation. Molly Berg’s persona emerged in radio as 281 ibid., 10-17. 282 Ibid., 15. 283 Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, interviewed by Larry Karaszewski at The Egyptian Theater, Los Angeles, July 23, 2010. 284 For more on Berg’s influence on radio and in early television, see Michele Hilmes, The Nation's Voice: Radio in the Shaping of American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 149 the Yiddishe Mama stereotype. Berg was a Jew-as-Jew, living in a fully Jewish world, dispensing Yiddishkeit-infused wisdom to both her family and the audience. The matronly, desexualized immigrant ghetto mother was confused by American modernity. But Mrs. Goldberg was able to offer gossipy pearls of humorous wisdom from her perch in her tenement window. A ghetto comedy playing with the same Yiddishisms and malapropisms that had fueled Abie’s Irish Rose and Private Izzy Murphy a generation earlier, the televisual medium made use of the same English/Yiddish double talk that Jolson had riffed on to mark the transition to sync sound in the cinema. In the linguistic double plays of Molly Goldberg’s “Mollypropisms,” the new medium of television brought Yiddish radio, theater and Vaudevillian comedy tradition as its introductory entertainment frameworks. Yet within a few years, Jewish emphasis was increasingly downplayed, as The Goldbergs did their best to appeal to the increasingly suburban, and non-Jewish, television audience. Vincent Brook describes this whitening of The Goldbergs as a key example of the Eisenhower Era “assimilationist project.” 285 George Lipsitz notes how any working class themes of these early ethnic comedies were mitigated by the universalizing desire of product consumerism. 286 The Goldbergs was so innocent and uneventful, Thomas Doherty describes the program “an unlikely site for subversive activity.” But as Doherty shows, the “nascent suspicion of the American Jew as an alien intruder in Christian America” fueled a deep mistrust of the program, and of early television itself, that led to 285 Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 22. 286 George Lipsitz, “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 1, No. 4, (Nov. 1986), 386-387. 150 extensive investigations in Washington. 287 HUAC and McCarthy created a two year tug of war between Molly Berg and The General Foods Corporation, the sponsor of the show, over the “suspicious” political activities of actor Philip Loeb, the patriarch who played Mr. Goldberg on the television show. Initially supportive, the pressure on Molly Berg became too much and Berg was forced to fire Loeb in 1951, replacing him with the non- Jewish actor Robert H. Harris. 288 In 1952, The Goldbergs moved from New York’s Lower East Side to the far more bland American suburbs and the show’s name was changed to the less ethnically overt Molly. For Philip Loeb, as with the fate of John Garfield, the McCarthy/HUAC investigations would prove not only to be a career ender, but a life ender as well. Isolated from Hollywood and with little public support, in 1955, Philip Loeb committed suicide. As David Zurawik and Joseph Litvak have argued, the tragic case of Philip Loeb was the clearest example of the anti-Semitic anxieties underpinning the HUAC investigations. 289 Despite Molly Berg’s concessions to HUAC through the recasting of Jake Goldberg with a non-Jew, the show’s “overt ethnicity,” as historian Lawrence Epstein puts it, was doomed in the age of the whitening of television. 290 Jewish masculinity, with its long tradition of schlemiels and pacifist labor organizers, was personified by the embattled nebbishy Philip Loeb and his urban, henpecked husband alter ego, Mr. Goldberg. Joseph Litvak describes Loeb as a member of the 287 Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 41. 288 Ibid., 46. 289 Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, The Blacklist and Stoolpigeon Culture, (London: Duke University Press, 2009), 156-158. 290 Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America, (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 146. 151 “Comicosmopolitan” performing class of the time: Jewish-comedic performers caught up in the post Holocaust tensions between European and American Jewry. 291 These tensions were exacerbated not only by HUAC, but in the real world drama of the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs in 1951. Playing out on television as a real life soap opera, the Army/McCarthy investigations and Rosenberg trial put a Jewish face on paranoia about the insidious communist Other. By selecting average looking Jews, the fear aligned with anti-Semitic traditions of Jews disguised within the larger population and working from inside to undermine it. The polysemy of star construction on T.V., Molly playing “Molly,” Lucy playing “Lucy”, Ricky playing “Ricky” and George and Gracie playing “George and Gracie” had already blurred discursive boundaries between performer and star in ways not seen since the silent era of film. Loeb’s political background, presented in context with his stereotypical sitcom husband character on The Goldbergs, revived just the sort of anxieties of Jewish cloaking within the nation-state that so many modernist writers and thinkers had critiqued as embodying the crisis of modernity in the 1910s and 1920s. But there is another angle to consider in the recasting of Jake Goldberg . If we position the Goldbergs not as individual representations, but as a coupling, we can consider the tensions of corporeal/fictive Jewish-Jewish identity represented in the Peck/Garfield dialectic of Gentlemen’s Agreement. It is in the act of recasting “Jake Goldberg” that we find Molly Berg’s concession not just to fire Philip Loeb, but to transmogrify the figure of the Jewish husband played by the Jewish actor (the “Garfield”) 291 Ibid., 48. 152 in the figure of the non-Jewish actor playing the Jewish character (The “Peck”). Berg did this by casting non-Jewish actor Robert Harris to replace Loeb as Jake Goldberg. Berg’s decision marked an ideological reconfiguration on The Golbergs towards the very notion of Jewish identity within performance. Robert Harris as the new Jake Goldberg supports Peck’s argument in Gentlemen’s Agreement. Jewish performativity overrides biological/indexical alterity. The site of contest was not just Philip Loeb the actor, it was in the decorporealization of the character from the Jewish body. Berg offered reassurance to HUAC by supporting Peck’s argument against Jewish biological alterity. The non-Jew performing as a Jew was less alien, and therefore less of a threat, than notions of fixed Jewish bodies. The anti-Semitic underpinnings of HUAC were not hard to find. Mississippi Congressman John Rankin had introduced the analogy of hidden Jewish infiltration on the House of Representatives in the 1940s: “Jewish bankers first crucified the German Republic, and in doing so they created Hitler. He is their baby. Hitler never would have been heard of if it had not been for these elements swarming into Germany and undermining the German Republic." 292 Rankin’s notion of cosmopolitan forces swarming into Germany leading to the Holocaust can be seen as the antithesis of the Gentlemen’s Agreement framework. For Rankin and much of the HUAC and Army/McCarthy hearings, Jewish/Communist threat was a biologic contagion in the American culture industry, to be rooted out as a variant of cultural purging. Jewish intellectuals responded to this by downplaying, or outright 292 Rafael Medoff, Jewish Americans and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook,(Santa Barbara: CLIO, 2002), 278. 153 hiding, their Jewish identity as much as possible. The first wave of feminist writers in the 1950s, Betty Friedan and Wini Breines, were almost completely silent about their identity as Jews. Karen Brodkin and Daniel Horowitz have shown how Friedan’s Jewish background, and her role in urban 1930s labor movements, is produced in her work as a structuring absence. Friedan’s lack of references to her Jewish identity is a complete textual negation appearing in an otherwise confessional work. Yet Brodkin and Horowitz argue that Friedan’s Jewish identity, and leftist/activist background informs The Feminine Mystique from an essential New York liberal Jewish perspective. 293 Friedan’s decorporealization of her distinctive Jewish identity can be read as part of a universalizing process meant to help sell Friedan’s argument without fear of intellectual ghettoization. 294 Friedan’s act of couching radical progressivism under the rubric of the white, suburban everywoman was also the embodiment of a “Jewish” language code that HUAC feared. Jewish/communism, cloaked in white suburbia was just like The Dick Van Dyke Show. A show about a white, WASPy couple (Dick Van Dyle, Mary Tyler Moore) was presented as the “mask” to communicate the comedy drawn from Carl Reiner’s specific New York Jewish reality. Jews-as-Jews had been driven off television by the mid to late 1950s. Yet Jewish ideas could continue if hidden behind a white, Christian veneer. The anxiety of communist/radical infiltration was, of course, not only directed at Jews. The intermarriage framework of I Love Lucy, with its playful satire of domestic 293 Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 167-168. 294 Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War and Modern Feminism (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). 154 suburban bliss in the arguments and battle of the sexes comedy of the Cuban Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz) and Lucy McGillicuddy-Ricardo (Lucille Ball), became the first breakout sitcom of the 1950s to transform the ethnic into the white person that Molly Berg had hoped to accomplish in the recasting of Mr. Goldberg. Ricky, as both “hot blooded Latin” in the Valentino mode as well as typical suburban husband, walked the fine line between the urbane ethnic New York multiculturalism and the encroaching American suburbia. Desi Arnaz had inspired just as much attention from HUAC as had Philip Loeb. Thomas Doherty argues that the polysemy of the relationship between the real life Lucy/Ricky and their fictional counterparts created a form of tension between the “real” and the fictional that spilled into congressional debates in Washington. Desi and Lucy faced repeated accusations by HUAC of un-American activities. 295 Yet by resisting these accusations, insisting on portraying Desi Arnaz as just another American house- husband (albeit one with ethnic showbiz ties), I Love Lucy presented the framework in which an intermarriage between a white and ethnic could resolve their differences in suburbia. Ricky was American so long as he focused his attentions on Lucy. But Ricky was the exception, not the rule. Joyce Antler, J. Hoberman, and David Marc have shown how, by 1956, ethnic Jewish comedies were driven off the air, replaced by fully white suburban counterparts on shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963) and Father Knows Best (1954-1960). 296 295 Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 52-55. 296 Neal Gabler, Frank Rich and Joyce Antler, Television’s Changing Image of American Jews (The Norman Lear Center, 2000) 32-34 David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), xiii. 155 Marc points out that vaudeville stars who had successfully transitioned to television such as Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner were, by 1958, barely hanging on as game show and talk show hosts. 297 Jack Benny, Phil Silvers, and Danny Kaye still thrived with a coded Jewish clownishness, but overt references to Jewish identity had disappeared. Following the execution of the Rosenbergs, in 1951, and the subsequent Army-McCarthy investigations of the backgrounds of Hollywood entertainers, Jews and communists become conflated as twin threats to the imagined suburban white American landscape. A notable exception, as Jeffrey Shandler points out, took place in dramatic televisual depictions of the Holocaust, and its aftermath on programs like Studio One and Playhouse 90. 298 Shandler argues that the framework of the episodic, live anthology series was particularly conducive to a story looking to negotiate the “drama of introspection.” 299 Contrasting Shandler’s examples of Paddy Chayefsky’s Holiday Song for Philco Television Playhouse in 1952 with Rod Serling’s In the Presence of My Enemies for Playhouse 90 in 1960, a radical shift in Jewish representation is notable. Both dramas were written by New York Jewish intellectuals, albeit with complex relationships to their own Judaism. 300 Chayefsky’s intimate story of a cantor’s redemption, produced in 1952, contrasts strongly with Serling’s grim tale of hopeless intolerance. This shift is notable in the casting choices. As Jeffrey Shandler notes, Rod 297 Marc, Comic Visions, 75 298 Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41-79. 299 Ibid., 45. 300 Shandler describes Rod Serling's isolated childhood in an anti-Semitic upstate New York suburb, his decision to join a Christian church as an adult and marry a non-Jewish wife, yet his ongoing fascination with the Holocaust in his writing. Shandler suggests Serling’s need to examine his relationship with his Jewish identity. Ibid., 60. 156 Serling’s casting choices for the rabbi and his son were non-Jewish actors Charles Laughton and Paul Heller. Their non-Jewish identity was made clear in the fact that neither actor made any attempt to perform the Eastern European immigrant accents or cadences of their characters. Instead, both Laughton and Heller performed using classic acting tropes of the British stage. 301 Serling’s script also makes intermarriage a central narrative point, mimicking the Ghetto love story framework by portraying a young, beautiful Jewess, Rachel, who falls in love with the British nobleman who is kind to her in the face of persecution. In 1962’s A Majority of One, the process of Jewish universalization of the period marked an ironic conclusion. The comedic love story between an elderly Jewish mother, “Bertha Jacoby,” and a Japanese businessman, “Koichi Asano,” had been a huge hit for the post Goldbergs Molly Berg on Broadway. Written by Leonard Spiegelglass, the comedic linguistic play of (mis)communication between the Yiddishisms of Bertha and broken English of Asano gives way to a narrative of mutual loss when it is revealed both characters lost children in World War Two. However, as adapted for film, the characters of Bertha and Asano were cast with the non-Jewish Rosalind Russell and non-Japanese Alec Guinness, respectively. Guinness performs in stereotypical Japanese eye makeup and Russell delivers a series of Jewish “dahlinks” that historian Joel Samberg describes as an attempt by a non-Jew to “sound Jewish.” 302 HUAC had removed Jake Goldberg’s Jewishness in the early 1950s. By 1962, Molly Berg’s Yiddishe Mama was now open season for actresses like Rosalind Russell. Jewish decorporealization was complete. 301 Ibid., 59 302 Joel Samberg, Reel Jewish (New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000), 58. 157 This process in the 1950s was by no means limited to Jewish identity. Blackface may have gone out of favor, but Alec Guinness in Japanese-face, as with Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), reflected the numerous efforts to destabilize ethnic alterity from corporeality not just among Jews, but a number of ethnic identities. Natalie Wood’s famed role as Maria, the Puerto Rican love interest of West Side Story (Wise: 1961) further emphasized the liberal push to argue against racism and bigotry not just on the narrative level of interracial romantic coupling, but on the performative/indexical level as well. The signification of these texts in concert with these performers seems clear: if ethnicity was performance, then racism was unjustifiable since there was no corpus to resist. The nascent Israel still hadn’t made its mark on the Western consciousness, even as Arendt’s reporting from the Eichmann trial in 1961 brought international attention to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Jewish-born movie stars such as Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Judy Holliday and Lee J. Cobb rarely played Jewish characters, having changed their original last names to Christian-sounding surnames. 303 This absence culminated in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). As Steve Cohan points out, the only Jewish actor given one of the many textually Jewish roles was Edward G. Robinson, cast as Dathan, the Hebrew Judas-figure who betrays Moses to the Pharaoh. 304 Moses, of course, was played by the non-Jewish Charlton Heston. The Jew-as-Jew was “Judas,” the betrayer of Heston-as-Moses. The Peck/Garfield dynamic was in full display. 303 A notable exception would be Lee J. Cobb’s originating role as the doomed Willy Loman on Broadway in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in the late 1940s. 304 Steve Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 133. 158 Decades later, the first film to confront the crisis of Jewish identity and the anti- Semitic underpinnings of the HUAC investigations was the Martin Ritt-directed The Front (1976). The film was famously written by, and starring, numerous blacklisted Jewish entertainers as a form of redemption for careers damaged, and lost, in the 1950s. But the film also featured one of the most famous young, overtly Jewish entertainers to emerge in the post The Graduate period, Woody Allen. By telling a fictionalized version of the tragic persecution of The Goldberg’s Philip Loeb, The Front foregrounded the centrality of anti-Semitism at work in the HUAC/McCarthy years. The Loeb character, “Hecky Brown,” was played by another famously blacklisted actor of the 1950s, Zero Mostel. In one of the most famous scenes depicting the crisis of identity for Jewish actors trying to hide their Jewishness, Hecky stands on Howard Prince’s (Woody Allen) balcony and shouts his pre-entertainment Jewish name, “Hershel Brownstein.” Hecky’s career-long attempt to hide his Jewish identity (and thus his inevitable Marxist affiliation) has become impossible. The HUAC forces became determined to remove him from television. Mostel’s portrayal of the tragedy of Philip Loeb drew a direct connection between HUAC persecution and the Jews hiding their Jewish identity in the comic codes of the 1950s. Hecky’s suicide, paralleling Loeb’s, is the moment at which Hecky realizes he can no longer appear on television. The sequence features an extended long take in which Hecky checks into a fancy hotel room, orders champagne, takes a sip, gives one final brief performance to himself in a hotel mirror, and then jumps out of an off-screen window. The moment at which Hecky jumps to his death is not seen, the camera pans 159 away. Ritt’s directorial choice aligns the ability to be seen, on-camera, with Jewish identity. Brown’s suicide, as for the real Philip Loeb, occurs when the camera, and the American public, is no longer witness. The Front makes its point that that the process of driving Jews off television for supposed communist affiliations in the 1950s provoked a crisis in Jewish identity. Mostel’s crisis of identity, as “Hecky Brown” the entertainer and “Herschel Brownstein” the Jew, produced the anti-Semitic suspicion that he was not suitably American enough. This unresolvable tension led to Hecky’s suicide. Mitigating Hecky’s descent and death from HUAC persecution is Woody Allen’s Howard Prince. This counterpoint draws a distinct generational separation between the crisis of the 1950s and the liberation of the 1970s. Prince presents a next-generation framework of Jewish identity in two ways. The first is in Prince’s use of voice. Originally a fake-writer, pretending to write the lines given to him by others, Prince is so shaken by the death of Hecky that he decides to speak out. This pays off in the conclusion of the film when Howard Prince, rather than plead the Fifth Amendment, tells a room full of HUAC investigators “you can all go fuck yourselves.” Prince can now say what none of the persecuted victims of HUAC could say in the 1950s. But this also works on a metatextual level. Woody Allen’s persona, an overtly Jewish construction that hadn’t been seen since Jolson, Jessel and Groucho in the 1920s and early 1930s, is the delayed Jewish voice returning. Allen, along with Dustin Hoffman, George Segal, Elliott Gould, Richard Benjamin, Richard Dreyfus, Charles Grodin and others, was no longer afraid nor intimidated by 1950s-era fears of Jewish alterity. Jewish performers, in the post The Graduate era, were free in ways Philip Loeb was not. 160 This generational transformation is also marked in The Front through the use of the love story. While operating as a “Front” for his more talented Jewish writer friends, Prince successfully courts the beautiful Connecticut WASP, Florence Barrett (Andrea Marcovicci). Prince does this by pretending to be the actual writer he is posing as, an artist with a dedicated political sensibility and deep creative aspirations. In a key dialogue exchange on Howard and Florence’s first date, the centrality of the Christian/Jewish dynamic is made overt: Howard Prince: Where are you from? Florence Barrett: Connecticut. Howard Prince: That's very ritzy. Florence Barrett: It's very proper anyway. I was very well bred - the kind of family where the biggest sin was to raise your voice. Howard Prince: Oh yeah? In my family the biggest sin was to pay retail. 305 Woody Allen’s Howard Prince was the Jewish voice responding to the previous generation’s silence. He did this through unapologetic Jewish humor in service of successfully wooing the Christian female. The solution to Hollywood’s Jewish ghettoization of the HUAC years was found in both generational reply and sexual expression. Ritt’s examination of the persecution of Jews of the 1950s found solution within a utopian framework of next-generation Christian-Jewish romance. How did Hollywood get from the totaling absence of 1950s HUAC fears to Woody Allen’s next-generation Jewish pride in 1976? One transition point can be read in the absurdist slapstick comedy of the spasmodic Jerry Lewis. Lewis performed the deviant and neurotic Jewish id almost fully unleashed, barely constrained by societal convention. Paired in tandem with the suave, contained Dean Martin, the Italian/Jewish 305 Martin Ritt, director, The Front, 1976. 161 comedy duo of Martin and Lewis formed their own form of Cohens and Kellys homosocial coupling narrative, only with Martin’s suave Italian substituting for the Irish figure. Martin and Lewis’s success as a comedy team began in 1949 when both changed their last names from Crocetti and Levitch, respectively. Together as a dual-ethnic Christian-Jewish team, they performed a far more sexually coded comedy in contrast to the chaste, genial, Hope and Crosby dynamic. Martin as the calm, suave seducer and Lewis as the primal and immature sex drive, represented two distinctive performative idioms in the 1950s. They were the first stirrings of unleashed ethnic sexuality hiding in comedic pretend-normative masquerade. 306 Lewis celebrated his twin identities as both a anarchic man-child as well as a creative auteur in the Charlie Chaplin mode. Lewis made this binary textual in 1963’s The Nutty Professor. Lewis wrote, directed and starred in the film as two characters. Lewis was Professor Julius Kelp, a nerdy, eccentric, and sexually frustrated Jewish academic. Even the character’s name of “Julius” echoed both the executed Julius Rosenberg as well as John Garfield’s birth name. Phonetically, the name can be heard as both a variation of “J(erry)-Lewis,” as well as “Jew-lius.” Kelp’s dream is to escape the limitations of his sexually undesirable intellectual body. Kelp discovers a formula to transform into his alter ego, the suave, sexually confident, and powerful “Buddy Love.” “Buddy Love” is, on his surface, a riff on Dean Martin’s hyper-masculine Italian lothario character. But Lewis’s comedic riff on identity also satirized the gothic horror tradition of on Jekyll and Hyde. Judith Halberstam argues that the original Jekyll and Hyde was a 306 Frank Manchel, The Box-Office Clowns: Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen (New York / London / Toronto: Franklin Watts, 1979), 32-35. 162 template for anxieties of racial hybridization that specifically draw from Christian-Jewish biological theories. Jekyll and Hyde plays with the tensions found between “Aryan” and “Semite.” 307 In The Nutty Professor, the notion of Jewish sexual deviancy that Halberstam describes is parodied in the Julius/Buddy transformation. Julius Kelp’s name changes into the provocative “Buddy Love,” suggesting an untethered erotic freedom. The transformative power of the apparatus allows Lewis-the-auteur to transform Lewis- the-schlemiel. The primal id of the spasmodic pre-linguistic guttural noises of “Jerry Lewis” is reconfigured, through both technology and biology, into a hyper-sexual and suavely confident Jewish erotic. Lewis’s play with Jewish body transformation took place three years before Dustin Hoffman appeared in The Graduate. Julius Kelp’s transformation from feminized Jewish schlemiel to masculinized hyper-stud echoed another transformation in masculinities taking place halfway around the world. This emancipation narrative actually pre-dated The Nutty Professor by three years, emerging in the hugely successful blockbuster of 1960, Otto Preminger’s Exodus. (S)EXODUS: ISRAEL, MILITARISM, AND EROS Leon Uris’s Exodus, a novel released in 1958, was a story of the determination of postwar European Jewry to find their way to Israel. In becoming a literary phenomenon in the United States, Exodus was seen as a perfect analog to the story of America’s own colonization myth. In Otto Preminger’s film version, released in 1960, the lead character of heroic freedom fighter Ari Ben-Canaan was brought to life by movie star Paul 307 Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 79. 163 Newman. Newman’s glamorous, idealized hero was a representation of the rugged Jewish masculinity that Herzl and Nordau had dreamed of at the beginning of the Zionist movement. No longer the embattled and weak communist schlemiels hunted by McCarthy (and, in the case of the Rosenbergs, executed), this new Israeli Jew, the hyper- masculine Ari Ben-Canaan, offered what Yosefa Loshitzky describes as a transnational recoding of the Jewish diaspora, a “Zionization of the American Jew.” 308 Loshitzky, along with Ella Shohat, notes the parallels of the relationship established between the figure of the “Sabra soldier” and the American in the form of Paul Newman’s very American-ish Ari Ben Canaan. Newman attempts no accent. Newman presents Ari as an American Movie Star writ Israeli freedom fighter, with no tensions between the two constructions. Ari’s primary desire is to move as many Jews as he can from Europe to Palestine to help found a new nation of hope and idealization. But, as Loshitzky notes, there is a third figure problematizing the path between Ari and the Jewish dream of Zionism – the non-Jewish blonde Midwestern girl from Indiana, Kitty Fremont, played by Eva Marie Saint. In an inversion of Julia Kristeva’s gendered gaze, Kitty, the blonde beauty, is now the normative gaze, the subject, and it is Paul Newman that is the beautiful, eroticized object of hers, and our, desires. It is through Kitty’s witnessing of the events of the story that the Jewish object of masculine beauty is introduced in the virile form of the unapologetic Ari Ben-Canaan. Newman is the beauty. Kitty is the witness. 308 Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 6. 164 Omer Bartov argues that Newman’s star persona played a key role in negotiating Exodus’s shifting understanding of the Jewish diaspora. Bartov argues that Newman’s “half-Jewish” background, publicized in the press of the time, gave Exodus an authentic claim to Jewish identity. Along with Newman’s “perfect Aryan looks” counterpointed by his prominent Star of David necklace, Bartov argues the film could have it both ways, a distinct scrambling of both diegetic and metatextual signifiers of Jewish alterity. This reaches its narrative convergence when Newman-as-Ben-Canaan impersonates a British Naval officer. 309 Newman’s ability to “pass” as non-Jewish is as unquestioned as Gregory Peck’s converse identity shift in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947). However, Newman’s real world identity, at least part-Jewish, was a new construction, a half-step between Peck/Garfield for the half-Jewish Newman. The militarism of Israel was able to at least partially return the Jewish body, as a body, to the cinematic diegesis. Newman-as- Canaan offers the solution to what Daniel Boyarin describes as the long search for a discourse of Jewish masculinity in Herzl’s Zionist project of the 1890s, what Boyarin describes as the “search of a Jewish political subject who will find a place in modernity.” 310 Newman-as-Canaan had found what Philip Loeb and John Garfield could not. This is confirmed not by the acquisition of Palestine, but by the acquisition of Kitty Fremont. Loshitzky and Shohat both observe that Exodus’s central character arc is not really Ben-Canaan, who always knows what he wants and where he is going, but rather is 309 Omer Bartov, The “Jew “ in Cinema, From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 190. 310 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997), 6-7. 165 located in the growing awareness of the witness to history, the “WASP American woman.” 311 The love story between the hyper-masculine Israeli settler, Ari, and the blonde, WASP American female, Kitty, became totems of the emerging geographic partnership between America and Israel. Newman’s iconic portrayal of Jewish masculinity, his “new Jew,” claims three “bodies” along his journey; the land of Israel, Kitty Fremont, and his own. So why Kitty Fremont? Understanding the Ari/Kitty love story is impossible without realizing the central role of blonde “Shiksa” beauty in the 1950s. Throughout most of the 1950s, blonde hair and blue eyed female beauty operated as what historian Steven Cohan describes as “the fifties’ primary trope for female sexuality.” 312 From Hitchcock’s many blondes (Day, Kelly, Novak, Hedren), to Brigitte Bardot embodying the erotic female in European art cinema in the 1960s, Cohan, via Richard Dyer, notes how reassuring narratives of WASP beauty helped quell anxieties brought about by the ethnic unrest of the American Civil Rights movement. 313 Yet the artificial construction of idealized Aryan beauty was just as quickly coming apart. Marilyn Monroe was satirizing this cliché as early as 1953 in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In her real life, the quintessential blonde shiksa of the 1950s made headlines with her rejection of her storybook marriage to the icon of Italian-American athletic masculinity, Joe DiMaggio. Monroe left DiMaggio to marry the older, bespectacled, Jewish intellectual, Arthur Miller, in 1956. Monroe’s choice not only introduced the progressive notion of the 311 Ibid., 7. 312 Steven Cohan. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties (Indiana University Press: Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1997), 12. 313 Ibid., 13. 166 Jewish intellectual/artist marrying the Shiksa Goddess, but, in Monroe’s conversion to Judaism, suggested a malleability of Jewish identity previously unknown in pop culture. The idea that the personification of blonde beauty would actively decide to join the Jewish religion marked a seismic shift in representations in terms of the sexually desirable male. But it also suggested a flexibility between Jewish identity and biology even beyond what Gregory Peck had performed in Gentlemen’s Agreement. The most famous brunette beauty in Hollywood of the 1950s, Elizabeth Taylor, would similarly convert to Judaism in 1959. Taylor, born a Christian Scientist, was rumored in popular press of the time to have converted because of the demands of either her Jewish husband Mike Todd, or, after Todd’s premature death in 1958, Taylor’s next husband, Eddie Fischer. However Taylor denied converting for any reason other than her affection for the Jewish people. In 1959, Taylor took the Hebrew name “Elisheba Rachel.” 314 Counterpointing two of the most famous Hollywood beauties of the 1950s converting to Judaism, actual Jewish performers were driven increasingly underground. Paralleling John Garfield, the Jewish Judy Holliday (Judy Tuvim), who had shot to fame in films such as Adam’s Rib (1949) and Born Yesterday (1950) found her career over just as quickly as she fell under HUAC persecution. Holliday’s persona was disruptive and complex, what Kathleen Rowe describes as one of the key “unruly” females of the early 1950s. 315 Holliday played with the duplicitous nature of the “dumb blonde” construction 314 Benjamin Ivry, “A Jew By Choice: Elizabeth Taylor: 1932-2011” The Forward, March 23, 2011. 315 Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 171. 167 itself, suggesting not only that “blondeness” was performance and not genetics, but that acting dumb for a woman might actually be a deceptively smart choice. Holliday’s fragmentation of the blonde worked similarly to Jerry Lewis’s doubling of bodies in The Nutty Professor a decade later. Holliday coded her Jewish identity under a peroxide blonde dye job and her ditzy persona belying a sharp intellect hinted at the very anxieties of Jewish deception that fueled so much of the HUAC investigations. 316 Cohan argues that the rupture in normative constructions of gender hinted at by Holliday’s duplicitous persona came to fruition with the arrival of the cross-dressing Tony Curtis in Billy Wilder’s raucous cross-dressing comedy, Some Like it Hot (1959). Curtis, like Paul Newman, was one of the first stars of the era to begin to explicitly acknowledge his Jewish identity. Curtis frequently joked to the press about his transformation from a nasal Jewish kid from the Bronx named Bernie Schwartz into the golden “it” boy in Hollywood. Curtis’s star construction was foregrounded as what Cohan describes as an “unstable masculine persona.” 317 Curtis was positioned as a “glamour boy-girl” in publicity materials of the time that contrasted sharply with Hollywood stars like Burt Lancaster and William Holden. 318 The pinnacle of this liminal construction was in Curtis’s cross-dressing performance as “Joe” in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1959). 319 The comedic journey for Tony Curtis and his co-star Jack Lemon was that of urban, cowardly musicians who are so afraid of “real men” gangsters that 316 As Rowe notes, Judy Holliday’s refusal to cooperate with HUAC rendered her fate similar to that of Garfield, and she was driven out of Hollywood by the mid 1950s. Holliday would die of cancer at the age of 43, mostly forgotten, in the late 1960s. Only the truly white blonde stars, the Doris Days and Grace Kellys, sailed through the ethnic purging and whitening of Hollywood in the 1950s. 317 Cohan, Masked Men, 308. 318 Ibid., 308. 319 Ibid., 305. 168 they’ll dress like women to survive. For Curtis’s Joe, his flawed masculinity, his fear of confrontation, cowardice and cross-dressing, eventually becomes solved in his seduction of the ultimate blonde love interest of the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe. Just as Kitty Fremont’s gaze is directed at Ari Ben-Canaan, the normative male- to-female gaze in Some Like it Hot is inverted when Joe, attempting to seduce Sugar (Monroe), takes on the affected persona of the Cary Grant-esque “Junior.” Here we find the unstable construction Cohan describes at work in the diegesis, as Joe-as-Junior, leads to a seduction sequence that Leger Grindon describes as “swapping gender positions.” 320 Curtis-as-Grant is a comedic inversion of Peck-as-Jew in Gentlemen’s Agreement. Here, the comedic masque is the Jewish schlemiel acting as a caricature of Cary Grant’s highly artificial and stylized masculinity (itself a comedic pantomime). Joe subverts the persona by pretending to be impotent. The WASP has no sexuality. Only when Monroe seduces Joe is the Jewish sexuality allowed to emerge. Further complicating the configuration, three years earlier in 1956, Monroe had famously converted to Judaism to marry the playwright Arthur Miller. Monroe’s status as blonde-turned-Jew operated as an inversion of Judy Holliday’s Jew-turned-blonde. Both blondes played with the fragmentation of female objectification. When asked what it was like kissing Monroe in press materials of the time, Curtis famously quipped, “it was like kissing Hitler!” 321 Curtis’s joke, the alignment of the worst nightmare of postwar Jewry with the acquisition of the ultimate blonde Shiksa 320 Leger Grindon, The Hollywood Romantic Comedy (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 134. 321 As Curtis explains it in a 2008 interview, "I said it as a joke. I mean, it was such a darn stupid question, so I gave a stupid answer." Interviewed by Petronella Wyatt, The Daily Mail (United Kingdom) April 18, 2008. 169 (herself a Jewish convert), played up the fractures and fragmentations of masculinity, sexuality and eroticism within frameworks of post-war Jewish anxieties of the 1950s. For Tony Curtis’s nebbishy cross-dressing Joe, as for Paul Newman’s hyper-masculine Ari Ben-Canaan, the journeys of exodus are solved when both acquire the idealized blonde Christian female after a spatial journey from urban city danger to beachfront tropical paradise. Florida, its own kind of “Israel” for many American Jews, operates as crypto-Israel “promised land” where the Jew can find his masculinity, and the beautiful Marilyn Monroe can be seduced. Tony Curtis’s Jewish schlemiel and Paul Newman’s masculine Israeli operate, within a year of each other, as the competing templates of the emerging Jewish masculinities of the 1960s. BENJAMIN BRADDOCK AS ZIONIST This chapter began by arguing that The Graduate contains the metaphor of a Jewish diaspora transformed, and sexualized, by Israel’s militarism. This is not an obvious reading of the film. The Graduate is intended to be read as a distinctly American story of generational transformation, youth culture angst, and counter culture resistance. Benjamin and Elaine’s unusual courtship and eventual break from the generational cycle imposed on them suggests a classic love story resolution within a romantic melodrama plot. This framework is what Marjorie Garber describes as one of “the most fundamental courtship narratives of Western culture;” the love triangle. 322 Garber observes how cultural and critical discourses of identity, gender, race and class can be explored in the 322 Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 423. 170 traditional love triangle structure by positioning two, and sometimes three, erotic and cultural entanglements at odds with each other. 323 Scrambling the sexual, oedipal and gendered love triangle’s normative signifiers is, as Garber argues by way of René Girard, a narrative device that offers a complex intersubjective reading on the modalities of desire and boundaries of erotic discourse. In the case of The Graduate, we find a male-female-female triangle in which one female, Mrs. Robinson, is recoded as the preying older, sexually aggressive male, and the male, Benjamin, negotiates an intersubjective queering between masculine and feminine states through his initially castrated, paralyzed schlemiel. Benjamin’s journey from schlemiel to sexually potent male is a journey of generational transformation rooted in Jewish identity. Yet in a generational twist, the new sexual freedoms and emerging empowerment of female sexuality taking place in the 1960s were embodied not by the daughter, but by the mother. This mitigates and problematizes simplified notions of sexual liberation at work in the narrative. It is the previous generation’s Mrs. Robinson that is rebelling from sexual norms (albeit experiencing little pleasure for her efforts), while the new generation ultimately desires a classic courtship romance even as it rejects the bourgeois values associated with it. Paralleling the very same framework of The Jazz Singer (1927) exactly four decades earlier, The Graduate presents a love story in which a Jewish protagonist is torn in an oedipal framework between a mother figure and a non-Jewish love interest. In both 323 Garber notes how gender theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have applied Foucauldian readings to these triangles to unpack complex discourses of power, queerness and bisexuality in which binaries break down under closer critical examination. 323 Ibid., 424-425. 171 The Jazz Singer and The Graduate, the technical and aesthetic innovations (sync-sound and Nouvelle Vague techniques, respectively) are used to reflect the text’s tale of the male protagonist’s generational transcendence. 324 For The Graduate, this transformation occurs with Benjamin’s abilities to transgress the cultural and generational barriers placed in front of him and claim the Christian woman. In the construction of the empowered schlemiel as erotic liberator, the long history of Jewish passivity and acquiescence to normative power structures, what Daniel Boyarin describes as the “sissy” stereotype, becomes transformed into an emergent power of Jewish agency. 325 This crystallizes in Hoffman’s disruptive entrance into the church, his Christ-like positioning behind the upper walkway glass, his screams of “Elaine,” and his eventual rescue of the Christian maiden. In the sexual union between Jew and non-Jew, the paradox of Israeli/Jewish masculinity resolve itself through the conquest of the normative female on the representational level (in essence, a “colonization” of the female to assert masculinity) as well as submission/negation through the Jew’s symbolic act of conversion in choosing the non-Jewish partner. Boyarin hints at this when he argues that “Herzlian Zionism, I suggest, is dueling carried on by other means.” 326 Taking Boyarin’s “duel” into the realm of the contested sexual sphere, we can position a “duel” taking place between two constructions of masculinity itself; a relational struggle for a female in which only one 324 In the 1920s, The Jazz Singer presented the progression narrative of the assimilation of European immigrants into America via the twin markers of blackface and music/sound. In the 1960s, The Graduate even more explicitly locates the casting off of religion and the assertion of Jewish power by having this transformation take place inside the Christian church and accompanied by the pop soundtrack of Simon and Garfunkel. 325 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, xxii 326 Ibid., 295. 172 can win. The “duel,” itself a cognate for the word “dual” in the best Derridean sense, is, in its purest specter, a tension of hybridity resolved through a mutually agreed act of confrontation, violence and resolution. It is a contest between conflicting masculinities in which coupling in the romantic comedy can be seen as a phallic contextualization. 327 Benjamin’s journey, his process of acquiring both voice and masculinity, ends through the successful acquisition of Elaine from his crypto-masculinized competitor, the aggressive Mrs. Robinson. This gendered discourse crystallizes via Garber’s notion of the triangle, but not only in the obvious Benjamin-Elaine-Mrs. Robinson formulation. As the narrative progresses, a second triangle forms that places Hoffman-Braddock in even starker relief contrasted by Elaine’s fiancée, the appropriately named “Carl Smith” (Brian Avery). After Benjamin has traveled to Berkeley to try to win Elaine back, Benjamin follows Elaine on a bus to the zoo where she’s meeting Carl by the monkey house. Carl arrives, revealing himself to be a confident, pipe smoking, blonde, Aryan looking Ivy League frat boy. Benjamin’s sarcastic crack upon seeing him for the first time, “he sure is a good walker!,” invokes the tradition of the Jewish schlemiel using comedy to respond to being out-masculinized by normative, confident, Aryan beauty. This notion of Jewish alterity is further cemented as Elaine and her fiancée walk away from Benjamin, when Benjamin turns and stares into the monkey house. Benjamin’s sad gaze is met by the uncanny stare of a gorilla. Benjamin’s deviant sexuality, his oedipal carnal desire for the mother figure of Mrs. Robinson, has marked him as an animal. 327 This can be read after 1967 everywhere from Woody Allen’s neurotic fear that his “Shiksa” will end up with a blonde Aryan male all the way up to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, the anxieties provoked in Ben Stiller’s character of Gaylord Focker when his fiancée, Pam, finds herself still being courted by a rich, blonde Wall Street trader ex-boyfriend, Kevin, played by Owen Wilson in 2000’s Meet the Fockers. 173 Benjamin is aligned with the caged monkey, pushed outside the normative coupling rituals of Elaine and her fiancée. Just as Kafka’s Ape, Red Peter, was denied entrance into human society due to his animal sexuality, Benjamin faces similar cultural isolation. After learning from Mrs. Robinson that Elaine’s wedding date has been moved up, Benjamin drives to Carl Smith’s fraternity house to try to learn where the wedding is taking place. Upon entering the quintessential WASP college frat house, Benjamin discovers a number of blonde haired, strapping men in the showers, preening and rough housing in various states of undress. They inform Benjamin where “the old make out king” is getting married. As with the monkey house sequence, Benjamin is positioned as a counterpoint, an outsider witness to the normative coupling. There are now two intersubjective triangles at work in The Graduate; the one between Benjamin and the mother-daughter, and the one between Elaine and the WASP-Jew. Near the end of the film, these contrasting iconic archetypes, the Jewish Benjamin, the WASP fiancée, Carl, the castrating Mrs. Robinson, and the innocent Elaine, converge. In the final sequence of the film, Benjamin reaches the church where Elaine and Carl are about to marry in what is presented as a classic fairytale wedding. Benjamin watches in horror through a dividing glass on the upper stairway, his sweaty, dirty, and very Jewish face operating as counterpoint to the formal, clean and Christian wedding on display below him. Determined to stop the proceedings, Benjamin bangs repeatedly on the glass window in a quasi-Crucifixion pose, shouting “Elaine!” over and over. Elaine turns from the ceremony, and in a somnambulant haze, walks towards him. Elaine passes by her parents, friends and relatives, depicted in a series of shots with faces 174 twisted in rage at Hoffman’s attempted intervention. Yet their voices are not heard diegetically. The only sound is Benjamin’s banging on the glass and his repeated shouting of “Elaine!” This subjective distortion of diegesis by removing the sounds of the crowd (a perhaps literal rendering of the Simon & Garfunkel song, “The Sounds of Silence”) creates a distancing effect from what is taking place through the glass between the Jesus-like Benjamin and the trance-like Elaine. Despite barriers, both physical (glass) and cultural (the Jew in church), the spell is finally broken when Elaine screams back “Ben!” This generational break marked by the union of Benjamin and Elaine is thus marked through three discursive concepts: 1. The linking of Benjamin and Elaine via subjective and spectral sound across barriers both spatial (dividing glass) and vertical (Benjamin above and Elaine below) 2. Elaine’s discovery of her own “voice,” able to cry out for herself and reject the determination imposed on her by her mother, Mrs. Robinson. 3. The disrupting rupture presented by the incongruous presence of a Jewish/Jesus hybrid intervening, interrupting a classic Christian/Normative fairytale ending. In the subsequent chaos in the church entrance, the symbolism of Jewish alterity rupturing Christian normativity is made even more overt when Benjamin grabs a giant cross and swings it at Elaine’s family as they try to prevent the couple from coming together. Benjamin eventually uses the cross to barricade the church doors as he and Elaine escape. The sequence concludes with director Mike Nichols’s iconic last shot of the couple’s confused and nervous facial expressions in the back of a public bus, as the 175 bus patrons, mostly older generation women, stare at them. Benjamin’s sexual desire, caught between the two Robinson women, parallels another bifurcated tension – the tension between Benjamin Braddock as leading man protagonist and the undeniable truth of Dustin Hoffman as an awkward, fumbling and feminized Jew. Hoffman’s performance plays up his castrated femininity through his use of repeated high pitched squeals whenever Benjamin is nervous. Here we find another triangle outside of narrativity and text. A triangle formed in which Hoffman’s Jewish leading man signifies not one identity, but two: The queered body of the Jewish Hoffman and the specter of idealized masculinity in the haunting absence of Robert Redford. In the final image of Benjamin and Elaine, this third triangle remains with Dustin Hoffman occupying two identities at once: audience expectations of movie star Robert Redford counterpointed by the actuality of Dustin Hoffman’s Jewish reality. CONCLUSION When Benjamin as not-Redford swung the cross in church to liberate Elaine from marriage to the blonde “make-out king,” a number of cultural changes were signified. Homi Bhabha describes the central method of resolving the tension of colonial discourse by locating an “ironic compromise” between self and other, between dominant and repressed. Bhabha describes this as a search for a “reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same” (emphasis his), in which double articulations operate as a centralized “mimicry.” 328 This dialectic between seen and unseen, body and spectrality, inform the subtle shift that Hoffman-as-Benjamin 328 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 122. 176 represents in light of Israel’s transformation of diaspora Jewry. The resolution of this tension would take place, at least in representations of the time, in the act of the Christian/Jewish coupling. Ari Ben-Canaan and Kitty Fremont, and Benjamin and Elaine, each become the binary understandings of the two Jewish masculinities, national and global, in the age of Israeli militarism. Their conquest of blonde women marks the Christian/Jewish love story as a Freudian Primal Trauma resolved. The Jewish male and Christian female could come together to embody a generational progression narrative. Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen suggest that attempts to resolve the two conflicting identities of Jewish masculinity -- the diaspora schlemiel and the Israeli conqueror -- were at work within the Zionist project from the beginning. Moore and Troen trace how this reification process began in Israeli media of the 1940s and 1950s, noting that “stories, novels, and films” of these eras aimed to assist Holocaust survivors in swapping “their Diaspora Jewish identity for a Hebrew-Israeli one.” 329 By the late 1940s, as Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak note, this process was also taking place among a number of European Jewish intellectuals. This was led by Hannah Arendt, who challenged constructions of Israeli alterity by offering what Spivak terms the “remote beginnings of globalization.” 330 These projects of universalizing the tensions of Jewish diaspora, as well as couching the militarism of Israel within a broader and abstract colonial progression narrative, were part a complex effort to heal the rift inherent between the Ari Ben-Canaans and the Benjamin Braddocks of popular imagination. 329 Deborah Dash Moore and S. Ilan Troen. Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 217-218. 330 Judith Butler and Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2000), 80. 177 Arendt’s reporting from Israel on the Eichmann trial in the 1960s and the notion of a global diaspora of traumatized post-war Jewry being offered their own nation-state in Israel directly align notions of globalism, cosmopolitanism and understandings of diaspora among scholars and intellectuals directly emerging from the Israel/diaspora dialectic as it developed in world Jewry. Arendt searched to define the “banality of evil” from Israel as a universal framework that Americans could identify with. 331 Jews were no longer positioned as discursively distinct. In the wake of the Holocaust, Jews became the test case for understandings of a universal human condition. 332 Daniel Boyarin’s examination of early 20th century Zionism describes the very same spatial masculinizing project that Benjamin performs as his journey to save Elaine in The Graduate. Boyarin notes that both Herzl and Freud, seemingly disparate thinkers, were part of a cosmopolitan European project “by German-speaking Jews in the nineteenth century to rewrite themselves, and particularly their masculine selves as Aryans, and especially Teutons.” 333 In his interrogation of this masculinity binary at the heart of Zionism, Boyarin describes a “masquerade colonialism” playing in a complex Bhabha-like framework of both mimicry of Aryan archetype while also offering a resistance reading of subversion. 334 Boyarin writes, “Jewish toughness, like the anti- 331 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 252. 332 But, as Richard Bernstein summarizes, Arendt’s desire to find a universal philosophic truth from the specificity of her experience as an expatriate German Jew grappling with the Holocaust did not mean she argued for a sameness of all peoples. In fact, Arendt’s idiosyncratic relationship with Zionism (first as nominal supporter and then critic of the subjugation of the Arabs) argues for her belief in the specific power of the “Jewish pariah” operating in the codes of what Bernstein terms the “hidden tradition.” See more in Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 18. 333 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 246. 334 Ibid., 308-309. 178 Semitism it abhors, is literally a body politics, a politics of ideal body images and the moral virtues that supposedly inhere in them.” 335 In pre-Holocaust Europe, Jewish assimilation, or any act to negate otherness and pledge fealty to the nation-state, was paradoxically what provoked even more virulent anti-Semitism. Fear of the hidden Jew became aligned with biological frameworks of hidden contamination. The more the Jew attempted to “pass,” the more he became suspect of vampiric or parasitic integration into the larger body politic. 336 The solution to this paradox was clear: Gender discourse, if articulated as normative, was the only plane in which the Jew could foreground his normativity in explicit terms. If Jewish men were masculine and Jewish women feminine, suspects of duplicity could conceivably be muted. Jewish assimilation in Europe during this period was therefore, as Boyarin argues, “primarily a gendered discourse.” 337 It is in the intersection of gender masquerade and diaspora where we can locate The Graduate’s echo of the masculine transformation produced by the Six Day War. This tension concludes with Benjamin’s Christ-Jew saving Elaine, the Jew-as-Teutonic validated in the acquisition of the non-Jewish female. The two sides of Israeli militarism’s masculinizing process, as a solution to both a specific geographic Jewish diaspora as well as a journey of masculine reclamation, first emerged in American mass media in the form of Paul Newman’s Ari Ben-Canaan. 338 The male American schlemiel of post 1967 Hollywood star construction, movie stars 335 Ibid., P. 28. 336 Ibid., 247-248. 337 Ibid., 248. 338 In “Babylon,” the sixth episode of the first season of AMC’s Mad Men (2007), the erotic underpinnings of the effect of the rising power of Israel on American Jews is noted when advertising executive Don Draper seduces Rachel, a Jewish client of his advertising firm, after reading Exodus. 179 such as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Wilder, Elliott Gould, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, among others, reflected an empowerment of Jewish sexuality in the wake of both Paul Newman’s sexy Jew, and the military power of Israel. But this Jewish masculine potency was produced only so long as it was aligned with pursuit, and acquisition, of the Christian female. 339 The intermarriage story of Exodus was not just a representation of the events of the past, but also signified the very real shifting demographics of the 1960s. The rate of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, only at 9% in 1965, rose to as high as 26% by 1974. 340 In the wake of the success of The Graduate, a number of eroticized and often coded Christian/Jewish coupling stories began to appear, including I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Funny Girl (1968), Harold and Maude (1970), Getting Straight (1970), The Way We Were (1972), Play it Again, Sam (1972), Straw Dogs (1973), Blume in Love (1974) and The Heartbreak Kid (1973), and on television in shows like He and She (1967), Bridget Loves Bernie (1969) and All in the Family (1970). Each of these shows embraced the newly eroticized Jewish schlemiel as the defining sexuality of the post civil rights generation. But in each case, the potency of the newly sexualized Jew was counterpointed in dialectic tension with the Christian partner. Dustin Hoffman was the “new face” of cinema, a distinct historical event that considers cinematic transition not just aesthetically, but thematically, technologically and culturally. Hoffman’s triumphant arrival as a movie star, at the same moment Israel 339 The post 1967 Jewess, as seen in star personas like Barbra Streisand, and to a lesser extent, Goldie Hawn, Karen Black and Bette Midler, was similarly queered as “alternative” beauty. Goldie Hawn following the Judy Holliday model of duplicitous “dumb blonde” masquerade, while Streisand, Black and Midler frequently played counter-culture inspired variants on the Ghetto Jewess love stories. 340 Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 241. 180 comes of military age, and the eroticized, often queered, Jewish stars that followed. This newly charged Christian/Jewish framework would dominate Hollywood films from 1967- 1980, as we will explore in chapters four and five. 181 CHAPTER FOUR POWER AND PORTNOY: SEX, JEWS AND LITERATURE IN THE 1960s “…as far as a certain school of shikse is concerned, (her) knight turned out to be none other than a brainy, balding, beaky Jew…” -- Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) 341 In the seven year period from 1967-1974, a fundamental shift in the iconography of the Hollywood movie star took place. Gone were the hyper-masculine and ultra- feminine conventions of the 1950s. They were replaced by performers with unusual faces, kinky hair, unusual bodies, and a highly neurotic verbosity. This new form of awkward, neurotic, and highly sexualized movie star signified the youth generation and counterculture. Performers such as Barbra Streisand, Gene Wilder, Dyan Cannon, Elliott Gould, Mel Brooks, Charles Grodin, Woody Allen, Richard Benjamin, George Segal and Richard Dreyfuss, character actors that in earlier decades would have been relegated to the comic margins, were suddenly performing as romantic leading men and women. In films as diverse as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968), Funny Girl (1968), Goodbye, Columbus (1968), The Producers (1968), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Where’s Poppa? (1970), Moving (1970), Getting Straight (1970), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex,… But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), The Way We Were (1973), and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), awkward nebbishes and schlemiels embodied the angst experienced by the 1960s counterculture and youth culture. They were also loudly and proudly Jewish. 341 Quote via Christine Benvenuto, Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 55. 182 Described as the “Jewish New Wave” by J. Hoberman, 342 and the moment when “Jews became sexy” by Henry Bial, 343 these new Hollywood movie stars embodied a collective generational break from the Doris Day and Rock Hudson era that defined an ethnic-free, white, normative beauty standard throughout the 1950s. Coded Jewishness, existing in a fluid abstract state that Joseph Litvak describes as “archaic Comicosmopolitanism,” was coded no longer. 344 These new performers and personas, nearly always playing textually Jewish, or barely coded, Jewish characters, were a direct cultural response to the denatured and universalized definition of Jewish that emerged from the Peck/Garfield dialectic of Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947). Whiteness studies scholars like Matthew Frye Jacobson describe this revival of ethnic pride as a nostalgic desire to “look back to the East Side immigrant ghetto.” 345 Streisand’s debut as Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968) evoked the Borscht-belt comediennes of the 1960s, and her star turn as a Marxist-Jewish labor union activist in The Way We Were (1972) confronted the paranoia of the 1950s, two examples that support Jacobson’s understandings. But something new was also present: sexuality. Sexuality was a defining component of the political resistance of the American counterculture of the 1960s. The “Free Love” movement reached national attention during the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco in 1967. The rejection of bourgeois 342 J. Hoberman, America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, ed. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 220. 343 Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 86-87. 344 Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans: Jews, the Blacklist, and Stoolpigeon Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 30. 345 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), 131. 183 standards of sexual morality linked political resistance with sexual experimentation. Rumors of casual sex, orgies, wife swapping, and an embrace of both gay and bisexuality, produced tremendous cultural anxiety. In a 1967 article in The National Review entitled “Who are the Hippies?,” columnist Will Herberg criticized “free love” as an impulse of narcissism and indulgence, stating that “it would be hard to find anything so rancid as the love-unction of the hippie love mongers.” 346 Herberg’s “rancid” condemnation of hippie sexuality was central to Nixon’s reactionary “Silent Majority” election campaign, presented as a backlash against youth culture’s moral relativism. For conservatives, sexual freedom was indicative of societal threat. For liberals, sexual freedom was an expression of political resistance. Mediating these tensions was the central privileged figure of American popular culture to emerge in the wake of this cultural upheaval; the cosmopolitan, neurotic American Jew. American Jews of the 1960s played a key role in negotiating this cultural transition. Historian Mark Dollinger observes that young, mostly secular Jews made up an overwhelming number of the radical leftist campus movement leaders in California throughout the mid to late 1960s. 347 Leftist figures from Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in politics, to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen returned the radical figure of the American Jew to the public stage. The leftist Jew had been in hiding throughout the 1950s. The Jewish Schlemiel, emerging from a two-decade cinematic exile into desexualized clownery, suddenly became the most prominent signifier of the sexually transgressive 346 Will Herberg, “Who Are the Hippies?” in The National Review, 8 Aug.1967. Via: <http://www.nationalreview.com/nroriginals/?q=MWE4ZGExNTg0YTU2YjBiMjNhNGFiZTBiNTIxZDI4 YTQ=&w=MA==> 347 Mark Dollinger, “The Counterculture,” California Jews, ed. Ava F. Kahn & Mark Dollinger (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2003) 154-156 184 (and titillating) counterculture. These tensions expressed themselves through a simple alchemy: the creation of the erotic-neurotic Jewish schlemiel, and the interest of that schlemiel in the normative Christian partner. The sudden appearances of so many Jewish movie stars in romantic leading roles of the late 1960s, just as in the late 1920s, was a phenomenon responding to a distinct political and cultural generational transition point. Jewish sexuality became mobilized as a privileged site of resistance against the normative codes of the 1950s. These texts reframed historical narratives of diaspora Jewry into sexually perverse signifiers of modernity. However, this potent youth-culture sexual agency was neutralized in two ways. First, by portraying ethnic, youth-culture sexuality in the unthreatening form of the clownish Jewish schlemiel. Second, by mitigating any overt threat presented by a sexually potent Jewishness through the successful union with the Christian. The “Jew” of 1967-1980 became the privileged site of counterculture sexuality at the same moment they were absorbed into the dominant Christonormative structure. This chapter will consider how sexuality and Jewish representation came together in literature, standup comedy, comics, and music of the late 1960s. Collectively, this work was the precursor to the Hollywood “Jewish New Wave” of the 1967-1980 period. Eroticized Jewish movie stars of the late 1960s, presented in coupling narratives with Christian love interests, were the end result of a nearly twenty year developing in the literary, artistic, musical, and creative avant-garde of the 1950s and early 1960s. Before the cinema of the “Jewish New Wave” can be considered, these early Christian-Jewish coupling patterns must first be located. Israel’s impact on Jewish sexuality as a 185 “retroactive diaspora” in the 1960-1967 period was one influence. Sexualized Jews in the urban literary avant-garde was another. THE JEWISH “BIG BROTHER” Eroticism, as Georges Bataille argues, emerges from the tension produced between the normative and the transgressive. The European nation-state, grounded in Victorian-era codes of Christian morality, sees erotic desire as a dangerous rupturing force that threatens societal cohesiveness. However, Bataille argues, the very attempt at state control of erotic desire produces and defines the erotic deviancy society hopes to contain. Contained within the individual desire to express erotic deviancy, there are “elements of transgression… essential to the sexual act.” 348 Societal containment and individual resistance are linked. Erotic deviancy, defined through a culturally produced negation process, represents the essentialist human desire for an uncivilizing process rooted in animality, primitivity, and taboo. 349 Sex is therefore a political act in which the impulse to resist systems of erotic containment reflects the impulse to resist the control of the nation-state. In 1955, Herbert Marcuse agreed, arguing that the civilizing process expresses itself as the need to sexually contain the bestial, or primal, nature of man. Yet society is also titillated by the very erotic absences it imposes. The act of creating that absence, itself, is a form of presence. 350 Foucault’s pioneering work on sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s continued to argue for a historical materialist read of sexuality and the nation-state. 348 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vol. II & III (New York: Zone Books, 1993 (1976), 159. 349 Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986 (1957), 107-108. 350 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books, 1962 (1955), 15-17. 186 Foucault positioned sexuality as a series of state-controlled sites of power contestation inscribed in the framework and presumed agency of the individual body. 351 These theorists were the leading thinkers of a broad academic push in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, to reconsider sexuality not as innate and personal, but as a site for contested mediations of state power in which the expression of sexuality could both mediate and challenge the systemic mechanisms of control imposed by the nation-state. George Orwell’s 1984 was an early postwar text that mediated the tensions between the sexual and the political that Marcuse and Bataille describe. 352 Orwell’s dystopian novel, published in 1949 in England the wake of World War Two, linked sexual control as central to the fascist mindset. Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, is impotent sexually, but also impotent in his desire to resist the state, led by the fraternal/paternal amalgam of the ever-present “Big Brother.” Winston’s first act of open resistance to Big Brother is an act of sexuality, when Smith pays for sex with a proletariat prostitute. Winston’s recording of his deep shame regarding this act in his diary shows how Orwell positions the written word, like the sexual act, as an act of resistance. 353 When Winston meets Julia, a young member of the Party who works as a mechanic, Winston’s rage at her is both sexual as well as political. Julia volunteers for the Party’s “Junior Anti-Sex League,” a group of young people who reject sexual desire to instead pledge complete celibacy as a gesture of political fealty to Big Brother. 354 Winston’s 351 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 54. 352 George Orwell, 1984 (New York: The Penguin Group, 2003). 353 Orwell, 1984 . 65. 354 Ibid., 68. 187 intense hatred, an expression of sexual panic, is abruptly reversed when Julia makes contact with him through a hand-written note that reads, simply, “I love you.” As Marcuse, Bataille and Foucault theorized, Orwell’s representation of the human impulse to resist totalitarian state control was expressed not politically, but as an act of carnal desire. When Winston and Julia become lovers, it is a sexual act performed as a gesture of anger towards Big Brother. In a rented room that lacks the ubiquitous telescreen used to monitor party members, their successful sexual union causes Winston to celebrate the dirty carnality of sexuality as a political act, and to dream of infecting the Party with “leprosy and syphilis.” 355 Winston writes: Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act. 356 The successful act of sexual coitus between Julia and Winston become the central act of defiance of the nation-state’s systems of control. Yet Orwell also links the erotic and the political through a noteworthy structuring device. Winston and Julia are recruited by the mysterious figure of O’Brien, an even higher ranking party member who also claims to be part of the resistance. O’Brien gives Winston and Julia a copy of the contraband book, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” by Emmanuel Goldstein. Goldstein’s writings inspire Winston politically to continue to resist Big Brother. But Winston’s intellectual stimulation brings with it a sexual potency, as his fervent sexual episodes with Julia increase. Goldstein’s political ideas of resistance are a form of aphrodisiac. Goldstein is 355 Ibid., 128. 356 Ibid.,129. 188 the mediating force that links sexual and political resistance in the signifier of the cosmopolitan Jew. The significance of Emmanuel Goldstein is central to Orwell’s exploration of the Bataille-Marcuse configuration. Orwell presents Jewishness as an abstraction, an easily identified challenge to the purity and cohesion of the nation-state. Orwell demonstrates this by evoking Goebbels’s use of Jewish physiognomy. During the daily ritual known as the “Two Minutes of Hate,” a number of close-ups of Emmanuel Goldstein’s Jewish- looking, academic, intellectual face is flashed on the telescreen, causing the party members of Oceania to react in screaming rage. Some even physically strike the screen. Winston describes being caught up in the frenzy, reacting to Goldstein as “the primal traitor,” with a “lean Jewish face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee beard, a clever face, yet inherently despicable.” 357 Orwell’s description of this daily ritual, eerily presaging the power of televisual propaganda before television, suggests how the Jewish body, as a body, could be exploited by the state as a visual icon of the nation-fracturing threat of modernity. The Jewish face signified complex and contradictory emotions in the audience: academia, intelligentsia, individuality, and the disruption of the singular nation-state, all in one inchoate package. When it is revealed that O’Brien was a double-agent for the Party, Winston and Julia are arrested and brought to the “Ministry of Love,” where they are separated and tortured. The goal of this torture is simple, to break their individual desires for each other, to redirect their love away from the sexual realm and towards a platonic love for 357 Ibid., 12. 189 Big Brother. The breaking of the spirit of both Winston and Julia occurs as both psychological and quasi-physical castrations. The novel concludes when the state has become completely successful at destroying their carnal desire for each other, and thus, destroying the ideas of Emmanuel Goldstein. In the Ministry of Love, this act of resistance, the written word and the desire for love/sex, is broken. The final line of the novel concludes the state’s total victory over the individual. Winston Smith realizes that he, finally, totally and completely “loved Big Brother.” 358 Orwell’s use of the cliché Jewish intellectual as central tool of propaganda to focus the anger of the masses understood the central role Jews played not just as focus of rage, but a signifier of modernity. Goldstein never appears in the novel. He is an abstraction, a thematic structuring totem. A “Jewishness” in which the Jew is not even corporeally present, but functions as the disruptive iconography at work in both the political as well as the sexual realm. Written three years after the Holocaust, forty years after Dreyfus and almost eighty years after Disraeli, it was not hard to see why Orwell chose the contested face of a Jewish intellectual as the signifying threat against totalitarian intellectual homogenization. By nature of his Jewish cosmopolitanism, Dreyfus had been accused of insufficient love for France. Disraeli had mediated this by marrying a non-Jewish aristocrat and theatrically performing as a queered dandy. The Jewish face, to Orwell, was the iconography of rupture to normative systems of control at work in the European nation-state. Goldstein is the mythical peddler of modernity’s fragmentations, an 358 Ibid., 308 190 (intentionally) ill defined anti-totalitarian philosophy that Orwell implies is a mix both of free market libertarianism and radical Marxist communism. Goldstein is Freud, Marx, Trotsky, Einstein, and Ayn Rand mixed together into a singular pastiche signifying Jewish modernity. Orwell’s “Goldstein” is, in many ways, no different than Joyce’s Leopold Bloom or Al Jolson’s seduction of Mary Dale through the performative tropes of blackface in The Jazz Singer (1927). Modernist thinkers of the early 20th century used Jewish identity to negotiate ethnicity, animality, sexuality, cosmopolitanism, and deviant desire itself as metaphors for an anti-Victorian, anti-European, American progression narrative. Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Borges, and many other modernist writers used the erotic realm and the deviant nature of the Jewish corpus as a phantasmal expression of the desire for a cosmopolitan and modernist alterity. The transgression of boundaries, both spatial and conceptual, was expressed by modernist writers through the erotic longing for the unattainable in the field of the Other, Lacan’s object petit a. 359 Entanglements between nations and cultures, cosmopolitanism and nativism, became expressed through coupling narratives. The Jewish Other mediates Winston and Julia’s carnal desire as a political force rendered in the erotic realm. NON-KOSHER LITERATURE For American literature of the 1950s and 1960s, Jews acting out sexually operated in very different configurations of resistance from Orwell’s spectral Goldstein. But these authors were articulating similar crises of the fracturing cohesion of the nation-state. In a 359 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI (New York and London, W.W. Norton and Company, 1998 (1973), 194. 191 1988 speech looking back at his work, Canadian-American author Saul Bellow described how the Jewish identity problem was located at the heart of the “modern intellect.” 360 Beginning in the 1950s, Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, along with Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, J.D. Salinger, and Arthur Miller, were at the vanguard of a mid- century American literary movement led by Jewish-born authors who located an explicit, or minimally coded, Jewish identity at the center of the crisis of post-war American conformity and suburban malaise. Like Orwell, these authors frequently placed explicitly Jewish protagonists at the center of the crisis to define American identity in the postwar era. But whereas Orwell had presented Jewishness as a haunting and artificial construction inspiring acts of sexual resistance through intellectual provocation, these novelists placed a literal Jewishness as the central other of American letters of the 1950s. It is in their literature that the seeds of Benjamin Braddock and the Jewish New Wave of the late 1960s first begin. Bellow, a Canadian-Jewish child of European immigrants, learned early on about the inherent contradiction in being both a Jew and a westerner when he realized that even an enormously successful European statesman like Disraeli could only survive through “study and artifice.” 361 Bellow’s youthful epiphany about Disraeli as a performative construction was at the heart of Bellow’s central paradox of identity in the 1950s. Postwar America may not have been Orwell’s dystopian “Oceania”, but the themes and crises were the same. Bellow describes this as the central thematic project of all of his 360 Saul Bellow, “A Jewish Writer in America,” The New York Review Of Books, 27 Oct. 2011, need website Transcript of Online Only) 361 Ibid., 2. 192 writing. Bellow’s paradox was thus: to “combine being a Jew with being an American and a writer.” 362 Bellow, at this late point in his life and career, is reflecting on whether his work had an essentialist Jewish alterity, or was simply a part of a larger assimilationist universalizing project taken up by diaspora Jews in the 1950s. Bellow’s reflections on the impact of Disraeli and Dreyfus on his early thinking argue that the American diaspora Jew could still maintain a perspective aligned with European métèque (“outsider”) writers confronting far more clearly demarcated anti-Semitic cultural boundaries, as seen in Orwell. Bellow rejected the notion that he was narrating a universalized American assimilation myth in his work by drawing a distinction regarding his explicit Jewish characters. In so describing his work, Bellow attempts to respond to criticisms he received from Jewish academics, notably Gershom Scholem, of trying to normalize the Jewish experience as universal. Scholem had criticized Bellow as one of the many Jews of modernity who thought they could blend if only they worked hard enough at couching their philosophical and creative output in a more universal, rather than specifically Jewish, framework (Walter Benjamin et. al.). Bellow responded thusly: I did not wish to become part of the Partisan Review gang. Like many of its members I was, however, ‘an emancipated Jew who refused to deny his Jewishness,’ and I suppose I should have considered myself a ‘cosmopolitan if I had been capable of thinking clearly in those days. 363 Scholem’s critique of Bellow, similar to his regret over Walter Benjamin, places both the Jewish philosopher (Benjamin) and Jewish novelist (Bellow) as grappling with the same crisis of diaspora identity. Scholem’s emigration to Palestine to found a school 362 Ibid., 3. 363 Ibid., 9. 193 of modernist, but distinctly Jewish, philosophy, was the opposite of Benjamin’s attempts to universalize his work by what Scholem saw as de-Judaising it, couching it in universal terms to sell it to the Western (non-Jewish) world. 364 Benjamin’s search for the aura of the authentic art in the age of “mechanical reproduction,” and his Angel of History, were both grounded in Kabbalah-inspired critical materialism. Yet Benjamin, like Marx, Husserl, Adorno and Horkheimer, and perhaps even Freud’s fin de siècle, couched his work in the language of the universal in an attempt to mitigate rejection by non-Jewish audiences. Bellow resented this criticism from Scholem. Bellow claimed his work remained distinctly Jewish, and was not denatured in the hopes of selling more copies. A solution to Scholem’s criticism is located in Bellow’s use of Jewish codes. Like Orwell, Bellow mobilizes sexuality as metaphor for the struggle of identity in the postwar era. Much of Bellow’s writing focuses on sex outside of marriage, and specifically the erotic non-Jewish love interest as an expression of Jewish crisis. It is here, in the depiction of sexuality, where Bellow’s response to Scholem’s critique locates its Jewish response. Bellow does to hide the Jewish identities of his protagonists. Instead, Bellow presents the sexual desire for the non-Jew as a form of critique. The postwar Jew is in a crisis of identity, and the desire for the non-Jew (the Shiksa) presents a crisis of identity that is not universal. It is distinct to the postwar Jewish experience. This responds to Scholem’s criticisms of Bellow as assimilationist. Did Bellow use the codes and tropes of thematic metaphor? To an extent. But, like Kafka before him, Bellow placed a distinct Jewish identity as central to his entire body of work. However, 364 David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982), 6-7. 194 unlike Kafka or many of the other first wave modernist writers in the 1910s and 1920s, it was in the realm of sexual longing that Bellow would articulate a modality of political resistance. Just as it was for Orwell, the act of sexual expression was an act of political resistance. And just as for Orwell, this sexuality would be mediated and contested over the controversial and provocative role of the Jewish diaspora intellectual. In Bellow’s acclaimed 1964 novel Herzog, we see an example. 365 Herzog links an emerging urbane Jewish alternative masculinity with the neurosis of sexual crisis brought about by an erotic interplay with the non-Jewish love interest. This tension becomes expressed in a familial story of midlife crisis. Bellow’s character of Moses E. Herzog is a meek, passive, urban Canadian-Jewish academic. Herzog is suffering through the breakup of his second marriage to Madeleine, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism and is pursuing her graduate studies in Slavonic Languages. Madeleine cheats on Herzog and eventually leaves him. Herzog becomes obsessed with violent revenge, buying a pistol and attempting to murder his ex-wife. Failing to summon the courage, Herzog instead writes letters, which he never sends, to contemporary politicians and dead philosophers such as Spinoza and Nietzsche. Like Winston Smith, Bellow’s acts of resistance are found in the written word and the sexual act. Bellow draws an explicit connection between Herzog’s struggles as an emancipated urbane Jewish intellectual with the echoes of historically specific pre-war European Jewish trauma (in his flashbacks to his immigrant father). Herzog’s crisis of identity also conflates the sexual desire for the non-Jew with the failures of Freudian psychoanalysis to cure his 365 Bellow, Herzog (New York: Penguin Books, 1991). 195 alienation. This fragmentation is made clear when Herzog’s Jewish lawyer and non- Jewish psychiatrist, Himmelstein and Edvig respectively, both betray Herzog to go and work for his ex-wife, Madeleine. As L.H. Goldman points out, Herzog’s contempt for Edvig’s “Protestant Freudianism” demonstrates the fractures and flaws when Freud’s “Jewish science” fell into the hands of non-Jewish practitioners. As Herzog sees it, Edvig’s Christian identity gives him a mistaken conflation between psychoanalysis and Christianity that ultimately renders psychoanalysis illegitimate. 366 Herzog was unable to assimilate into the larger, non-Jewish, Western framework, personifying the Shul- studying masculine alterity that Daniel Boyarin describes as central to European Jewish identity throughout the 19th century. 367 Herzog presents an historically informed and distinct diaspora Jewish experience as an irreducible signifier of resistance to the nation-state. In the hands of the non-Jew, Edvig, a bastardization of psychoanalysis takes place when intellectual work with Jewish specificity is repackaged for Christonormative consumption. Bellow extends this into the sexual realm through the figure of Herzog’s ex-wife, Madeline, seen by Herzog as the “personification of the essences of romanticism and Christianity.” 368 Herzog’s subsequent sexual affair with his student, Ramona, is expressed as an act of rebellion, a response to the pangs of resentment produced by the newfound Christian identity of his converted ex- wife. The entanglement between the trauma of European Jewry and the various crises of modernity’s adaptation (and corruption) of the work of Jewish thinkers like Freud for 366 L.H. Goldman, Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1983), 144. 367 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, xvii-xix 368 Goldman, Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience (New York: Irvington Publishers,1983), 137. 196 Christian consumption crystallizes in the course Herzog teaches in New York, “The Roots of Romanticism.” By privileging Herzog, a distinctly un-heroic neurotic Jewish intellectual as a new form of literary protagonist, Bellow’s novel does not couch his work in universalist metaphor. Herzog argues that that émigré Jews like Bellow who did not choose the path of Zionist reinvention (as Scholem advocated) still found cause for battle. Only these battles were not found on the political, national, or cultural level, but as sexualized and eroticized metaphors of marriages, affairs, and sublimated sexual desire. Like Bellow, Bernard Malamud focused his work on the subject of diaspora Jews facing crises of identity in the nation-state. An acclaimed novelist and short story author of the 1950s and 1960s, Malamud also connected the struggle to resist the hierarchies of the social framework with the diaspora Jew’s agency of sexual expression. Malamud debuted as a novelist in 1952 with The Natural, a metaphysical story about baseball as a metaphor for the American dream. 369 Yet The Natural was an outlier to Malamud’s career. After this initial success, the young Malamud shifted his lyrical and imaginative writing style towards a series of short stories and novels about explicitly Jewish characters. The Jewish protagonist became the main template Malamud used to embody the spiritual and cultural postwar American crisis of identity. In Malamud’s second novel, The Assistant (1957), we see this shift. Malamud thematizes the rapidly disintegrating world of Jewish New York in the form of a failing 369 The story of Roy Hobbs was steeped in a lyrical and mythic nostalgia. The tale of a fictional baseball player with a traumatic past, who suddenly appears in his late 30s to lead a fictional team in depression-era New York to the playoffs, was eventually adapted into a film directed by Barry Levinson in 1984. It “naturally” starred the very un-Jewish and un-Hoffman Robert Redford. 197 grocery store owned by Morris Bober (a name perhaps echoing Martin Buber). 370 Bober’s emancipated daughter Helen, and Bober’s Italian-American employee (and criminal), Frank Alpine, are attracted to each other. Unknown to both Morris and Helen, Frank had robbed Morris’s grocery while wearing a disguise, severely injuring Morris. Guilty over his actions, Frank returns to the grocery to work for Morris as an act of repentance. Frank struggles to confess his crime to Morris as well as earn the love of Helen. The story concludes with Bober’s death, at which point Frank Alpine chooses to convert to Judaism as his final act of penance, an act that can read as hybridizing both Christian redemption and Jewish piety. As with Bellow’s Herzog, Malamud was one of the first authors of the postwar era to connect the generation gap with notions of repentance, sin, and the desire for redemption, and to explore these themes through the problematic and erotic nature of the transgressive Jewish/non-Jewish coupling. Malamud explained in an interview that he saw Italians and Jews as entangled identities, “closely related in their consciousness of the importance of personality…” 371 However, Malamud hastened to add, “’The Assistant’ is in the European tradition. So am I.” 372 But is this true? The European modernist tradition dictated a Jewishness of fictive metaphor, Kafka’s animals, Proust and Joyce’s half-Jewish semi-Jews, or even the postwar George Orwell’s corporeally absent Emmanuel Goldstein. Malamud, like Bellow, did not need such European-centric hedging and metaphor. Malamud’s Jews were textual Jews. 370 Bernard Malamud, The Assistant: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). 371 Joseph Wershba, Conversations with Bernard Malamud, ed. Lawrence Lasher (City: University of Mississippi Press, 1991), 5., reprinted from The New York Post, September 14 th , 1958. 372 Ibid., 4. 198 Malamud’s poeticism occurs in the erotic and imaginative realms of his protagonist’s subjectivity, not the corporeal metaphorical of the narrative itself. In arguably Malamud’s most famous short story, The Magic Barrel, Malamud uses the Talmudic quest for God as a parallel for the desire for a wife. Leo Finkle, a Yeshiva student in his late twenties and studying to be a rabbi, hires a matchmaker, Salzman, to find him an appropriate Jewish bride. Leo has spent so many years studying that he has no experience with women. Salzman informs Leo that he keeps those seeking a match on index cards, and has so many index cards that he’s forced to store them not in a filing cabinet, but in a barrel. The titular “magic barrel,” unseen by Leo, is an imaginative construct. It is the place in which carnality exists, where single Jewish women have filed cards seeking a male. After an unsuccessful date, Leo eventually becomes obsessed with the one picture on an index card that Salzman won’t identify. After pursuing her identity, Leo discovers that it is Stella, Salzman’s own daughter that Leo has selected. Salzman refuses to make the match. Salzman exclaims that he has rejected his daughter for being, “a wild one--wild, without shame… Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. This is why to me she is dead now.” 373 Leo insists, and his eventual meeting with Salzman’s daughter is a combination of hopeful erotic union but also a sense of traumatic displacement and loss. Leo has chosen love over intellectually selecting his partner. A strange haunting death hangs over Leo’s choice. Malamud’s final line of the story makes this clear. As Leo and Stella meet, Malamud 373 Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003 (1953), 212. 199 writes: Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead. 374 The Magic Barrel was not a story of intermarriage, since it ostensibly featured the coupling of two Jewish characters. But the notion of Jewish sexuality as an expression of generational break hinted at what was to come in the late 1960s. For Malamud, the awakening of Jewish sexuality was a signifier of diaspora shift, just as it had been for the first wave of immigrants in the 1920s. Only instead of the euphoric assimilation narrative of that period, spiritual crisis remained. In 1966, Malamud’s exploration of sexual desire and Jewish alterity became even more grounded in a nostalgic recall of pre-modern European Jewry. In The Fixer, Malamud tells the story of an innocent European Jew accused of a blood libel and the massacre of a young Christian child. The Fixer directly echoes both Kafka’s The Trial as well as Fritz Lang’s use of Peter Lorre in M (1931). Yet the allegorical tale of the historical trauma of European anti-Semitism in which Jews were seen as sexually perverse was also a commentary on 1960s American youth culture. Jewish sexuality could be seen as both emancipation as well as a threat to the nation-state. Malamud’s modernist framework, like Bellow, privileged the Jewish protagonist not as historical victim, but as a postwar literary emblem of generational transition into modernity. The Jew-as-Jew was now textual, no jackal or ape metaphors needed. Gregory Peck was no longer needed as the Christonormative witness to Jewish trauma. Malamud offered an explicit and distinct textual American Jewish identity fraught with dangers of 374 Ibid. P. 214 200 assimilation and negation. Like Bellow, Malamud saw the expression of this tension taking place in the sexual realm. The work of Bellow and Malamud in privileging postwar Jewish sexuality as the crisis-point for generational break set the stage for the seismic literary change that was about to take place in the late 1960s. This occurred in Philip Roth’s literary sensation, Portnoy’s Complaint. Released in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint became the literary event that crystallized explicit sexuality and generational crisis as comedic absurdity. Roth merged the loud Jewish stereotype of the mother-hating neurotic schlemiel of Borscht- Belt tradition with a highly charged, counterculture infused exploration of explicit sexuality. Portnoy’s many acts of sexual expression thematized cultural issues such as self-hatred, generational confusion, psychoanalysis, and mother hatred. Portnoy’s raging Jewish sexuality brought the Jewish protagonists in Malamud and Bellow into the American counterculture. Describing in explicit detail the sexual activities and desires of a young, neurotic Jewish man as he leaves home and becomes an adult, Portnoy’s Complaint pushed the envelope of the emerging artistic freedom of the late 1960s. But Roth’s goal was not to present Portnoy’s sexual explicitness as erotic titillation. Instead, Jewish sexuality became fodder for a comedic cultural satire of the generational rupture about to take place as a response to the repression and phoniness of 1950s-era suburbia. Barry Gross notes how Portnoy’s obsession with white, Christian normalcy begins, as a child in the 1950s, with the radio programs he listens to. Gross describes this as Roth’s critique of the incongruity between the culture industry’s construction of a happy white Christian American family and the counter-culture Jewish reality of 201 Portnoy’s lived experience. 375 This dialectic between the Christian-normative in “traditional” mass media and the Jewish-deviant of Portnoy’s reality is how Roth establishes the central tension of the American crisis of identity in the late 1960s. Portnoy is a child of white American mass culture, a fictional and idealized land of Christmas trees and families that never argued. Yet Portnoy’s Jewish family’s irreconcilable outsider status to this imagined Americana is what informs not only the adult Portnoy’s neurosis and hatred for his family, but his eternal lust for, and pursuit of, the blond, Christian “Shiksa.” The idealized females desired by Portnoy are all Hollywood constructions of the 1950s. Jane Powell, Elizabeth Taylor, and Debbie Reynolds, the latter of whom, as Gross observes, codifies around Reynolds’s perfect “goyishe” nose. 376 The comedy is one of self-hatred; Portnoy desires the Christian- normative sexual partner to purge his dissatisfaction with himself. The use of explicit and outrageous sexual comedy in Portnoy’s Complaint established the emerging comedic template that Hollywood’s Jewish New Wave would embody: the neurotic self-hating Jewish male expressing that self-hatred as an erotic desire for the shiksa. 377 Roth’s barely coded alter-ego of Portnoy was, like Benjamin Braddock, a neurotic, libidinal, confused, comically self-hating young Jewish male who expresses these emotions in the sexual realm. Portnoy’s sexual acting-out was a form of cultural resistance, an act of coded violence directed at the emasculating role of both his parents 375 Barry Gross, “Seduction of the Innocent: Portnoy’s Complaint and Popular Culture,” MELUS, vol. 8 no. 4 (Winter 1981), 82-83. 376 Ibid., 85. 377 The importance of the template in “Portnoy’s Complain” cannot be understated. The merging of neurotic carnal desire for the non-Jew would inform numerous film and television texts and star personas from Woody Allen and Mel Brooks all the way through Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and the films of Judd Apatow. 202 and Christian society. Portnoy’s notion of his body as a “Jewish joke,” his fantasies of smothering women with his penis and hatred of his own Jewish nose, allow Roth to establish Portnoy’s Jewish body as a truth claim; as the alternative to the Teutonic beauty standards and Christonormative fantasy produced by the culture industry of the 1950s. The incongruous Jewish body became a tool of generational opposition. Roth’s graphic depictions of Portnoy’s uncontrollable sexuality presented sex as generational rebellion. Portnoy’s emotionally castrating Jewish mother pushes Portnoy to see sex as rebellion. When Portnoy masturbates to his sister’s bra, he attempts to hit the ceiling light with his ejaculation. Portnoy’s sexuality comes from neurosis and anger. This neurotic self hatred leads Portnoy to seek out the blonde, Christian female as his solution. Portnoy’s gleeful discovery of non-Jewish sexual partners begins first with Kay Campbell, whom he nicknames “Pumpkin,” continues to Sarah Abbot Maulsby, whom he nicknames “The Pilgrim,” and culminates with his joyous discovery of the ever-horny Mary Jane Reid, whom he nicknames “Monkey” for her ability to perform complex sexual acrobatics. 378 Portnoy’s obsession with the Shiksa, and his playful nickname system, represent the transformative act of literary stylization and linguistic re- representation. Portnoy, like Roth, is rewriting the lived experience into the fictive- abstract through substitute WASP imagery (Pumpkins and Pilgrims) and then animal carnality (Monkeys). When Portnoy finally travels to Israel to find what The New York Times called his “bête noire,” a horny Jewish woman who reminds him of his mother, he 378 David Gooblar. The Major Phases of Philip Roth (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 52. 203 attempts to sexually punish her, only to be rendered fully impotent. 379 This crisis is what sends Portnoy into psychoanalysis. Portnoy’s desire for the shiksa is entangled with his hatred for his castrating Jewish mother. European Jewish emancipation from the animalized body lived, for Kafka, in an imagined America. The location of Jewish castration lies, for Portnoy, in an imagined Israel. As with Orwell, Malamud and Bellow, Roth is playing with a Bataille-Marcuse- Foucault understanding of sexuality. Portnoy’s sex acts are also acts of violence at systemic methods of control. The Jewish desire for the non-Jewish female is, for Roth, a carnal act presented as an act of resistance against state control in the form of his domineering mother (“Big Mother” if you will). But sex is also an act of self-hatred. In Roth’s configuration, “Shiksas” are the objectified signifier offering the tool of resistance against systems of control both external and internal. The loosening of constraints on the sexuality of the American Jewish male of the 1960s became a metaphor for the loosening of constraints for the American youth culture. Matthew Frye Jacobson places the literary trend of Jewish protagonists that peaked with Portnoy’s Complaint as part of a larger upsurge in ethnocentric literature that began in 1960 with the hugely successful republishing of Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel, The Rise of David Levinsky. 380 Jacobson argues the revival in ethnic literature was directly aligned with the radical politics of the New Left that would inform the Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam protests and counterculture movement. Portnoy is, for 379 Josh Greenfield, “"Doctor, this is my only life and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke!” in The New York Times. February 23, 1969. 380 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 2006), 130. 204 Jacobson, located within a tradition of Jewish identity in letters that began as early as the 1910s. But Jacobson draws a distinction. Portnoy argues that “the psychodrama of Jewishness and the multifold interpretation of its meanings will be played out on the sexualized field of women’s bodies…” 381 Jacobson’s notion of Portnoy’s transference, the movement of the “psychodrama of Jewishness” from the self onto the projection of the abstract female body, is essential to understanding the conflation between eroticism and neuroticism taking place in the late 1960s. The central psychoanalytic move for the male Jewish protagonist was from the castrating Jewish mother (and ugly stereotypical Jewish sister) to the antidote; the idealized dream of the “Shiksa.” Jacobson notes the famous quote from the novel in which Portnoy celebrates his sexual achievement with Monkey thusly: “she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy.” 382 Roth’s first novel, Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959, merely hinted at the sexually explicit boldness that would appear in Portnoy’s Complaint. Couching his social critique in a safer 1950s rubric, Roth presented the sexual transgressions of Goodbye, Columbus entirely within dialectics of class and location. The story of an urban, working class Jewish male from New York pursuing a rich, upper class Jewish female from upstate presents a binary between ethnic Jewish alterity and universal Jewish assimilation very much in line with the Peck/Garfield dialectic. Both families are textually Jewish in the novel, but Roth’s codings are clear. The journey from urban, ghetto “ugly Jew” to rich, aristocratic country club Jew is one that marks not only the de- Judaising process lurking within the American assimilation myth and progression 381 Ibid. P. 154 382 Ibid. P. 155, Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1994) , 216-217, 209. 205 narrative of upward mobility, but the erotic charge of the transgressive coupling. It is no surprise that it would be the more outrageous and explicit Roth, and not the poetic Bellow or lyrical Malamud, whose texts would make the most impactful transition into cinema. In the film adaptation of Goodbye Columbus (1969), the novel’s central narrative tension is located in the class and culture divide between old world and new world Jewry. Neil Klugman (Richard Benjamin) and his family represents the rude Ghetto Jews of the Lower East Side. The Patimkin family functions as the assimilated, barely-Jewish, family of upstate New York. Brenda Patimkin (Ali MacGraw) signifies a Jewish female able to “pass” in ways the Jewish male cannot, Brenda’s father, Ben Patimkin (Jack Klugman) symbolizes the previous generation’s working class New York Jewish roots. These affects remain in Ben’s accent and table manners. They emerge during the scene in which Brenda’s family welcomes Neil to dinner. The binary of Goodbye, Columbus is not a textual Christian/Jewish divide, since both families are Jews, but a divide between types of Jews. Neil and Brenda’s father represent the “Jewish-Jewish” configuration. Brenda, however, is a hybrid. Brenda is a product of her white, Christian suburban environment. Brenda can be read as “Christian-Jewish,” culturally Christian by virtue of her suburban life. Roth’s first novel already contained the thematic Christian-Jewish sexual binary he would play with in later works such as Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life as a Man (1974). So while Brenda remains textually Jewish (and played by the half- Jewish Ali MacGraw), thematically she speaks to the Christian-Jewish divide that would 206 come more explicitly in Roth’s later work. In Goodbye, Columbus, the romantic tension is between authentic Jewish identity and the desire to transform into Christian, suburbia. The film’s play with ethnic masquerade is highlighted in the first phone conversation between Neil and Brenda. Before they’ve even met, Neil calls Brenda up after finding her in the phone book, and they have the following exchange: Brenda: “What do you look like?” Neil: “I’m dark.” Brenda: “Are you a negro?” Neil: “Sagittarius.” 383 Neil’s playful riff on identity, ethnicity and birth-month is a response to even the hint of miscegenation taking place. While African-Americans were still banned from coupling narratives with white people (with only Sidney Poitier granted the occasional exception), the transgressive boundaries of cultural shift are hinted at. When Neil discovers that Brenda has had a nose job and is deeply ashamed of her Jewish father, Brenda’s artifice begins to crumble. Their dynamic is similar to Hoffman and Ross in The Graduate. Richard Benjamin’s hirsute Jewish looks operate as an iconographic inversion of male movie star conventions of the previous generation. But Brenda Patimkin’s Jewishness is textual only, and barely even that. MacGraw-as-Brenda signifies the non-Jew-as-Jew as seen throughout the 1950s. This allows for the erotic desire of Richard Benjamin’s Neil. Brenda is not “too Jewish.” But this thematic operates in a distinct casting inversion: It is the “Jew-as-Jew,” the Richard Benjamin character that actually represents the new configuration for representations in the late 383 This dialogue did not appear in the novel. 207 1960s. The “new Jew,” played by Ali MacGraw, actually signifies the regressive 1950s- era act of Jewish hiding in suburban Christian code. 384 Goodbye, Columbus, both the novel and the film, established Roth’s use of the Jew as a metaphor for youth-generation alienation. Like Bellow and Malamud, Roth saw himself as part of a distinctly cosmopolitan extension of Jewish modernist writers from Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. Roth became celebrated, along with Tom Wolfe and Ken Kesey, as one of the key literary voices of the late 1960s expressing the generational angst of American youth counterculture. But unlike Wolfe and Kesey, Roth was more the product of a distinct literary tradition of Jewish writers that had begun not in the counterculture, but with Bellow and Malamud’s work of the 1950s. The connection between these three writers is not simply because the three were born Jewish, what Warner Sollors calls the “descent” understanding of ethnic identity informing creative output, but can be read as “consent” based; the collective schematization of Jewish identity (and sexuality) as central to their postwar crisis of American suburbia in the age of whiteness. 385 The exploration of Jewish alterity, presented in irreducible crisis with the nation-state, was an artistic movement every bit as potent as the work of European modernists like Proust, Kafka and Joyce. Just as Bellow referenced Disraeli, Roth’s frequent invocations of Franz Kafka show his understanding, and choice, to participate in this distinct Jewish literary lineage. 384 MacGraw’s dual star construction as both signifier of the new movie star as well as normative beauty icon echo of the 1950s came to its peak in the massively successful Love Story (1970) in which MacGraw played a Catholic opposite Ryan O’Neil’s WASP, set in an ethnic-free, Jewish-free, humor-free, idealized Ivy League world of WASP privilege. 385 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 14-16. 208 Roth makes numerous references to Kafka in his novels, and directly invoked Kafka in his 1972 short story, The Breast. Roth’s comedic, playful reimagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis inverts the transformation from Kafka’s coded-Jewish insect into an overtly textual Jew turning into a female breast. 386 Roth’s comedic riff on Kafka illustrates the three central themes of Roth’s work: An exploration of Jewish identity crisis rendered as comedic and ludicrous, a self-aware and self-reflexive intertextual writing style, and a playful but overt depiction of sexuality challenging the boundaries of censorship. Kafka had presented the deviant Jewish body in modernist code, the pseudo- Jew as signifier of the bestial animality underneath societal control in the age of eugenics. Roth brought out the psychosexual components of Jewish corporeal transformation as comedic, absurdist and playfully self-aware. Roth’s self-proclaimed literary connection to Kafka is what Elaine B. Safer describes as a distinct form of meta-fiction, a deliberate entanglement between biography and an imagined transnational Jewish history in which boundaries between character and biography are intentionally blurred. 387 Roth called Kafka a Jewish comedian, a “sit-down comic,” an allusion that Sanford Pinsker argues is an act of self-inscription of Jewish lineage that Roth is as much parodying as embracing. 388 Roth’s perspective of Kafka as macabre humorist is made clear in Portnoy’s Complaint when Portnoy compares himself 386 Woody Allen would similarly play with the joke of a giant female breast as escaped monster in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,… But Were Afraid to Ask (1972). 387 Elaine Safer, “The Double, Comic Irony, and Postmodernism in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock,” MELUS, vol. 21 no. 4, Ethnic Humor, Winter, 1996), 158. 388 Sanford Pinsker, “Guilt as Comic Idea: Franz Kafka and the Postures of Modern Jewish Writing,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 6 no. 3, Franz Kafka Special Number, September 1977, 466-471. 209 to Gregor Samsa. 389 The 1920s had seen Jewish bodies presented in code, as vessels for tragic, nightmarish corporeal crises of European transgression in the age of eugenics. Roth demonstrated the new paradigm. The 1960s used Jewish bodies as vessels for comedic-erotic neurosis, what we can call the invention of the erotic/neurotic. The idea of a man turning into a breast in The Breast, or even Portnoy’s sexual horniness, as a metaphor for Gregor Samsa’s corporeal decay was central to Roth’s linkage of sexuality and Jewish alterity in a modernist milieu. It was by adding sexuality and comedy to Kafka that Roth continued the American-Jewish transformation metaphor in a 1960s context. The same year as Roth’s The Breast, 1972, Woody Allen would also play with Jewish perversion in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask (1972). As with The Breast, one of the largest set pieces in Allen’s series of comedy sketches involves Allen’s discovery of an underground laboratory run by a scientist who has gone mad pursuing sexual pleasure. In his haste to escape, Allen unwittingly unleashes a giant marauding breast that goes on a violent rampage, milking people to death. Allen’s comedic genre riff on the classic monster film echoes Roth’s riff on Kafka’s use of Jewishness in literature. Both present the incongruity of the Jew as the “hero,” unleashing an unconstrained carnality in the form of monstrous female bodies. 390 Bringing out the psycho-sexual underpinnings of the monstrous body aligned with both Jewishness and sexual crisis, Allen confronts his marauding breast by holding up a 389 Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1994 (1967), 121. 390 Gender and feminist theorists like Barbara Krieger and Laura Mulvey, among many others, have traced the function of the monstrous female body in horror. Placed in context with feminized and neurotic Jewish anti-heroes, the monstrosity remains, but is also rendered into comedic farce. 210 Christian cross for protection, a humorous play off his very un-heroic and very un- Christian persona. The breast responds by squirting milk at Allen. The cross is of no use. The only way Allen can contain the breast is to trap it in a giant brassiere. Kafka’s transformations placed a deviant crypto-Jewish corpus at the center of the emerging European modernity of the early 20th century. In 1974, Roth would introduce “Nathan Zuckerman” in My Life as A Man. Zuckerman would continue to represent Roth’s alter ego through numerous novels over the next four decades. In My Life as a Man, as for so many Roth novels, the Jewish male’s pursuit of the Christian female became his singular act of agency. Roth’s horny Jewish Schlemiels were a resurrection of Kafka’s transformations, only within a self-reflexive and ironic comedic framework distinct to the late 1960s. For America’s transition into post-modernity, the Jewish body, still queered, sexualized and transgressive, signified not only the European gothic monstrosity of Kafka’s era, but a postmodernist and distinctly American deconstruction of history itself as an artificial mass media hallucination. Portnoy’s sexual frenzy with the uncomplicated Shiksa, “Monkey,” and the realization of the dream Americana had sold him through radio in the 1950s, established a paradigm of generational response. The representation of Jewish-Christian sexuality was a transgressive act that would define American youth culture for the next dozen years. Portnoy’s Complaint was, like The Graduate, the seminal text that merged the aesthetic transformation of the medium with the thematic embrace of the counterculture, a Jewish carnality freed in the realm of 211 the comic. Portnoy was Marx’s second read of history writ corporeal: History as the sex-farce. 391 “ALL RIGHT SHMEGEGAH, DROP THE YEAGAH!” 392 What Portnoy’s Complaint had represented to American literature and The Graduate for Hollywood, Lenny Bruce was to the nascent art form of stand-up comedy. By the late 1950s, Bruce’s linguistic jazz-inspired cadences and be-bop comedy riffs had completely overturned the notion of comedy as a performing art. As self-destructive as he was innovative, Bruce was frequently arrested and persecuted for “obscenity,” due to the language in his stage act. 393 Bruce believed it was this form of sexualized language, and the bravery to speak it, that represented a revolutionary act of patriotism. 394 Lenny Bruce’s contributions to the development of standup comedy in the 1950s produced two distinct innovations in the medium. The first was to introduce an overt acknowledgement of adult sexuality in both the use of graphic language and the construction of the stage persona, without fear of audience alienation or limitations of mass-appeal. The second was to present this ribald sexuality as an act of political defiance, a patriotic blow against systemic tools of cultural control that had homogenized culture in the 1950s. In one his most famous jokes, Bruce makes this connection clear: 391 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” The Marx-Engels Reader 2 nd Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1978), 594. 392 A Yiddish translation of Humphrey Bogart’s famous line, “All right, Louis, drop the gun!” frequently delivered by Lenny Bruce during his comedy performances. Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 184. 393 For more on Bruce’s frequent trials and arrests, see Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover’s The Trials of Lenny Bruce, The Rise and Fall of an American Icon (Illinois: Source Books, 2002). 394 Sol Saporta argues that Bruce’s use of transgressive language is aligned with the work of political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky, complex language systems meant to challenge the dominant reading strategies and status quo. Sol Saporta, Society, Language and the University: From Lenny Bruce to Noam Chomsky (New York: Vantage Press, 1994). 212 “Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say "fuck the government.” 395 Bruce’s quip asks the audience to consider the emancipating potential of language. Like Winston Smith’s diary, Bruce’s joke argues what Bataille and Marcuse had theorized; that sexual and political acts are inextricably linked. This idea was also seen in Bruce’s famous musical-comedy routine, “’To’ is a Preposition; ‘Come’ is a Verb.” 396 Performed with a backing jazz band (and recreated in Bob Fosse’s 1973 biopic, Lenny), the routine showed how Bruce deconstructed language deemed “offensive” into inoffensive subsections via the performative hipster jazz persona. Bruce chant-repeated one sentence over and over: “Didja come?... Good! Didja come good?” Using various pauses and emphasis changes, Bruce’s repetition of this one single sentence was delivered as a jazz-beat rhythmic chanting, highlighting how inflection and sequence create meaning out of otherwise “harmless” words like “did,” “you,” “come,” and “good.” Bruce’s critique of the bias embedded in language reading strategies was a linguistic Marxist critique in the Peirce and Lévi-Strauss tradition. But a third element was also central to Bruce’s nightclub performances as a transgressive act of state resistance; Bruce’s unapologetic foregrounding of his Jewishness. Bruce’s routines made constant references to his Jewish background. Bruce’s language was peppered with playful Yiddishisms, never defined nor explained, giving his language the cadence of urban Jewish exclusivity. These techniques of Jewish self-deprecation pulled from the classic Borscht-Belt comedy tradition at the same time 395 Bruce reportedly would say this, with minor variations, in his nightclub routines of the late 1950s and early 1960s 396 This routine was cited in the prosecution’s case in Bruce’s 1964 obscenity trial over his performance at the Café Au Go Go. 213 that they subverted them through Bruce’s carnal lens. Musicologists Josh Kun and Roger Bennett note how Jewish comedy albums of the 1960s had worked to present Jewishness as benign and universal, part of a broader multiethnic American celebration. On LPs such as You Don’t Have to Be Jewish and Stories our Jewish Mother Forgot to Tell Us, Kun and Bennett show how comedians such as Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, and Myron Cohen sold a nostalgic Catskills Jewishness that targeted both Jew and non-Jew alike. 397 Gerald Nachman traces how Bruce embraced the formal structure of Jewish comedy tradition performed by less controversial comedians such as Shelley Berman, Stan Freberg, and (of note) the comedy team of Mike Nichols & Elaine May. 398 But rather than appealing to the masses, Bruce was unafraid to use his role as Jewish outsider to provoke rather than reassure. To challenge the structure as a sexually transgressive presence without apologia, one that ruptured normative expectations of emasculated Jewish comedic clownishness. Yiddishkeit became the key methodology that Bruce used to mark his language as different, aligning Jewish alterity with the emerging Jazz-based, urban, hipster aesthetic. Bruce would parody famous phrases of the time by “Yiddishizing” key words in the phrase. 399 Sanford Pinsker argues that while Bruce’s Yiddishisms may have echoed Shtetl comedians of the 1920s, Bruce’s configuration actually represented a sharp break from the Jewish linguistic tradition Bruce was mimicking. 400 Bruce’s criticisms of 397 Kun and Bennett, And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, 116-118 398 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 392. 399 Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 184. 400 Sanford Pinsker, “Shpritzing the Goyim/Shocking the Jews,” Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 89-91. 214 societal mores were located not just in what Bruce was saying, but how he said it. As Josh Kun has argued, cultural theorists analyzing Jewish identity often privilege the Jewish body, but the Jewish voice also plays a significant role in marking Jewish difference. 401 Kun’s analysis of comedians and performers of the 1950s described an “aurality of Jewish difference” at work in which Yiddishisms ruptured the cohesive framework of the American melting pot. 402 Bruce’s use of Yiddish supports Kun’s argument by not only unapologetically foregrounding Bruce’s dual-language status as both American and Jew, but celebrating Yiddish as a sign of hipster urban difference. Yiddish, for Bruce, was a tool of linguistic political opposition. By using Yiddishkeit as a tool of verbal disruption, presenting Yiddishisms with the same disruptive force as words such as “shit” and “fuck,” Bruce privileged “Jewish” language as political challenge. For Bruce, both Yiddishkeit and x-rated language combined to challenge to normative societal constraints embedded in Christian-centric systems of control. 403 Bruce saw Jewish identity as culturally defined. In one of Bruce’s most famous monologues, Bruce positioned “Jewishness” as code for hipster identity. “Jewishness” was comically identified as both performance based and regionally signified. Items such as macaroons, bagels, fruit salad and even Ray Charles were described as Jewish, while 401 Josh Kun, “The Yiddish Are Coming: Mickey Katz, Antic-Semitism, and the Sound of Jewish Difference,” American Jewish History vol. 87, no. 4 (December 1999), 343-344. 402 Ibid., 343 403 Dustin Hoffman would make the connection between Bruce and the liberation of Jewish performance even clearer by playing Lenny Bruce in 1973’s Lenny, directed by Bob Fosse. In 1994, Joan Rivers would perform a show based on Lenny Bruce’s eccentric mother, “Sally Marr -- and Her Escorts,” at the Helen Hayes Theater. Via tvparty.com. 215 lime Jello, Eddie Cantor and even B’nai B’rith were called Goyishe. 404 For Bruce, Jewishness became the signifier of the modern, the urbane, and the counterculture, a rejection of the past. “Unhip” Jewish organizations, even the international social organization, B’nai B’rith, were “Goyishe” to Bruce. Bruce’s consent-based ethnic reconfiguration would also appear in monologues such as “Religion, Inc.” and the character of “Father Flotsky,” direct critiques of organized religion, including institutional Judaism. Bruce’s “Jewishness” was presented as outside of systemic control, neither by the nation-state nor the synagogue. For Bruce, Jewishness was a culturally progressive and subversive amalgam of urban cities and language meant to challenge Christian-centric modes of power. Bruce’s monologue describing Adolf Hitler meeting with a Jewish casting agent came from the tradition of genre parody that had emerged from the sketch comedy of Vaudeville, but with a biting critique of Jewish influence in Hollywood. 405 Bruce’s playful invoking of his role as a Jewish pariah jester was made clear in a routine in which Bruce apologized for killing Christ, attributing it to a party that got out of control. Invoking Hitler and killing Christ were just two examples of how Bruce refused to place his Jewish alterity, nor his Yiddish-infused language itself, into a reassuring template aimed at both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences alike. Bruce sought neither. Instead, Bruce targeted the hipster and youth culture, with his Jewishness as the clarion call of opposition and resistance 404 Steven E. Kercher, Revel with a cause: liberal satire in postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 97. 405 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 392-394. 216 Bruce was not the only Jewish comedian introducing innovative standup comedy. The erudite Mort Sahl had introduced political riffs as a component of comedy, but as a genteel professorial figure from the New York intelligentsia. A young Woody Allen was just beginning to introduce neurotic self-criticism in his comedy routines. Joan Rivers mined the comedic potential of the sexually frustrated Jewish housewife finally given voice, in her comedic refrain, “Can we talk?” Joyce Antler describes how Joan Rivers changed her entire act after seeing Lenny Bruce in Greenwich Village in 1961. 406 Bruce empowered Rivers to shift from the universal “housewife” framework of her comedy, and to draw inspiration from the specificity of her Jewish background, her sexual frustrations, and her role as an “urban ethnic.” 407 As part of the vanguard of confessional truth-comedians, Antler argues that Rivers was very aware of her role as part of a “transitional comedy generation.” 408 But even this next generation of hip, urban comedians didn’t push the boundaries of acceptable discourse like Bruce. These Jewish performers, despite presenting a new urban realism and self-reflexive awareness in their acts, mitigated their language and subject matter within the “mass appeal” tradition. Bruce did not. If Hugh Hefner was the super-ego of genteel, controlled, WASP 1950s American masculinity, Lenny Bruce was the queered, raging, uncontained and primal Jewish id of the 1960s. 409 406 Joyce Antler, “One Clove Away From a Pomander Ball: The Subversive Tradition of Jewish Female Comedians,” Jews and Humor: Studies in Jewish Civilization, Vol. 22, Ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon (USA: Purdue University Press, 2011), 162-163. 407 Ibid., 163. 408 Ibid., 164. 409 . Like the classic 1930s and 1940s movie idols that he both idealized and emulated, Hefner was preternaturally calm, collected, and always in control. The sexual desire that Hefner expressed, no matter how libidinal, was always untroubled, never neurotic, and fully controlled at all times. Hefner’s act was so 217 By the early 1960s, Bruce was being roundly criticized as a gimmick comedian who trafficked in offensive material, one of a number of comedians that Time Magazine labeled the “Sickniks” (a play on “Beatnik”). 410 Historian Paul Buhle notes how Bruce’s comedy informed the counter-culture of the late 1960s by influencing the founder of the Yippies, the Jewish political prankster, Abbie Hoffman, who reconfigured Bruce’s rebellious jester persona as part of his political assault in the street theater tradition. 411 Musicologist Steven Lee Beeber argues that it was Lenny Bruce, and not the folk singers or musical innovators of the 1950s, who was the true progenitor of the musical pranksterism that would inform the musical counterculture and punk rock movements, tracing the personas of Bob Dylan, Tuli Kupferberg (referenced by Ginsberg in the poem “Howl”), and Lou Reed, directly to Bruce. 412 Bruce’s riffs were more aligned with music than with comedy, where sexually charged Jewish personas appeared at the foreground of the international avant-garde. Bruce’s girlfriend at the time, and future wife, was the non-Jewish stripper, Honey Harlowe (born Harriett Lloyd). Honey legitimized Bruce’s hipster underground credentials. Bruce not only discussed the urban jungle, he shtupped a shiksa stripper. archly constructed and obviously performed that it was satirized as early as 1959 by Rock Hudson’s performance as unmarried lothario Brad Allen in Pillow Talk (Gordon). Pillow Talk also featured the nebbishy Jewish counterpoint to Rock Hudson’s confident ladies men in the form of the Jewish actor Tony Randall. Randall’s wisecracking comic relief had no real chance to land Doris Day, and his frequent references to seeing a psychiatrist perfectly encapsulated the emasculated Jewish schlemiel of the early 1960s. 410 “Nightclubs: The Sickniks,” Time Magazine, cover story, Monday, Jul. 13, 1959 411 , Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 185. 412 Beeber, Steven Lee, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006), 4-5. 218 Like Roth, Bellow and Malamud, Bruce foregrounded the role of Jewish identity in mediating the normative and transgressive through the use of language and sexuality. Bruce’s refusal to tone down his act, his highly publicized blacklisting, arrests and jail time, represented a rebellious defiance more in line with the leftist and progressive Jewish radicals of the 1930s such as Saul Alinsky and Emma Goldman, than with the soft Borscht Belt Jewish comedians selling a hapless schlemiel comedy to the American public that Kun and Bennett describe. Bruce’s frank and raw sexual address, in both substance and style, challenged his audience to pick sides between a regressive 1950s conformity and the emerging 1960s counterculture. 413 Lenny Bruce is now regarded as the central artistic break in American comedy between the desire for as broad an audience as possible and the establishment of cultural barriers meant to intentionally demarcate subculture in direct address. Bruce was the first comedian of the postwar era to present the Jewish artist as a self-hating comedic pariah challenging structural authority. By combining Borscht Belt Jewish cadences with X- rated language and scat-riffs based around his sexuality, Bruce presented himself as an entirely new identity; an unapologetic, sexual Jewish force that was hyper-neurotic, angry, rude, vulgar, offensive, and crass. Just as Winston Smith witnessed the rage directed at Emmanuel Goldstein, Bruce presented himself as the Jewish face meant to confront the conformity of whiteness and represent the brave new world of libertarian performance. After years of legal troubles and a heroin addition, Bruce died in 1966, just one year before Dustin Hoffman’s act of Shiksa liberation in The Graduate, and two 413 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 399-401. 219 years before Philip Roth’s Portnoy would make the role of the outsider-Jewish schlemiel as purveyor of the new sexual freedoms an icon of the counterculture. Bruce’s combination of carnal sexuality with unapologetic Jewish hipsterism established the template for the Hollywood Jewish New Wave of the late 1960s. By 1965, Bruce’s influence could be seen in the early stand-up comedy of Woody Allen. In a comedy special aired on British television in 1965, Allen demonstrated Bruce’s connection between a neurotic Jewish sexuality and artistic impulse, describing his burst of “inspiration” upon seeing a painting of a nude woman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The audience laughter immediately signals their awareness of the real motivation behind Allen’s supposed artistic epiphany. Allen describes the painting as “succulent,” and of a “naked huntress stabbing a warthog,” an image of a powerful Nordic female, masculinized, able to hunt and kill an animal while naked. The description of a powerful, naked huntress counterpoints with Allen’s feminized, neurotic, Jewish schlemiel persona. The painting inspires Allen to try to “lick some of the oil off the canvas,” and requires two guards at the museum to restrain him. Allen’s comedy, like Bruce, places unconstrained and deviant sexuality at the heart of his motivation. Allen’s monologue continues by describing his new found determination to become an artist. When a woman arrives for a nude modeling session at Allen’s apartment, Allen delivers the final punch line of the routine, telling the model: “Take off your clothes, right away, because I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” 414 414 The British television special was the broadcast of Allen’s live stage performance and was produced by noted British television producer, Johnnie Hamp. Tobler, John. NME Rock 'N' Roll Years (London: Reed International Books Ltd. 1992), 149. Via Wikipedia. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCufsHa8wU&feature=related 220 This early-career comedy monologue produces one of the central themes that would define Allen’s career; the juxtaposition between high culture and the primal pursuit of carnal sexuality. Allen tempered his performance in key ways that draw distinctions from Lenny Bruce. Bruce may have been a self-hating, self-destructive hipster, but Bruce was a hipster lothario. Bruce was confrontational, rebellious, angry, never cowardly, and sexually successful. Allen’s nebbish was the opposite. Allen presented his sexuality under the cover of cowardice, slapstick, and incompetence; Woody not only never got the girl, but had no aspirations beyond picking himself up and trying to get the girl once again. 415 Allen’s first success in Hollywood, the 1965 screenplay for What’s New, Pussycat?, establishes these themes in Allen’s film career. The nominal sex-farce plot follows a hyper-masculine Hollywood celebrity lothario, Michael James (Peter O’Toole, in a role originally written for Warren Beatty) and his neurotic, Austrian-Jewish, psychoanalyst (replete with comedic Freudian accent), Dr. Fritz Fassbender (Peter Sellers, in a role originally written for Groucho Marx). Through numerous comedic therapy sessions, the incompetent Dr. Fassbender attempts to “cure” Michael of his sexual promiscuity so Michael can finally be faithful to his wife. But Dr. Fassbender is courting one of his own patients. O’Toole’s “classic” blonde haired, blue eyed movie star, and the performance of Sellers as the neurotic Austrian-Jewish psychoanalyst, showed how Jewishness, neurosis and sexuality were coming together in the mid 1960s 415 This served in stark counterpoint to accounts of the real Woody Allen, described as highly athletic, confident, successful with women, and not particularly neurotic in his professional work as a writer and director. Nachman, Seriously Funny, 526-527 221 as harbinger of generational transition from the past (O’Toole’s confident suave idealized masculinity) to the future (neurotic, sexualized Jewish clowns). The female “Shiksa” objects of desire are played by Romy Schneider, Bond girl Ursula Andress, and the French model Capucine. The suave Peter O’Toole’s Teutonic good looks are counterpointed with the neurotic and libidinal sexuality of both Peter Sellers and Woody Allen himself. But a shift was occurring. O’Toole’s 1950s-era beauty was now ripe for satire. The new masculinity was in the form of Sellers and Allen. An amalgam of James Bond and Inspector Clouseau, the heavily rewritten script strayed far from Allen’s draft, and while the bland French sex farce did not receive much critical respect, it was a huge box office hit. 416 Allen would cement his position as Bruce’s mainstream successor that same year in a pictorial for Playboy Magazine to promote the film, entitled, “What’s Nude, Pussycat?,” in which a shirtless Allen posed on a football field surrounded by Playboy bunnies dressed in football gear, attempting to tackle him. 417 As in his 1965 comedy routine in which Allen was erotically inspired by a painting of a naked huntress, the Playboy pictorial textually riffed off Allen’s flawed, neurotic, Jewish masculine deficiencies. The photo spread also demonstrated Allen’s ability to successfully perform this flawed masculinity as comedy. Comedy was the tool by which Allen was “scoring.” This display of Jewish sexual accomplishment was located not on the football field but through the creative arts. What’s New Pussycat? riffed on this transformation in masculinity. The hyper-masculine, confident, WASP 416 Frank. Miller, “What’s New, Pussycat?” Turner Classic Movies Website: <http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/354685%7C21392/What-s-New-Pussycat-.html> 417 John Baxter, Woody Allen: A Biography (New York: Carol & Graf, 1998), 105. 222 movie star, whether Warren Beatty or Peter O’Toole, traditionally got all the girls through physical accomplishment and traditional 1950s-era masculine beauty. The neurotic, highly sexualized Jew performed a different masculinity, that of comedic masquerade. O’Toole represented the old way of “scoring.” Woody Allen and Peter Sellers, together as variations of the “schlemiel,” represented the new iconography of counterculture sexuality. The hyper-sexual Jewish schlemiel covertly assaulting Christonormative convention had entered Hollywood cinema. COMIX AND COUNTERCULTURE Perhaps no counterculture medium of the late 1960s better encapsulated the tensions of representation and the sexual freedoms than the underground adult comics movement, “Comix.” Based out of San Francisco, Comix presented a ribald, raunchy and uncensored take on sex, drugs, and the counterculture movement, using the distancing effect of cartoon stylization to mitigate the cultural criticism that might target more realistic representations. The most famous Comix character of the time was arguably R. Crumb’s “Fritz the Cat,” made into the film Fritz the Cat (1972) by the young animator, Ralph Bakshi. The first animated film to receive an X rating, Fritz the Cat’s urban adventures in New York focus on the primal carnality and bored pleasure-seeking of a young college-age cat spending a day in Manhattan. The film opens with Fritz dropping out of NYU and abandoning his stifling dorm room to experience the truth of the streets of New York. The episodic adventures include Fritz seducing women into group sex in a bathtub (and experiencing coitus interruptus when the police show up), taking drugs, hanging out in Harlem, and generally rebelling from his upper middle-class life of 223 privilege to seek a more authentic experience. Fritz was an iconic counterculture reflection of Marcuse, Bataille and Foucault, linking sexuality and youth resistance. But Fritz was also the Jewish sexual adventurer presaged in the work of Bellow, Malamud, Roth, and the comedy of Lenny Bruce. As originally conceived by the non-Jewish R. Crumb in comic strips throughout the 1960s, Fritz began as a sexually bold hep-cat who was not textually identified as Jewish. Instead, Fritz was an amalgam of hipsterism coded in a nostalgic recall for cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. Despite not being Jewish himself, Crumb’s work has long been read as crypto-Jewish in its use of theme and metaphor. Crumb’s long obsession with Jewish women, and specifically the exaggerated female Jewish body, has been central to his work from the beginning. Andrea Most traces how Crumb’s marriage to the Jewish Aline Kominsky echoed the central obsession of Crumb with Jewish women, specifically his fascination with the frequently appearing cartoonish, “ugly” female body. Crumb’s female bodies contain the classic stereotypical Jewish attributes (large hips, large breasts, etc.). Crumb presents the exaggerated female not as critical or derogatory, but as an extension of his own erotic fetish. Crumb’s Jewish fetish is made clear in Aline and Robert Crumb’s collaboration in the mid 1990s, “Self-Loathing Comics #1.” The comic was based on Aline’s self-hatred for her perceived Jewish ugliness. Most argues that Self-Loathing Comics #1 plays with the anxieties of Jewish alterity as a metaphor for “The whole problem of perception and identity in postmodern 224 culture.” 418 Throughout much of Crumb’s work, these bodies recur. Crumb’s obsession with cartoonish depictions of the imagined body place the deviant codes of eroticism found in 1960s “Comix” in a distinct play with coded Jewish alterity. Ralph Bakshi, the Jewish-born animator who adapted Fritz the Cat, brought these themes into textual specificity. Fritz’s Jewish identity is revealed in the film when Fritz, fleeing the cops, ends up hiding out in a synagogue where numerous orthodox Jewish dogs are mumbling Hebrew prayers. Fritz manages to escape when the congregation decides to send more weapons to Israel. Just one of a number of broad political, cultural and social jokes in the film, Bakshi’s contribution was to present Fritz as a sexually adventurous college-student Jewish “cat” determined to score as many girls as possible, with the occasional anarchic gesture when provoked. Fritz’s middle-class Jewish girlfriend, Winston Schwartz, represents the bourgeois Jewish-Jewish coupling that (like Portnoy) repels Fritz and fuels his rebellion, expressed as sexual experimentation. Bakshi’s broad racial caricatures included African-American crows as the ultimate in hipster sexual virility, and Bakshi establishes a Jewish vs. African-American sexual hierarchy in which women desire the African-American crows over the neurotic and sexually suspect Fritz. By making Fritz (and Winston) Jewish, Bakshi thematizes the hippie and counterculture’s navigation of changing sexual, political, and racial mores in the form of a Jewish protagonist’s comedic quest for sexual satisfaction; Portnoy and Lenny Bruce drawn in the cartoon realm. 418 Andrea Most, “Re-Imagining The Jew’s Body,” You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey, London: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 22- 23. 225 There was a huge rift between Crumb and Bakshi over these choices for the film version of Fritz the Cat. According to Bakshi, this was over Bakshi’s decision to make Fritz explicitly Jewish and to play with Jewish identity in the film. In an interview, Bakshi stated, “Crumb hates the picture, because I slipped a couple of things in there that he despises, like the rabbis – the pure Jewish stuff. Fritz can’t hold that kind of commentary… (The strip) was cute and well done, but there was nothing that had that much depth.” 419 Bakshi’s textual acknowledgement of Crumb’s thematic Jewish subtext may be a more accurate read on the disagreement between the two artists. It may be that it was not that Crumb objected to Jewishness in Fritz, it was that Fritz’s Jewishness was textual. If Crumb can be read as a thematic modernist in the European tradition, the “Kafka” in this equation, then Bakshi can be read as Philip Roth, taking Crumb/Kafka’s coded metaphors of alienation and re-presenting them as both explicitly Jewish (and thus comedic), and anarchically sexual. Fritz the Cat, a Jewish hipster seeking political and cultural upheaval through the seduction of the shiksa, extended the Portnoy template into X-rated cinema. But this dynamic was also forming in pop music. In France, the Jewish wunderkind “bad boy” pop singer Serge Gainsbourg (born Lucien Ginsburg) famously dated the preeminent icon of blonde (non-Jewish) French beauty, Brigitte Bardot, causing intense controversy. 420 Bardot was seemingly echoing the template established by her iconic American predecessor, Marilyn Monroe, whose flirtations with Einstein and eventual marriage to 419 Heather, Brian, “Interview: Ralph Bakshi, Pt. 2” The Daily Cross Hatch, June 30, 2008. Via Wikipedia. 420 Bardot was married at the time to the German millionaire, Gunter Sachs. 226 Arthur Miller expressed a similar desire for the urbane Jewish intellectual creative. The sexually transgressive coupling of the blonde Bardot and Jewish Gainsbourg artistically informed Gainsbourg’s controversial and massively successful pop song, Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus (I Love You… Me Neither). An alternating duet between a man and a woman punctuated with what can only be described as a female orgasm that builds over the course of the song, Je T'aime… Moi Non Plus caused a scandal in France and made Gainsbourg a polarizing figure. Gainsbourg symbolized the generational break taking place in France between “hipsters” and “squares” in the Left Bank Dreyfus tradition that would soon peak with the student riots of May 1968. Originally recorded with Bardot, Gainsbourg rerecorded the female role with his subsequent girlfriend, Jane Birkin. With lyrics such as “Je vais et je viens, entre tes reins” ("I go and I come, in between your loins"), Gainsbourg’s persona was a musical variation of Lenny Bruce and Portnoy. Gainsbourg pushed the boundaries of sexual expression through linguistic play. Gainsbourg performed this artistic accomplishment as a Jewish display of sexuality in pursuit of, and seduction of, the “Shiksa” goddess. 421 Gainsbourg’s subsequent hit “Les Sucettes” (“Lollipops”) took these ideas even further, making double entendres about oral sex and implied pedophilia in the metaphor of the lollipop. 422 421 As rock music grew more explicit in the period of declining censorship, Jewish artists also began exploring themes of identity and sexuality. Singers such as Simon & Garfunkel (Mrs. Robinson), and Leonard Cohen (Sisters of Mercy) and Bob Dylan penned ironic, pop-culture infused love songs to Jesus informed by their Jewish-outsider status. In 1968, the Jewish singer Norman Greenbaum’s revival tent preacher parody, Spirit in the Sky, became an unironically received hit. 422 A 2010 French biopic of Gainsbourg directed by Joann Sfar, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, presented Gainsbourg’s creativity emerging from anxieties from his childhood as a Jew living in occupied France. The film depicts a series of stylized fantasies in which Gainsbourg sees himself haunted by giant anti- Semitic puppets, complete with large noses and beady eyes, moving among crowds of French people 227 The art Avant-Garde produced a similar coupling iconography that same year in New York City. Andy Warhol’s famed downtown Factory was a chaotic swirl of gender bending, drugs, transvestites, and prostitutions. It was Lou Reed’s “Nice Jewish Boy” journey through Wonderland that crystallized the notion of the innocent Jewish hipster leaving bourgeois suburbia for the dark side. Reed, the lead singer of Warhol’s The Velvet Underground art-rock band, became the very icon of the Jewish hipster that Norman Mailer had railed against in his famous 1957 essay for Dissent, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” 423 Mailer’s critique of “white” people who adopted the language and cultural affectations of African-Americans was meant as an indictment of the exploitation of the authentic by the privileged class that made up the Beatnik movement. But, as Andrea Levene points out, Mailer’s self-positioning was a distinct Jewish critique. Mailer was a Jewish author slamming hidden Jews for presenting themselves in ethnic masquerade. 424 Mailer’s critique of hipsters, like Scholem’s critique of Bellow, was one of the false efforts of ethnic masquerade at work in the production of art, literature and philosophy. This manifests most clearly in Mailer’s critique of “hipster” sexuality as an inauthentic replication of the perceived sexual freedom of the African-American, the very codings Bakshi had introduced between Fritz the Cat’s hipster sexuality emulating the more “authentic” African-American crows. In 1967, Lou Reed was Mailer’s White Negro personified, the Jew in sexual black-face. Yet Reed’s Jewish hipster sought sexual 423 Norman. Mailer, “The White Negro” Dissent (October 1957). 424 Andrea Levine, “The (Jewish) White Negro’: Norman Mailer's Racial Bodies” MELUS, Vol. 28, No. 2, (Summer 2003), 59-81. 228 validation not through the emulation of black culture, but through the seeking and acquisition of the purest of Aryan white women, in this case, the German Warholian superstar, “Nico” (Christa Päffgen). Just as with Gainsbourg and Bardot in Paris, the Lou Reed-Nico love story informed The Velvet Underground’s role as a bohemian and avant- garde harbinger of a new form of music/art hybridity. The German blonde Nico was the Jewish Reed’s ethereal muse, a plastic Warholian pop art creation of idealized Aryan beauty come to life. The Reed-Nico pairing furthered the iconography of male Jewish hipsterism and female Aryan beauty at the vanguard of music, performance, image, and art. Reed-Nico presented the post 1967 hipster not from the perspective of Mailer’s “White Negro,” but as a Christian-Jewish avant-garde progression narrative. The hipster Jewish male, successfully acquiring the icy Shiksa dream, became a coupling narrative exclusively intended for an urbane, savvy youth culture. Lenny Bruce’s Jewish assault on convention had merged with sexuality. Reed and Nico took the iconography into pop art abstraction. CONCLUSION From Gentlemen’s Agreement, in 1947, when Gregory Peck presented the postwar configuration of the non-Jewish Jew as universal, until Dustin Hoffman ushered in Hoberman’s “Jewish New Wave” in The Graduate (1967), American cinema experienced a long and mostly Jewish-free (and ethnic free) era. In this period of suburban normativity, white beauty followed a normative, racialized, Germanic-Christian hierarchy. However, in literature, stand-up comedy, rock music and underground comic books, Jewish sexuality began to emerge as the central signifier of counterculture 229 resistance. Sexualized Jews, celebrating neuroticism and Jewish identity became, after HUAC, a challenge to normative frameworks of both medium and message. In literature, the work of Bellow, Malamud and Roth introduced intellectual, neurotic, and libidinal American Jewish men as encapsulating the generational angst of the postwar era. In rock music and standup comedy, performers such as Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Lou Reed, and Serge Gainsbourg introduced raunchy Jewish explicitness as part of a literate and urbane cosmopolitan avant-garde. In the counterculture movement itself, Jewfro’d street performance agitators like Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jerry Rubin appropriated Borscht-Belt Catskills sketch comedy techniques as a form of social critique. By the late 1960s, and throughout the 1970s, Jewish actors in Hollywood were a continuation of this urban aesthetic as it moved into the mainstream. Jews-as-Jews became privileged as figures of the new sexual and intellectual freedoms that emerged in the wake of the hippie and counterculture movements. Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Elliott Gould, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, Richard Dreyfus, and Gene Wilder, among many others, would emerge in cinema to embody the new sexual freedoms. They did this by mixing sexuality with a highly urbane, and quite comedic, neurotic verbosity. These nebbishy Jewish un-heroes were a direct response to the highly constructed and idealized Aryan beauty and white Anglo-Saxon masculinity offered by Hollywood’s movie stars from the suburban, white wasteland of the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet era. By scrambling the normative codes of beauty, ethnicity, gender and eroticism, the cinematic-Jew of the late 1960s and 1970s operated as a counterculture 230 truth claim simply by embodying the erotic-deviant presence that, as Bataille, Marcuse and Foucault all pointed out, society works to mask, control and sublimate. However, there was a mitigating factor of control at work containing this disruptive body. The negation of the erotic-deviant threat posed by these empowered Jewish figures was signified in counterpoint with the normative and dominant, the love interest in the form of the fully white, Christian, sexual partner. By ensuring that these newly sexualized Jews were chasing non-Jewish love interests, a mitigating containment was also taking place, as we will see in Chapter Five. Jewish sexuality emerged as neurosis and comedic rupture. But it was always presented in service of acquiring the non-Jewish white beauty object. When Christian and Jew coupled in these texts, a cohesive and progressive American assimilation narrative emerged as potent as the one seen in 1927-1928’s triumvirate of Christian-Jewish coupling and assimilation narratives, The Jazz Singer (1927), Surrender (1927), and Abie’s Irish Rose (1928). Only this narrative was entirely distinct to the 1960s. It codified the new erotic freedoms that introduced a generation of highly sexualized Jewish movie stars. Whether it would be Woody Allen chasing Diane Keaton or Barbra Streisand desiring Robert Redford, tensions of the American counterculture could be mediated through narrative resolution. Jewish-Christian coupling narratives would perform this freedom, throughout the 1967- 1980 period, as a post-hippie American assimilation myth. 231 CHAPTER FIVE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD PT.1: COUNTERCULTURE AND THE COMEDIC-EROTIC 1967-1980 “Years ago I wrote a short story about my mother called ‘The Castrating Zionist.’ I want to expand it into a novel.” -- Isaac (Woody Allen), Manhattan (1979) Hollywood films produced in the 1967-1980 period are critically regarded as a creature pinnacle for the industry. The economic collapse of the studio system, the end of the Production Code in 1966, the charged political climate of the Vietnam War, and the rise of the Civil Rights movement all combined to destabilize the structural underpinnings of 1950s-era Hollywood convention. The resulting auteur-driven and youth-driven films of Hollywood of the 1970s are now seen as a time of unprecedented creative freedom, formal innovation, and auteur-driven triumph. David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson define this era as a renaissance of “American Art Cinema,” a creative boom shaped by the impact of the French Nouvelle Vague, the British New Wave, the rise of Pop Art, rock music, and the counterculture. 425 The so-called “film school generation” represented what Mark Harris calls the “birth of the new Hollywood,” and Lester Friedman describes as the peak of film innovation as a distinct art form before the advent of home video in the 1980s. 426 This narrative is a popular one. Peter Biskind describes this era as the “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation.” Biskind marks the start of this period with the collective impact of Easy 425 Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction, Third Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), 478-479. 426 Lester Friedman, American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 3. 232 Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Graduate in 1967, and ends it, thirteen years later, in the financial debacle of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). 427 Intriguingly, far less attention has been paid to the fact that the 1967-1980 period of Hollywood cinema was also overwhelmingly and overtly Jewish. During this period, dozens of overt and proudly Jewish movie stars, comedians, and entertainers became some of the most celebrated and influential stars of the era. J. Hoberman describes this period as the “Jewish New Wave.” 428 Following The Graduate (1967), performers such as Gene Wilder, Richard Benjamin, Karen Black, George Segal, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, Bette Midler, Richard Dreyfus, Elliott Gould, and Barbra Streisand merged the Vaudevillian and Catskills tradition with a ribald comic sexuality. These youth-culture icons performed in genre films with a self-reflexive and playful self awareness that overturned the hyper-serious method style of the 1950s-era movie stars. They used parody, sarcasm, and the sketch-comedy mode to speak to a youth culture cynicism driven by cultural destabilizations. By 1970’s Time Magazine cover featuring Elliott Gould, the Jewish schlemiel had arrived. 429 Jewish actors, for so long at odds with the Teutonic and WASPy good looks embodied by stars of the 1950s, found themselves perfectly positioned to embody these generational transformations. Their “real world” faces offered a highly libidinal and rebellious youth culture the means to overturn the previous generation’s beauty standards. 427 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 16-17. 428 J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 220. 429 “Elliott Gould: Star for an Uptight Age,” Time Magazine, Cover Story, Sept 7, 1970. 233 This Jewish assault on normative convention took two forms. Films such as The Producers (1968), The Fearless Vampire Killers (1969), Harold and Maude (1971), Carnal Knowledge (1971), The Way We Were (1973), Love and Death (1975), Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1975), Blazing Saddles (1975), and The Front (1976), were either set in the past, or used traumatic historical events as source material for both the comic and the erotic entanglements. The second approach, seen in films such as I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Where’s Poppa? (1970), Getting Straight (1970), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), focused on using neurotic Jewishness to embody the new uncertainties of sexual liberation in the hippie era. In each of these films, Jewish protagonists, nearly exclusively played by Jewish performers, performed a sexually libidinal and comically neurotic version of youth culture angst. This directly echoed both Roth’s Portnoy and the template of Benjamin Braddock that had first crossed over into mass culture in 1967. This chapter will examine how, and why, the 1967-1980 period of Hollywood cinema featured such a significant amount of overt Jewish stories and characters. As a destabilizing signifier of how historical narratives began to unravel, the Jewish New Wave became the most important ethnic iconography of youth culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. Christian-Jewish coupling narratives served to reflect the destabilization of “history” in terms of American socialist and labor movements of the previous three decades. Explicit, and often comic sexuality, played a key role in this generational renegotiation. Jewish Americans, viewed suspiciously as representing a deviant and 234 amoral sexual threat by censorship groups such as the Catholic League, now found that very alterity celebrated as the emancipated signifiers of generational transformation. With the decline of censorship and rise of youth culture, Jewish movie stars became the face of the sexualized counterculture. Yet these representations only found expression in the form of the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative. Barbra Streisand and Elliott Gould were celebrated as desirable icons of the new sexuality so long as they pursued blonde, Teutonic movie stars such as Robert Redford and Candice Bergen in The Way We Were (1972) and Getting Straight (1970), respectively. Yet, even as a famous real-life married Jewish couple, Gould and Streisand would never be paired together in the same film. 430 Jewish-Christian coupling was the key mechanism by which youth culture sexuality was depicted. The turmoil of generational change took the form of the sexualized, comedic and neurotic Jewish schlemiel. But the centrality of Christian-Jewish coupling also contained reassurance. Any threat posed by the unruly nature of Jewish sexuality was contained through the Christonormative partner. This period began when 1967’s “Summer of Love” reached mass public consciousness, creating a counterculture movement built on sexual freedoms. This period would end, quite ignominiously, in the return to a retrograde 1950s-era gender normativity ushered in by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD PT.1 Starting in the mid 1960s, schools in the United States undertook a significant financial investment to reconfigure the teaching of “history.” The goal was to incorporate 430 Streisand and Gould were married from 1963-1971. 235 more diverse sensibilities. Sandro Mazzadra argues that Frantz Fanon’s groundbreaking writing in the late 1950s first began the “unhinging of compartmentalization” seen throughout Western and European academia by the late 1960s. 431 Historian Glenn Linden observes that, by the 1970s, a significant reexamination of the social, political and structural entanglements of the teaching of “history” was taking place in the United States’ school systems. 432 Linden describes this process as “rethinking the nature of history, the values it teaches, and how those values could be taught to students.” 433 Scholars, critics, filmmakers, and the media achieved a collective awareness that absences of ethnic identity, and the use of stereotype, had played a key role in how society told itself narratives of history. In the mid-1970s, in a series of lectures delivered at the College de France, Foucault observed that the act of teaching a singular narrative of “history” had been successfully destabilized by Marxist critics. This project exposed “history” as a top- down construction with embedded violence at work in its colonial “famous white men” narratives. 434 With the rise of the American counterculture and the student uprisings in France in May 1968, “history” had been successfully challenged for containing canonical fraudulence. By the late 1970s, Jacques Derrida founded the Greph Movement, meant to mobilize opposition to French governmental attempts to “rationalize” the educational system from a nativist perspective. Derrida located the crisis taking place in the French 431 Sandro Mazzadra, “The Post-Colonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present” Immaterial Labor, Multitudes and New Social Subjects, (Cambridge: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism Conference, University of Cambridge, 2006) 432 Glenn Linden, The History Teacher Vol. 23, No. 3. May 1990, 293-303. 433 Linden, The History Teacher, 296. 434 Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997) 236 academy as due to the breakdown of the “common code(s)” found in linguistic, regional, and national differences. 435 Derrida’s critique of the teaching of history was in locating a contested space between the “the ethnic” and “the national.” 436 Supporting Derrida’s Greph project, Foucault argued that western culture of the 1970s had reached the limits of the grand historical narrative. “History,” according to Foucault, began to collapse from within. History was now seen as fractured, incomplete, entangled, disparate, and containing irresolvable fragmented narratives. 437 Scholars, critics, filmmakers and the media became aware that ethnic identity and stereotype had played a central role in how society inscribed narratives of the national-historical. This academic work had a profound effect on cinema. The historical fragmentation that Foucault and Derrida described took the form of casting challenges to the gender, ethnic and sexual normativity that had taken place before. Just as scholars challenged the grand narratives of history, movies began to challenge the assumptions of genre conventions. Filmmakers began to foreground ethnicity as a tool for ideological challenge to the dominant historical narrative. Jewish representations would once again become foregrounded as the embodiment of this destabilization. Given the role Jews had played as signifiers of the cosmopolitan shift into modernity in the 1910s and 1920s, it should not be surprising. 435 Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I. trans. Jan Plug (California: Stanford University Press, 2002), 102-103. 436 Derrida’s examination focused on the contrast between Anglo-Saxon philosophy and the African subaltern in French school systems. 437 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 326-328. 237 With the arrival of the “Jewish New Wave” came an awareness of the politicized connection between Jewish absence and communist anxieties of the 1950s. The HUAC years, the Blacklist, and the execution of the Rosenbergs began to be seen as forms of historical violence. Two major Hollywood films of this era addressed the anti-Semitic underpinnings of nativist assaults on communist and labor movements in the 1940s and 1950s. The films The Way We Were (1972) and The Front (1976) each explored the trauma of HUAC and the persecution of Jews in the postwar era. In both of these films we see how the tension between the ethnic and the national-historical that Foucault and Derrida describe was being mapped through the erotic coupling narrative. Within the reassuring framework of the love story, historical narrative was being revised. Much has been written on how both The Way We Were and The Front function as 1970s-era responses to the reactionary hysteria of the HUAC years. But less attention has been paid to the centrality of the Christian-Jewish coupling at the heart of each story. Both of these films map their political, labor, and class critiques onto a classic Hollywood love story. The purpose of this is two-fold. First, by locating a multicultural progression narrative within a classic heteronormative framework, both films are able to reassure any presumed political threat contained in their pro-labor message. Second, the privileging of the Christian-Jewish coupling firmly identifies that these films are not a product of the historical eras of their setting. Instead they remind the audience they are a part of the progressive 1970s. Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976) was the first major Hollywood film to explicitly confront the damage of the McCarthy years in the 1950s. Produced, written and starring 238 the actors, writers, and directors who actually had been blacklisted in the 1950s, the film was meant to symbolize an historical corrective. By allowing the people who had been damaged by the congressional investigations to tell their story, without fear this time, the film was positioned as a cathartic historical exercise done as a comedy. As we examined in Chapter Three, Jews had been forced into coded, clownish and mostly marginalized entertainment roles throughout the 1950s as a result of the anti-Semitic underpinnings of the HUAC investigations of Hollywood. 438 Yet The Front also functioned as a generational hand-off. The Catskills-era comedians of the 1950s may have been ruined, but the next-generation, in the form of the young Woody Allen, was ready to pick up the mantle of Jewish comedy in a new era of liberated identity. Allen’s character, Hal Prince, is a name that quite literally establishes Allen as the Jewish Prince, the inheritor of the Jewish comedy mantle. Prince enters as an outsider to the historical context of HUAC. Since Hal is not an actual writer, and therefore has nothing to lose, Hal is unthreatened and vaguely bemused by HUAC’s investigations. Hal is counterpointed with the tragic story of Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel, an actual victim of the blacklist). Hecky’s tragedy, and eventual suicide, is mitigated in the film by the love story between Woody Allen’s Howard Prince and the idealistic Connecticut-raised WASP producer, Florence Barrett (Andrea Marcovicci). A dialogue exchange on one of their first dates illustrates the bringing together of Christian and Jewish culture: 438 For more on how HUAC began with fears of Jewish global influence in Hollywood, particularly in Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, see Leonard Dinnerstein’s Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 136. 239 Howard Prince: Where are you from? Florence Barrett: Connecticut. Howard Prince: That's very ritzy. Florence Barrett: It's very proper anyway. I was very well bred - the kind of family where the biggest sin was to raise your voice. Howard Prince: Oh yeah? In my family the biggest sin was to pay retail. The connection between the healing process of representing an historical trauma and the freedom to erotically couple the Christian-Jewish love story is made explicit in the end of the film. The HUAC investigators ask Hal to give them Hecky’s name as a communist. Since Hecky’s already dead, HUAC feels it won’t matter to “name” him. This reminds Hal of Hecky’s confessional that his real name was not Hecky Brown, but Herschel Brownstein. To “name” Hecky as a communist is also to name him as a Jew. Hal refuses, telling his HUAC accusers to “go fuck yourselves.” Hal’s moment of empowerment is signified by his ability to speak. Not by “naming” the deceased Hecky Brown as “Herschel Brownstein” (thereby acknowledging Hecky as duplicitous both as a Jew and as a communist), but by telling the committee to go fuck themselves. Woody Allen, as the next-generation of unafraid Jewish performers, can use the word “fuck” without fear of reprisal. Hal Prince’s moment of political agency, his refusal to acquiesce, is then aligned with the love story with the Christian female. The scene cuts from Hal walking out on the HUAC committee to a close-up of Hal and Florence kissing. Hal lifts his hand to touch Florence’s face, revealing Hal has a handcuff on him. Hal is going to jail for refusing to name names, and in so doing, has won the affection of the Christian female. In this final image in The Front, political, generational, historical, and sexual issues of the 1970s are 240 aligned in the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative. The tragedy of Herschel Brownstein (and all Jews silenced in the 1950s) had a benefit; it has empowered the next generation of Jewish comedians to no longer hide. Woody Allen is free to be as Jewish as he’d like to be. This is confirmed through the acquisition of Florence Barrett. In Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were (1973), the gender roles are inverted from the Jewish male chasing the Shiksa. But the use of Christian-Jewish erotic love to negotiate historical trauma remains the same. As with the overt Jewish identities of both Woody Allen’s Hal Prince and Zero Mostel’s Hecky Brown in The Front, Barbra Streisand’s role as Katie Morosky, a Jewish labor leader and political activist, makes an explicit connection between the labor movements of the 1930s and the prominent role of American Jews as leaders of those movements. The act of making a female Jewish socialist the lead character in a major Hollywood film was, in and of itself, a political response to the blacklist’s anti-Semitic underpinnings. The act of making the “unconventional” Barbra Streisand the lead in a romantic love story, opposite no less than Robert Redford, was a political response to WASP beauty standards. Redford’s role as Hubbell Gardner, an apolitical “jock” aristocrat who knows he should not be attracted to the loud, unapologetically Jewish Katie, brought the Christian-Jewish transgressive coupling into an historical setting. Streisand’s unapologetic Jewishness has long been a focus of Jewish, queer, and gender readings. As Joyce Antler notes, the feminist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s such as Betty Friedan, Phyllis Chesler, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Vivian Gornick and Bella Abzug, were Jewish-born women who refused to identify themselves as Jews for the 241 majority of the movement. 439 Portraying the radical leftist union organizing Jews of Hollywood so absent in Betty Friedan’s work, Streisand acknowledges her Jewishness in tandem with both her potent sexuality and the sociopolitical activism of leftist Jewish history. This direct response to the McCarthy decades of Jewish absence in the 1950s demonstrated how much The Way We Were was also utilizing a Christian/Jewish framework as a demonstration of the Jewish visibility of the early 1970s as much, if not more so, than its purported critique of the labor and censorship issues of the 1940s and 1950s. Streisand’s iconic first role in Funny Girl (1968), four years earlier, had made her a star by also utilizing, and subverting, Jewishness in a period-piece setting. Streisand’s role as the legendary Jewish Ziegfeld Follies comedienne, Fanny Brice, aligned Streisand with a nostalgic recall for the 1920s, when overt Jewish entertainers like Brice, Molly Picon, George Jessel and Al Jolson were unafraid to make their Jewish identity an explicit part of their star personas. Yet there were key differences between Brice and Streisand. Unlike Streisand, Brice had gotten a nose job in 1923, inspiring, as Sander Gilman notes, the famous quote by Dorothy Parker that Brice had “cut off her nose to spite her race.” 440 Brice’s nose job is not referenced textually in Funny Girl. However, we can consider Streisand’s proud, unaltered, “ugly” Jewish body a form of thematic response. While invoking the heyday of Jewish celebrity in the 1920s, Streisand also offers a corporeal corrective. 439 Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America, (New York: Schocken Books, 1997), 260. 440 Ibid., 205. 242 In considering Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were (1973), it may seem that a clarification should be made along gender lines. The idea of the “ugly” Jewish female courting the blonde, beautiful, Christian male suggests a distinction from the far more prevalent Jewish male chasing the “Shiksa” Portnoy’s Complaint mode. But while the gender roles of this post Graduate template are seemingly reversed, the change is more cosmetic than biological. In The Way We Were, Streisand’s performance does not begin as female-object and recipient of the gaze, but instead is coded as male-subject. This is made clear when it is Streisand who first sees Redford at a crowded bar, and not the other way around. Streisand’s gaze at Redford’s beauty inspires her to flash back to when they first met. The beautiful Robert Redford offers the same object-based ethereal classifications as did Katherine Ross, Cybill Shepherd, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, and the other blonde Shiksas being gazed lustily at by Jewish men. But there is also a distinction. Henry Bial points out that Streisand is not entirely attracted to Redford until she reads a short story Redford has written. It is then that Streisand becomes attracted not just to his looks, but also to his talent. 441 Streisand’s gaze is at first aligned with an understanding of a normative audience’s gaze directed at the beauty standards that Redford embodied. But Streisand’s agency in rejecting Redford until he demonstrates the proverbial “inner beauty,” marks Streisand’s gaze within a Jewish framework of achievement and activism. Dustin Hoffman had functioned as not-Redford in The Graduate a few years earlier, and Redford’s idealized masculine beauty can be seen as an outlier to the Jewish movie stars of the time. Without drawing 441 Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, Press, 2005), 95. 243 too simplified a parallel, Streisand is far closer to Benjamin Braddock, and Redford is far closer to the object of acquisition that was Elaine (Katherine Ross), than to determine this configuration simply along gendered lines. In the entanglement between the Aryan- normative and the Jewish Other, Jewish desire for Christian beauty does not cleanly break down along gendered lines. Sander Gilman observes that cultures often assume a fixed understanding of what constitutes an erotic and unerotic body. Gilman argues that these perceptions of eroticism are an impermanent, and constantly changing, social construction. 442 Cultural fields of power impact our understanding of race, gender, and sexuality in the realm of the represented body. Both Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand connected the political critique of Jewish absence of the 1950s through the realignment of beauty hierarchy they represented as movie stars. Allen challenged masculine convention. Streisand challenged feminine convention. The Jewish assault on Christonormative gender standards thematized the political assault on 1950s-era absence. Streisand, like Mel Brooks, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, and the other Jewish movie stars of the late 1960s, aligned her undeniable Jewish body as a marker for youth culture’s transformation in understandings of erotic hierarchy. In Funny Girl the entanglement between the political, the sexual, and the historical is made explicit through casting. The role of Fanny’s wife, the Jewish gangster Nicky Arnstein, was played by Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. Streisand’s uncompromising Jewish physiognomy may have called for a new truth-claim in ethnic beauty, but by 442 Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 206-207. 244 pairing her not only with a non-Jewish partner, but an Arab one, the film mitigated any claims to a full Jewish alterity through the potent neutralizing force of inter-ethnic coupling. Streisand’s famous Jewish nose had challenged normative notions of female beauty, but her inter-religious coupling spoke to the new universal framework of youth- generation storytelling. What do the casting choices and erotic entanglements of period-piece films such as Funny Girl, The Front, and The Way We Were, illustrate about changing modes of historical representation in the 1970s? The arrival of the unapologetic Jew in period- piece films destabilized historical narratives by destabilizing both genre and gender conventions. Jewish sexuality was also a signifier of the liberation of the counterculture. What many filmmakers had long feared to represent for fear of stoking anti-Semitism, an explicit communist-Jewish alignment, was now safe in Hollywood cinema of the 1970s. Yet, each film mitigates the political, class, and gender tensions of the story through the lens of a romantic Romeo and Juliet love story featuring two of Hollywood’s biggest box office stars. Any radical association with political belief was subsumed under the progression narrative of inter-religious coupling. But the genre that would most embrace historical revisionism through the insertion of the comic Jew into historical narratives was not melodrama. It was farce. 443 SPRINGTIME FOR JEWISH COMEDY Judith Butler argues that parody, as both a practice and mode of performance, exposes “the very distinction between a privileged and naturalized gender configuration.” 443 Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” in The Marx-Engels Reader 2 nd Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 594. 245 This produces what Butler describes as a “subversive laughter.” 444 Subversive laughter, brought about through the scrambling of gender stereotypes, was central to the persona of late 1960s and 1970s Jewish performers. They played off the unconventional Jewish nature of their looks, thereby offering a comic critique of beauty standards. Streisand’s famous comment to her reflection in the mirror in Funny Girl (1968) “Hello, gorgeous!,” signified the paradox of the cinematic Jew starring in a role where she should not, according to her looks, actually be. The incongruity of Streisand as the romantic lead in a musical both satirized 1950s beauty standards, while inverting them. Streisand’s incongruous Jewish body was the perfect embodiment of new beauty standards found within the rising ethnic awareness of the late 1960s. 445 Two of the most successful practitioners of this form of societal critique were Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. Both had famously gotten their start as writers on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the 1950s. But both comedians spent nearly a decade in relative obscurity after their initial success as writers, struggling to find work during the post-HUAC period. Both found work in television, with Allen performing and writing for Candid Camera and Brooks serving as a co-creator and writer on Get Smart. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that both Allen and Brooks would emerge as unlikely leading men of a new form of comedic cinema. They were writer-director-performer auteurs in 444 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 200. 445 Stacy Wolf observes how Streisand’s performance in Funny Girl is both paradoxically as the every-Jew as well as the uniqueness that was Barbra Streisand. Wolf argues that this tension in her persona informs the themes of Jewish alterity and queerness challenging the normative female standards in both Fanny Brice’s time as well as in Streisand’s own career. For more see Stacy Wolf, “Barbra’s ‘Funny Girl’ Body,” Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 256-257. 246 the Chaplin and Keaton mode. Only they brought something new with them: they were unlikely romantically successful leading men of the new Hollywood. While Woody Allen focused more on contemporary genre parodies in which Allen’s flawed masculinity performed a spasmodic Freudian neurosis, Mel Brooks saw famous historical events as a fertile source for costume parody. Brooks’s sketches, films and comedy records of the 1960s and 1970s directly satirized cultural anxieties about what constituted a dominant historical narrative. Brooks began with the idea that the historical Jew had long been denied or sublimated within Christonormative grand narratives. Brooks’s Vaudevillian instincts saw the potential to draw humor out of this absence through comedic inversion. The Producers (1968), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), History of the World – Part 1 (1981) and To Be or Not To Be (1982) were all either set historically or renegotiated historical events as central underpinnings of their comedic premise. Frequently casting against type, these films commented on the gender and racial crises of the 1967-1980 period. The black sheriff protagonist of Blazing Saddles (Cleavon Little) and the Jewish showbiz Torquemada revue in History of the World – Part I both satire the dominant historical narrative by placing the historical victim (the old West black and the Spanish Inquisition Jew) into a position of diegetic, thematic, and aesthetic power. This inversion satirized ethnic absences of historical representation by inverting them. Ella Shohat, building off Warner Sollors’s seminal work on ethnicity in the 1980s, argues that ethnicity within a multi-ethnic society must be conceived of as a relational 247 discourse with “permeable boundaries of identity.” 446 Brooks’s use of ethnic scrambling supports Shohat’s observation. By performing ethnicity as parody, Brooks’s comedies foregrounded the artificial constructions that Butler locates in gender, and Shohat and Sollors locate in ethnicity. Brooks’s first major success as a performer, The 2,000 Year Old Man, suggests this schema was central to Brooks’s comedy from the beginning of his performing career. 447 Beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Brooks and his writing partner from Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows found themselves out of work and attempting to break into Hollywood. Brooks and Reiner began performing live sketch comedy at Hollywood parties, and then recorded a number of hugely successful comedy records, with Reiner playing a reporter interviewing a man (clearly Jewish) who happened to have lived for 2000 years. The numerical connection to Jesus’ age within the title critically renegotiates the entanglements of power and historical narrative in what Michel Foucault describes as the heterotopic space, a complex ideological multiplicity of power frameworks. 448 If Jesus is the 2,000-year-old dominant historical framework, Brooks’s Jewish “old man” represents its comedic inversion – Franz Fanon’s post- colonial reclamation of the split self run through a Christian-Jewish, rather than a black- white, binary. 449 Jesus’ Christian perspective was the first, and dominant read of history. Mel Brooks’s 2,000 year old Jew is the second. One comedic bit illuminates the underpinning of Jewish comedic response to Christian hegemony: 446 Ella Shoat, “Ethnicities-In-Relation,” Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema. ed. Lester D. Friedman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 216. 447 Co-created and co-performed with Carl Reiner in 1960. 448 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, (Spring 1986): 22-27. 449 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 109. 248 Reiner: “There were no buses at the time. What was the means of transportation then?” Brooks: “Mostly fear.” Reiner: “Fear transported you?” Brooks: “Fear, yes. An animal could growl, you’d go two miles in a minute.” Reiner: “What language did you speak?” Brooks: “Basic rock. That was before Hebrew.” Reiner: “Can you give us an example?” Brooks: “Hey, don’t t’row t’at rock at me!” 450 Brooks’s schlemiel presents the notion of a reassuring consistency. The Jew has always been the Jew, in any historical era. In the historical farce, language itself has become denatured and devoid of meaning, functional only as pun and joke. The 2000 Year Old Man’s fear of rocks presents the Jewish counter-narrative of history, the perspective not of the conqueror, but of the victim. The history of The 2000-Year-Old- Man is not one of historical triumph, but survival long enough to laugh at the tragic. This is trauma reimagined as the performatively sublime through the second historical read of farce. It is Marx by way of Brecht, a parody that is given voice within a Foucauldian heterotopic space of shifting and permeable ethnic identity. 451 Brooks’s disclosures about his motivation for creating the character of The 2000 Year Old Man underscore a distinct awareness of the function of his ethnic Jewish body as a signifier of ideological challenge. “I did them (albums) because I wanted to do something for ethnic comedy. In 50 years I don’t think there will be a Jewish accent. I wanted to leave something, because I’m spectacularly Jewish.” 452 Brooks’s awareness of 450 Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 473. 451 Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1986), 22- 27. 452 Don Page, “Viewers ‘Get Smarter’ With Breakthrough in Hip Satire,” Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1966. 249 his historical moment and his “spectacular” Jewishness inform his equally potent anxiety about cultural loss. Brooks renegotiates history through a 2000-year historical narrative incongruity, a Jewish “Jesus.” By suggesting a second 2000 year timeline, Brooks’s Jewish voice becomes the voice of a alternative past, previously silenced by the imposition of the dominant (Christian) historical narrative. But Brooks’s Jewish voice of history can only emerge through comedic absurdity. Without farce, the ruptures and absences of historical trauma could not be made visible. By the time of Brooks’s feature film debut with The Producers (1968), the transformation of Nazism and the Holocaust into an absurdist Broadway musical was drawn from the same notion of rereading history as historical farce. Brooks might not be able to have stopped the Holocaust, but by rendering it ludicrous, he could make a very cogent critique of the indifference of the non-Jew to the tragedy. This point is made, somewhat subtly, at the end of The Producers. Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and Leopold Bloom (Gene Wilder) are shocked to discover that the most offensive show they could dream up, a pro-Nazi Musical called “Springtime for Hitler” is not only not offensive to the masses, but is celebrated as a trifling comedic farce. Brooks’s Jewish producers are historical schlemiels, too stupid to realize that the larger world would not be remotely offended at the making light of historically specific Jewish trauma. Brooks’s ode to the role of modernism in destabilizing identity is seen in his appropriation of James Joyce’s “Leopold Bloom” from Ulysses. Evoking Joyce’s iconic representation of the distinctly modernist anti-heroism that emerged in literature of the early 20th century is central to this understanding of Brooks’s use of parody. As with 250 Joyce’s un-hero of modernist literature, Brooks’s Leopold Bloom is a neurotic hysteric, barely able to function in society. Brooks further draws out the joke through the introduction of the Swedish secretary Ulla (Lee Meredith). Ulla is a cartoonish cliché of Aryan female beauty. The joke of her Swedish desirability is that the cartoonish blond haired, blue eyed, Amazonian “Shiksa” is the only force that could motivate a Jewish schlemiel like Bloom to take a risk. Sexual desire for the Aryan female inspires Bloom to commit to Bialystock’s plan. In teaming up together, Bialystock and Bloom are a rare manifestation of the Jewish-Jewish coupling narrative. Yet, as with Hecky (Zero Mostel) and Hal Prince (Woody Allen) in The Front (1976), male Jewish friendship is mitigated by desire for the Shiksa. It is an interesting transnational journey for the “Leopold Bloom” character to go from James Joyce to Mel Brooks. For Joyce, the modernist antihero of the early 20 th Century was the European Jewish cosmopolitan. For Brooks, Bloom is now not only the Jewish schlemiel as (un)hero, but at the vanguard of the comedic-neurotic and highly libidinal second wave. Bialystock spends his time sexually seducing old ladies to convince them to invest in his musicals. Bloom’s uncontrollable lust for Ulla causes him to shake with desire. Jewish visibility in the late 1960s brought with it a comic reevaluation of the notions of Jews as sexual perverts. Bialystock’s overweight Jewish schlemiel seducing old ladies for their money subverts the cliché of Jewish greediness and perversion. Bloom, his younger and far more innocent partner, is the awkward and repressed Jewish schlemiel as comic representation of counterculture sexual awakening. 251 Brooks’s casting of Gene Wilder in the role of Bloom functioned similarly to Mike Nichols’s casting of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967). Both are incongruous anti-heroes who take risks due to their long repressed sexual libido finally emerging. Wilder-as-Bloom, just like Hoffman-as-Benjamin, is a coward and a schlemiel, an incongruous, feminized Jewish anti-hero replacing the traditional masculine archetype. Brooks’s response to early 20th century eugenics was to introduce a post- Holocaust modernist inversion; trauma turned comedy. Like The 2000 Year Old Man, The Producers locates its central comic presence out of how Christians and Jews have very different perspectives on historical events. Bialystock and Bloom make the fatal mistake of assuming non-Jewish audiences would be as horrified over a musical about the Holocaust as they were. Just as in The 2000 Year Old Man, Brooks challenges Christian history from the Jewish perspective. In History of the World – Part 1 (1981), Brooks, in costume as King Louis XVI, Torquemada, or as Comicus (Nero’s personal Jewish Catskills comedian), operates as historical incongruity simply through Brooks’s appearance in historical events he should not be found in. The effeminate Dom Deluise as Nero and African-American Gregory Hines as palace guard Josephus in History of the World – Part 1, African-American Cleavon Little, the Jewish Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn all play to Brooks’s ethnic scrambling for comedic effect. As each performer makes their entrance in the film in historical costume, their ethnic presence alone is enough to signify historical parody. Brooks is satirizing the notion that women, Jews, and blacks were not meant to be depicted as the heroes of history. Brooks’s genre parody, especially the blustery scope of 252 the historical epics of the 1950s such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben Hur (1959), relies on the ethnic body to signify parodic inversion. Brooks’s farces can be read as historiographical projects. They use ethnic and gendered bodies to critique historical absence in the Benjaminian sense. Benjamin observed that empathy with “the victor invariably benefits the rulers [since]… all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered them.” 453 To subvert the ruling class, one must inspire empathy not with the victors, but with the victims. Brooks produced empathy with the historical victim through a bottom-up narrative of historical destabilization. Brooks did this by focusing not on the famous white men of history, but through sketches about servants, waiters, and victims. By casting blacks, Jews, gays, and women as heroes, instead of in their traditional roles as sidekicks, foils, fools, and villains, Brooks’s parodies of history spoke to the liberal climate of the 1970s. If within the biblical epic genre of the 1950s, Cecil B. DeMille could cast Moses as the clearly non-Jewish Charlton Heston, then within genre parody, Torquemada must invert to produce the Jewish Mel Brooks. Brooks’s films supported Foucault’s argument for the expansion of Marxian class dialectics into the post-colonial discourses of race and ethnicity. 454 Brooks used parody to denature the assumed hierarchies of the past, and thus satirize the anxieties of the present, in much the same way Linden, Foucault and Derrida were challenging history in the academy. The Jewish body signified historical disruption. But only in a relational dialectic with the normative Christian power structure it was 453 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, (London: Fontana, 1992), 263. 454 Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 79-80. 253 usurping. Brooks’s vaudevillian style did not tease out the erotic underpinnings of the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative, focusing more on sketch comedy and broad satire. It would fall to the other famous Jewish comedy auteur of the period, Woody Allen, to locate the sexual component of historical destabilization. ERNO’S NOSE Mel Brooks had located the “Jew” as the body of historical counter-narrative in the 1960s. Woody Allen made the same conceptual argument as Brooks, locating the “Jew” as a body of disruption. Allen featured his Jewish body similarly to Mel Brooks. Allen’s persona was spasmodic, cowardly, neurotic, and in a state of perpetual panic. Yet while Brooks used a vaudevillian sketch-comedy ethnic troupe to satirize the Christian- centric historical narrative, Allen satirized the erotic hierarchies of Christian beauty. Instead of engaging the historical parody, Allen focused first on the sex farce, and eventually on the romantic comedy. Allen’s critique of history was not one of historical events, but of the erotic body itself. By performing an alternative masculinity, Allen emphasized the erotic shift taking place in the 1960s away from the idealized Christian body and towards the comedic Jewish brain. In each of Allen’s scripted and directed films of the 1965-1977 period, as well as acting-only roles in films such as Casino Royale (1967) and The Front (1976), Allen’s characters subverted expectations of the normative masculine Hollywood “hero.” 455 Allen did this by invoking the comic discrepancy between his own distinct Jewish body, 455 The one-sheet poster promoting The Front featured a hand-drawn arrow pointing at Woody Allen, with hand-written text reading “America’s most unlikely hero.” Allen’s incongruous and unlikely presence as a movie star was drawn-in even on the film’s poster art. 254 and the imagined, idealized, Aryan ideal that he had usurped. Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man character was funny by being the not-Jesus. Dustin Hoffman has performed Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967) as an inversion of normative masculinity, as not-Redford. As with Hoffman and Portnoy, Woody Allen was the sexual protagonist as the not-Aryan. Allen would follow this template for much of his career, mining comedy as much by what he was not as by what he was. Allen’s first produced screenplay and film role, predating The Graduate by two years, established Allen’s awareness of the comic potential for satirizing the differences between Teutonic and Jewish bodies. Along with this challenge to normative beauty, censorship was also undergoing a major transformation of the mid 1960s. As sexual explicitness was emerging in the wake of the breakdown of the Production Code, the Jewish body signified the new carnality simply by deviating from normative convention. As Victor, the bumbling but horny schlemiel in the Allen scripted What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), Allen’s first screen role presented an archetypal contrast between the 1950s-era idealized masculine movie-star ideal, and Allen’s own emerging visibility as a neurotic and libidinal Jewish Other. Michael, the nominal protagonist of What’s New, Pussycat? was played by Peter O’Toole in a role originally written for Warren Beatty. Michael is meant to represent the handsome, passive, confident, and idealized male lothario beauty of the 1950s Hugh Hefner variety. As the idealized male, Michael is inundated by sexually willing women without making any real effort to woo them. Yet Michael is being treated for “sex addiction” by the true comic star of the film, his neurotic crypto- Jewish Freudian therapist, Dr. Fassbender (Peter Sellers). It is Dr. Fassbender who 255 reveals he is the real sex addict of the film, living vicariously through Michael’s many conquests. 456 In O’Toole, the movie places the blonde haired, blue eyed Hollywood protagonist at the center of the film. But it is the performances of both Woody Allen and Peter Sellers, in supporting roles as sexually frustrated but highly libidinal Jewish neurotics, that drives the real source of the sex farce comedy. 457 Allen’s supporting role as “Jimmy Bond,” the cowardly and villainous nephew of James Bond in Casino Royale (1967) cemented Allen as the Jewish un-hero poking fun at hyper-masculine clichés. Allen’s uncredited appearance in the Bond parody played up Allen’s cowardice, neurosis and pathological sexual compulsions. Allen’s persona was now firmly established as a self-aware satire of what Daniel Boyarin describes as the early 20th century understanding of Jewish men as queered, bookwormish, and fundamentally flawed “sissies.” 458 Two years later, Allen directed and starred as a hapless gangster in the episodic farce, Take the Money and Run (1969). Allen’s performance as Virgil Starkwell, an incompetent bank robbing schlemiel again satirized genre expectations of masculinity. Virgil is a nebbishy anti-Cagney, unable to coherently write a stick-up note let alone brandish a gun that isn’t carved out of soap. The prison 456 A few years later, along with Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967) and Elliott Gould in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Peter Sellers’s role as Harold Fine in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) was at the vanguard of the emerging iconography of the erotic-neurotic Jewish schlemiel. 457 Allen makes the competition between Aryan and Jewish masculinities even more clear in a sequence when his character, Victor, attempting to seduce Carol at a library, is confronted by a hulking German brute who steals Carol’s book. Carol tells Victor he must defend her honor, stating “Victor, if you have any hopes of winning me, now is the moment to prove it,” Allen’s cowardice is turned into action driven by uncontrollable carnal desire. Victor snatches the book away from the German, before engaging in a slapstick battle in which his ineffective blows barely budge the large German. Victor is ultimately victorious when he runs away, book in hand. 458 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1997), xviii-xix. 256 scenes, long a standard of the gangster genre, invert the machismo of the gangster by presenting Allen as a hapless coward, easily bullied and perpetually terrified. By the time of the film adaptation of Allen’s Broadway play, Play it Again, Sam (1972), Allen had fully inverted the Christian-Jewish masculine hierarchy he’d first satirized in What’s New, Pussycat? Allen’s character of Alan Felix is a verbose, neurotic, and sexually frustrated San Francisco movie critic. Felix, the movie-obsessed schlemiel, was the new protagonist of cinema; the neurotic schlemiel as a movie-obsessed libidinal youth culture antihero. Alan is a sexual hysteric. He is recently divorced, terrified of women, and in the process of trying to betray his best friend, Dick (Tony Roberts), by seducing his best friend’s wife, Linda (Diane Keaton). Alan lacks any of the tropes of masculinity associated with the male movie protagonists he idolizes in the movie posters on his wall. To place Alan’s masculine deficiencies into even more stark relief, Alan invokes the ghost-like presence of cinema’s idealized masculine movie star, Humphrey Bogart (Jerry Lacy). Bogart, a product of Alan’s movie-obsessed imagination, is not there to guide Alan on a great adventure, such as the one in Casablanca (1942). Bogart is only there to help Alan in the act of sexual seduction. As with Joyce’s Ulysses, Alan’s grand adventure occurs entirely within his psyche. Alan cannot seduce Linda unless he drops his neurotic Jewish personality and adopts a non-Jewish identity grounded in classic Hollywood masculine archetype. 459 Woody Allen’s deft satire of the shift in 459 Interestingly, the line “Play it again, Sam” is never actually spoken in Casablanca (1942), suggesting an intentional incongruity. Woody Allen makes the point that slippages of translation occur as a great work of art is reimagined by a subsequent artist. 257 masculinities plays up the Jewish schlemiel as the un-Bogart. The film also locates Allen’s long obsession with the Shiksa. In 1973’s Sleeper, Allen brings these ideas out even more clearly. Allen’s function of the incongruous, un-heroic Jewish presence is once again presented as a satire of Hollywood understandings of an idealized Christian masculinity. Sleeper also once again locates the Shiksa as the ultimate validating force for Allen’s unheroic schlemiel turned hero. Sleeper invokes the political, historical, and sexualized binaries that motivated much of early 20 th eugenics and race-based theories. Allen satirizes this historical trauma through the recurring motif, and political implications, of one of the central tropes of anti-Semitism; the contested landscape of the Jewish nose. Produced six years after Nichols’s breakthrough with The Graduate (1967) and four years after Philip Roth had introduced Portnoy, Sleeper places the Jewish neurotic un-hero as the central threat to a dystopian fascist future world. On its surface, Sleeper is a parody of the nightmare landscapes seen in literature in George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and, in cinema, George Lucas’s THX1138 (1971). Like Benjamin Braddock and Portnoy before him, Allen’s Miles Monroe, a nebbish from 1970s Greenwich Village, embodied the comic un-hero archetype of the early 1970s. Miles suffers from the usual masculine deficiencies; profound sexual panic, uncontrollable fear, hyper-verbosity, fainting spells, and relentless sarcasm. Yet the centrality of Jewish identity within the film’s parody of fascism is not made textually overt. Instead, Sleeper’s comic set pieces echo the classic silent-era Hollywood tradition of physical slapstick. Sight gags and physical puns abound, from giant chickens and 258 inflatable water suits to a chase scene that culminates with the slipping on a banana peel gag taken to a ludicrous extreme. This comedy reads as nostalgic Borscht Belt shtick by way of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops. However, as historian Foster Hirsch notes, Allen’s use of high-speed silent era physical comedy also plays a thematic role. Hirsch argues that these set pieces are so clearly at odds with Woody Allen’s persona as a highly verbal comedian, they become a thematic displacement echoing Miles’s own out-of-place role as an “interloper.” 460 Hirsch’s distinction between Allen’s verbal comedy tradition and the slapstick of Sleeper is important. But there is an additional thematic function for Allen’s use of physical comedy that builds off Hirsch’s notion of the interloper incongruity. This is located in Allen’s highly self-aware use of his own body not just as a disruptive presence, but as a Jewish body. As argued in chapter four, Orwell’s “Emanuel Goldstein” had demonstrated the postwar understanding of the Jewish body as the central signifier of modernity. Goldstein represented Jewish cosmopolitanism as intellectualism, individuality, and a resistance to the fascist impulse. Allen’s comic take on Emanuel Goldstein places the nebbishy and cowardly Allen, and not the intellectual Goldstein, as the Jewish body representing a threat to the nation-state. Allen is a Jewish body, and thus a threat, whether he exhibits agency or not. This is made clear through Sleeper’s recurring comic motif: the competing physiognomies of the Christian and the Jewish nose. The nose motif is made clear right from Sleeper’s opening sequence. Scientists in a futuristic lab unwrap the frozen body of Woody Allen from a tin foil “T.V. Dinner”-esque container. 460 Foster Hirsch, Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: The Films of Woody Allen (Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2001), 74. 259 The first part of Allen’s body is revealed to be Allen’s nose. From there, Allen’s full face is revealed, the embodiment of the un-heroic schlemiel complete with wild hair, eyeglasses and silly smile. Allen’s body is comic on two levels. As a genre parody, Allen is the “hero” of a film in which Miles Monroe is completely ill equipped to be heroic. But as a political critique of future-shock fascism, Allen’s body is also a distinctly Jewish body. Miles, a neurotic New York based, clarinet-playing, health-food store owning Jew, is about as unthreatening and cowardly a nebbish as any culture could produce. Yet, transported to an imagined fascist future-world, Miles’s Jewish nose suddenly represents a grave threat to the cohesion of the fascist state. Noses were the central trope of biological-based early 20th century anti-Semitism. Eugenics theory claimed that Jews could be identified biologically by measuring the nose. Jay Geller summarizes how numerous scholars have examined the important physiognomic role that the “Jewish nose” played in early 20th century pseudo-science. 461 Sander Gilman describes how anxieties of Jewish noses played a central role in the development of rhinoplasty in Weimar-era Germany. 462 The ability to surgically alter noses brought with it new fears of Jews “passing” as Germans. During Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s, this new surgical ability to “pass” as Aryan provoked German anxiety about not looking “German enough,” or possibly being mistaken for a Jew. 463 Medical science had destabilized the body. Body metaphors of Jewishness as medical 461 Jay Geller,“(G)nos(e)ology: The Cultural Construction of the Other,” People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective, ed. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 250-252. 462 Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body, (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 184-187. 463 Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999), 176. 260 contagion occurred throughout Hitler’s writings on Jewish difference in Mein Kampf. Hitler likened the Aryan nation to a singular “body,” and Jewish presence in that body as maggots putrefying its purity. 464 The Jewish religion and Jewish philosophy were no longer the primary threats to the cohesiveness of the fascist state. Jewish threat was now located in the form of the stereotypical Jewish body, and particularly, the Jewish nose. Allen’s comic interplay between Christian and Jewish noses riffs on this historical tension. Miles’s awareness of his Jewish body is the subtext of much of his comedy, especially his seduction of Luna (Diane Keaton). In Miles’s first attempt to seduce Luna, Miles brags that his girlfriend back in Greenwich Village has both blonde hair and “a great upturned nose, you know it was really dynamite.” Miles’s erotic fetish for the upturned nose of his idealized Christian female makes clear that Miles sees erotic success with the Shiksa as an impressive sexual accomplishment for the Jewish male. Contested noses also motivate much of the comedy of the third act. After posing as scientists, Miles and Luna discover the truth of the “Aries Project.” A terrorist attack has destroyed the Leader’s entire body, leaving only the Leader’s nose intact. The “Aries Project” hopes to clone a new body for the Leader from his nose without letting the masses discover what has happened. The irony of Sleeper is now complete. Allen, the Jewish nose, enters the film as the unlikely body that sparks the resistance movement. The Leader has now been reduced to the very state of pure nose that lies as the central mark of alterity used in the Nazi era period of race-based biologisms. Just as Miles Monroe’s nose was revealed as 464 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999). 261 the initial disruption point for the fascist state, The Leader’s nose must be destroyed to conclude the revolution. After Miles and Luna steal the Leader’s nose, Sleeper takes the notion of Jewish- Christian nose competition to its absurdist conclusion. 465 During the escape, Miles hides the Leader’s nose inside his own surgical mask, hoping to disguise the nose as his own. The capturing of the nose is both a literal plot point as well as a metaphorical desire for Miles to shed his unalterably Jewish body. Allen’s fantasies of his Greenwich Village girlfriend’s tiny “upturned nose” have returned, not as erotic liberation, but as a dystopian nightmare cloning experiment. The destruction of the Leader’s nose is concluded when Miles and Luna destroy the nose by throwing it under a construction vehicle, where it is flattened into a large, cartoonish shape. Sleeper’s body politics are clear: the Jewish body is both a threat to the fascist Nation-State as well as a satire of Hollywood genre convention. But if Sleeper’s warring noses represent the physiognomic battle between Jewish and Aryan bodies, the progressive solution is presented in the form of Allen’s love interest, Luna. As performed by Diane Keaton, Luna is the embodiment of a privileged Christian-white-normative class. Luna is an aspiring, but not very bright, poet. She is carefree, un-neurotic, with no sexual inhibitions. 466 Luna embodies the corporeal 465 After entering the cloning room, when Miles and Luna realize they have an audience of observing medical students. Miles begins performing Catskills-era Jewish Borscht Belt one liners, much to Luna’s chagrin. Miles signifies the tradition of Jewish comedy with lines such as, “We’re here to see the nose! We heard it was running!” and “Better lay off Armenian women,” before finally concluding, “I think what we’ve got, what we’re basically dealing with, is a nose.” Miles’s neurotic cowardice turns into comedy about a nose at the moment he becomes the unlikely Jewish hero. 466 Luna’s poem, recited while Miles is in disguise as her robot servant, accidentally reverses the notion of a metamorphosis, telling the sad story of a butterfly that becomes a caterpillar. The mistake not only 262 inversion of Miles in every sense; gender, class, culture, ethnic and sexual. Luna is also thematically “blind,” unable, and at first unwilling, to see the fascism at work in her society. This blindness to societal trauma is made comically clear when, at Luna’s party, one of her guests enters garbed in a giant Swastika. Luna’s lack of ability to recognize a central signifier of historical fascism plays up her Christian-normative blindness. This “blindness” is originally established in her comic inability to see Miles, comically hidden in disguise as Luna’s servant robot, despite the giveaway signature Woody Allen glasses remaining in place. Luna is oblivious to Allen’s comic fumbling as he attempts, and fails, to perform robotic tasks. Eventually, Luna senses something is “off” about her robot, and takes Miles to a factory where she asks the technicians to replace Miles’s head with something “more aesthetically pleasing.” This rejection of robot-Miles’s head plays as a comic body rejection. Miles has somehow bothered Luna as aesthetically displeasing, failing even to pass as a robot. Miles has the capability to unnerve Luna simply through his physiognomy. This link between Jewishness and the deviant body is made even more explicit when Miles is captured by The Leader’s military troopers. Sleeper’s world is futuristic, but it is also clearly Christian. The Leader, a Christ-like Messiah figure, requires unyielding devotion and submission. After his capture, Miles is not killed. Miles is instead hooked up to a machine and brainwashed, with the ultimate goal being to turn Miles into a happy, relaxed member of the state. Miles is given a home, a job, a robot dog, and all the comforts of suburban middle class life. This Christian version of Miles is establishes that Luna is almost completely ignorant of nature, but also invokes Kafka’s perverse corporeal devolution of Gregor Samsa’s crypto-Jewish body in Metamorphosis. 263 presented as similar to our introduction to Luna. Miles has been transformed into a “sleeper,” an unquestioning, calm, relaxed, suburban drone. Miles even attends a robotic Catholic confessional, where he confesses his sins calmly and rationally in a very un- Woody-Allen voice. The sins are acknowledged through a flashing computer sign on the confessional that reads, “Absolved,” and Miles is rewarded for confessing with a gimmicky kewpie doll prize. Christian rituals are presented as an anesthetic for the masses. Miles’s initial threat to the nation-state was that of being both an incongruous Jewish body and a Jewish thinker (neurotic, questioning, sexual). Once Miles is turned into a Christian, he no longer holds any of the attributes of Jewish alterity (neuroticism, hysteria, etc.), and thus has no power to threaten the nation-state. Luna, however, has been “awakened” just as Miles is put to metaphorical sleep. Luna’s journey from somnambulant tool of the nation-state to free thinker presents Luna’s awakening as a journey that is read as both political and sexual. Erno (John Beck), a typical square jawed, muscular “hero,” is introduced fairly late in the film as the hyper-masculine leader of the resistance. Erno is also presented as competition for Miles. Erno courts Luna with none of the hesitancy and neurosis that defined Miles’s awkward seduction attempts. The love triangle between Miles, Erno and Luna, is presented as a contest of competing masculinities between the classic Aryan hero and the neurotic Jewish un-hero that echoes What’s New, Pussycat?. This satire of Christian-Jewish masculine hierarchy is made explicit when Luna and Erno attempt to reverse Miles’s brainwashing. To bring back Miles’s original personality, Erno and Luna must remind Miles of his childhood traumas. This culminates 264 in a scene when Erno and Luna impersonate Allen’s neurotic Jewish parents, complete with comically butchered attempts at Yiddishisms (“stop whining and eat your Shiksa!,” “Soon the Passover holidays will be here… you’ll be wanting to wear your matzos”). Miles’s core Jewishness is foregrounded through the performance of gentiles masquerading in Jew-face. To awaken, to see the truth of society, Miles must return to being Jewish. Miles must reacquire the neurotic traits and spasmodic Jewish body the nation-state had taken away as part of his integration process into normative society. Miles’s second “awakening” echoes his first, as the Jewish “nose” is again revealed, only this time metaphorically and verbally through the performance of non-Jews. The love triangle tension between Erno, Miles and Luna focuses the comedy during the film’s third act. 467 Posing as cloning scientists, Miles and Luna break into the laboratory to stop the Aries Project. Yet Miles and Luna spend this time arguing about whether Luna is in love with Erno or Miles. Miles grows angry, mocking Erno as “Mr. White-Teeth” and “The rebel chieftain with the wall to wall muscles on his chest.” When Luna asks Miles if he’s jealous, Miles responds, “With a body like mine, you don’t have to be jealous.” Allen’s imagined construction of Erno’s hyper-confident Aryan masculinity is comically contrasted with Miles’s incongruous and cowardly Jewish reality. The location of the contested body has shifted from the political realm into the sexual. 467 Marjorie Garber describes how love triangles allow for an intersubjective interplay between normative and deviant perspectives. Garber, Marjorie, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, Touchstone: New York, 1995. Pp. 423 265 Miles’s final plea to Luna to awaken to the cyclical and destructive nature of politics completes the contested nose metaphor not as political action, but as sexual selection. Miles tries to convince Luna to accept the unending cycle of physiognomic anti-Semitism with the following quip: “Don’t you realize? In six months, we’ll be stealing Erno’s nose!” To Miles, all Aryan noses pose the same threat. But Miles is reassured when Luna declares her love for him and kisses him. The final coupling of Miles and Luna affirms a Christian-Jewish erotic union as the progressive antidote to physiognomic isolation. The nose motif concludes in the final line of the film, Allen’s Old Testament inspired joke, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a nose for a nose.” The solution is clear. Luna chooses Miles, and not Erno. This act of sexual awakening by Luna, the choosing of the Jewish nose over the Christian nose, represents the true destruction of the fascist state. THE EROTIC-NEUROTIC Sleeper demonstrated Woody Allen’s successful shift in masculinity from the Christian body to the Jewish brain. This celebration of the Jewish schlemiel as the new archetype of masculinity was validated through the successful acquisition of the white, Christian female. In addition to Mel Brooks’s The Producers and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate, Patricia Erens argues that Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing (1967) and the Paul Mazursky scripted I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) were the first films to introduce “neurotic sons” as the new archetype embodying youth-culture resistance. 468 Other films, such as Bye Bye Braverman (1969), Where’s Poppa? (1970), and The Heartbreak Kid 468 Erens, Patricia, The Jew in American Cinema, Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1984. Pp. 258- 263 266 (1972), presented the neurotic Jewish schlemiel as both a destabilization of masculinity as well as a critique of genre traditions. The Jewish libido, neurotic and comic, became the perfect vessel to express the confusions, contradictions, and destabilizations in sexuality brought about by the counterculture movement in the “free love” era. As Woody Allen demonstrated in films such as Sleeper and Love and Death (1975), the function of the erotic-neurotic Jewish schlemiel was a counterpoint, and thus a satire, of normative masculine tropes of the 1950s and 1960s. The impact of Israel and the generational resistance to the McCarthy years had made Jewish diaspora erotic in the mid 1960s, as Chapters Three and Four argued. In the post-Graduate era, a new wave of libidinal erotic-neurotic Jewish movie stars became the central signifier of the new sexual exploration of the emerging youth culture. Woody Allen, along with Dustin Hoffman, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, Gene Wilder, and Elliott Gould, positioned youth culture resistance as a generational response to Christonormative tropes of the 1960s. However, the Jewish schlemiel could also be contained. This was done by repressive parents (the castrating Jewish mother), his own comic ineptitude, or most often, through the schlemiel’s seemingly greatest triumph, the successful sexual acquisition of the Shiksa. Michael DeAngelis notes how two films in 1972 showed competing frameworks of masculinity. In the hyper-masculine adventure film Deliverance, DeAngelis argues that the infamous rape scene (“squeal like a pig!”) is so sexually traumatic for the heroes (Ned Beatty, Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds), that it must be repressed. Deliverance is a film in which masculinity is equated with silence. These characters must never speak of 267 the traumas they experience on the river. For DeAngelis, the queering that the rape represents leads to both the murder of the rapist and the submersion of the body into the river. In the last shot of the film, when the body rises out of the river, DeAngelis argues that this thematizes how repressed memories of queered sexual trauma can never be fully contained. 469 In contrast, DeAngelis cites the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, also released in 1972. Portnoy’s desire to constantly verbalize his own neurotic sexual compunctions leads to what DeAngelis terms an equally problematic configuration of sexuality rooted in “excessive and expressive disclosure.” 470 Both films present masculinity in crisis. Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight’s physical and non-verbal masculinity is a stark contrast to Jewish actor Richard Benjamin’s highly libidinal neurotic. These competing versions of masculinity presented a contested sphere by which issues of gender and sexuality would play out throughout the 1970s. In 1970, it was Elliott Gould who most famously embodied this transformation in understandings of masculinity and stardom. Time Magazine famously featured Gould on the cover with the headline, “Star for an Uptight Age.” 471 Gould had become an overnight sensation with movies such as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), M*A*S*H (1970) and Getting Straight (1970). The author of the Time article was Jules Feiffer, the Jewish playwright, cartoonist, and screenwriter of the Gould starring film, Little Murders (1970). Feiffer wrote, "(t)here's been a shift in focus of movie heroes and movie stories… out of this shift came the possibility of careers for the likes of Gould, Alan Arkin and 469 Michael DeAngelis, “1972: Movies and Confession” in American Cinema of the 1970s: Themes and Variations, ed. Lester Friedman (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 87-89. 470 Ibid., 89. 471 Time Magazine, “Elliott Gould: Star For an Uptight Age,” Cover Story, (Sept 7, 1970): 1-4. 268 Dustin Hoffman. What really happened is that Hollywood is trying to update its mythology, and these are the stars of the new mythology." 472 Yet Feiffer does not make any mention of Gould’s Jewishness. Instead, Feiffer describes Gould only as an “ethnic” type. However, Feiffer’s article makes a coded call for Gould’s Jewish specificity by noting that “(t)here has not been a film star of such distinctly urban identity since the days of John Garfield.” 473 Feiffer’s invocation of John Garfield, the most overtly famous Jewish movie star of the post-war era, whose career destruction at the hands of HUAC led to a nearly twenty-year absence of Jews playing Jews on screen, is unmistakable. Feiffer’s reference to the most famous post-WW2 sexualized Jewish movie star is not incidental to understanding Gould’s highly sexualized appeal. Gould was an historical response to Garfield’s absence. Beginning with his first significant role in 1968’s The Night They Raided Minsky’s, a film set in 1925 about a Jewish-owned Burlesque theater, Gould’s persona was constructed as both overtly neurotic and overtly Jewish. Yet Gould, like Hoffman, Streisand and Allen before him, was an eroticized schlemiel. In Gould’s first starring role in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Gould played Bob, a nebbishy Jewish schlemiel married to a nice Jewish wife, Carol (Dyan Cannon). Actress Dyan Cannon, the child of a Jewish mother and Baptist father, played Carol as a sexually neurotic, but sexy, female version of the Jewish schlemiel template. The film’s other couple, the WASPy Ted (Robert Culp) and Alice (Natalie Wood), ask Bob and Carol to join them in a partner-swapping experiment. Together, both Jewish and WASP couples make an 472 Ibid. 473 Ibid. 269 awkward, and ultimately doomed, attempt to stay current with the free-love hippie generation. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice located Christian-Jewish couplings at the heart of the counterculture destabilization of the nuclear family. Central to its “free love” satire was the comedy inherent in the premise. The film produced the coupling narrative not as between two characters, but four. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, while actually quite demure in its depictions of sex, was the first Hollywood film to celebrate the hippie “free love” movement. The film’s opening sequence reveals Bob and Carol attending a weekend EST-like retreat in which they’re forced to confess and be honest with each other about what they really want. This honesty begins to express itself sexually, as Bob and Carol experiment with an open marriage. As Bob attempts to dress the “hippie,” they eventually petition Ted and Alice to join them in bed. The famous bedroom scene in which an increasingly sexually frustrated and neurotic Ted tries to get Alice to perform is presented in stark contrast with Bob and Carol’s polite, formal ways. The film concludes in Las Vegas, where the two couples are planning to see a performance by Tony Bennett. The couples dress formally, in suits and dresses, and drink martinis. The 1950s Rat Pack associations and the Las Vegas association suggest their dawning awareness that the libertine framework of the 1950s is now stodgy and outdated. As the film’s confused protagonists eventually realize, the new frontier for youth culture is no longer in social settings, but in bed. The contrast between Robert Culp and Elliott Gould in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice presented a prominent example of the shift in masculinity taking place with the destabilization of the counterculture. In a 2010 in memoriam article after Robert Culp 270 died, The New York Times Magazine described Culp’s career peak as a charming male heartthrob as remarkably short lived. The Times eulogy traced this period as beginning in 1965 with TV’s I Spy (1965-1968), opposite Bill Cosby, and ending with Culp’s awkward, stilted performance as a swinger opposite the charming next-generation sexuality of Elliott Gould. The Times described the contrast between Culp and Gould as emblematic of “the next step in male expression” of the 1960s. 474 Culp began his fame paired with the African-American Cosby, and ended it opposite the nebbishy Gould. For both the African-American and the Jew, Culp was the WASP normative alternate. The transference of masculinity from Culp to Gould in 1969 demonstrated how quickly the culture had shifted between 1965 and 1969. The Times analogized Culp’s short career as that of a “relief pitcher.” Culp’s movie star career was a brief nostalgic appearance that helped transition American culture from the teen-idol 1950s-era male beauty of actors such as Troy Donahue and Rock Hudson to the land of Elliott Gould and his “emotionally messy progeny.” 475 Interestingly, the 2010 article, just like Time Magazine’s Gould profile exactly forty years earlier, makes no mention of Gould’s ethnicity. Instead, the article simply refers to the shift in archetype as from 1950s masculine matinee idols to 1970s queered and feminized neurotics. Neither Time Magazine in 1970, nor The New York Times in 2010, would make the specific ethnic argument that Paul Mazursky makes in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. The journey from 1950s repression to 1970s liberation represented a 474 Anthony Giardina, “Robert Culp: The Self Conscious Hunk” The New York Times Magazine, (26 December 2010): 44. 475 Ibid., 44. 271 transformation in masculinity from Christonormative to Jewish alterity. If the Peck/Garfield dialectic of 1947 had determined that Jews could (and should) be played by non-Jews, then Elliott Gould’s “star for an uptight age” was the counterculture response. Jewish universality, the days of Charlton Heston as Moses, were no more. Jewish performers, playing Jewish characters, were a form of cinematic truth claim. While Mike Nichols’s The Graduate had first expressed this generational shift in masculinity in 1967, Paul Mazursky was the first Hollywood filmmaker to explicitly link Jewish-Christian coupling narratives to the counterculture’s “free love” movement. In both I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968) and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Mazursky wrote scripts that linked the anxiety-provoking sexual freedoms of the counterculture movement with the neurosis of Jewish protagonists attracted to Shiksa beauties. 476 I Love You, Alice B. Toklas’s protagonist is a nerdy Jewish accountant, Harold Fine (Peter Sellers) who is trapped in a loveless engagement to the clichéd, sexless, and metaphorically castrating Jewish female, Joyce (Joyce Van Patten). Joyce is connected to Harold’s equally clichéd and neurotic Jewish mother, Mrs. Fine (Jo Van Fleet). Harold, like Dustin Hoffman the year before, is caught in a triangle between mother and fiancée. But before the nebbishy Harold can go through with the wedding, he falls in lust with the free spirited, innocent, and uncomplicated “Shiksa” hippie beauty, Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young). 476 Mazursky was fired at the last minute from directing I Love You, Alice B. Toklas by the star, Peter Sellers, who was convinced Mazursky was interested in his new wife, Britt Eckland. Mazursky only served as screenwriter on the project. The film was instead directed by Hy Averback. However for the purposes of this analysis, we will treat the film as part of Mazursky’s larger body of work. 272 Harold’s liberation from the entrapment of the expectations of the emotionally castrating Jewish mother-wife follows the same pattern as The Graduate. Harold acts out sexually to resist the societal expectations placed on him. Yet Harold operates in a strange sort of reverse symmetry to Benjamin Braddock. Rather than rescuing the Shiksa from a Christian wedding, Harold rejects his own Jewish wedding by running out. This occurs not once in the film, but twice. Harold simply cannot go through with a Jewish marriage to a Jewish bride. His desire is to remain single to experiment with marijuana brownies and free love. The idealized pixie beauty of Leigh Taylor-Young, more a cipher than an actual character, offers a way out from the repressive castration anxieties conflated by the Jewish mother/fiancé depictions. 477 While glossing over the sexual aspects of the counter culture and hippie movement, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas implies that orgies, free love, drug use, and sexual promiscuity were central to the liberation of Jewish repression. Harold’s sexual liberation, like Benjamin, is fraught with anxiety, confusion, and marked by a highly libidinal desire. Mazursky’s humorous reference to the titular Alice B. Toklas invoke the gay Jewish coupling of Toklas and Gertrude Stein (also Jewish) who were at the center of the avant-garde of 1920s Left Bank France. Mazursky’s invocation of the most famous gay Jewish couple at the heart of European modernity suggests a complex through-line between European modernism, cosmopolitanism, the avant-garde of the 1920s and its 477 Sellers’s comic masks, from Clare Quilty in Lolita (1962) to Dr. Fassbinder in What’s New, Pussycat? (1965) , can arguably be read in the Jewish vaudevillian tradition. But Harold Fine represented the first time in which the British chameleon Sellers played an explicitly Jewish character. Sellers’s Jewish background, specifically his doting and career obsessed Jewish mother and Sellers’s attachment to her, was a staple of his star persona in much popular press of the time. Sellers’s father was not Jewish, but Sellers stated in numerous interviews that he considered himself Jewish growing up and often suffered anti- Semitic taunts at school in England. 273 recall in the 1960s. Like Mel Brooks humorously invoking the name of Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in The Producers, Mazursky recalls the role of Jewish liberation in the avant- garde. THE “SHIKSA” In observing this erotic function of Jews of the late 1960s David Biale notes that neurotic Jewish movie stars such as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, and Elliott Gould presented a new archetype, the “little man with the big libido.” 478 The Jewish ethnic problematic – are Jews white or not-white? -- is one that Richard Dyer argues plays out through sexuality. 479 Following Dyer, the process of whitening the Jew is a process of removing that sexuality. Any sexual danger posed by the libidinal Jew was mitigated by the Jew’s desire for the Shiksa. In the 1950s, most famously utilized by Alfred Hitchcock, Shiksa beauty was of the Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, and Kim Novak variety. These blonde beauties invariably played off highly masculine 1950s male movie stars. In cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, the demure and idealized Shiksa played a different function; a mitigation role performed as a counterpoint to destabilized notions of masculinity and gender. She served not just as the idealized object of beauty and acquisition, but as the counterweight to the disruptions, fractures, and deviancies embodied by libidinal Jewish identity. Upon successfully acquiring the Shiksa, Jewish deviation and neurosis was neutralized, via narrative resolution, through a sexual absorption into the normative 478 Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the State and Screen, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 93. 479 Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) 274 hierarchy. From a eugenics standpoint, the Shiksa offered a dominant, normative set of genes that would eventually negate, or at least dilute, any corrupting or queered flaws in the Jewish partner she selects. Embodied by starlets of the time such as Cybill Shepherd, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergin, and Faye Dunaway, the Shiksa was the sought-after validation of Americanism itself. She was the neutralizing antidote to neurotic Jewish self-hatred, the prize awaiting Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Grodin, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Gene Wilder, and Elliott Gould. Woody Allen’s use of migration as metaphor for loss of authenticity in Annie Hall is as complex a metaphor for Jewish assimilation as Fiddler on the Roof (1971). Paul Simon and Tony Roberts move to Los Angeles and find great Hollywood success in addition to acquiring numerous non-Jewish sexual partners. Woody Allen remains in New York and is alone, thematically “killed” for remaining in the Shtetl and refusing to emigrate. Even in the nihilistic and violent Straw Dogs (1971), the notion of alternative masculinity located in the Jewish male’s protection of his Christian wife. Isolated in a rural British countryside, nerdy mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) must learning to put down his books and fight off brutish British rapists attacking his wife Amy (Susan George). Sam Peckinpah’s film was criticized for its misogyny. When Amy is being raped, she gradually begins to enjoy it as the means by which she can get 275 back at her castrated, intellectual husband. It is only when David fights back violently that he regains his masculinity. 480 This template can also be seen in independent director John Cassavetes’s Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). Cassavetes featured the non-Jewish actor Seymour Cassel as a downwardly mobile Jewish hippie, Seymour Moskowitz, who becomes involved with a blonde beauty, Minnie Moore. Minnie was played by Cassavetes’s real-life wife, Gena Rowlands, in the emerging Shiksa mode. Positioning the Christian-Jewish coupling as transgressing both cultural and class divide, Minnie and Moskowitz echoes the upstairs/downstairs tradition seen in everything from Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1968) to television’s Bridget Loves Bernie (1972). Erens argues that Minnie and Moskowitz, like many of the Jewish-centric films of the time, is more a story of parental rejection than erotic love. Seymour Moskowitz exhibits little signs of overt Jewishness until his Jewish mother, Sheba Moskowitz (Katharine Cassavetes) arrives. 481 The castrating Jewish mother stereotype was central to films such as I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968), Where’s Poppa? (1970) and Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1975). The Shiksa then became the intersubjective triangulation counterpoint, emblematic of the Jewish male’s hope for erotic salvation in the wake of familial thematic castration. Minnie and Moskowitz was one of the few films of the 1967-1980 period to feature a non-Jewish actor in a Jewish leading role. Philip Roth’s Portnoy, Dustin Hoffman and Woody Allen had made Jewish men “hip.” The 1950s-era Gregory Peck 480 Woody Allen drives this point home in Annie Hall (1977) when Allen and his Jewish co-star, Tony Roberts attend a party in Los Angeles. The party is filled with gorgeous non-Jewish women. Paul Simon and a young Jeff Goldblum (in a cameo) also appear at the party, the joke being Los Angeles is a Jewish man’s shiksa paradise. 481 Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 308. 276 framework of a universal Jewishness (in which anyone could play Jewish) had been overturned. A reconnection of Jewish identity to Jewish roles had taken place in nearly all of the Jewish characters of the period. It’s even more striking given that Cassavetes’s frequent collaborator, Peter Falk, was exactly the type of Jewish character actor made popular at the time. The reasons for Cassavetes’s casting choice may rest in the improvisational acting philosophy he espoused. Cassel as Seymour Moskowitz is a character fully alienated from his identity as a Jew. As performed by the non-Jewish actor, Cassavetes’s film makes a very different critique of alienation and identity in the 1970s than the more mainstream films of the period. Minnie and Moskowitz can be read as an outlier when compared to Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972). May, the former comedy partner of Mike Nichols, directed her own version of this tension by adapting Neil Simon’s hit play. Instead of the castrating Jewish mother, The Heartbreak Kid played with the stereotypical castrating J.A.P. wife. Following Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, George Segal, Richard Benjamin, the young Jewish actor Charles Grodin was cast as Lenny Cantrow, the proverbial nice- Jewish-boy nebbish who, just days after marrying his Jewish wife, Lila (Jeanne Berlin, daughter of Elaine May), ends up leaving her to pursue the beautiful Kelly Corcoran, the angelic blond Shiksa (Cybill Shepherd). Kelly’s role is as the idealized blonde, Christian interloper into a fully Jewish world. Kelly is not just the disruption event that fractures the three-day-old wedding of Lenny and Lila, but takes place during their honeymoon in Miami Beach. The location here is central to understanding the breakdown of cohesive Jewish life in the 1960s. Miami Beach, the mythic Jewish landscape that inspired the 277 fantasies of Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) in Midnight Cowboy (1969) had been invaded by the idealized Nordic blonde. Miami Beach of the 1960s was the Jewish nirvana, a proto-Zionist fantasyland of cabanas, pool parties, and canasta games. It was also the land of Jewish retirement. For Lenny, a restless, young Jewish male, Miami Beach signified the prison of Jewish American isolation from marriage to death. Kelly Corcoran, the beatific blonde from Minnesota represented the way out from the bourgeois imposition. Lenny’s “Shiksa Goddess” fantasy is also presented as a destructive act, the delusional folly of neurotic self-hatred. Kelly has little actual interest in Lenny. But Lenny’s desire to escape the confines of Jewish identity manifests itself in his sexual compulsion for what she represents. This conflation between Christian-Jewish eroticism and transgression reached critical mass with Richard Dreyfus’s star-making turn in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974). Based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, Duddy’s desire to create his own Catskills-like resort in French-Canadian Montreal was a thematic alignment with histories of diaspora Jewry. Duddy’s Canadian search for a “homeland” was a metaphor for the diaspora Jewish homeland of the Catskills and the Borscht Belt. The mythical Catskills, where Jewish entertainers could hide out during the Blacklist, had become, by the 1970s, a place for Jews to find safe self-expression. The connection between land assimilation and erotic entanglement, first templated by Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint in Exodus (1960), is here expressed through Duddy’s romance with the beautiful French-Canadian hotel employee, Yvette (Micheline Lanctôt). Duddy’s restless sense of an incomplete diaspora self, just as for Paul Newman’s Ari Ben-Canaan and Charles 278 Grodin’s Heartbreak Kid, produced the idealized “Shiksa” as a phantasm – an ethereal beauty abstraction that offered normativity that the Jew was denied. Dreyfuss’s first starring role was the year before, in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). While Drefyuss’s character of Curt Henderson was never defined as Jewish, his bookwormish performance playing off the WASPy angst of his best friend, Steve Bolander (Ron Howard), lent the character a coded Jewishness that Duddy Kravitz made explicit. The running theme of Curt Henderson’s last night in Modesto is his obsession with “The Blonde” (Suzanne Somers), a beautiful girl driving around in a white Thunderbird that Curt only catches fleeting glimpses of. “The Blonde,” an idealized abstraction who never speaks and is barely seen, is Curt’s poetic muse. She is never humanized and never acquired. Instead she provides Curt the inspiration to visit Wolfman Jack, the ubiquitous D.J. and erstwhile film narrator, and ask him for a dedication. Emboldened by his newly discovered agency, Curt reverses his decision and decides to leave for college. Upon departing Modesto, Curt catches a fleeting glimpse of The Blonde in her Thunderbird from his seat on the plane. Embedded in Lucas’s pastiche of the early 1960s were the seeds of the Shiksa muse as inspiration for the Jewish intellectual. Curt Henderson is the only one to make it out of Modesto, suggesting a cosmopolitan Jewish traveler seeking “The Shiksa.” Lucas’s use of this template, so distinct to the late 1960s and early 1970s, performs the same Jewish queering of the period piece that Streisand had done in Funny Girl (1968) and The Way We Were (1972). The narrative may be located in the past, but the erotic configuration spoke to the increasingly sexually liberal late 1960s and 1970s. The Shiksa of the 1967-1980 period was both a continuation, as well as a self-reflexive 279 commentary, on the traditions of female beauty in the 1950s. Actresses in this period continued to be mostly petite nosed, blonde haired, blue eyed fantasies. 482 TEVYE’S DAUGHTERS Perhaps no film of the era crystallized the connection between historical revisionism, sexual desire as an act of generational resistance, and the centrality of Christian-Jewish couplings to embody these changes quite like Fiddler on the Roof. In 1971, the Norman Jewison directed musical became the first major Hollywood film of the postwar era to consider the role of anti-Semitism in driving American immigration of the early 20th century. The Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof had been a huge success in 1964. The play nostalgically recalled the lost New York Yiddish Theater of the 1920s as well as the romantic, tragic silent-era shtetl-based love stories of the 1910s and 1920s such as Judith of Bethulia (1914) and Surrender (1927). The comedic interludes with Tevye the Milkman sarcastically responding to his poverty-stricken lot in life also recalled early sound-era ghetto comedies such as The Cohens and the Kellys series (1905-1933), Abie’s Irish Rose (1927), and The Jazz Singer (1927). The film version would make this nostalgia explicit. Molly Picon herself, the young comic star of Yiddish theater and film in the 1920s, appeared in Fiddler on the Roof as “Yente the Matchmaker.,” The film was highly aware of its connective roots in pre-war American cinema. 482 The Shiksa is not always gender distinct. The signifiers of Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy and Robert Redford in The Way We Were show, how the function of the “Shiksa” as the object of the Jewish gaze is not always Jewish-male-to-Christian-female. 280 Based on “Tevye’s Daughters,” a collection of 1890s short stories from Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem (Salomon Naumovich Rabinovich), Fiddler on the Roof was an ethnic celebration aligned with the rising visibility of the Civil Rights movement. But Fiddler also presented a historical Jewish setting within a palatable and universalized narrative framework. Tevye narrated the show for a Gentile audience presumably unfamiliar with Jewish customs. The show was configured for both Jews and non-Jews to enjoy as a universal tale of American assimilation. 483 Tevye’s character arc, experienced through the romantic entanglements of his daughters, told the story of the American immigrant Ellis Island myth. The fact that Tevye’s family was Jewish was repeatedly affirmed as incidental to the film’s universal themes of pre-modern “tradition” and the lurching transition into the modern era. Jewishness was treated as an abstract European ethnicity. It was merely the specificity of the narrative need to establish the melting-pot narrative of European ethnic crisis, generational transition, and the secularism of Western modernity replacing the antiquated traditions of pre-modern Europe. Like Mel Brooks’s 2000 Year Old Man, Tevye offered a perspective of history as an alternative to dominant historical narratives. Tevye came from an imagined Russian landscape poised at the moment of revolutions both political (Communist) and emigrant (to America). A change in adaptation makes it clear how this universalizing process occurred. In the Broadway adaptation of Aleichem’s stories, produced seventy years after they were first written, Tevye serves an additional function distinct to the 1960s. 483 Similar to the theater-to-film journey of The Jazz Singer and Abie’s Irish Rose, Fiddler on the Roof began as a hit Broadway play in 1964. 281 Tevye was no longer a contemporary, as he would have been when Alecheim’s story was published. Instead Tevye operates as an historical specter, a haunting witness cloaked in the comedic 1950s Catskills performative tradition that actor Zero Mostel was famous for (and would explicitly reference in his performance in Martin Ritt’s The Front in 1976). Tevye was comic in nature. But Tevye was also the Benjaminian witness of historical trauma of the end of European pre-modern history. But this understanding fails to consider a second read of Tevye as a contemporary commentary. Tevye’s crises functions on two levels. Tevye is, of course, a protagonist facing the generational break taking place in the 1890s from traditional shtetl life to American multiculturalism. But Tevye is also witnessing the sexual and gender transformations taking place in the 1960s. Fiddler on the Roof can be seen as witnessing two cultural transformation points for the American assimilation myth. The end of “traditions” in pogrom-era Tzarist Russia of the 1890s, but also the end of miscegenation and ethnic isolation taking place in the Civil Rights America of the 1960s. In this understanding, Fiddler on the Roof follows The Graduate as an historically distinct exploration of generational transformation of the 1960s. Tevye’s struggle with, and eventually acceptance, of Jews entering the non-Jewish modern world, is represented as a three step process directly aligned with the act of romantic coupling. This is shown as a three step process marked by each of Tevye’s three single daughters. Each daughter exhibits increasing agency that challenges Jewish tradition. Collectively, they mark not only the end of shtetl patriarchy, but also liberation of Tevye himself from Russian shtetl to the streets of New York City. 282 Tevye’s first daughter, Tzeitel, falls in love with the poor Jewish tailor, Motel. Rather than honoring her contractual obligation to marry the rich butcher, Lazar, Tevye agrees to Tzeitel’s desire to marry for love rather than property. The introduction of romantic love marks the first step in the progression narrative. Tevye’s second daughter, Hodel, falls in love with Perchik, the communist agitator, who introduces Marxist interpretations of the Torah in the Shtetl and eventually joins the Russian Revolution. Tevye’s second acceptance is political in nature. Tevye’s status as an apolitical dreamer must confront the new thinkers of modernity. The conflation between Jewish thought and Marxist revolution in Perchik also explains how Jewish identity was increasingly aligned with the emergence (and threat) of the new sciences of philosophy, politics and science. Tevye’s use of dream interpretation with his wife Golde, played for comedic effect in the show, invokes Freud. Additionally, a formal break with “Tradition” occurs in Tevye’s direct address to the audience. Invoking the modernist frameworks of Joyce, Proust, and Brecht, Tevye’s playful meta-commentary, often delivered mid-scene, place any claim to the show’s narrative “tradition” as firmly tongue-in-cheek. Tevye is already modernist by the very nature of the framework of the play he exists in. Narrative itself has been fragmented, dropping any claims to historical storytelling tradition. The Jew signifies modernity even when performing the pre-modern past. It is Tevye’s third daughter, Chava, in love with the non-Jew, Fyedka, that marks the final break from the past and launches Jews into both the modern world and the westward journey to America. “America,” almost completely unmentioned in the play until the very end, exists as it did for Kafka. “America” is a conceptual abstraction that, 283 along with Zionist Israel, thematized the spatial journey in which European Jewry could find liberation from the shackles of biological alterity in the age of eugenics. Tevye’s resistance to modernity is seen in his inability to acquiesce to his daughter’s request to marry the non-Jew. For Tevye, the act of Jewish-non-Jewish coupling represents not only a step too far outside the boundaries of Jewish culture, but the end of European Jewry itself. Chava’s announcement of her love for Fyedka is immediately followed by a Russian attack on the village. Tevye sees Fyedka as part of this assault, even as Fyedka announces he, too, will flee Russia in the face of such anti-Semitism. As Rabbi Philip Graubart points out, there is a key change from Aleichem’s Chava story and the ending of Fiddler on the Roof. 484 In Alecheim’s story, Chava’s marriage to the non-Jew, Chvedka, ultimately collapses. Chvedka is violent, unloving, and abusive to Chava, “thus proving Tevye right all along.” 485 Aleichem’s original narrative presented Russian-Jewish intermarriage as a bridge too far for Jews to transgress. Alecheim’s story is clear on this point; Chava’s choice to love the non-Jew was disastrous. The Jew could not succeed by marrying the non-Jew. Some boundaries needed to be maintained for the perseverance of the culture. In the 1960s Broadway production, however, not only does Tevye quietly bless the couple in an aside to the audience, but it is the success of their union that sparks the 484 In Aleichem’s original story, “Chava,” the non-Jew is named Chvedka, not Fyedka. In pleading for Tevye to consider the merits of the non-Jew, Chava compared Fyedka to Maxim Gorky, furthering the alignment between Christian-Jewish coupling and modernist literature. Sholom Aleichem, Tevye’s Daughters, trans. Frances Butwin (New York: Sholom Aleichem Family Publications, 1999), 95-96. 485 Philip Graubart, “From Taboo to Afterthought: A Literary History of Intermarriage,” Interfaithfamily.com, online only: <http://www.interfaithfamily.com/arts_and_entertainment/popular_culture/From_Taboo_to_Afterthought.s html?rd=2> 284 exodus of Russian Jews westward. The successful intermarriage of the play and film thematically align with the final step for shtetl Jews to assimilate to the modern world. Chava’s non-Jewish husband joins the Jewish exodus out of sympathy and loyalty to his wife. He is not a brute, but a loving and loyal husband. Jewish-Christian intermarriage, that had once signified an untenable transgression for Aleichem in the 1890s, had become reconfigured, in the 1960s, as the central bridge between antiquity and modernity. This example from Fiddler on the Roof provides two key insights to the transliterative role of media in the 1960s. One, its source material comes directly from the 1890s, a period of significant transformation in understandings of Jewish identity, globalism, diaspora and modernity, as I argued in chapters one and two. Secondly, Tevye’s relationship to his daughters, and specifically their budding sexuality, presented the Jew as the central tool for a 1960s-era historiographical reconsideration of the past. This was central to 1970s cultural transitions in understandings of how to (re)read history through art, film, literature, television, and theater. Aleichem’s stories became the source material for a nostalgic Jewish transformation not in the wake of the Shtetl pogroms of the 1890s, but of Israel’s Six Day War of 1967. Tevye’s daughters, with their three cascading transgressions (attraction to romantic love, Marxism, and the non-Jew, respectively) force Tevye to let go of the past and accept modernity. Tevye’s transformation is then signified spatially, as an expulsion from Russia and immigration to the United States. “Tradition” loses. Modernity wins. Tevye, like Lenny Bruce and Philip Roth’s Portnoy, spoke to the emerging counterculture under the rubric of overturning the “tradition” of the medium, and of representation itself. The Jewish artist, 285 the “fiddler,” produces music outside of the house of the nation. Instead, the Jewish artist stands on the roof and serves as witness. BRIDGET LOVES BERNIE ON TELEVISION Unlike cinema, television shows of the late 1960s and 1970s located issues of counterculture, liberalism, and sexuality through a much more coded Christian-Jewish coupling narrative structure. The reason for this had to do with the specific understandings of medium in the pre-VHS era. With the demise of the Catholic League’s Production Code in the mid 1960s and the institution of the ratings system, cinema was viewed as exclusionary and with barriers to entry that television did not have. Films carried “R” and “X” ratings, whereas television was seen as a community building all- ages medium. The ribald nature of libidinal Jewish sexuality in the age of Portnoy was perfectly suited for the ratings system in film. Television, however, was viewed not only as a mass culture medium, but with the institution of Public Broadcasting in the mid 1960s, a progressive tool for childhood education. Television dealt with the counterculture primarily through denial, what Lynn Spigel and David Marc have described as the escapist fantasy approach. 486 This did not mean that issues of the 1960s weren’t being expressed in television of the time. Only that engagement with the counterculture was produced through code and metaphor, the opposite of Hollywood’s turn towards auteur-based explicit imagery and direct political confrontation. Televisual Jews, as signifiers of the new sexuality, remained present, but textually unidentified as 486 Lynn Spigel, “From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sitcom,” Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 206. 286 Jews. The contrast between televisual Jewish codes and explicit Jewish identity in cinema speaks directly to their differing modes of medium reception. Thanks to the ratings system, cinema had become exclusive and protected. Television, however, remained a “mass” medium, and therefore unable to overtly address the same themes taking place in Hollywood film at the time. Perhaps the most famous example of the coded Jew on prime-time was Carl Reiner’s son, Rob Reiner. Reiner played the iconic role of Mike “Meathead” Stivic on CBS’s smash hit All In the Family from 1968-1979. A liberal anti-war peacenik and perpetual student, Mike was never textually identified Jewish, instead identified only as a second-generation American child of Polish immigrants. Archie Bunker’s racist curmudgeon relied on reverting to ethnic slurs when confronted with political or cultural issues he didn’t like, and Archie’s racist insult directed was through repeatedly calling him a “Pollack.” While Jewish characters appeared on the show in a number of episodes, Meathead is clearly not written as a Jewish character. 487 However, Reiner’s performance as the nebbishy, college educated, liberal hippie embraced the very Jewish stereotypes that would provoke a working-class bigot like Archie. The hippie generation and Jewish liberalism are brought together in Reiner’s performance. Mike would challenge Archie on issues such as race, class, religion, and Vietnam, proclaiming himself a proud pacifist and an atheist, much to Archie’s chagrin. 487 In one of the show’s last seasons, after Mike and Gloria had left the show to move to California, the Bunkers adopt Edith’s nine year old grand-niece, Stephanie, only to discover Stephanie is Jewish. In Season 9, Episode 20, “Stephanie’s Conversion” (1979), Archie attempts to have Stephanie forcibly converted to Protestant Christianity. The textual insertion of a Jewish character into the Bunker household in the form of a nine year old girl continued the comic tensions between Archie and Meathead in a more overtly anti-Semitic way. Archie eventually learns to accept Stephanie’s Jewish identity, and the Bunkers help her to join a local temple, Beth Shalom. 287 Archie’s daughter, Gloria, was presented as the classic American Christian female, the type we might find in a DeMille film from the 1910s. By locating Mike and Gloria within the iconography of youth generation Christian-Jewish coupling, the comic framework of All in the Family plays with the generational provocation that such a pairing represented to Archie’s nativist racist impulses. Archie’s anger against “Polacks” is meant to be read as coded anti-Semitism: Mike’s role is as the coded Jewish male in a Christian-Jewish coupling. Mike is, in effect, deceiving Archie. Archie can’t see what everyone but Archie knows. Mike is Jewish. Yet by coding Mike only as Polish, All in the Family played with counterculture and generational sexual revolution without textually identifying the core thematic source of the tensions. One year before the All in the Family debut, the first major television show to present an interreligious couple, He and She (1967-1968), aired to critical acclaim. Richard Benjamin, in his first major role, played Dick Hollister, the husband of Paula Prentiss’s Paula Hollister. The couple was married in real life, and the show mainly focused on the comedic situations of a new marriage. Created by Leonard Stern, Dick Hollister was, like Rob Reiner, only thematically Jewish. However, played by the future “Portnoy” and very Jewish looking Richard Benjamin, there could be no doubt as to Dick’s iconography. Further supporting the Jewish reading, Dick was a comic book artist with an urbane wit, the very personification of the vanguard of the hip and urbane Jewish comedians of the early 1960s such as Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Woody Allen, and Nichols and May. Yet in the vast wasteland of 1960s television, filled as it was with 288 broad, white, homogenized slapstick (the lead-in to He and She was Green Acres), the urbane wit of the show did not catch on. He and She was canceled after one season. 488 A few years later, CBS’s Bridget Loves Bernie (1972-1973) would follow the same comedic template, only this time, the Jewishness of the lead character was made explicit for the first time. The show focused on a working-class New York urban Jewish male attempting to make his marriage to a non-Jewish “Shiksa” work. But unlike Dick and Paula Hollister, and Mike and Gloria Stivic, Bridget Loves Bernie moved the Jewish- Christian generational transgression of the youth culture from subtext to text. Playing with an upstairs/downstairs class framework, the show was about the tensions that occurred when a rich Irish schoolteacher, Bridget Fitzgerald (Meredith Baxter) marries a poor Jewish cab driver, Bernie Steinberg (David Birney). 489 Much of the show’s comedy pulled from the contrast between Bridget’s repressed parents, and Bernie’s delicatessen owning Sam and Sophie Steinberg. With episodes called “Tis the Season,” (12/16/72), “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Vatican” (09/23/72), “The In-Laws Who Came to Dinner” (11/25/72) and “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (11/11/72), the show attempted to evoke classic Cohens and Kellys family collision comedy. The opening credit sequence in the pilot episode tells the narrative of Bernie meeting and romancing Bridget. Bernie picks Bridget up as a passenger in his cab, then waits for her all day outside of her job as a school teacher. They go to Central Park and other scenic locations around New York. They’re shown kissing in Bernie’s cab. Then 488 For more on the complex relationship of 1960s television to social and cultural anxieties of the time, see Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin’s The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, Routledge: New York, 1997. 489 Interestingly, given how prominent a Jewish role it was, David Birney was not Jewish, possibly an effort by the network to mitigate the uproar anticipated by airing the show. 289 the title song, featuring the refrain “love is crazy,” stops, to allow the following exchange between Bridget and Bernie, delivered to each other in a scenic shot by the East River: Bridget: You know this is crazy. I don’t even know your full name. Bernie: Bernie… Steinberg. What’s yours? Bridget: Bridget. Bridget… Theresa… Mary… Colleen… Fitzgerald. Bernie: I… uh…. Bridget and Bernie (together): … think we have a problem. Airing directly after All in the Family on Saturday nights, the highly rated show (top 5) was canceled after only one season due to an intense backlash of anti-Semitic hate mail over the Christian-Jewish love story. 490 Television, seen as a more cross-culturally potent influential medium than cinema, could not share in the success that films were finding in mining the comedy of Christian-Jewish erotic couplings. The differences in receptiveness speak to the specificities of the medium. By establishing the “love conquers all” initial romance facing the real-world tensions of generational break with the religious traditions of the past, Bridget Loves Bernie was hardly groundbreaking.. The same basic material had achieved considerable success since the coded Jewishness of The Graduate, and the explicit Jewishness of 1968’s I Love You Alice B. Toklas. That same year, The Heartbreak Kid was a huge box office success, based on largely the same premise (even featuring a divorce). Television, seen as a more cross-culturally potent influential medium than cinema, could not share in the success that films was finding in mining the comedy of Christian-Jewish erotic couplings. 490 Eric Homberger, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York (Cambridge Companions to Literature) ed. Cyrus R. K. Patell, Bryan Waterman, (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 136. 290 By the mid 1970s, CBS finally found an overt Jewish character to base a sitcom around, spinning off the wisecracking Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), from The Mary Tyler Moore Show into Rhoda in 1974. Interestingly, although they played the two most explicit Jewish characters on prime-time, neither Valerie Harper nor David Birney was Jewish. Jewish-born actors such as Rob Reiner and Bea Arthur played coded Jews, while the textual Jews of this period, such as Maude and Valerie were played by non- Jews. Bea Arthur, who played the liberal feminist Maude Findlay on Maude (1972- 1978), watched as her culturally Jewish character (based on Jewish show creator Norman Lear’s wife) was textually identified, not as a Jew, but as a WASP. In a later career interview with Arthur, she explained the rationale behind this decision, stating that Maude was intentionally not written as a Jewish character because, “(i)f you made her Jewish ... her courage in fighting bigotry would be personal instead of ideological.” 491 Arthur’s quote about Maude is revelatory in understanding the complex role of Jewish representation in negotiating liberalism in the 1970s. The fear of the feminist movement had long been to be aligned with Jewish/labor traumas of the 1940s. Daniel Horowitz has pointed out how the author of The Feminist Mystique and seminal first- wave feminist, Betty Friedan, created a careful construction of her personal narrative that avoided all mentions of either her Jewishness or her role in labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s. 492 Bea Arthur understood how non-Jewish audiences would decode (and dismiss) an aggressive liberal, Jewish feminist. Maude required a coding process that 491 As quoted by Kristen Fermaglich, The Jewish Women’s Archive, <www.jwa.org> 492 Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of ‘The Feminine Mystique;’ The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 291 cinema was seemingly not suffering from. For Norman Lear, and Bea Arthur, feminist critique would be ignored by non-Jews if the Jewish Bea Arthur played the character as a Jew, whereas Streisand’s representation of the role of Jews in labor movements in The Way We Were (1972) suffered from no such reservations. This suggests a clear demarcation in how the two mediums were viewed as cultural arbiters of the ideological issues of the time. Most Jewish characters of 1970s television remained textually unidentified as Jews, existing in a state of ambiguity. Larry Fine (Richard Klein) on Three’s Company (1977-1984) performed a sleazy over-sexed comic Jewishness without ever being identified as Jewish. Not all religions were off the table for Three’s Company, however, as Christmas “Chrissy” Snow (American Graffiti’s Suzanne Somers) was identified as the daughter of a religious Christian preacher family. Gabe Kotter (Gabe Kaplan), the titular lead character on Welcome Back, Kotter, resembled a real-life Groucho Marx, and would end each episode by telling a 1950s-era Vaudevillian style Jewish joke to his wife, Julie (Marcia Strassman) that always began “did I ever tell you about my uncle...” Yet Gabe Kotter’s non-Jewish wife and the near total absence of reference to his Jewish identity, especially in light of the ethnic focus of the show’s Brooklyn identity, is notable. Mr. Kotter’s class of students, The Sweathogs, consisted completely of ethnic types. Juan Epstein (Robert Hegyes) would make frequent jokes that he was a “Puerto Rican Jew.” Vinnie Barbarino (John Travolta), Arnold Horseshack (Ron Palilo) and Vinny “Boom Boom” Washington “(Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs), presented archetypes of Italian, gay, and 292 black, respectively. Yet Kotter’s Jewishness was referenced only obliquely, and only by his wife, Julie, in an episode where Julie almost divorces him. 493 The “too Jewish” fears of the creators of Maude, and the carefully coded Jewishness of Mr. Kotter and Larry Fine, belied the Jewish renaissance taking place in cinema. The specificity of stars such as Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman, and Elliott Gould was finding massive success in film. But on television, still seen as a pervasive and suspicious influence on youth since the HUAC days, Jewishness remained mostly in code, or mitigated by the universality of the non- Jewish actor “playing” Jewish. It wouldn’t be until Seinfeld that television would embrace the explicit Jewish lead character without fear of alienating the non-Jewish audience under the “too Jewish” rubric. GODFATHERS AND TAXI DRIVERS The fetishization of the “Shiksa” as ethnic erotic progression narrative was not limited to Jewish representations. Beginning with 1972’s The Godfather, Italian- Americans became the single largest ethnic corollary to the Jewish renaissance already underway. As with Woody Allen films such as Play it Again, Sam (1972), and Sleeper (1973), Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) not only aligned successful assimilation with the acquisition of the Christian female, but did so through the wide-eyed persona of actress Diane Keaton. Keaton’s performance as the innocent and sheltered Kay in both The Godfather and The Godfather 2 (1974) may seem a very different performance from Keaton’s comedic roles in Sleeper, Play it Again, Sam, Love and Death (1975), or even 493 According to numerous fan sites, the only reference to Kotter’s Jewishness is made by Julie in the episode “Follow the Leader (Pt.1),” 1/20/76. 293 the titular character in Annie Hall (1977). Yet for both Coppola and Allen, Keaton’s all- American beauty served as a metaphor for an idealized Christonormative Americana. As Kay in The Godfather, Keaton represented the final step into American society for the ethnic, urban American child of New York immigrants. Kay’s blindness to Michael Corleone’s actions reads the same as Luna’s blindness to the Big Brother-esque violent fascism of Sleeper. In each of these roles, Keaton’s persona signified the privileged white American girl living in a state of delusion. Yet delusion can be read here as luxury, the unseen benefit of American normativity. Keaton’s characters are either unable, or unwilling, to let themselves see the ugly, violent and brutal nature of the human experience. Alvy Singer buying Annie Hall books on death is thematically the same as Michael Corleone’s sarcastic crack to Kay about her ignorance regarding the crimes of American politicians. Each offers the same critique under very different genre rubrics. Both films identify the white female’s sunny innocence as a form of willful blinding, the inevitable self-imposed ignorance brought about as a product of shelter, normativity, and privilege. Kay personifies what Michael’s father, Don Corleone, had dreamed of for his youngest son. Kay is the final confirmation that Michael was leaving the family business to possibly become “a congressman or senator.” 494 Like Mary Dale in The Jazz Singer (1927), the de-ethnicizing American progression narrative expressed itself as union with the white female. Coppola counterpoints Kay’s American whiteness in the sequence when Michael flees to his ancestral village in Italy. For the only time in any of the three 494 Francis Ford Coppola, screenplay for The Godfather based on the novel by Mario Puzo. 294 Godfather films, Michael experiences a strong, primal sexual desire for an Italian woman he hasn’t yet met, and who speaks no English. Michael courts her in the traditional Italian way, and their wedding, and subsequent sex scene is presented in stark contrast to the political machinations of his courtship of Kay. The savvy and preternatural Michael Corleone saw in Kay what Benjamin Disraeli had discovered in 1840s England, and Dreyfus never learned. For political, cultural and social integration in Anglican countries, the threat of ethnic alterity could only be mitigated through marriage to the white-normative partner. Coppola’s grand tale of the struggles of ethnic assimilation into America echoed the same themes seen in seemingly dissimilar romantic comedy films such as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1973) and The Heartbreak Kid (1972). Michael Corleone and Portnoy were not as far apart as it may have first appeared. Even the stark violence and existential crisis portrayed in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) played off the iconography of idealized white female beauty. Taxi Driver’s psychological schism at work in Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) played up the role of urban decay, ethnicity, racism and self-hatred. It did this by counterpointing Travis’s rage with his desire to transcend his own crises via the acquisition of the white female. Travis, a traumatized Vietnam veteran, moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the urban wasteland of New York. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) is the idealized blonde beauty of American normativity. Travis attempts to solve the crisis of the post-Vietnam American male by seeking a female that invokes nostalgia for a suburban American past. Just as for Portnoy, this past is a media creation. It exists only in Travis’s 1950s-era imagination. 295 While Travis is never explicitly identified as Italian, the notion of New York as both a highly racial and highly racist pit of corruption, sin, queerness, and deviancy places Betsy outside of Travis’s world. Travis’s other object of desire is the blue-eyed New England-raised child prostitute, Iris (Jodie Foster). Like Betsy, Iris is imagined by Travis to be a white beauty of purity and innocence. But, unlike Betsy, Iris is the unspoiled child who can still transcend the filth of sexual awakening. While Travis seeks to rescue Iris out of the pornographic, he takes Betsy into the pornographic theater instead. His attempts to rescue the child are problematized by his attempts to sully her adult doppelganger. Travis’s racism is primarily directed at African-Americans. His references to the “scum” of New York liken the city to a post-Vietnam jungle in which Travis is the colonizer/outsider and the natives are violent and dangerous. With Iris, the sexual deviant is represented by her Native American pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). But there is another component of Travis’s racialized anger that manifests differently. This is seen in Travis’s anger at Tom (Albert Brooks). Tom’s young, urban, nebbishy Yuppie presence is established through his neurotic joking and verbal dexterity. Tom is also lusting after his office-worker, Betsy. This locates Tom as a continuation of the post The Graduate, post Portnoy’s Complaint, Jewish schlemiel un-hero. Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese are presenting Travis’s rage as that of the disenfranchised former American hero. Travis is the war veteran returned to find a different America, one in which ethnic hierarchies have inverted, and Travis has been replaced by both a 296 culture of sexual pornography and a land where blacks, Jews, and other ethnics don’t fear him anymore. Travis’s anger at Tom is less defined than his racial anger at the African- Americans he glares at. Travis makes his anger at Tom clear on his first date with Betsy, when he grills Betsy about her interest in Tom. Travis announces to Betsy, “I don’t like him. I don’t know why, but I don’t like him.” Unlike the more clearly demarcated African-Americans that Travis glares at on the streets, Travis’s hatred for Tom is only provoked by Tom’s interest in Betsy. Scorsese presents Travis as a retrograde American masculinity lost in the 1970s. Travis’s final act of violence is intended to target the only signifier of WASP hegemony Travis meets in the film, Senator Palantine. 495 When the attempt is thwarted, Bickle ends up shooting both the Native American pimp and the Italian-American Mafioso john who is with Iris at the time. As Pierre Bourdieu might observe, Travis’s rage at hegemony is ultimately redirected at those closest to him in both class and ethnicity: the Italian, African-American, Native-American, and Jewish New Yorkers with little political power. 496 While Jewish un-heroes successfully liberated whiteness via comedic and sexual progressivism, Travis Bickle’s rage at miscegenation is presented as both regressive and racist. Travis reacts to the new era of explicit sexuality he witnesses in the pornographic cinema. Scorsese’s commentary on sexual desire for the white woman (and white child) is one that Bickle experiences as a voyeur. This is seen when Travis sits alone and 495 When interrogated by the Secret Service while scouting Palantine, Bickle gives his last name as “Henry Krinkle,” an interesting allusion to Santa Claus. 496 David Swatz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 184-185. 297 watches porn through his fingers, alternately obstructing and un-obstructing his vision. The racism and violence that Bickle first expresses outward as a reactionary rage at the city, returns at the end of the film as a rage directed inward. Early in Taxi Driver, we see Bickle making a pretend gun out of his hand and aiming it at a black pedestrian. After being wounded in the final shoot-out, Bickle turns that same finger-gun hand gesture back at himself, pretending to blow his own brains out. Bickle has become the very same sexual pervert ethnic desiring the white woman that he had tried to purge from society. If Jewish sexual acquisition of the Shiksa represented progressive emancipation, Italian-American narratives of the time saw mostly violence and destruction. KRAMER VS. KRAMER AND THE REAGAN REVERSION David Biale had argued that the “Sexual Schlemiel” of the late 1960s and 1970s was a figure fraught with contradictions. By invoking the historical anti-Semitic trope of what Biale describes as “Jewish rapists (that) threaten the purity of Christian women and, through them, Christian society,” Biale argues that the bumbling Jew neutralizes this through a de-eroticized “comic fumbling.” 497 For much of the 1970s, this dynamic synched perfectly with the cynicism of the political climate, the libertine sexuality of the hippie movement, and the challenge to historicity taking place in the academy. Erotic Jews of the 1967-1980 period were the central privileged figure used to negotiate the formal and thematic transitions of American cinema. Yet, to maintain cohesion, Jews were required to desire the normative in the form of the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative. 497 David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblica Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 206-207. 298 Yet a conservative resistance to these destabilizations was also forming. This can be read in a number of male stars of the 1970s that were positioned as hyper-masculine counterpoints to the neurotic Jewish schlemiel. Stars such as Burt Reynolds in Deliverance (1972), Steve McQueen in The Getaway (1973), Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry (1973), and Charles Bronson in Death Wish (1974) signified the beginning of the backlash to the Woody Allen and “Portnoy” era. Collectively, these stars performed masculinity as a laconic, violent, reactionary response to liberal culture. Characters such as Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and Bronson’s Paul Kersey in Death Wish performed masculinity as vigilante justice against a weak, permissive and sexually degraded society. These stars were physical rather than verbal. They were aggressive rather than cowardly. Most notably, they were nearly completely sexually disinterested, and often overtly non- sexual around women. 498 With few words, no fear, and little sexual expression, these stars offered the conservative response to Jewish schlemiel liberalism. They offered a path to a 1950s-era normative masculinity. By the time of Robert Benton’s Kramer Vs. Kramer (1979), any progressive signification lent to the Jewish-Christian coupling narrative had fully given way to a nostalgic reversion to classic post-war gender tropes and regressive 1950s archetypes. A story of a young New York couple’s painful divorce, Kramer vs. Kramer’s realist divorce narrative placed Hoffman opposed a classic blonde, Shiksa wife, played by the emerging star, Meryl Streep. Streep had first emerged in the television miniseries, Holocaust 498 That being said, women were invariably drawn to them, even as they had to make little to no effort towards seduction. Contrast this with the intense effort Jewish stars of the era would put in to their sexual conquests. 299 (1978), playing the Polish woman, Inge (Meryl Streep), who marries the Jewish Karl Weiss (James Woods). In Manhattan (1979), Streep’s rejection of Woody Allen and her choice to become a lesbian satirized Jewish masculinity as flawed and incomplete. By the time of Kramer vs. Kramer, Streep’s iconography as the blonde Aryan beauty playing opposite Jewish men was cemented. Hoffman’s portrayal of the agonies of going through a divorce from Streep serves as the final coda on whatever ambiguity lay in the last shot of The Graduate. The cultural resonance found in idealizing Christian-Jewish couplings had come to an end. By the early 1980s, stars such as Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, had replaced the hyper-neurotic schlemiels of a decade earlier and risen to the top of the box office. They offered an intense physicality primarily in the form of kinetic violence as a final rejection of 1970s liberalism. These masculine stars performed as not-not-Redfords, reviving a nostalgic, gender-normative Christian-American framework within the display of masculine spectacle. Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman, the two figures most emblematic of alternative movie star physiognomy and the destabilization in ethnic and gender norms of the late 1960s and 1970s, became fully gender inverted in two films of the early 1980s. Hoffman appeared in old-woman drag in Tootsie (1982) and Streisand as a young woman who poses as a Yeshiva boy in Yentil (1983). 499 Other emerging Jewish personas of the late 1970s such as Bette Midler, Richard Dreyfuss, and Gene Wilder, were no longer playing viable romantic leads, only 499 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ella Shohat and Daniel Boyarin, among many other scholars, have shown the long historical tradition that equated Jewish identity to queerness, cross dressing, and gender instability. See Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct: Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Male, Garber’s “Category Crises: The Way of the Cross and the Jewish Star” in Boyarin’s Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, and Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet. 300 comic relief. Elliott Gould, George Segal, and Richard Benjamin saw their careers dissipate. Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign had promised a nostalgic return to an idealized suburban America rooted in the 1950s. The connection to Hollywood’s ability to define that “America” was an extension of Reagan himself. Reagan had been a B-Movie actor of that era, further demonstrating the commingling of politics and film culture. Reagan symbolized a stabilization of gender roles and ethnic hierarchy as a cultural response to the liberalism of the 1970s. This manifested in a shift in depictions of masculinity and femininity in Hollywood cinema. Violence and spectacle replaced sexuality and dialogue. The hyper-masculinity seen in actors such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger defined the Reagan era by performing what scholars such as Yvonne Tasker and Martin Flanagan have described as ‘muscilinity.’ 500 While these displays of the hyper-masculine body brought with them their own critiques and problematic deconstructions, the 1970s era of the comic-erotic Jewish schlemiel was effectively over. 501 The period that Biskind described as Hollywood’s creative renaissance came to an end in 1980 with the economic debacle of Heaven’s Gate. So too did the function of The Jewish New Wave. The 1967-1980 period had produced highly sexualized, neurotic, Jewish movie stars as a progressive and emancipatory manifestation of youth culture’s sexual and ethnic awakening. This second wave of Jewish representations also carried with it nostalgia for the pro-immigrant narratives of the first generation in the 1910s and 500 Martin Flanagan, “The Chronotope in Action,” The Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (New York: Routledge, 2004), 112. 501 Yvonne Tasker, “Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, The Body, and the Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema,” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993), 230-231. 301 1920s. In the 1980s, Reagan-era nostalgia for the 1950s reverted ethnic and sexual hierarchy to its pre-1967 borders. With Reagan’s cultural conservativism, Jewish- Christian coupling narratives went back to the margins. They wouldn’t return again until the early 1990s in an entirely new configuration, as we will see in chapter six. 302 CHAPTER SIX MEETING THE FOCKERS: CHRISTIAN-JEWISH COUPLINGS AT THE MILLENNIUM 1990-2010 “Can you believe I fathered him with just one testicle? Imagine how he would have turned out if I had had two?” – Bernie Focker (Dustin Hoffman), Meet the Fockers (2004) 502 American film and television of the 1980s reflected the contradictions of the Reagan presidency. The image of Ronald Reagan as a horse-riding Cowboy president exemplified the period’s deep nostalgic longing for a return to racial, ethnic, and sexual hierarchies of the 1950s. At the same time, rapid innovations in cable television and upgraded movie theater technology presented increasingly high-technology methods for consuming this nostalgia. Gary Wills describes this tension as between a mythic American past and the fractures of a rapidly developing technological future. 503 In Hollywood, the auteur films of the 1970s had been quickly replaced by a trend toward escapism and popcorn entertainment. The fairy tale structures and cartoonish villains introduced by Spielberg and Lucas revolution in the late 1970s had taken hold. As Peter Biskind puts it, the Spielberg/Lucas revolution “finally succeeded in turning the counterculture upside down.” 504 This expressed itself in two ways. First, 1980s film and television contained nostalgia for the time before AIDS, women’s liberation, and the destabilization of racial 502 Jay Roach, Director, Meet the Fockers, 2004. 503 Garry Wills, Reagan’s America (New York: Penguin Books, 1987) 448-450 504 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 364. 303 and ethnic hierarchies brought about by the counterculture in the late 1960s and 1970s. Second, in a return to simplified gender-normative roles, masculinity and femininity became couched in a nostalgic recall of the 1950s. At the same time, perhaps reflecting both the power of the Reagan myth and the Spielberg/Lucas teenage sensibilities, gender archetypes became stylized to cartoonish proportions. Neurotic Jews winning the hearts of beautiful Christians no longer spoke to the culture. Christian-Jewish couplings became a relic of pre-AIDS sexuality and 1970s-era liberal multiculturalism. Blonde haired and blue eyed women, and muscular, tough guy men, were restored to their rightful place at the top of the beauty chain. Hollywood leading men such as Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and even the half-Jewish Harrison Ford gave performances rooted in laconic heroism, muscular physicality, brave gunplay, fist fights, and action over dialogue at all times. Female stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer, Kim Basinger, Melanie Griffith, Kathleen Turner, Meg Ryan, and Darryl Hannah, symbolized the blonde haired, power-suited, confident 1980s working woman. But they were also a return to Hitchcock’s idealized movie star Christian blondes of the Grace Kelly era. Even African-American stars such as Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington reversed the neurotic, spasmodic persona of 1970s-era Richard Pryor by performing in action films as confident, heroic, and brave. While Albert Brooks and Woody Allen continued to produce films with their recurring themes of 304 neurotic Jewish solipsism and Shiksa lust, their work was increasingly marginalized to the urban art house. 505 The period of neurosis as a virtue was over. By the early 1990s, however, a response to the Reagan years began to take place. The celebration of traditional masculine and feminine gender roles, as well as 1950s-era blond haired, blue eyed, Nordic beauty began to be seen as artificial and false. 506 With the election of President Bill Clinton and a push towards “politically correct” considerations, a new ethnic visibility took hold in popular culture. Along with it, a third wave of Christian-Jewish coupling narratives emerged. Just as the 1980s had contained a nostalgic recall of Eisenhower-era conservatism, this 1990s Christian-Jewish coupling formulation produced an intense nostalgia for the late 1960s sexualized “Portnoy” era. Jewish characters, played by Jewish actors, began to dominate American film and television once again. Beginning most notably with the unlikely success of the anti-warm sitcom Seinfeld, and reaching critical mass in 1995 with the release of Adam Sandler’s Hannukah Song (and its premise of “outing” Hollywood Jews), the 1990s launched a wave of explicit Jewish representations meant not as an ideological challenge, but as a form of nostalgic, and self-reflexive Jewish revival. These texts recalled the liberalism of the 1967-1980 period just as the Reagan years had longed for a return to the 1950s. Jewish identity was once again locating as America’s liberal response to conservatism. 505 Perhaps the most overtly Jewish love story art-house hit of the period was Crossing Delancey (1988). The story of a Jewish beauty (Amy Irving) rejecting a WASP suitor (David Hyde Pierce) to marry a Jewish pickle man (Peter Reigert) is one of the only major films of the postwar era to demonstrate a Jew picking another Jew over a Christian love interest. The only major film of the 1970s to also do was likewise directed by Joan Micklin Silver, Hester Street, in 1975. 506 Susan Jeffords argues that the transition in masculinity the 1980s to 1990s can be seen in the transformation of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger went from performing roles as hyper- masculine robots and killers in the early 1980s to comically feminized neurotics in films such as Twins (1988) and Kindergarten Cop (1990). Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 141 305 In keeping with tradition, these explicit Jewish representations were nearly always tied to a relational counterpoint with the Christian partner. This nostalgic return of the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative in the 1990s and 2000s emerged in three distinct formulations. First, the courtship between Christian and Jewish characters formed a new relationship comedy template for the television sitcoms of the 1990s. Second, Hollywood “gross-out” comedies utilized the neurotic and highly sexualized Jewish schlemiel to embody the new explicit form of body-fluid comedy of the late 1990s. Third, in an oppositional configuration I will refer to as “Spielbergian Universalism,” Holocaust films throughout the 1990s and 2000s presented Christian- Jewish couplings as a means of coping with historical trauma. Collectively, these three distinct formulations of Christian-Jewish coupling narratives produced a generational response to the absences of the Reagan decade. Embedded in their self-reflexive reissue of the Christian-Jewish framework was a nostalgic recall for the political potency of neurotic Jewish sexuality embodied by Benjamin Braddock, Barbra Streisand and Portnoy in the late 1960s. But unlike the political potency of Jewish sexual desire in the 1960s, these texts produced a Jewish-Christian sexual configuration not as a forward- looking progression narrative, but as a nostalgic return. Jewish-Christian coupling emerged not as a challenge to a regressive Christonormative structure, but to create barriers that needed transgression in the first place. These barriers were located not in the spatial boundaries of the 1920s, or the sexual boundaries of the 1960s, but in the psychological barriers of the 1990s. In the 1990s and 2000s, Christian-Jewish coupling 306 narratives were no longer emancipatory liberal responses to nativist conservatism. They now produced as many barriers as they solved. DIRTY DANCING WITH HARRY AND SALLY Two notable Jewish-Christian love stories did become enormous box office successes in the late 1980s, Dirty Dancing (1987) and When Harry Met Sally (1988). Both films used Christian-Jewish coupling narratives not as forward-looking progression narrative, but as nostalgic recall. In so doing, these films demonstrated the complex coding process that deemphasized Jewish specificity in favor of a universalized storytelling approach. Neither film mentions the word “Jewish” or in any way overtly identifies its characters as Jewish. In their evocation of Christian-Jewish coupling narratives of the past, and in the de-emphasis of Jewish specificity, both films spoke to how the Reagan years impacted Hollywood representations. Dirty Dancing featured nostalgia for early 1960s innocence combined with the Irish-Jewish immigrant culture crossings of the 1920s. Yet Dirty Dancing actually performs a thematic inversion. By using the Jewish Catskills as its location, the film actually produces a conservative Reagan-era nostalgia for a return to traditional gender roles rather than the forward-looking multicultural assimilation narrative of the genres it recalls. The young Jewish American Princess at the center of the film, Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey), represents this transformation. Baby, an ambitious twenty- year old, has been babied by her overprotective father her entire life. Her father, Dr. Jake Houseman (Jerry Orbach), is a highly successful New York doctor. But Dr. Houseman’s neurotic worry and overprotection of Baby suggest the smothering cliché of the Jewish 307 parent. The masculine, stoic working class Catholic, Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze), is the contrast to this world. Johnny is the powerless outsider. The film’s whitewashing of the tension for Jews of the 1950s and early 1960s is seen in the inversion of Christian- Jewish power structure. In this world, Jews hold all the power. The local Catholics work for them. Johnny is framed as a quasi-gigolo, hired ostensibly to teach “dance” to aging Jewish women, but in actuality, to provide them with the thrill of the touch of a “real” man. It is here, in competing understandings of masculinity, that Dirty Dancing introduces its regressive Reagan-era ideology. By performing masculinity rooted in a graceful physicality, Johnny Castle represented not only the “anti-Jew” from a physiognomy perspective, but also a rejection of the Jewish schlemiel personas so celebrated in the 1970s. The Jewish characters that flirt with Baby throughout the film are presented in stark contrast with Johnny. They are neurotic, phony, verbal, sleazy, and unappealing. Baby’s sister, Lisa (Jane Brucker), represents the typical spoiled J.A.P. who only wants a Jewish husband to take care of her. Baby’s career ambitions and intelligence communicate she is not of this Jewish world. Baby’s yearning to break out of her Jewish world of stereotypes codifies in her interest in Johnny, as well as the secret world of the working-class Christian staff of the Catskills resort. In Johnny Castle, the codes of 1970s desire have been reversed. Jewish men represent stereotypes of the libidinal but neurotic schlemiels who had been lionized in the 1970s. Only now, instead of being heroes for the youth culture, these men are presented as buffoons, clownish echoes of Jerry-Lewis-era and HUAC 1950s powerless Jewish 308 emasculation. Dr. Jake Houseman’s concern for his daughter’s interest in Johnny recalls the uncomprehending immigrant parents of the shtetl and ghetto comedies of the 1910s. That Dr. Houseman’s first name evokes Jake Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, presents Dirty Dancing as a next-generation continuation of the cycle of Jewish generational break and transformation. Dr. Houseman’s initial resistance to Johnny comes out of his stereotypical assumptions about both ethnicity and class. It is only when Dr. Houseman realizes that the proverbial “nice Jewish boy,” Robbie Gould (Max Cantor), is the real culprit behind an unintended pregnancy, and not Johnny, that he accepts Johnny as worthy for Baby. As in The Jazz Singer, this acceptance is cemented when the parent witnesses the child perform a new, highly sexualized, configuration of a Jewish performance ritual. While Jack Robin turned cantorial synagogue hymns into jazz in The Jazz Singer, Baby turns the Jewish talent show into a showcase for “dirty dancing,” an eroticized and bold new form of dance that Johnny has invented. Johnny’s powerful Christian hyper-masculinity does what the Jewish schlemiels could not – it unlocks Baby’s erotic yearning and signifies a triumphant break with the past in the form of Christian-Jewish generational transformation. The final dance sequence between Baby and Johnny not only marks this transformation, but the ending of a Jewish world. This is confirmed when the owner of the resort, Max Kellerman (Jack Weston), acknowledges that business in the Catskills is slowing down. Johnny’s successful lifting of Baby, literally helping her to soar, suggests a hopeful future represented by their overcoming of the cultural and class barriers that had blocked their coming together. 309 Just as with Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and The Jazz Singer (1927), Jewish diaspora represents the triumph of the American assimilation myth at the moment our characters choose to give up their Jewish world for the Christian partner. Fiddler’s loss of the Shtetl, The Jazz Singer’s end of the Lower East Side, and Dirty Dancing’s end of the Catskills all link the transformation of the diaspora with the desire for, and entrance into, Christonormative culture. This is also communicated by the song, the distinctly contemporary 1980s hit, Time of Your Life, one of the only songs on the film’s soundtrack not from the 1950s. As the contemporary song plays, it is a reminder that the Jewish Catskills is already gone. Dirty Dancing has used dance to transform nostalgia for what was lost into a celebration of what was gained. The Jewish Catskills audience celebrates with wild cheers. But what were they cheering? Not just the coupling of Baby and Johnny, but the re-masculinization of the 1980s male from 1970s Jewish nebbish to the 1980s laconic, tough, but noble, muscular Gentile Christian ideal. Dirty Dancing utilizes the framework of the Christian-Jewish ghetto comedies of the 1920s to ironically inscribe the retrograde conservatism of the Reagan-era 1980s. Given that Dirty Dancing is clearly about a Jewish world, set in a Jewish location, and starring Jewish actors playing Jewish characters, the film is notable for how muted any explicit references to Jewish identity are. The words “Jew” or “Jewish” are never actually spoken in the film or screenplay. Jewish identity is instead performed in code. Jokes about the prices of shoes, complaining about the heat, and the nebbishy cadences and dialogue all communicate Jewishness in the conservative codes of the 1950s itself. While some of this could be 310 attributed to the period setting, the fact that the film was released in 1987 and considering the Jewish setting and Jewish characters that fill the screen, Dirty Dancing represents a distinct shift from the 1967-1980 era. Nostalgia was also central to When Harry Met Sally, which frames its purportedly contemporary love story in the style of a 1940s-era Hollywood love affair. This is done through both a classic Hollywood-era cinematography look, as well as the retro Big Band soundtrack that did not include any 1980s rock music. Instead, the film featured contemporary versions of hits from the 1920s and 1930s such as It Had to Be You and Gershwin’s Love is Here to Stay and Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off. Yet unlike Dirty Dancing, When Harry Met Sally revived the increasingly anachronistic Jewish schlemiel character of the 1970s in the form of Harry Byrnes (Billy Crystal). Unlike Johnny Castle, Harry is a typical Jewish nebbish; neurotic, hyper-verbal, and hyper-sexual. Throughout the film, Harry’s neurotic sexuality is presented as sexually liberating for the uptight and WASP, Sally (Meg Ryan). Sally laments that her first marriage to Joe, a blonde haired and blue eyed ideal partner seen only briefly in the film, was sexless and boring. It is the hyper-sexual Harry, a signifier of the Jewish alternative to the WASP ideal that Sally needs to liberate her from her controlling tendencies. The notion of Jewishness as sexually liberating is communicated in the film’s most famous scene, Sally’s faked orgasm at Katz’s Deli. The usually uptight Sally performs her orgasm for Harry by boldly and loudly screaming in a public place. This is a complete inversion of her normally uptight WASP persona. Liberation occurs at the 311 moment Sally is fully ensconced in a Jewish environment. The connection between pastrami and Jewish sexuality is made even more clear with the iconic punch-line of the sequence, delivered in a cameo by Rob Reiner’s real-life mother (and Carl Reiner’s wife), who proclaims “I’ll have what she’s having.” The ribald Jewish sexuality that Harry represents is liberating for Sally, but it is also an extension of the nostalgic framework for the film. Harry himself is nostalgic because Harry offers a neurotic Jewish alternative masculinity that was lost during the Reagan-era masculine reversion. In spite of such scenes, When Harry Met Sally has a total textual absence of Jewish references. References to Christmas occur throughout the film as a structuring motif, steeping the love story in a postwar 1950s nostalgia for films such as An Affair to Remember (1957). Not only is Harry Byrnes seen carrying a Christmas tree with Sally, but after their post-coital fight, Harry calls her and offers to do the “traditional Christmas grovel.” Yet a line of dialogue excised from Castle Rock’s original screenplay draft shows that Harry was originally intended to be a Jewish character from the start: 507 “It’s the holiday season, this doesn’t happen to be my holiday, but I thought I might remind you that this is a season of forgiveness and charity…” 508 In the film, this line is rewritten to remove the words “this doesn’t happen to be my holiday.” Instead, Harry offers to do the “traditional Christmas grovel.” The reference to Harry’s Jewish identity had been removed. This change from script to film can hardly be attributed to the casting of Harry. Billy Crystal was one of the most 507 When Harry Met Sally, draft dated 8/23/88 by Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner, and Andrew Scheinman <http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/whenharrymesally.pdf> 508 Ibid, 108. 312 famous Jewish comedians of the 1980s. Instead it suggests a larger framework for keeping Jewish identity firmly in code throughout the 1980s as what Herbert Gans defined as “symbolic Judaism.” 509 As with Dirty Dancing, Jewishness had become thematized and no longer explicit. Jewishness was communicated through taste culture, a concept left unspoken and communicated only through code. Despite reviving the Ghetto Love Story and Schlemiel Comedy frameworks of the 1920s and late 1960s eras, both Dirty Dancing and When Harry Met Sally show how 1980s nostalgia was actually grounded in the 1950s. This brought with it a universalizing need to return to whiteness, and Christonormative gender roles. In the age of Reagan, just as in the 1950s, Jews were performing in code. These are two prominent examples from the 1980s, but there are others. 510 The film that first exemplified the de-Judaising of Hollywood in the Reagan years was the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer (1980). While Diamond’s film retained the Jewish specificity of the original story, as well as the intermarriage angle, it presented three changes that spoke to the Reagan shift. 511 First, the film presents the lead protagonist, now named “Jess Robin” (Neil Diamond), as already married to an orthodox 509 Herbert J. Gans, Symbolic ethnicity: the future of ethnic groups and cultures in America, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 2. Num. 1 (January 1979), 15. 510 Another prominent example is Back to School (1986) starring the iconic Jewish comedian, Rodney Dangerfield, as an uneducated slob who falls in love with his highly educated Gentile professor of history, Diane (Sally Kellerman). Dangerfield’s unmistakable Jewish persona, complete with his signature line “I don’t get no respect,” wins the blonde and erudite Diane away from her sexless and uptight aristocratic British boyfriend, Philip (Paxton Whitehead). Yet Dangerfield’s character, Thornton Melon, references having changed his name from “Meloni.” Even Dangerfield was performing his Jewishness in a relational ethnic Italian code. 511 As Vincent Brook points out, the 1952 and 1959 remakes also transformed the template of the 1927 version to navigate cultural and historical transformations in the American assimilation narrative. Vincent Brook, “The Four Jazz Singers: Mapping the Jewish Assimilation Narrative,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, (November 2011): 401-420. 313 Jewish wife (Catlin Adams). This also produced a discourse of Jewish divorce as part of the film’s transformative generational journey. Second, the emphasis on the Jewish “Yiddishe Mama” in the original is shifted to the Jewish father. The shift from matriarch to patriarch is notable in the age of Reagan-era masculine reversion. As the 1927 version understood, Jewish lineage runs through the mother, and it was Jack Robin’s mother whom Jack appealed to in his pivotal moment on stage in blackface singing, “My Mammy.” By shifting emphasis to the Jewish father, and by completely eliminating the key Kol Nidre scene from the original, the 1980 version denatured the connection of Jewish masculinity to the matriarch into a Christian-centric patriarchy. Third, the film also denatured Judaism through performance. Laurence Olivier’s over-the-top performance as Cantor Rabinovitch, a role that just a few years earlier would likely have been reserved for a Jewish actor, marked a key transition point. As with Gregory Peck in Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1947, Jewishness was now universal again, open to all actors to perform. In the scene when Diamond announces he’s marrying the non-Jewish Molly Bell (Lucie Arnaz), Cantor Rabinovitch announces “I have no son,” and rends his clothes. What was played with deft lightness as an American assimilation myth in 1927 had become, in 1980, a chance for a non-Jewish actor to emote. Criticized at the time by New York Times film critic Janet Maslin as “offensive” 512 and by Roger Ebert as “ridiculous,” 513 the film’s Jewish themes were soundly rejected by critics. Stories of the Jewish experience had fallen completely out of favor in Reagan-era 512 Janet Maslin, “The Jazz Singer,” New York Times, 12 December 1980. 513 Roger Ebert, “The Jazz Singer,” Chicago Tribute, 22 December, 1980. 314 America. In conservative Reagan-era America, Jewish-Christian couplings remained a viable comedic-romantic formula, but only when couched in universal codes. In the 1990s, however, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives would once again emerge in overwhelming numbers. This reaction to the Reagan years accompanied the election of Bill Clinton, and spoke to the rising liberal approach to sexuality and gender that would define much of 1990s and early 2000s American media. But unlike the 1967- 1980 period, this transition would begin not in film, but on television. “WHICH WAY IS ISRAEL?” 514 Many scholars have commented on the sudden and spectacular rise of Jewish representations on television in the early 1990s. As Joyce Antler notes, not a single program in Nielsen’s top twenty shows featured an identifiably Jewish character between 1983 and 1987. 515 While Jewish supporting characters would sometimes appear on hit shows such as such as L.A. Law (1986-1994) and Thirtysomething (1987-1991), the absence is striking. Mid 1980s television stars such as Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, Don Johnson, Loni Anderson and Shelley Long produced a Gentile beauty standard in a seemingly direct refutation of the Jewish New Wave’s scrambling of Teutonic beauty standards in the 1970s. Sex was also downplayed. The Jiggle T.V. of the late 1970s gave way to action and style, a 1980s industry shift that John Caldwell called 514 A rhetorical line of dialogue from “The Cigar Store Indian” episode of Seinfeld, 12/9/93. After an Asian mail carrier gets angry and accuses Jerry of racism when Jerry asks him if he knows which way Chinatown is, Jerry complains to his friends that if someone asked him “which way Israel is,” he would not be offended. The line was one of the first overt and unprovoked moments in which Jerry explicitly referenced his Jewish identity on the show. 515 Joyce Antler, Television’s Changing Image of American Jews, (The American Jewish Committee and Norman Lear Center: Los Angeles, 2000) 38. 315 “televisuality.” 516 1980s sitcoms were almost entirely family or coworker based. Only the culture clash tensions between working class Sam and educated Diane on Cheers (1982-1993) held any of the romantic tensions of romantic sitcom tradition. 517 Antler notes that by the 1996-1997 season, 20% of dramatic television shows featured Jewish characters, while Jews in leading roles on situation comedies did especially well in the ratings. 518 Vincent Brook describes two waves of Jewish comedies in the 1990s. Brook marks the 1990-1992 period as the first wave, when Jewish stars on sitcoms such as Anything But Love (1989-1992), Dream On (HBO 1990-1996), and, of course, Seinfeld (NBC 1990-1998) emerged from a mixture of industrial changes and the stand-up comedy influence. 519 The massive success of Seinfeld launched what Brook calls the second wave, covering the 1992-1998 period. Shows such as Mad About You (1992-1999), Will and Grace (1998-2004), Dharma and Greg (1997-2002) and The Nanny (1993-1999) functioned as a generational counter-aesthetic to the heartwarming, and very Gentile, 1980s comedies. 520 Yet this surge in Jewish representation brought with it the usual caveat. The specificity of Jewish identity could be coded, as with Paul Buchman (Paul Reiser) on Mad About You and Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) on Friends. Or the specificity could be overt, as for Fran Fine on The Nanny, Dharma Finkelstein on Dharma and Greg, 516 John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 67. 517 Christine Scodari, “Possession, attraction, and the thrill of the chase: Gendered mythmaking in film and television comedy of the sexes,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, (1995): 23 518 Antler, Television’s Changing Image Of the Jews, 39. 519 Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom, (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 74-76. 520 Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here, 118-119. 316 and Grace Adler on Will and Grace. But in either coded or explicit form, the Jew’s unambiguous focus remained on acquiring, or maintaining a relationship with the Christian love interest. Fran Fine might be set up on dates with Jewish doctors and lawyers, but her true love remained for her boss, the British aristocrat, Maxwell Sheffield. Grace Adler might end up marrying the proverbial nice Jewish doctor, Dr. Marvin “Leo” Marcus (Harry Connick Jr.) on Will and Grace, but her true love, and the focus of the show, remained Grace’s relationship with her non-Jewish gay best friend, Will Truman (Erik McCormack). Whether the barrier to coupling was sexual, as on Will and Grace, class, as on The Nanny, or just relationship problems themselves, as on Dharma and Greg and Mad About You, these coupling narratives used the culture clash of Christian and Jewish archetypes to drive the central long-form conflict underneath the comedy. While the form of Christian-Jewish coupling resurrected patterns throughout 20th century American media, the tensions were entirely new. The Ghetto Love Stories of the 1910s and 1920s, and the counterculture sex comedies of the 1960s and 1970s spoke to cultural resistance and generational change. The first wave of Christian-Jewish couplings had addressed a pro- immigrant multiculturalism. The second wave had signified sexual freedom. These sitcoms spoke not to emancipation, but to stagnation. Characters such as Dharma Finkelstein were dealing with the legacy of 1960s-era Jewish liberalism and confusion. Characters such as Paul Buchman were simply neurotic to the point of self-destruction. In the 1990s, Jewish-Christian coupling, whether coded or explicit, no longer offered a forward-looking progression narrative. Instead, it had become a nostalgic signifier of the 317 unresolved generational attempts of the past. The only elements now preventing Jews and Christians from coupling were the emotional shortcomings of the characters themselves. Within the Christian-Jewish template, these shows actually contained a wide range of configurations. Fran Fine’s stereotypical Queens J.A.P desire to marry her rich, aristocratic, British boss, Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy) on The Nanny draws a number of critical distinctions from Paul Buchman’s neurotic quibbles with his wife, Jamie (Helen Hunt), on Mad About You. But what they share is the notion of the neurotic Jewish sitcom character not only fixated on the Christian love interest, but on the lack of cultural barriers to the coupling where societal resistance once stood. Paul and Jamie are already married. No one objects. Yet their neurotic courtship continues. Maxwell’s refusal to think of Fran romantically because he employs her similarly sets up an arbitrary barrier to coupling. What connects these texts is the psychological barrier. A generation earlier, Bridget and Bernie on Bridget Loves Bernie and Mike and Gloria on All in the Family struggled with parental resistance and cultural upheaval interfering in their marriage. 1990s sitcoms relocated the barriers from external to internal, from cultural resistance to the psychological makeup of the characters themselves. The first prototypes for this pattern emerged in the stars of two self-titled shows of the late 1980s, Garry Shandling on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986-1990), and Roseanne Barr on Roseanne (1988-1997). While neither show made more than the briefest of passing mentions of their titular characters’ Jewish identity, both shows self- 318 consciously satirized their star personas as Jewish stereotypes. 521 Shandling’s neurotic, narcissistic schlemiel was the first hint of a return of the 1970s-era Jewish protagonist on television. 522 Roseanne’s configuration was new. Roseanne performed as the rarely seen, but often alluded to, loud and unapologetic J.A.P. housewife. This type of unapologetic Jewish loudness had been seen before in Joan Rivers, but not as the lead character of a family sitcom, with the possible exception of Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) on Rhoda (1974-1978). Yet both Shandling and Roseanne mitigated their Jewish alterity in the familiar way –through marriage and/or erotic interest in the Christian partner. 523 Roseanne’s television husband, Dan Connor (John Goodman), was a classic working-class Polish Catholic. 524 Shandling’s love interest, and eventual wife on the show, was the non- Jewish Phoebe Bass (Jessica Harper). Shandling’s breakdown of sitcom convention, playing both himself and a fictional version of himself and breaking the fourth wall, borrowed heavily from the direct-address of the genre’s origins in the early 1950s on such shows as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950-1958). Roseanne’s 521 Roseanne did identify herself has being “half-Jewish” in passing when asked about the ethnic background of the family by one of her children. 522 As Lawrence J. Epstein points out, it wouldn’t be until Shandling’s follow-up, The Larry Sanders Show on HBO, that Shandling would textually elevate his Jewishness to the center of his neuroticism. Epstein points out how the show’s creation of two personas, the on-camera Larry Sanders and the behind the scenes “real” Larry Sanders, thematized the tradition of Jewish doublings and fractured identity that lies at the source of Jewish comedy. Lawrence J. Epstein, The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America (New York: Public Affairs, 2001) 229-230 523 In a 2009 edition of Heeb Magazine, Roseanne conflated her satire of gender roles with her Jewish identity in a provocative photo spread. Roseanne presented herself in drag as a matronly Adolf Hitler, baking “Jew cookies” in an oven inside a domestic 1950s kitchen. 524 In season eight, episode four, “The Last Date,” 10/24/95, Roseanne and Dan decide to crash a Bar Mitzvah, an event culminating in Dan sampling Jewish food for the first time. 319 impact was more overtly political, resurrecting the pointed working class comedy of The Honeymooners (1955-1956) and The Goldbergs (1949-1956). In 1989, Jackie Mason’s Chicken Soup (1989) and Richard Lewis’s Anything But Love (1989-1992) followed Garry Shandling and Roseanne Barr to bring overt Jewish schlemiels back to prime-time. Chicken Soup aired after Roseanne, and featured the Yiddish-inflected comedian Jackie Mason (a former Rabbi) finding love in middle age with an Irish woman, Maddie Peerce (Lynn Redgrave). The Cohens and Kellys framework was unmistakable. Similarly, Anything But Love featured Richard Lewis as Marty Gold, falling for his co-worker, Hannah Miller (Jamie Lee Curtis). 525 By the second season, references to Marty’s Jewish identity became more overt, culminating with Marty introducing Hannah to his family at a Passover Seder. The extended Passover sequence featured Hannah’s confusion at learning the rituals of the Seder culminating with a trick being played on Hannah by Marty’s ex-fiancée, who talks Hannah into throwing a piece of matzo against the wall. 526 While Anything But Love lasted for three seasons, and Chicken Soup less than one, they were followed by an avalanche of sitcoms with at least one Jewish romantic lead, including Seinfeld (1990-1998), Northern Exposure (1990-1995), The Nanny (1993- 1999), The Commish (1991-1995), Ned and Stacey (1995-1997), Mad About You (1992- 1999), Dharma and Greg (1997-2002), Will and Grace (1998-2006), and even the 525 Jamie Lee Curtis’s father was the Jewish movie-star Tony Curtis, but her character is clearly identified as not Jewish on the show, and her ignorance of Jewish culture drove the comic scenarios of a number of episodes. 526 Anything But Love, “Days of Whine and Haroses” March 21, 1990 320 implied “half Jewish” characters on Friends (1994-2004). 527 All featured strongly coded (if not always overt) Jewish characters as central romantic leads. In each of these cases, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives mitigated and contextualized the privileging of Jewish identity. What is notable about the 1990s sitcoms is the number of female Jewish lead characters. While the 1967-1980 period was primarily driven by male Jewish schlemiels, the television resurgence of the 1990s featured a number of Jewish female protagonists. Grace Adler on Will and Grace, Fran Fine on The Nanny, Dharma Finkelstein on Dharma and Greg, and Roseanne Connor on Roseanne, collectively signified the first significant wave of “out” Jewish female characters since the Ghetto Love Stories of the 1910s and early 1920s. Perhaps to mitigate this, the quirky eccentricities of these unruly females, especially Roseanne, were analogized as a nostalgic extension of the classic 1950s-era sitcom female. 528 Lynn Spigel, building off David Marc, observes that the “magical” sitcoms of the 1960s had established the template of the supernatural woman desiring to repress her potential “in return for the ‘rewards’ of family life.” 529 In this 1990s configuration, Jewish females were the new genies; magical disruption forces that challenged the WASP domesticity of the 1980s. The Jewish female became its own form of unruly, magical female. Jewish women were transgressive signifiers of domestic fragmentation. 527 Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here, 74-76, 94. 528 Kathleen Rowe, Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, (Texas: Texas University Press, 1995), 7-79. 529 Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 128. 321 A show such as The Nanny (1993-1999) seems aware of the connection between the Jewish female and the magical female of the 1960s. Fran Fine’s intertextual identification with the 1960s magical housewives Jeannie and Samantha can be located in the brightly colored animated opening titles that directly parodied both Bewitched (1964- 1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). In the title sequence, the Nanny’s “rescue” from suburban Queens by Mr. Sheffield parallels Captain Nelson’s discovery of Jeannie’s bottle during the opening credits of I Dream of Jeannie. Fran’s servant status also parallels Jeannie and Samantha. Just as with Samantha and Jeannie, Fran Fine is perpetually trying, and failing, to gain the undivided (and sexual) attention of her “Master” while also trying not to embarrass him so much that she’ll scare him away. This central romantic tension drives the narrative just as the 1960s Magicoms did, and allows the text to play with gender and stereotype in much the same way. In season one’s “The Christmas Episode” (12/22/93), Fran is introduced as confused by the Christmas ritual, yet actively participating in it, and eager to learn. We see Fran stringing cranberries as well as giving gifts under the Christmas tree. As with Jeannie and Samantha, Fran willingly abandons her identity to seek inclusion into the hegemony. After pawning her Christmas gift from Mr. Sheffield to pay off a debt (summoning ugly stereotypes of the Jew as money grubbing shyster), Fran learns that the true spirit of Christmas is not gift giving, but is spending time with family. Regaining the gift, Fran becomes transformed through learning the “meaning of Christmas.” The episode ends with Fran’s acceptance as a member of her new family – a transformation achieved through Jewish interest in Christonormative acceptance. 322 Christmas became a key ritual for Jewish characters in the 1990s to participate in. On a Christmas episode of Friends, Ross (David Schwimmer) goes out of his way to teach his son, Ben (Cole Sprouse), about Hannukah, while still participating in Christmas with the rest of the group. 530 In the first season of Mad About You¸ an episode broadcast right before Christmas establishes that Paul Buchman met and fell in love with Jamie on Christmas Eve. 531 Both Friends and Mad About You embraced the negotiable and fluid duality of what Jeffrey Shandler calls the “Crypto-Jew” -- characters who are not textually identified as Jewish but use Jewish codes and/or are played by Jewish actors. 532 But even in contexts such as Christmas, both shows allowed Jewish signifiers to exist in ways not seen in the 1980s. Dharma and Greg (1997- 2002) was the show most overt in its reminder of the Jewish reinvention in the 1967-1980 period. Dharma Finkelstein (Jenna Elfman) is the child of Jewish hippies, a classic “unruly woman” who challenges (but never upsets) the traditional gender politics of containment attempted by her straight-laced and conservative husband, Greg (Thomas Gibson). Even Dharma’s name indicates her ethnic confusion. A Jew with an Indian name, Dharma explains that this is a result of the radical politics and “hippie” tendencies of her 1960s Jewish radical father. But in spite of Dharma’s interest in New Age culture, Buddhist meditation, and hippie sensibility, she remains Jewish. In a 1997 Christmas episode (12/17/97), Dharma and Greg struggle to resolve their religious holiday issues with Dharma finally agreeing to celebrate 530 The One with the Holiday Armadillo, Friends Season 7, Episode 10, 14 Dec. 2000 531 How To Fall In Love, Mad About You Season 3, Ep. 12 Dec. 16, 1992 532 Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, ed. J. Hoberman and J. Shandler (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 251. 323 Christmas. By expressing the desire to assimilate, the Jew is transformed through the love of her Christian partner into a fully formed American. Just as the magical Jeannie and Samantha sought entrance into domesticity through the white, Christian male of the 1960s, in the 1990s, it was the unruly female Jew. FESTIVUS FOR THE REST OF US Perhaps no television comedy has been as lionized in the 2000s as much as Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO 2000-present). Created by Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld, Curb was positioned as both an extension of, and a distillation of, Seinfeld’s themes of neurotic Jewish narcissism. Yet while the character of Larry David, a hapless schlemiel unable to get out of his own way, echoed Jewish vaudevillian and early sitcom tradition, the show’s formal techniques announced a very different configuration. Episodes of Curb took place within the same Seinfeldian existential paralysis. Characters learn nothing, accomplish nothing, good deeds are misinterpreted, and everyone is depicted as miserable no matter how much money or success they acquire. Seinfeld had been a conscious rejection of 1980s-era positive-message family sitcoms such as The Cosby Show (1984-1992) and Family Ties (1982-1989). Seinfeld accomplished this not only by fracturing the family structure into the pseudo-family of George, Elaine, Jerry, and Kramer, but by replacing the genial and loving Gentiles of the 1980s with selfish Jews and pseudo-Jews devoid of any nobility nor generosity. Curb Your Enthusiasm not only continued this rejection of sentimentality, but even more explicitly aligned it with Jewish identity. Jewish identity, from seating in synagogue to supporting Israel, would 324 inform the plots of dozens of episode. For David, Jewish selfishness and neuroticism were simply extensions of the existential crisis of being a perpetual outsider. Benjamin Wright argues that while David clearly continues the Jewish schlemiel tradition, he problematizes it by performing an uneasy hybridity in which he is “neither comfortably Jewish nor cozily unJewish.” 533 David maintains his outsider status not simply by being a Jew in a Christian world, but by being an outsider Jew in a Jewish world. This is established through David’s circle of Jewish friends, including Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin), Richard Lewis playing himself, and Marty Funkhouser (Bob Einstein). David’s foil, Jeff Greene’s wife, Susie Greene (Susie Essman) completes the Jewish circle much in the way Seinfeld was surrounded by Jewish archetypes in non-Jewish code. 534 Wright’s notion of David’s paradoxical relationship to Jewishness itself reflects the hybrid nature of the show. Curb Your Enthusiasm is an extension of the humor structure of Seinfeld, while also addressing Seinfeld within its diegesis. It is both a classic situation comedy while at the same time it formally inverts the sitcom aesthetics that had been settled since I Love Lucy in the early 1950s. One way the show counterpoints David’s paradoxical tension that Wright describes is in the role of Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), Larry’s patient, quiet, Shiksa wife. Cheryl and Susie operate as opposites on the Christian/Jewish spectrum, each a cliché of the form. Susie’s loud, castrating J.A.P. loathes Larry, while Cheryl exhibits unending patience with his many neurotic shortcomings. It is in the articulation of the female 533 Benjamin Wright, “’Why Would You do That, Larry?’ Identity Formation and Humor in Curb Your Enthusiasm” The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2011. 675 534 Hoberman and Shandler, Entertaining America, 2003, 251. 325 Other that David’s oscillation is reflected. Cheryl’s Christian family also plays into this configuration. Larry cannot find acceptance in either Church or Synagogue. Whether accidentally eating the Nativity Scene cookies, gagging on a pubic hair after interrupting a Passion Play, or having a splash of his urine land of a Jesus portrait in a bathroom, Larry’s assault on Christian culture is hardly subtle. Yet whether pretending to be orthodox to convince a Jewish doctor to help Richard Lewis, or insulting a Holocaust survivor, Jewish culture doesn’t receive any respect either. Cheryl’s tolerance for Larry as he tramples on Christian and Jewish culture equally suggests an uneasy truce between the Jewish schlemiel and Christian Shiksa goddess, an extension of the ambiguous ending of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967). Schlemiel and Shiksa have made peace with each other. But they have not transgressed. Curb best exemplifies both the pinnacle of the Christian-Jewish sitcom framework, as well as its most distilled iteration, in the 1990s and early 2000s sitcom cycle. In 2007, the sixth season of the show, Cheryl decides to divorce Larry. This represented an important shift. In a sense, the divorce between Cheryl and Larry was the end of an era. This breakup held a thematic parallel to the breakup of Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). The divorce of Cheryl and Larry came at the tail end of the wave of mid 1990s Christian-Jewish sitcoms. By 2007, Will and Grace, Mad About You, The Nanny, and Dharma and Greg had all gone off the air. By breaking up Larry and Cheryl, Curb marked a thematic end-point, the conclusion of the Seinfeld cycle. The televisual trope of the patient Christian in love with neurotic Jew had reached creative exhaustion. David’s subsequent relationship with Loretta Black (Vivica 326 A. Fox), followed by his season-long attempt to win Cheryl back by offering her a role on Seinfeld in season eight, gave the breakup a self-reflective and multi-racial context. David’s eventual journey to New York to begin dating in season nine marked the cyclical return to the genre’s roots in urban New York Jewish ethnicity. Curb’s unmooring of the formula of Christian-Jewish coupling marked its spiritual end. However, before the breakup, a number of notable and original Christian-Jewish coupling narratives took place in the mid 2000s. Many of these occurred outside of the traditional sitcom format. Perhaps the most notable example was seen on the long running family show 7 th Heaven (1996-2007). 7 th Heaven was one of the few overtly Christian shows on television. Set in small town America, the show was an hour long comedic drama about Reverend Eric Camden (Stephen Collins), a minister, his stay-at- home homemaker wife Annie (Catherine Hicks), and their seven cute and precocious children. The show’s weekly life lessons were grounded in a wholesome and un-ironic framework that echoed 1950s-era Ozzie and Harriet television. Each episode addressed a real world topic in which moral choices challenged the family, but through the support of family, and the community, things would work out. However, season six introduced a love story in which their oldest son, Matt Camden (Barry Watson) becomes engaged to a Jewish girl, Sarah Glass. Sarah’s father is Rabbi Glass, played by Anything But Love and Curb Your Enthusiasm veteran comedian Richard Lewis. Much of season six deals with the tension of this engagement. Rabbi Glass and Reverend Camden agree to co- officiate the wedding, but in the next-to-last episode of the season, Eric announces to his father that he’s converting to Judaism for the wedding. The two-part season finale was 327 called “Holy War,” but in context of the show’s nostalgic hue, the plot line actually produces the same generational conflicts seen from The Jazz Singer to Dirty Dancing. Reverend Camden eventually comes to terms with his son’s choice, and the acceptance not only of intermarriage, but of conversion, restores the cohesive Christian family unit in a distinct 21st century context. The introduction of a Jewish challenge to the previously Christian world of 7 th Heaven could be read as simply a plot point contrivance to create tension as the series passed two hundred episodes. But its viability as a plot point suggests how Christian- Jewish configurations continued in the 21st century. Similarly on The O.C. (2003-2007), half-Jewishness was introduced in the character of Seth Cohen (Adam Brody), the only child of a Jewish father, Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher), and Christian mother, Kristen Cohen (Kelly Rowan). In arguably the show’s most famous episode, “The Best Chrismukkah Ever” (12/3/2003), the hyper-verbal Seth explains how he gets around the conflicting faiths of his parents by merging Christmas and Hannukah into one holiday. Contrast this textual address with the Festivus codes of the Costanza family on Seinfeld, and the shift in televisual address of Jewish alterity a decade later is notable. But perhaps no television show of the period demonstrated the liberating signification of Christian-Jewish coupling narratives like the journey of Charlotte York (Kristen Davis) on HBO’s Sex and the City (1998-2004), and in the films Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010). Charlotte’s conservative Connecticut upbringing and Episcopalian background informed her character’s dream for a perfect upper-class Christian wedding for much of the first three seasons (1998-2002). 328 Charlotte’s idealized romantic wedding eventually comes true in the form of Charlotte’s first husband, the rich, WASP, Trey MacDougal (Kyle MacLachlan). Yet the marriage is quickly shown to be both loveless and sexless, as the repressed Trey turns into a relentless disappointment for Charlotte. After an inability to conceive, the couple eventually divorce. In season six, Charlotte falls in love with her divorce lawyer, Harry Goldenblatt (Evan Handler). Harry is depicted as the sweaty, hairy, loud, Jewish antithesis of Trey. Yet it is Harry who is revealed to be Charlotte’s real prince, and the true fairytale structure comes true for Charlotte not with the upper-class WASP but with the hairy, but bald, bestial Jewish male. Charlotte converts to Judaism, and the series finale of the show reveals they are adopting a child from China. The Christian-Jewish coupling is further validated in the 2008 film, when it is revealed that Charlotte was finally able to conceive a child with Harry. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, the cycle of Jewish-Christian relationship comedies began to run out. Single comedies such as How I Met Your Mother (2005- present) and workplace comedies such as The Office (2005-present), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present), and Parks and Recreation (2009-present) replaced the coupling comedy. The Big Bang Theory (2007-present) is an exception, featuring the nerdy Jewish character of Harold Walowitz (Simon Helberg), an aerospace engineer who lives at home with his dominating Jewish mother and is engaged to a Polish-Catholic Bernadette Rosenkowski (Melissa Rauch). Harold’s over-the-top and hyper-sexualized Jewish stereotype echoes the 1970s schlemiel persona, and his lust for the Polish- Catholic Bernadette further cements the nostalgic recall of the character. But Harold is 329 an exception. The resurgence of Christian-Jewish coupling narratives as the basis for relationship comedy on American sitcoms had, by 2007, mostly wound down. After the near uniform and retrograde Christonormative family structures of 1980s television, what suddenly made these Christian-Jewish coupling narratives so popular in the 1990s? Vincent Brook argues that the massive success of the openly Jewish Jerry Seinfeld’s eponymous show certainly reminded studios of the profitability of tapping into the persona of the stand-up comedian. 535 But a cycle of nostalgic recall also must be considered. The 1980s had been steeped in nostalgia for the “innocence” of the 1950s. This was perhaps best exemplified by Robert Zemeckis’s time-traveling Back to the Future, in 1985; a film that contrasted dingy mid 1980s reality with idealized mid 1950s hopefulness. The 1990s contained a different form of cyclical reuse. With a resurgent economy, the end of the Gulf War, and 1980s conservatism having retreated to the political fringe, the Clinton years faced little social barriers. Ethnic and gay visibility reached unprecedented levels of acceptance. This freedom revived a longing for the 1967-1980 period when the libidinal Jewish schlemiel desiring the Shiksa had defined youth culture rebellion and generational transformation within a far more politically charged environment. Paul Buchman on Mad About You performed Woody Allen shtick to his wife Jamie (Helen Hunt) as a form of tribute to the Woody-Diane banter of the 1970s. The Nanny’s title sequence evoked late 1960s magicoms. The central reversal of the configuration of the 1967-1980 period of Christian-Jewish comedy was one of gender. 535 Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here, 74. 330 The 1990s configuration more often than not took the form of Jewish females desiring Christian males. The sexual boldness of Fran Fine, Dharma Finkelstein, Grace Adler, inverted the male-chasing-female patriarchy that had privileged so many male Jews of the late 1960s and early 1970s. If the object of beauty was the Aryan Christian female in the “Portnoy” years, the object of beauty in the 1990s was the Aryan Christian male of the Reagan years. Even if he was effete, gay, repressed, or shy, these usually sexless Christian men occupied the space of desire. But they also allowed the Jewish female to find an agency that, outside of Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler, had rarely appeared before. JEWISH PIE Beginning in 1998, and following the increasing visibility of Christian-Jewish sitcoms, Hollywood film also began to feature explicitly Jewish characters, played by Jewish actors, in numbers not seen since the mid 1970s. 536 This film cycle followed the quick rise of a number of young Jewish actors and comedians such as Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler. Stiller and Sandler had both made their breakthroughs on television, and brought with them a new, self-aware Jewish sensibility. Sandler’s iconic Hannukah Song, performed on Saturday Night Live (1975-present) in 1995 had made light of “hidden” Jewish entertainers trying to hide in plain sight. But it also announced 536 Sidney Lumet’s A Stranger Among Us, in 1992, could arguably be the first film to hint at this cycle. The film starred Melanie Griffith as Emily Eden, a vice cop investigating a murder in the Brooklyn Hassidic community. The Biblical implications of the obviously named Eden imply an “original sin” formulation represented by the proverbial Shiksa. Eden ends up falling in love with a rising Hassidic scholar, Arial (Eric Thal). The tale of forbidden lust for the exotic Jewish male, mixed with a murder-mystery potboiler plot, was met with neither box office success nor critical praise In noting obvious parallels to the film Witness (1985), Variety’s Todd McCarthy sarcastically titled it “Vitness,” Todd McCarthy, “A Stranger Among Us,” Variety, May 14, 1992. 331 Sandler’s own lack of fear of being known as an “out” Jewish comedian. Ben Stiller’s directorial debut, Reality Bites (1994) contained a scene with Stiller confessing on a date that he was a “non-practicing Jew.” 537 Howard Stern, the enormously popular radio personality, reached a national audience in the mid 1990s when his daily radio show was broadcast on E Entertainment Television. Stern made his Jewishness, and his married sexual frustration, central to his daily self-deprecating comedy routines. 538 In 1997, the engagement between the Jewish magician, David Copperfield, and German supermodel Claudia Schiffer was deemed so unbelievable that the French gossip magazine Paris Match claimed it was an elaborate hoax to boost Ms. Schiffer’s career. 539 Copperfield and Schiffer successfully sued for libel. Jewish pride, the desire for Jews to “out” themselves, became central to the American media landscape of the mid 1990s. The easiest answer as to why this change occurred is that Jewish “pride” routinely follows liberal political climates. The generational shift from Reagan’s 1950s iconography to Clinton’s 1960s Baby Boomer culture was unmistakable. As previous decades had shown, liberal political periods privileged Jews-as-Jews, while conservative periods drove Jews into coded status. But this may be too simplistic a reading. For most of the 1990s, Hollywood feature films remained located in an idealized, abstract romantic configuration that had carried over from the 1980s. Romantic features such as Pretty Woman (1990), Ghost (1990), and Titanic (1997) offered up white, Christian, fully Christonormative fairytales of longing, melodrama, and desire. It was on television, in 537 Reality Bites (Stiller, 1994) screenplay by Helen Childress 538 Stern even sang his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah to a large Los Angeles press corps in 1997 after being asked if he was really Jewish. 539 “Fairytale romance that began with a cunning illusion, “The Independent, United Kingdom, July 11, 1997. 332 sitcoms and on Saturday Night Live, that had first unleashed the army of neurotic and libidinal Jews. As James Cameron’s Titanic broke box office records, Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller were emerging as a new form of comic masculinity in direct counterpoint to Leonardo DiCaprio’s heroic self-sacrifice as Jack Dawson. The two films that best exemplified the mobilization of Jewish perversion as a new comic sensibility in the late 1990s were There’s Something About Mary (1998) and American Pie (1999). As Geoff King notes, the gross-out comedy traces to the late 1960s period of Hollywood censorship upheaval and rise of explicit imagery. 540 These late 1990s gross-out films contained an inherent nostalgia for the ability of comedy to disrupt and upset the boundaries of societal taste. There’s Something About Mary was the first major comedy to launch this “gross-out” cycle by using body fluids, politically incorrect humor, and explicit nudity, as a direct comedic assault on romantic comedy convention. At the same time, the film integrated these visual gags into a sunny, seemingly innocent, romantic love story. There’s Something About Mary became the breakout performance for actor Ben Stiller in the role of Ted Stroehmann. Stiller, the child of 1960s-era Irish-Jewish comedy team Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, would become one of the most important Jewish performers of the period in terms of signifying a recall of the star personas of the 1960s- era schlemiel heyday. Stiller’s performance as Ted, a former high school geek with a stalker-like obsession with Mary (Cameron Diaz) reintroduced the libidinal Jewish schlemiel persona back into the romantic comedy, only with a graphic twist. Ted’s 540 Geoff King, Film Comedy (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2002), 72-75. 333 sexual desire for Mary informs the central “gross-out” set pieces of the film. The first major comic set piece features the high-school aged Ted, having convinced Mary to go with him to the prom, accidentally getting his genitalia caught in his zipper. Mary, along with her parents, enters the bathroom to witness the accident. Ted’s humiliation is eventually compounded when the medical team arrives and he is wheeled out on a gurney for the world to see. From an obvious Freudian perspective, the scene can be read as castration anxiety. But it also contains a comedic circumcision metaphor, one that introduces the specificity of the Jewish schlemiel to the comedic formulation. The thwarted attempts for the Jewish schlemiel to acquire the blonde dream-girl contextualize the film in a distinct late 1960s Portnoy configuration. But the graphic display of Ted’s genitalia caught in his zipper suggests a comic sensibility that is distinctly contemporary. Later in the film, a comic sequence builds to produce perhaps the most iconic imagery of the film. In a hotel room in Miami, Ted decides to masturbate before his date with Mary. The film not only shows Ted masturbating through a lingering close-up on his facial reaction, played for laughs, but also his reaching of orgasm. Ben Stiller’s contorted face is intercut with Mary arriving for the date. Mary arrives at the moment of Ted’s orgasm, and as Ted quickly attempts to gather himself, he realizes he’s lost track of his (unseen) semen. When Ted opens the door for Mary, the semen, heretofore unseen in the film, is revealed to be clinging to Ted’s ear. The delayed reveal, just as with Ted’s zipper-stuck genitalia, pays off only when Mary is watching. In other words, the audience does not see the graphic reveal until Mary does first. Sexual fluid and genitals mark the humiliation of the romantic desires Ted has for Mary, and that frustration pays 334 off to the audience only when humiliation for Ted has been achieved. The scene inverts expectations, however, when, rather than being repulsed, Mary mistakes Ted’s semen for hair gel and grabs it. The subsequent result for Mary’s hair produced the iconic “sticky- hair” image that has come to define the film’s comic sensibility. From castration to masturbation, Ted’s neurotic tendencies are performed by Ben Stiller as next-generation Woody Allen. It is neurosis and obsession channeled in the sexual desire for the Christian female. The comedic framework of the spasmodic and libidinal Jewish male seeking the Shiksa Goddess echoes back to the 1960s. But the graphic nature of the comedy is entirely new. Mary, the idealized Christian muse, is a sports-loving, beer drinking guy’s girl. Over the course of the film, Mary acquires a number of stalkers, expanding the notion of Jewish specificity into a number of queered masculine configurations. In the final scene, it is revealed that Mary’s long-lost love, “Brett,” is actually the hyper-masculine football quarterback Brett Favre, playing himself. Ted’s realization that he can never compete with Brett Favre signifies Ted’s final acceptance of his own status as an incomplete (castrated) Jewish male. Ted’s final gesture to Mary is selfless, as he brings Brett Favre back to her and clears up the confusion of their breakup. In an echo of the 1967-1980 period, Mary then rejects the conventional alpha male and instead chooses the Jewish alternative, picking the pathetically sobbing Ted over the Christonormative masculine ideal that is Brett Favre. There’s Something About Mary revived the construction of an erotic, alternative, 1960s-era Jewish schlemiel masculinity, but in the new framework of the gross-out comedy. It would be followed, a year later, by another film with the same sensibility, 335 American Pie (1999). A classically structured R-Rated virgin comedy that recalled the subgenre’s heyday in the early 1980s, American Pie’s horny virginal protagonist was the hyper-sexualized schlemiel, Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs). However, unlike the uncomprehending parents of the 1960s youth, American Pie presents a next-generation twist. Jim’s Father (Eugene Levy), also a hyper-sexual and perverted Jewish schlemiel of the 1960s generation, responds to Jim’s sexual antics not with outrage, but with encouragement. Jim’s Father buys Jim a number of porn magazines and makes frequent attempts to discuss sex with him. As with There’s Something About Mary, the spin on 1960s archetypes is done through inverting generational expectations. American Pie’s most famous iconic image is similar to the semen-crusted hair of There’s Something About Mary. On the poster art, the image of a misshapen apple pie hints at the film’s most outrageous set piece, the scene when Jim attempts to have sex with an apple pie. The perverted Jewish Jim literally tries to fuck the iconography of America. The scene ends when even Jim’s father is shocked to discover the lengths Jim will go to express himself sexually. The sexual allusions of American Pie are a next- generation, self aware reference to The Graduate (1967). Perversion has shifted from generational desire (Mrs. Robinson) to inanimate food product (apple pie). Just as for Ted’s ear-hanging sperm in There’s Something About Mary, Jim’s masturbation is ultimately interrupted, producing a “gross out” comedic moment built around hapless libidinal Jewish male’s sexual inadequacies. The ideological twist of both There’s Something About Mary and American Pie lies in the notion of universal perversion. As Jim’s sexual escapades progress, Jim begins 336 to discover much of the world is as perverted, if not more so, than he is. This culminates in the sex scene Jim experiences with the Swedish exchange student, Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth). The scene begins with Jim discovers Nadia likes to look at the pornographic magazines his father gave him. The normative gender roles continue to invert as Nadia demands that Jim dance for her and perform a slow strip tease. Jim again experiences coitus interruptus when he discovers the entire experience is being broadcast, live, on the internet. In the finale of the film, when all four protagonists of the film lose their virginity, Jim discovers that his nerdy, flute playing, band-camp obsessed classmate, Michelle Flaherty (Alyson Hannigan) is as “perverted” as he is. Michelle’s announcement that she uses her flute to masturbate is the cue that Jim has found a viable sex partner. The scene concludes with Michelle jumping on top of Jim, smacking him in the face, and demanding, “what’s my name, bitch?” Jewish sexual alterity had a claim of ethnic distinction in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s, male Jewish sexuality had become universalized under the explicit comedic nature of body fluids. The characters of Ted and Jim reintroduced the feminized, Jewish schlemiel as a trope for the late 1990s R-rated sex comedy. Their relentless desire for the “Shiksa,” either in the form of the idealized Mary or Swedish Inga, manifested Jewish perversion visually as semen crusted hair and sexed apple pies. As they had in the late 1960s, Jewish men signified a sexually transgressive assault on the boundaries of taste. Even in the next-generation configuration of Ted and Jim, Jewish men remained firmly focused on the idealized and imagined Teutonic Christian female. Jewish women, as for the horny Jewish schlemiel comedies of the 1960s, remained nearly entirely absent. 337 Two years later, Jason Biggs would star in Saving Silverman (2001), another film that would reintroduce the Jewish schlemiel counterpointed by an idealized Christian female beauty. As the passive, nerdy, Darren Silverman, Biggs has his life taken over after entering a relationship with a beautiful but domineering J.A.P. stereotype, Judith (Amanda Peet). Darren’s best friends, J.D. (Jack Black) and Wayne (Steve Zahn) attempt to break up his relationship with Judith by reintroducing him to his true love from high school, the Catholic girl Sandy (Amanda Detmer). Complicating the plot, Sandy isn’t just a Catholic girl, she is about to take her vows as a Nun. The plot resolves when Darren leaves Judith, and Sandy and Darren come together when Sandy leaves the church for him. Saving Silverman is perhaps the least subtle film of the period in terms of its critique of Jewish-Jewish coupling and its championing of Jewish-Christian romance. As if the title’s implication of “saving” Silverman didn’t make the religious themes clear enough, Judith’s name, with its phonetic “Jew” syllable, does. “Saving” Silverman requires him to leave the J.A.P. and marry the blonde-haired, blue eyed Nun, Sandy. Biggs would complete his “Jewish trilogy” in 2003’s Anything Else for director Woody Allen himself. Biggs’s Jerry Falk, a hapless comedy writer, becomes sexually obsessed with Amanda Chase (Christina Ricci). 541 Yet Biggs is a notable outlier of the period in that he wasn’t Jewish, but Italian. Yet Jewish identity was so associated with Biggs that on his Twitter account in 2012 he described himself simply as “The Jewiest looking non- Jew.” 542 Biggs’s recurring roles as Jewish schlemiels suggested that Jewish-Italian 541 Allen himself co-starred in the film as David Dobel, a paranoid Jew convinced anti-Semitism was taking over the world. 542 Written on Biggs’s official Twitter account @biggsjason as of 4/20/12 338 interchangeability continued, just as Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni had once played Italian gangsters in the 1930s. Numerous other films of the period presented Christian-Jewish coupling as scandalous and transgressive, even ones that were not a part of the “gross-out” trend. In Barry Levinson’s semi-autobiographical Liberty Heights (1999), set in Baltimore in the 1950s, two Jewish brothers, played by Adrian Brody and Ben Foster, date non-Jewish women, a blonde WASP dream-girl (Carolyn Murphy) and a black girl (Rebekah Johnson), respectively. This scandalizes their religious parents. Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), an independent film co-written and starring the Jewish Jennifer Westfeldt in the titular role, was more demure in terms of gross-out imagery. But again, Jewishness is foregrounded, as the film contains numerous textual references to Jessica’s Jewish background, interactions with her Grandma Esther (Esther Wurmfeld), her rabbi (Hillel Friedman), and even has a scene set at Stein’s family Seder. The transgressive barrier Kissing Jessica Stein locates is by shifting the Christian-Jewish coupling into a gay formulation. The formerly straight Jessica begins a relationship with the non-Jewish Helen Cooper (Heather Juergensen), a transgression both cultural and gendered. The fact that Stein is a Jewish female, and not the libidinal Jewish schlemiel, suggests that the lesbian configuration was far more palatable than its equivalent gay love story might have been. 543 Stein ultimately determines that she’s not gay, however, and in the film’s conclusion, another, far more subtle, transgression is hinted at. Jessica Stein’s Jewish 543 The closest parallel would be seen a few years later in Adam Sandler and Kevin James pretending to be a gay couple in Chuck and Larry, although the fact they maintain their heterosexual bonafides throughout the film suggest the different cultural barriers between gay and lesbian formulations. 339 coworker, Josh Meyers (Scott Cohen), finally asks her out. The film concludes by hinting that the two will eventually fall in love and be together. Even in a tale of lesbianism, it is the Jewish-Jewish coupling that remains the real specter of transgression. The broad hip-hop parodying romantic comedy, Marci X, crossed the racial divide in 2003. Directed by 1960s schlemiel icon and film “Portnoy,” Richard Benjamin, and written by Paul Rudnick, Marci X featured Lisa Kudrow as J.A.P. stereotype Marcy Feld, the inheritor of a struggling hip-hop record label. Marcy’s clueless entrance into black culture allows the film to play across a broad range of racial and ethnic stereotypes. The plot leads Marcy into a love story scenario with African-American rapper Dr. S (Damon Wayans). The title’s reference to Malcolm X racialized the contested identity of Marcy’s Jewish identity and showed yet another configuration of Jewish-Christian transgression aligning with cultural satire. Perhaps the most famous film of the period to foreground the Christian-Jewish coupling was Meet the Parents (2000). Another film featuring perhaps the most famous Jewish performer of the period, Ben Stiller, the film self-consciously hits all the tropes of the Jewish-Christian romantic comedy. Stiller’s character’s name, Greg “Gaylord” Focker, textually satirizes the notion of Jews as both queered and highly sexual. Greg’s job as a nurse feminizes him in the eyes of his fiancée Pam’s (Teri Polo) WASP family that he spends the weekend trying to impress. Greg’s Jewish outsider status in Pam’s family is counterpointed by the hyper-confident WASP Kevin (Owen Wilson). Kevin is an enormously rich, incredibly relaxed and confident stock broker who was once engaged to Pam. Pam, the classic blonde Shiksa, becomes the contested object in which 340 archetypes collide. Greg’s Jewish-outsider status must not only overcome the challenge of the highly masculine, blonde Kevin, but also Pam’s overprotective and implied anti- Semitic father, Jack Byrnes (Robert DeNiro). Jewish jokes are explicit and prevalent throughout the film. Upon learning that Jack is a florist, Greg brings Jack a “Jerusalem tulip,” a flower so rare it hasn’t bloomed yet. Jack’s confusion by the absent flower, as well as the fact it is from Jerusalem, plays up Greg’s Jewish lack. When asked to say Grace by Jack before dinner, Greg ends up improvising lyrics from “Day By Day,” a song from the musical, Godspell. When Greg asks Kevin what inspired him to start carving in wood, Kevin’s response is that he was inspired by the carpentry of “Jesus Christ.” Even the famous interrogation scene, when Jack hooks Greg up to an ancient polygraph, mines its comedy by hinting at Spanish Inquisition Jewish trauma. In the four year period after Meet the Parents, Christian-Jewish coupling expanded in a number of directions. In Garden State (2004), writer-director-star Zach Braff flips the family structures of both his Jewish character, Andrew Largeman, and his Christian love interest, Sam (Natalie Portman). It is the Christian Sam’s family that is coded as stereotypically Jewish. They are neurotic, quirky, with numerous pets and an adopted African exchange student living with them, Titembay (Ato Essandoh). Meanwhile, Andrew’s Jewish father is played by the non-Jewish actor, Ian Holm, and lives in a state of intense repression and isolation. Sam is played by the Jewish actress, Natalie Portman, which only further served to scramble the signifiers. 341 Portman was well known in the American popular press not only as Jewish, but also for having lived in Israel and able to speak fluent in Hebrew. Portman’s “out” Jewish identity brings up the problematic absence of Jewish representations in cinema of this period. Other than a role as a Hasidic bride in a short film as part of the episodic New York, I Love You (2009), Portman did not play “out” Jewish characters the way male stars of the period were. In a 2010 interview, Portman stated that “"I've always tried to stay away from playing Jews… I get like 20 Holocaust scripts a month, but I hate the genre." 544 A year later, the Jewish actress Rachel Weisz offered a similar perspective in an interview as to why she never played explicit Jewish characters: “(W)e're Jewish but we can get away with just being exotic. We're kind of Jews in disguise. Those cultural stereotypes about the Jew with the big hooky nose and the fleshy face rub off on you. In some way acting is prostitution, and Hollywood Jews don't want their own women to participate. Also, there's an element of Portnoy's Complaint — they all fancy Aryan blondes.” 545 Weisz states what Portman hints at. Even in our contemporary historical moment, Jewish women in Hollywood remain in an abstract, “exotic” status. Weisz also suggests that Jewish creative executives in Hollywood continue the 1960s Portnoy-era obsession with Shiksas. Both Weisz and Portman offer some insight into why, in the 2010s, overt Jewish women remain rare, while Jewish men find their schlemiel status both culturally celebrated, and validated in the eyes of the Shiksa love interest. This brings up an important question. Why was it television, and not film, that Christian-Jewish couplings of the 1990s first appeared? And why was it on television 544 “Natalie Portman, The Sexy Funny Side of a Hollywood Enigma,” Elle UK, February 2010. 545 Rachel Weisz interviewed by Emma Frost for Index Magazine, 2001. Online only: <http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rachel_weisz.shtml> 342 that the non-Barbra Jewish female also reemerged? One possibility is that the rise of the multiplex and teenage markets had shifted Hollywood cinema into the very same all- demographics broadcasting framework that had prevented 1960s-era television from taking more chances. The rise of televisual narrowcasting, what Joseph Turow called the “breaking up of America,” may have liberated television in ways that the far more expensive film industry had not been able to. 546 Television’s need to find a new “unruly Female” in the Lucy tradition, while also tying sitcoms to the emerging multicultural perspectives of the 1990s, found a perfect representation for both ideas: The unruly Jewish female. There was another potential factor for the rise of Jewish representations in the 1990s. The economic boom of the late 1990s, combined with the liberal philosophy towards sexuality, required films to create barriers to coupling. While the libidinal schlemiel had defined counterculture sexuality for the hippie generation, the need for counterculture representation no longer existed. Instead, the libidinal Jew was introduced as part of a wave of “gross-out” comedies. Jewish neuroticism became the perfect counterpoint to the new comedy style, an explicit visual display of body fluids and graphic sexual acts. Neurotic Jewish self-destructiveness was an easy trope for comic Jewish performers to utilize. But another explanation is also possible. With increasing anxieties about the millennium and subsequent shock of the events of 9/11, the Christian- Jewish coupling narrative became informed by nostalgia. The 1967-1980 period had resurrected the bawdy Jewish vaudevillian personalities, Ghetto Love Stories, and 546 Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 343 Borscht Belt entertainers of the 1920s, but the ribald sexuality of the “Portnoy” era was entirely new. By the late 1990s, an additional layer of nostalgia now extended the formula. The daring comic sexual boldness of the second wave of Jewish comedians such as Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand had given way to a third wave of highly self- aware, often explicitly graphic, and cinematically self-reflexive Christian-Jewish comedy pairings. EROTIC HOLOCAUST Among the second-wave Jewish-Christian cycle from 1967-1980, there were a marked lack of Holocaust narratives. The reason for this may seem obvious. Theodor Adorno famously said that to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. 547 While Adorno himself repeatedly challenged the misunderstandings of this quote in the wake of his seeming prohibition on representations of art after the Holocaust, this perspective was the dominant one for decades. 548 Other than Resnais’s poetic Night and Fog (1955), the flashbacks in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker (1965), and, perhaps the 1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, explicit imagery of concentration camps were nearly totally absent in postwar Western culture. Jerry Lewis’s legendary attempt at making a film about the tragedy of the Holocaust, The Day The Clown Cried (1972), had been deemed offensive for even attempting a story of Holocaust victimization. Lewis never released it and has prevented any copies from being shown. 549 Jeffrey Shandler notes that the period between the Eichmann trial in 1961 and the airing of Holocaust in 1978 did feature a 547 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, 1983. (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1983), 34. 548 Yvonne Kyriakides, “‘Art After Auschwitz is Barbaric’: Cultural Ideology of Silence Through the Politics of Representation”, Media, Culture, & Society, Vol. 27(3), (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2005), 441-450. 549 Rumor has it that there is only one print of the film, and Lewis keeps it locked in his vault. 344 number of documentaries and episodic narratives that told stories about the Nazi Party and, at least thematically, the subject of the Holocaust. 550 But actual representations of the Holocaust itself were practically nonexistent. This changed in 1978 with the premiere of the “event” miniseries, Holocaust, on NBC. Numerous Holocaust-centered dramatic films followed, including Sophie’s Choice (1982), Enemies: A Love Story (1989), Europa Europa (1991), Schindler’s List (1993), Don’t Touch My Holocaust (1994), Life is Beautiful (1997), The Pianist (2002), and Black Book (2006), to name some of the major texts. Each of these films takes very different approaches to the material. Yet each of these films also employs within its narrative the familiar trope of Christian-Jewish coupling. In attempting to represent what seems beyond the comprehension of representation, the sharing of the traumatic event through the mitigation of the erotic coupling became a central method of universalization. Before Holocaust changed the landscape of representation in 1978, a small number of Hollywood films had grappled with the Holocaust in code. One such example is Roman Polanski’s little seen, and critically ignored, The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967). 551 Polanski’s history as a young Holocaust survivor in Europe who lost his parents at Auschwitz, only to subsequently be adopted by Catholics, is a well known part of his biography. Yet most auteur readings of Polanski’s oeuvre conclude that while Holocaust trauma may inform the themes of his body of work, his first explicit Holocaust film was in 2003’s The Pianist. Not so. The 550 Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 133-135. 551 The original title for this film was Dance of the Vampires, but was changed by MGM, much to Polanski’s dismay. 345 opening sequence of The Fearless Vampire Killers shows how Polanski first engaged the Holocaust not as horror, but as parody. In his first significant acting role, Polanski cast himself in the film as Alfred, the young assistant to the Einstein-like scientist, Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran). The opening sequence depicts the two figures riding on a horse-drawn sleigh through an unknown European winter night. Abronsius and Alfred are beset upon by ravenous dogs that nearly pull Albert from the sled. Polanksi invokes not only Einstein in the visage of Professor Abronsius’s wild white hair and mustache, but also the Holocaust-era use of dogs to hunt fleeing Jews. The two are rescued by a local Jewish family living in shtetl- like isolation. This leads Alfred to meet the young, beautiful chambermaid, Sarah Shagal, played by Polanski’s real-life wife, Sharon Tate. Tate’s classic “Shiksa” beauty gives her role as a humble Jewish servant a parodic quality, just as Polanski, as a short Jewish coward, both fearful and afraid, is the antithesis of the vampire-slaying hero of classic literature. Film historian Darragh O’Donoghue argues, via Virginia Wexman, that Polanski’s first foray into period filmmaking was also the young filmmaker’s first attempt to engage, and satirize Jewish themes. When Sarah’s father, Yoine Shagal (Alfie Bass) , is turned into a bloodsucking vampire, he is still not allowed to sleep with the other vampires, who are blonde and Nordic looking. Instead, Yoine is banished to the outhouse to sleep with animals. 552 In European tradition, Jewish cohabitation with 552 Darragh O’Donoghue, “Dances of the Vampires / The Fearless Vampire Killers,” Senses of Cinema, No. 46. (May 16, 2008). 346 “Shiksas” was not allowed. Even a Vampiric gothic Europe maintains eugenics hierarchies. Polanski’s seduction of Sharon Tate, both in the film and in real life, also informed the film’s story of generational break. Polanski, one of the first heralded artists of the European Avant-Garde filmmakers of the early 1960s to cross over to Hollywood, placed himself into the narrative, a transformative function from director to actor in the realm of Christian-Jewish coupling. Chagal, the older Jewish generation, is turned into a vampire and then cast out as an animal. Chagal, like Dreyfus, is banished. But Sarah, the non-Jewish-actress playing a Jew, represented the same progressive youth culture scrambling of signifiers that Hoffman and Ross had performed that same year in Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. Together, Polanski and Tate perform the same theatrical act of reinvention using the codes of gothic literature that Benjamin Disraeli and Mary Anne Lewis had performed together in 1840s England. The following year, Polanski would invert the Mother Mary conception narrative itself in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Taking another exemplar of Aryan beauty in the form of the young and wide eyed Mia Farrow, Polanski cast the Italian actor and indie director John Cassavetes as his ethnic corruptive force, Guy Woodhouse. Cassavetes was not Jewish, but his urban, New York persona played in distinct counterpoint to Farrow’s wide-eyed middle-American innocence. Cassavetes, like Polanski, was also a celebrated filmmaker who had emerged from the urban avant-garde of New York in the 1950s. As with Polanski in The Fearless Vampire Killers, the polysemy of the director-as-actor informs Cassavetes’s performance as Guy. The Woodhouses’s nebbishy neighbors, 347 Minnie (Ruth Gordon) and Roman Castavet (Sidney Blackmer) are positioned as loud, pushy, “Jewish” New Yorkers, preying on Rosemary’s politeness and acquiescence. Rosemary’s unwitting victimization by the seemingly friendly urban milieu positions an ethnic New York hiding a deviant, violent anti-Christian sexuality underneath its pushy but benign exterior. Both The Fearless Vampire Killers and Rosemary’s Baby can be read as offering a deft critique of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the context of the legacy of the Holocaust. Jewish Vampires played by Christian actors preying on Christian heroes played by Jewish actor/directors fractured the linear hierarchies of European gothic monstrosity. As with Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, the non-Jewish Jew, and Proust’s half-Jewish Charles Swann, Polanski produced fractured and modernist understandings of Jewish identity operating in a Christonormative framework. The coven of neurotic pseudo-Jews praying on the politeness of a young, all-American Christian to produce the anti-Christ directly mocked the Blood Libel. In both films, representations of sexuality were used to engage, and subvert, normative historical narratives. Both films positioned a normative Aryan female beauty (Tate and Farrow) as the corporeal object. The female body became the contested site between Gothic Horror nativism and modernist Jewish liberation. Alfred’s ineffectiveness at stopping the Vampire hoard and Guy Woodhouse’s willingness to pimp out his wife to Satan both mocked notions of sexual deviancy. In both cases, the ethnic male unleashed the carnal sexuality of the Christian female that Christian Victorianism 348 (and the films of D.W. Griffith) had fought so hard to contain. 553 Both films were examples of Polanski using Jewish-Christian coupling as metaphor for the youth-culture revolution of the Hollywood avant-garde, but also as coded reflections on post-Holocaust European trauma. Rosemary’s Baby actress Ruth Gordon would go on to play the titular Maude, a Holocaust survivor, three years later in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971). Maude’s Jewish identity is coded but present throughout the film. Maude speaks about a period when she broke into pet shops to liberate canaries, but then claims the idea was “ahead of its time” because “the world still dearly loves a cage.” 554 Maude lives in a railroad box car, a cooption of the signifiers of the Holocaust as part of her acts of active pro-life reclamation. Maude also rejects of the notion of sending flowers to a funeral, echoing the Jewish prohibition on flowers at a funeral. In a moment of confession, Maude tells her twenty-year-old lover, Harold (Bud Cort), about her youth in Europe as part of an unnamed revolution that led to the death of her first husband. In contrast with the sheltered, repressed, WASP aristocrat, Harold, Maude has witnessed real historical trauma. Harold’s theatrical death performances, meant to disturb his emasculating mother, are suddenly recast in stark relief to the real witness. Halfway through the film’s May-December love affair, Harold turns over Maude’s arm to discover she has the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor. The usually verbose Maude pulls her arm away and, for the first time in the film, makes no direct mention of 553 The pregnant Sharon Tate’s subsequent murder at the hands of Charles Manson’s gang in 1969 brought a horrifyingly ironic and macabre real-world response. Polanski’s subsequent trial for the alleged raping of a thirteen year old girl in 1973 seemed to cast Polanski as living out the predatorial Jewish stereotype of parasitic deviancy he’d parodied in 1967. 554 Hal Ashby, director, Harold and Maude, 1971. 349 what Harold has seen. Instead, Maude stares at a flock of seagulls in the distance over the water and, after a pause, references Alfred Dreyfus: “Dreyfus once wrote from Devil's Island that he would see the most glorious birds. Many years later in Brittany he realized they had only been seagulls. For me they will always be glorious birds.” 555 Maude’s reference to the Dreyfus Affair echoes Hannah Arendt’s famous observation that Dreyfus was a dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. 556 However, Maude’s Dreyfus quote is not a direct reference to anti-Semitism. Maude references Dreyfus’s yearning, and failure, to find art from his tragedy. In a sense, Maude is responding to Adorno. Dreyfus had found inspiration in his exile, but later realized it was a fraudulent hope. Maude rejects Dreyfus’s realist stance. In spite of the Holocaust, Maude maintains a poetic hopefulness that Dreyfus could not. Maude’s neurotic eccentricities, previously understood only as the quirky dementia of an old woman, suddenly take on the lens of Jewish response to the Holocaust. On the surface, Harold and Maude is a love story about transgressions; Life and death, old and young, Victorian quasi-British aristocracy and American hippie sexual liberation. But by presenting Maude as a survivor of Jewish holocaust only through the briefest and most passing references, Harold and Maude was one of the first films of the postwar era to relocate the trauma of the Holocaust into the sexual realm, and to do so through the emancipatory coupling narrative of Christian and Jew. Joshua Hirsch observed how in Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the preeminent Hungarian filmmaker and Jewish Holocaust survivor, István Szabó, produced 555 Harold and Maude screenplay by Colin Higgins 556 Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, (USA: MIT Press, 1996), 62. 350 a trilogy of films, Father (1966), Love Film (1970), and 25 Fireman Street (1973) that dealt with the lingering, residual traumas of the Holocaust. Hirsch notes how the Jewish- born filmmaker used Proustian techniques of memory to implicitly recall Holocaust trauma through memory, affect, and sublimation. 557 Like Polanski, Szabó's tensions as both Hungarian and Jewish produce a subjective film narrative that echoes this irreducibility of identity through narrative decay. Yet, as Hirsch notes, explicit identification of Szabó’s characters as Jewish never take place. Jewish identity remains in code, suggesting that the protagonists of a film such as Father (1966) could be non- Jewish as well, persecuted by the Nazis for reasons other than being Jewish. 558 The Hollywood suspense thriller Marathon Man (1976) followed the same modernist techniques of memory and trauma that Szabó, Polanski, and even Harold and Maude had introduced in dealing with the legacy of the Holocaust. Marathon Man was one of the first major Hollywood films to directly explore the trauma of the Holocaust in terms of its generational affect. Marathon Man’s opening imagery of Thomas Babington Levy (Dustin Hoffman), aka “Babe,” running through Central Park echoed Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers in terms of notions of Jewish flight. As he jogs, Babe is forced to dodge a growling German shepherd that tries to bite him. Babe’s name signifies his innocence. The fact Babe is a long distance runner makes the metaphor of Jewish flight even more clear. Babe does not know why he loves to run, only that he must run. As the film gradually reveals, Babe’s instinct for running emerges directly from the legacy of 557 Joshua Hirsch, “István Szabó: Problems in the Narration of Holocaust Memory,” Journal of Film and Video 51.1 (Spring 1999): 13-14. 558 Ibid., 17. 351 Holocaust trauma that claimed his father, and will eventually claim his brother (Roy Scheider). The film’s most famous moment is the dental torture scene in which a notorious Nazi prison guard, Dr. Szell (Laurence Olivier), revives his concentration camp torture methodology on a confused and terrified Hoffman. This notion of torture of the son visualized in an explicit way the theme of trauma handed down generationally. Marathon Man was also one of the first major Hollywood texts to draw a direct alignment between the legacy of Holocaust trauma and the desire to resolve that legacy in the erotic realm. Even more specifically, by locating this desire in the form of the idealized Christian female sex object. The British-Jewish director, Arthur Schlesinger had explored themes of gay Jewish longing for non-Jewish beauty in both Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). In the former, Hoffman’s performance as the nominally Catholic Ratso Rizzo was counterpointed with his longing for the almost cartoonish blonde haired and blue eyed Cowboy archetype, Joe Buck (Jon Voight). In Marathon Man, Hoffman is no longer in Italian-code. The legacy of Holocaust trauma is now both textual, and generational. Hoffman’s desire to heal the trauma of his father’s seeming suicide leads him not only into a career in academia, but also an erotically obsessed affair with a mysterious Scandinavian woman. Postwar films such as Fearless Vampire Killers, Harold and Maude, and Marathon Man hinted at how movies could mediate the legacy of Holocaust trauma through Christian-Jewish coupling. But the event itself remained outside the realm of film depiction. It would fall to television, and the epic NBC miniseries of 1978, 352 Holocaust, to broach not only the actual depiction of Holocaust trauma, but the mediation and universalization of that depiction through the Christian-Jewish love story. HOLOCAUST AND “HOLOCAUST” In her seminal study of Holocaust cinema, The Holocaust in American Film, Judith E. Doneson argues that universalization of the Holocaust was a central theme of postwar films on the subject. 559 Doneson notes that the happy ending tendencies of Holocaust films reinforced a distinct American ideology that positioned “America as a land of salvation.” 560 Doneson reads Holocaust narratives as echoing the metaphors of Kafka’s exile narratives of the 1920s. They became a collective project to denature Jewish specificity for American non-Jewish reception. The actual events of Holocaust had become, in the postwar era, a metaphor for the power of a non-Jewish hegemony that wants to claim the Holocaust as part of a shared history of Western culture. Any Jewish desire to keep the Holocaust as a distinctly Jewish event was pushed to the margins of these inclusive and universal tales of Holocaust trauma. Holocaust scholar Lawrence Baron has observed how the skills of communicating the trauma of the Holocaust lie not in historical accuracy but in storytelling technique. 561 Yet debates over Holocaust representation focus on aesthetics and narrative. Can an historical event as monumental and complex as the Holocaust be told through direct representation, as Spielberg argues in Schindler’s List (1993). Or can it only be hinted at through memory, never depicted through recreation, as argued by Claude Lanzmann’s 559 Judith E. Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film: Second Edition, (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 8-9. 560 Doneson,, The Holocaust in American Film, 219. 561 Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), 4. 353 Shoah (1985). Issues such as documentary (Night and Fog) versus fiction (Schindler’s List), historical recreation (Holocaust) versus metaphor and affect (Maus) inform the debate. Or, as Baron argues, grappling with a monumental historical event such as the Holocaust requires a radical break with aesthetic convention and cinematic language itself. 562 Yet what often goes overlooked in this understanding is just how central the role of the Christian-Jewish coupling played in the iconography of universalization. The function of Christian-Jewish coupling in the Holocaust narrative occurs in two ways. First, the casting of non-Jewish actors to play Jewish Holocaust survivors relocated any claims to a distinctly Jewish trauma to a universalized and relatable historical event. Second, the positioning of the Jewish-Christian erotic entanglement helped to universalize the trauma of the historical event. So long as Christians are love interests for Jewish characters, the good/evil binary of the Holocaust story can avoid aligning Good with Jewish and Bad with Christian. Sadomasochism is the flipside of this configuration. The sadomasochistic erotic fetish found between Jew and German is seen in everything from Lina Wertműller’s Seven Beauties (1975), Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Paul Verhoven’s Black Book (2006), and even in Quentin Tarantino’s orgiastic beating scene between The Bear Jew Donnie Donawitz (Eli Roth) and his Aryan Nazi victim, Sgt. Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel), in Inglorious Basterds (2008). These violent couplings, played out in intimate sadistic detail, can be read as nothing short of violence writ erotic. 562 Ibid., 5. 354 As Omer Bartov points out, the sadomasochistic and theatrical descent into eroticized games played by second-generation German and Jewish children of survivors in Don’t Touch My Holocaust (1994) shows how Israeli cinema found liberation in dealing with Holocaust trauma in ways American films did not. 563 This was also true for Wertműller. Whether sadomasochistic eroticism, or idealized romantic, the function of the Holocaust coupling narrative not only removes any essentialist Jewish alterity from the trauma, but recalibrates the Holocaust as shared by all of humanity. 1978’s Holocaust marked the first major crossover foray into American depictions of the Holocaust. It was also the first to universalize the specific crisis of European Jewry through the story of the Christian-Jewish couple. One of the central dramas of the miniseries was the marriage between the Jewish Karl Weiss (James Woods) and non-Jewish Inga Helms (Meryl Streep). Placing the story of Christian- Jewish love at the center of the Holocaust served an obvious function. It allowed Jews and Christians to feel equal vested and vicarious interest in the events of the melodrama. If Meryl Streep could risk being sent to a concentration camp, then so could anyone. Jeffrey Shandler notes how famous Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel harshly critiqued the miniseries for trivializing the Holocaust through an exploitative melodramatic convention. 564 Before the Holocaust miniseries brought Holocaust imagery into the mainstream in the late 1970s, Holocaust narratives appeared mostly in metaphor and code. Regardless of its merits, after Holocaust, film depictions of the 563 Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust, (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005), 305-309. 564 Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 168-169. 355 events of Hitler’s concentration camps were no longer verboten. That it featured an intermarriage story of Karl and Inga was not incidental to the selling of Holocaust to a non-Jewish audience. Holocaust’s ending, with the baby born by Inge representing the future, suggests how the only hope for Jewish escape from the trauma of the Holocaust is through the Christian. Streep, emerging as one of the most popular and talented actresses of the 1980s, played a key role in the universalization of Jewish trauma in the wake of Holocaust’s success. Not only did Streep win her first Academy Award in 1979 playing opposite Dustin Hoffman in Kramer Vs. Kramer, but Streep would appear again as a Polish Holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice (1982). As Zofia "Sophie" Zawistowski, Streep’s performance locates Holocaust trauma as equally shared between Christian and Jew. Doneson’s understanding of universalization informs how traumatic events influence sexual choices. The sublimation of the traumatic event of Sophie’s past leads her to a violent affair with the equally troubled Jewish survivor, Nathan Landau (Kevin Kline). Both Holocaust and Sophie’s Choice forms an eerie parallel with the seemingly much milder divorce story, Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), as well as Streep’s brief turn as Woody Allen’s lesbian ex-wife in Manhattan (1979). In each of these disparate roles, Streep performs her role as a sexual object of desire for the Jewish male. For each of Streep’s male counterparts, Karl (James Woods), Kramer (Dustin Hoffman), Landau (Kevin Kline), and Isaac (Woody Allen), there is no repairing the damage done to the once idyllic Portnoy-esque dream of Aryan beauty. Holocaust ends with the death of Karl at Auschwitz. Sophie’s Choice ends in suicide. Kramer vs. Kramer and Manhattan end in 356 divorce. In the Holocaust melodrama, the contemporary drama, and even in a Woody Allen romantic comedy, whatever hopefulness had been offered by the bringing together of Christian and Jews in the 1970s had, by the 1980s, become too damaged to repair. Over the next two decades, in addition to Schindler’s List, five major films about the Holocaust would use the Christian-Jewish coupling story to mitigate any notion of the events of the Holocaust being exclusively the province of Jewish survivors. Agnezika Holland’s Europa Europa, a critically received art-house hit in 1991, would utilize the Christian-Jewish template. Similar to Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987), Europa Europa focuses not on the events of the concentration camps, but on a story of survival and overcoming the odds, using a real story as its source material. The film tells the story Solomon “Solek” Perel (Marco Hofschneider). Solek was a Jewish teenager who managed to pose as a non-Jew, convincing Nazi officials that he was a German Aryan. Europa Europa argues against Jewish biological distinction on two levels. First, that Solek is actually indistinguishable from his non-Jewish German peers. Solek is even singled out in class by a eugenics scientist who, after measuring his features, pronounces that Solek is a model physical specimen of Aryan purity. Yet Holland’s hopeful argument against eugenics is mitigated by her casting of the non-Jewish German actor, Marco Hofschneider, to play Solek. That the actor playing Solek is non-Jewish ironically cuts against the very point of Holland’s critique of eugenics theory. Solek’s Jewishness is instead asserted in the film through his erotic desire for the passionately pro-Nazi Aryan female, Leni, (Julie Delpy). Solek is unable to perform sexually with a willing Leni out of fear that she will see his circumcision and discover the 357 truth of his Jewish identity. Ruth D. Johnston, building off Eve Kosofsky’s seminal work on the connections between the Jewish and queer closets, notes how Europa Europa connects hidden Jewishness with deviant sexuality. 565 Johnson describes the moment when Solek comes out to Leni’s mother (Halina Łabonarska) as a Jew. Solek’s desire for Leni, and subsequent quasi-oedipal intimate act of sharing his Jewish identity with Leni’s Mother, both conflate erotic desire with the act of confession. While Leni, and then Leni’s Mother, are situated as temptations threatening to inspire Solomon to confess his difference, both contain erotic charge. Leni’s Mother’s affection for Solek, and her hatred of the Nazis, is an inverted redemption story in which the mother redeems the sins of the daughter. Solek’s contested masculinity, presumed queerness, and inability to act on his desires due to his circumcision, are defined only in the presence of the Aryan Christian female witness. The thwarting of that coupling due to the barriers of religion and culture were a requisite condition of all of the Holocaust film narratives of this period. Another example is in the 1997 Italian film, Life is Beautiful. The writer-director- star of the film, acclaimed Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, plays Guido, a Jewish bookkeeper. In a fairytale opening, Guido marries a non-Jewish Italian wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), and they have a child (Giorgio Cantarini). When Guido and his son are sent to a concentration camp, Guido protects his son from the horrors of the Holocaust by spinning fictions about what is taking place. Dora, the non-Jewish wife, is also in the camp as she voluntarily chose to accompany Guido and their son even though 565 Ruth D. Johnston, “The Jewish Closet in Europa, Europa,” Camera Obscura 18(1 52) (2002): 1-33. 358 she did not have to. This equal sharing of Holocaust trauma between Jew and non-Jew in the intermarriage of Guido and Dora aligns Life is Beautiful with the same universalized template as seen in Holocaust. The non-Jewish Benigni presents Holocaust trauma as equally shared between Christian and Jew through the story of the Christian-Jewish couple. Other Holocaust films followed this configuration. The Dutch film Left Luggage (1998) dealt with residual Holocaust trauma obliquely, and did not feature a love story component. But the film did feature Italian actress Isabella Rossellini as Mrs. Kalman, an orthodox Jewish mother. Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) did not feature a love story either, instead focusing on episodic events of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), an un-heroic, passive, professional piano player living in Warsaw, Poland. Szpilman’s cowardice forces him to witness the bravery of the Warsaw Uprising in the very ghetto he’s managed to avoid being trapped in. Polanski’s critique of heroism stories provided a potent corrective. Michael Stevenson argues that by maintaining ambiguities in the episodic format, Polanski’s film captures the cool and distanced survivor accounts of Borowski and Levi. 566 Polanski’s Szpilman reclaims an alternative Jewish masculinity outside of the tropes of traditional heroism. Szpilman’s lack of bravery is human and relatable. Szpilman simply desires to survive. In so doing, Szpilman is witness to historical events beyond his comprehension. But even Polanski does not resist a universalizing coupling framework. Dorota (Emilia Fox), the attractive, blonde, Polish woman who becomes interested in Szpilman 566 Michael Stevenson, “The Pianist and Its Contexts,” The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema, ed. Lawrence Baron (Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 181. 359 after hearing him play piano, brings Christian-Jewish interplay as central to Szpilman’s journey. With angelic blonde looks, Dorota is the Good Christian as healing angel. For much of the early parts of the film, Szpilman is mostly disinterested in his Jewish friends and family. Only Dorota sparks his interest. Dorota angrily rejects the idea that Jews should be persecuted, and appears at key moments to bring Szpilman food. It is implied that they shared some form of intimate relationship in the past, but it is never made explicit. When Dorota brings him food, a starving Szpilman gazes up at her with adoration and gratitude. The Good Aryan is not quite eroticized in Polanski’s configuration, but plays a relational counterpoint to Brody’s Jewish pianist. Even the critically reviled Jakob the Liar (1999), gave the non-Jewish Robin Williams a chance to perform as the very sort of Jewish clown denied to Jerry Lewis in 1972. For the Holocaust film to find a non-Jewish audience, the Holocaust itself had to contain a non- Jewish component. Why the need to universalize the story of Holocaust trauma through the mitigating function of the Christian-Jewish love story? Sander Gilman notes how that impact of the Holocaust applied the notion of “madness” to the postwar Jew. 567 If the Jew signified madness, the Christian signified the mitigation of that madness. Together, an emancipation narrative formed that posited a hopeful solution to the darkness inherent in representing such an overwhelming historical event. The entanglement between Christian and Jew was also a signifier of the tenuous nature of historical representation itself. Hannah Arendt once described this tension as that of “Jewish history, which for 567 Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 361. 360 two millennia has been made not by Jews but by those peoples that surround them… when Jewish history is written by Jews, it has usually been a tacitly – rarely expressis verbis – conscious or unconscious attempt to come to terms with their foes.” 568 Arendt argues that the “madness” that Gilman describes is not only of grappling with trauma, but with the contested landscape of how trauma is claimed. What Holocaust films, especially from 1978 onward, demonstrate is that the depiction of historical trauma requires a relationship not only between the event and its victims, but also between the text and the spectator. This was done in the on-screen coupling of Christian and Jew. No filmmaker understood this better than Steven Spielberg. SPIELBERGIAN UNIVERSALISM In her edited volume of essays examining the impact of Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s Holocaust, Yosefa Loshitzky describes the early 1990s as the culmination of a long process she terms “the Americanization of the Holocaust.” 569 Nearly all of the Holocaust films that came after Holocaust produce a relational formulation as part of their historical depiction. This relational historical understanding is expressed in the erotic realm, and through Christian-Jewish coupling. One reason is spectatorial. The assumption of a broad audience that is both Christian and Jewish requires an association with the on-screen characters. Spielberg’s maturation as an artist, his progression from boy-child magician to serious auteur, is marked in his iconic and bold representation of the Holocaust, 568 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. (New York: Schoken Books, 2007), 48. 569 Yosefa Loshitzky, Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 5. 361 Schindler’s List (1993). A box office smash, a global phenomenon, an Oscar winner and the impetus for the formation of the Shoah Foundation, no film of the postwar era so overtly signified Jews as both on-screen depictions and behind the camera creators than Schindler’s List. Much has been written on the aesthetic choices Spielberg made. But in tracing a Jewish body outside of diegesis, Schindler’s List is entirely consistent with both Spielberg’s larger body of work, and a traditional postwar 1950s-era Hollywood understanding of Jewish representation. This Spielbergian universalization is rendered explicit from the start: The cinematic Jew should not, and must not, be limited to portrayal by the Jewish actor. To require Jewish characters to be constrained to Jewish bodies is to render a Jewish essentialness outside of narrativity that demarcates an Otherness as explicit as anything found in the eugenics and race based hierarchies of the cinema of the Third Reich. For all of the praise Schindler’s List received, it also received a fair amount of academic and scholarly criticism. No less than Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, took Spielberg to task, stating, as Geoffrey H. Hartman cites, “fiction is a transgression.” 570 But while much of the criticism centered in the formal and thematic depictions of narrative and historical event, hardly any of the critical response focused on the specificities of casting choice. A story primarily concerned with Christian redemption, Spielberg’s Christian hero, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), uses the events of the Holocaust to redeem his soul. Schindler’s doppelganger, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) sins horribly, and does not. In Schindler’s List the events of the Holocaust are 570 Geoffrey H. Hartman, “The Cinema Animal” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 63. 362 the backdrop to the opposing stories of two Christians. Spielberg demonstrates these opposing journeys through the coupling narrative. Schindler is coupled homosocially with his Jewish sidekick, Yikzak Stern (Ben Kinglsey), while Goeth, the sadistic Nazi, finds himself attracted to his young, Jewish servant girl, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz). Both couplings, one heterosexual and one homosocial, produce a Christian-Jewish entanglement of historical negotiation. While Helen Hirsch does not reciprocate, the increased desire by Goeth suggests that erotic feelings between Christian and Jew are inevitable. Only a Nazi would sublimate those inevitable desires. For Stern and Oskar Schindler, the western framework of business and profit give structure to their very Americanized partnership, even as they save lives. Each speaks to an essential dependency and cohabitation between Jew and non-Jew, held at bay only by the racist hierarchies of the Nazi movement. When Jewish bodies appear as bodies, as in the shower scenes, the boxcars, or as a collection of witnesses to Schindler’s speeches (and final epiphany), they are Jewish bodies rendered mute and passive. When the Jewish body is a body, it cannot perform. It can only witness. In the realm of the Spielberg’s performative characters, Jewishness is universally accessible to Jew and non-Jew alike. Both couplings in Schindler’s List reiterated the progression narrative of the Christian/Jewish dialectic as it would emerge in Holocaust films after Holocaust. The miscegenation of Jewish/Christian coupling narratives in Holocaust texts was produced in two ways. There is the miscegenation between two textually identified characters, one Jewish and the other Christian. But there is a second universalizing process that occurs when the actor playing the Jewish character is not actually Jewish. Spielberg uses both 363 coupling strategies in Schindler’s List. First, in casting, Spielberg cast noted British actor Ben Kinglsey as Stern (Kingsley has one Jewish grandparent), as well as the non-Jewish South African actress Embeth Davidtz as Helen Hirsch. Both casting choices show Spielberg’s insistence on a universalized and representational Jewishness. Spielberg’s preference for casting non-Jewish actors as Jewish characters would continue to even more startling effect in Munich (2005), a film in which nearly the entire team of Israeli protagonists are played by non-Jewish actors. This included Australian Erik Bana (Avner), German Hanns Zischler (Hans), the Irish Ciarán Hinds (Carl), and the British Daniel Craig (Steve). Only the French actor Mathieu Kassovitz (Robert) had Jewish parentage. This is startling when considering how Munich operates as a sort-of corrective to critiques of Spielberg’s Schindler and Goethe focused Schindler’s List. Spielberg’s Jewish avenging assassins may have produced a normative masculinity through acts of bravery and through military response. This follows Boyarin’s argument that Zionism was a masculinizing project for feminized Jewish males to transform themselves into pseudo-Aryans from the beginning. 571 But Munich also contains a normative (non-Jewish) masculinity simply by that fact its actors are not even Jewish to begin with. It is here that Spielberg produces a Christian-Jewish coupling narrative. Not between characters on screen, but between the character and the actor playing it. Eric Bana as Avner Kauffman produces its own form of coupling affect. Spielberg’s nostalgia for the Gregory Peck argument in Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947) that Jewish identity is indistinguishable from non-Jews should not be surprising. 571 Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, P. xiv 364 Judith Doneson notes, the masses of Jews in Schindler’s List revert to a pre-Israel feminist stereotype. 572 It is as if, for Spielberg, the 1960s Israel-influenced remasculinization of the male Jew never happened. Spielberg insists that Jewishness can be fully and completely represented in the performative realm through the structuring codes of performativity and narrativity. Like his choice of black and white film stock, these casting choices represent a return to the era of universal Jewishness of the 1950s. Spielberg’s most notable Jewish character played by a Jewish actor is Mellish (Adam Goldberg) in Saving Private Ryan (1997). Mellish is positioned as one of a number of plausibly diverse ethnics serving in John Miller’s (Tom Hanks) unit. Mellish ends up giving up his life to save the titular blonde haired and blue eyed Private Ryan (Matt Damon). 573 Spielberg’s relationship to on-screen Jews in Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List position them as secondary characters by which Christian characters achieve Christian redemption. When Jewish agency exists on its own terms, as in Munich, Spielberg’s universalizing casting process eliminates any claim to Jewish alterity. 574 Daniel Craig the unlikely Jewish assassin in Munich, would go on to play a hyper-masculine Jewish avenger once again in the story of Polish-Jewish resistance fighters, Defiance (2008). Spielberg insists, in his purest ideological understanding of cinema, that cinema unites audiences through the sharing of emotional human themes. In 572 Judith E. Doneson, “The Image Lingers: The Feminization of the Jew in Schindler’s List,” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, Ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), 148-149. 573 The scene when the German soldier softly, almost tenderly, penetrates Mellish’s heart with his knife, killing Mellish, could be read as a sadistic Christian-Jewish sex scene, an extension of Spielberg’s S&M relationship between Goeth and Hirsch in Schindler’s List. 574 Spielberg’s personal life had also seen his divorce from the Jewish-raised Amy Irving and subsequent marriage to the blonde “Shiksa” Kate Capshaw, who converted to Judaism for the wedding. 365 other words, we all can be Jewish. Jewishness is no different than non-Jewishness. Anyone can perform it. Lester Friedman notes that the Spielberg produced animated film, An American Tail (1986), takes the Jewish specificity of Fievel Mouskewitz’s coded-Jewish immigrant journey and extends it as a proxy journey for all ethnic groups which, in Spielberg’s world, are “essentially the same.” 575 The sharing of the human experience in the cinema brings together the entire spectrum of humanity to share in the collective journey. Even when casting his presumed alter-ego, the Jewish actor Richard Dreyfuss, in films such as Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the character is never explicitly identified as Jewish. Spielberg’s philosophy has always been that movies are the great equalizer. Spielbergian Universalism is a notion of historical Jewishness as a metaphor for all universal historical trauma and alienation. Actors selected to play Jewish characters are judged only on the merits of their acting skills, and not their personal biography. Spielbergian Universalism is ideologically positioned as a post-Holocaust response to Hitlerian eugenics. It began, as I argue in chapter three, long before Spielberg himself, with Gregory Peck’s earnest performance as Philip Green in Gentleman’s Agreement. Philip Green’s ability to “pass” as a Jew involves nothing more than letting people think he is Jewish. No affectations or physiognomy required. Tarantino, the greatest cinephile of the generation of directors to follow Spielberg, had a response. 575 Lester D. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 298. 366 INGLOURIOUS BODIES Upon the release of Inglorious Basterds, magazine critic Tom Carson described Tarantino as the “anti-Spielberg.” Tarantino’s collage-use of pop culture in dealing with the Holocaust operated, as Carson put it, as a “riotous id” in contrast to Spielberg’s “superego.” 576 The titular Basterds were Tarantino’s avenging Jewish angels of cinematic hallucination, a mostly anonymous, mostly wordless, fearless killing machine. The Basterds are little defined as characters, yet fully defined as Jewish bodies. Jewish bodies that are so powerful, Hitler himself wonders if they are the ancient Jewish Golem myth come to life, superheroes of anti-Semitic Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion nightmare returned as the face of vengeance in the realm of the fictional rewrite. This is Spielbergian Universalism in full inversion. It is Tarantino embracing the tropes of Nazi cinema and philosophy for the purposes of subversion and reappropriation. Tarantino introduces the “Basterds” by invoking the famous tracking shot of rows of Aryans in Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1934). The striking introduction of the Basterds’ Jewish faces, a military lineup tracking shot directly echoing Riefenstahl, show Jewish men of slight build and unconventional body. These are not the non-Jewish “Jews” of Spielberg casting choice, played by non-Jewish Hollywood masculine ideals such as Eric Bana and Daniel Craig. It is precisely in the Basterds’ unapologetic affirmation of the very corporeal tropes of anti-Semitic stereotypes of the Jewish body that position them as an active ideological response. 576 Carson, Tom. “One Glorious ‘Basterd’” G.Q. Sept. 2009, 193. 367 Continuing the self-reflexive counterpoint, Tarantino introduces his version of the Christian-Jewish erotic coupling. They are led by Hollywood’s pinnacle movie star with almost clichéd Aryan beauty, actor Brad Pitt. Pitt’s selection of the Basterds for the simple fact they are Jews presents Pitt’s Aryan body as their counterpoint. Together, Brad Pitt and a lineup of unremarkable Jewish-looking Jews give the scene a playful and ironic commentary on Hollywood’s competing representations of masculinity. The Jewish Basterds, will end up posing as Nazi soldiers, French citizens, and Italian cameramen,. They will even appropriate the violent and gruesome scalping techniques of a 1950s-era Hollywood Native American villain from a film such as John Ford’s The Searchers. The Jewish female of the film, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), similarly masks her identity by taking on the name of Emmanuelle, the clichéd French seductress. Tarantino’s satire of Jews in ludicrous disguise as other ethnics responds directly to Spielbergian Universalism. For Tarantino, the tropes of performance can never deny the indexicality of the Jewish body. Shoshanna’s love affair with her black projectionist represents the other transgressive coupling of the film. By making the coupling interracial, by having Shoshanna choose the French-African rather than the German Aryan suitor, Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), Tarantino cements the notion of his film as an inverted self- reflexive corrective on the typical formulations of the Holocaust narrative. The Jewish- African alliance extended Tarantino’s critique as a relational black-Jewish ethnic assault on Aryan body hierarchy. The cinephile Tarantino was well aware of Jewish performance in ethnic masquerade through the history of cinema. The Basterds, and Shoshanna, 368 remain Jewish through the undeniable fact of their Jewish bodies. The audience is always aware that these are “real” Jews playing Jews. This allows Tarantino to mark them as Jewish by invoking the Hitlerian Eugenics paradigm – a Jew identifiable as a Jew simply by biology, and then subverting it by untethering the film from historical fact. Tarantino had a reason behind this body reclamation. In an interview with Rachel Maddow in February of 2010, Tarantino referenced having repeatedly screened Joseph Goebbels’ 1940 propaganda piece Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew,”). 577 One of Goebbels’s most notorious pieces of propaganda, Der Ewige Jude was a pastiche assembly of bits and pieces of biological theory, eugenics, medical film “documentary” footage and reappropriated clips taken from pre Third Reich German cinema. Even the name of Goebbels’ film echoes Martin Buber’s German-language journal of just a decade earlier (Der Jude), the very same one in which young Kafka first found publication success in 1917. As Robert Charles Reimer explains, the complex cinematic dialectic on discourses of the body that takes place in Der Ewige Jude occurs in Goebbels’s reuse of scenes of actor Peter Lorre taken from Fritz Lang’s M (1931). 578 Lang’s potent imagery had presented Lorre as a deviant crypto-Jewish sexual predator, and Lang did not shy away from depicting an overt spectacle of Jewish stereotype in the beady eyes of his murdering lead character. 579 577 The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC, 2/12/10 < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/12/rachel-maddow-on-quentin_n_460444.html> 578 Robert Charles Reimer, Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich. (Rochester: Camden House, 2002), 146-147. 579 Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein, was an Austrian-Hungarian Jew who immigrated to Germany originally as a comedic actor before his big break in M. 369 Yet Lang’s empathetic portrayal of sexual deviancy as a form of mental illness meant to subvert the Jewish predator cliché of the Blood Libel. For Goebbels, the image was reversed. It was stripped of subtext and presented as the very cartoon-like image that Lang was critiquing; the Jew as gothic predator. The complexities of signification offered by the Jewish body, problematized by Lang, and then re-simplified by Goebbels, are reclaimed by the cinephile Tarantino as a postmodern celebration of film history entirely devoid of historical accuracy. In all three cases, the Jewish body, as a body, was meant to signify the contested space of the representational body as a signifier of the medium itself. Tarantino appropriates the very same techniques Goebbels used, but as a form of self-reflexive cinematic response. Tarantino introduces us to Shoshanna Dreyfus, a French Jew being hidden, along with her family, by a non-Jewish farmer. While hunting the Dreyfuses, Tarantino’s “Jew Killer” Nazi hunter, Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) delivers a monologue analogizing the Jew to the rat. Landa’s philosophy – one of immutable hierarchy of ethnicity along lines of animality, is not contradicted by Tarantino’s film. In fact, it is fully supported by the Basterds themselves, who are happy to perform as the animals they’ve been accused of being. The invocation of the Dreyfus surname speaks to the film’s use of archetypal signifiers. Tarantino unveils his lineup of eight Jewish “basterds” as the very sewer rats Landa describes from the pages of Hitlerian eugenics and race based classifications. Tarantino introduces “The Bear Jew” (Eli Roth) from an actual sewer pipe, baseball bat in hand, like some monstrous descendant of Shylock and Fagin. Emerging from under a bridge, the Bear Jew is a troll, 370 every bit the animalized Kafka ape merged with Golem fantasies of avenging Jewish monstrous superpower. The Bear Jew continues Tarantino’s project to reappropriate anti- Semitic imagery by embracing it, an act of reclamation in the cinematic realm. Or, to critics such as Daniel Mendelsohn, it was simply an act of turning “Jews into Nazis.” 580 The Basterds’ response, the indiscriminate torture and killing of Aryan German soldiers, is the very act that slays the Hitlerian eugenics introduced in Der Ewige Jude. 581 The use of Jewish bodies as haunting specters of historical trauma conclude in the chapter Tarantino titles “Revenge of the Big Face.” Shoshanna lures the Nazi high command, including Hitler himself, to her movie theater as part of her revenge plot. Tarantino introduces the film-within-the-film, a German propaganda film called Nation’s Pride. Nation’s Pride reminds us of the propaganda power of bodies on screen as bodies, as the “historical” events of the back-story of the German sniper, Frederick Zoller, are turned into a fictional recreation. Echoing Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the film-within-the- film reflects on the film itself. Nation’s Pride reminds us of the agenda of any recreation of an “historical” event. The propaganda film is interrupted when Shoshanna splices footage of her own face into the film. Propaganda footage of German military heroism cuts to a close-up of Shoshanna, a Riefenstahl-esque close-up of Jewish physiognomy. As the screen Shoshanna informs the Nazis of their impending doom, the theater is set on fire by Shoshanna’s African lover. Nathan Abrams argues that the flammable celluloid is 580 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 'Inglourious Basterds': When Jews Attack". Newsweek. The Washington Post Company. August 21, 2009. 581 The figure of Aldo Raines comes complete with the rope burn on his neck from an unexplained lynching attempt, further commingling the signifiers of a relational American ethnicity at work involving African- American lynchings, American Jewishness, southern rural poverty in Pitt’s accent, and Raines’s claim that he is half Comanche Indian. 371 marked as an extension of Jewish revenge through the power of Hollywood cinema. 582 Shoshanna’s final line, delivered to the packed theater of burning German Nazis, is clear and unambiguous: “This is the face of Jewish revenge!” The screen is consumed and destroyed, leaving only Shoshanna’s spectral face projected onto the smoke of burning Nazi bodies. This moment of cinematic liberation for the Jewish cinematic face takes place only after the character of Shosanna herself has been killed. Bodies removed, only specters remain. Shoshanna’s laughing face, appearing only on smoke, is as a direct response to Spielbergian Universalism, and to Spielberg himself. The imagery is nearly identical to Spielberg’s use of revenging Jewish ghosts killing Nazis that emerged from the Arc of the Covenant in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). But the meaning is completely the opposite. Spielberg had intended Schindler’s List to memorialize the Holocaust through the power of the cinema. For Tarantino, there is no truth claim in film beyond the evocation of memory on the part of the spectator. Shoshanna’s strange stasis as a body-without-body, a face of filmic projection without screen, appearing only on the smoke of ignited film strips, agrees with Lanzmann’s indictment of Schindler’s List: Holocaust propaganda should not be seen, no matter what it intends. The Holocaust cannot be represented in cinema. Shoshanna’s cinematic revenge fantasy, as a proxy for the universal desire to rewrite the Holocaust in the fictive realm, ironically cannot actually take place at the very moment it is taking place within the diegesis. Truth can only be found by fully acknowledging the fiction of cinema itself as a medium of pure 582 Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema, (New Brunswick and New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 132. 372 fantasy and wish fulfillment. Actor Eli Roth described this historical rewrite in sexual terms, as “Kosher porn.” 583 In keeping with the notion of historical rewrite as an act of cinematic self- reflexivity, Tarantino inverts Brad Pitt’s Aryan beauty as well. 584 Pitt’s Aldo Raines seeks to mark Nazis by carving swastikas in their foreheads so they cannot “take off the uniform.” Raines’s act is a form of body inscription, “marking” the Nazi body as a body. Fritz Lang had inscribed Peter Lorre’s hidden sexual predator with the famous “M,” soon to be tragically echoed in the cloth sewn Yellow Stars of the Third Reich. Tarantino produces this same process of ethnic marking in inversion. The rejection of Spielberg’s universalizing process took the form of a reclaiming both Jewish and Aryan bodies as bodies. By foregrounding bodies, German, Jewish, and even the Aryan Hollywood beauty cliché of Brad Pitt, Tarantino takes Peter Lorre back from Goebbels, and returns him, through the ironic language of cinema’s ability to rewrite, back to the context Fritz Lang had originally presented. The bodies of Inglourious Basterds are Disraeli’s “blank page” writ corporeal; a Barthes-like umbilicus between the real and the imagined in which we can project our own understanding of “Jew” and “Aryan” onto unformed identities. The Basterds perorm as the savages from the Aryan imagination. They are Kafka’s Jackals in the desert, a metaphor as we choose to see them, reclaiming their nature by performing as the non- 583 Weiselman, Jarrett, “Eli Roth: Everybody Wants to be the Guy Who Kills Hitler!” The New York Post, 12/08/09 584 Pitt’s affected and queered hick stereotype presents Pitt as a strange amalgam of white trash, Native American and even African American through the tropes of language (accent), terror technique (scalping of Germans) and, never textually addressed, the rope burn around his neck suggesting a failed attempt at lynching. 373 Jewish audience would have them. The Jew substitutes for the animal metaphor by becoming literal Jewish savages (scalping like Indians from American folklore). As with Fritz Lang’s use of Peter Lorre in M, Tarantino’s “Basterds” are meant to attack the stereotype of the Jewish animal-predator by first embodying it, and then recontextualizing it. Tarantino contradicts Spielberg by acknowledging Hitler and Reifenstahl’s depiction of an immutable Jewish body able to be depicted through visual image. Only Tarantino reclaims it as a space for ideological response. BROMANCING THE JEWS Tarantino was not the only filmmaker to respond to Spielbergian Universalism in the mid 2000s. In a scene in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007), a group of young Jewish actors sit around in a bar hoping to work up the confidence to ask out one of the many attractive women nearby. Early in the dialogue sequence, presumably an improvisation, the actors refer to how many of them as Jewish. Actors Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill and Jay Baruchel are all Jewish actors playing Jewish characters. Only Martin Starr is not Jewish, and he is called out by the group as such. After establishing their collective Jewishness, the lead protagonist, Ben Stone (Rogen) states to his friends, “if any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.” 585 Ben’s reference is revealing for three reasons. First, Ben invokes the power of representation to inscribe a potent Jewish masculine identity. Second, Ben quips that his Jewish group of friends, under any objective genetic meritocracy, would simply not be able to sexually compete. Third, Ben reminds us that Holocaust stories and romantic 585 Knocked Up (Apatow, 2007) 374 comedies are inextricably linked in terms of inscribing Jewish sexuality and notions of masculinity. Paul Newman’s Ari Ben-Canaan’s successful seduction of Kitty in Exodus (1960) had set the stage for Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman’s sexual viability in romantic comedies in the late 1960s. Ben’s joke suggests Spielberg’s Munich was doing the same thing for Ben. The hierarchies of sexuality are not innate. They also influenced by film culture’s representations of masculinity. Because of Spielberg’s Munich, not only is there a contemporary depiction of Jewish masculinity as highly virile and desirable, but the actor Eric Bana, and not Avner, the character he plays, is the reason American Jewish men now have a chance to “get laid.” Rogen’s joke plays with masculine hierarchy along a Christian-Jewish framework. The body of the non-Jewish actor, Eric Bana, is the masculine archetype. Women see Jewish masculinity performed within the diegesis of Munich. Rogen sees the non-Jewish masculinity of the actor Eric Bana as offering the real cultural accreditation. By invoking Bana in Munich, Ben acknowledges the power of the cinema to infuse Jews with sexual viability through a specific historical depiction of the events of Israeli trauma and military response. American male Jews of the late 1960s had seen their masculinity retroactively validated by the actions of Israeli’s Six Day War (as Munich depicts). In 2007, these circulations continue to reverberate, only this time within a self-reflexively cinematic, and not political, discourse. Knocked Up plays with the fact that it is echoing the well-worn tropes of the Christian-Jewish romantic comedy of the 1960s in a deft interplay between the political and the representational. The film acknowledges that its template of “Jewish schlemiel 375 seeking Shiksa Goddess” is the safe haven where Jewish actors can play overt Jewish characters so long as they remain in pursuit of the Christian female. It also reminds how the events of the 1960s and 1970s reverberate on Jewish masculinity in the eyes of the non-Jewish female. Moments after making the observation, Ben works up the courage to seemingly miraculously seduce the idealized blond Shiksa fantasy, Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl). Male Jewish sexual potency is validated, as it has been throughout film history, by the Christian female. This sequence of events in Knocked Up is deceptively complex. It plays with how the contested potency of male Jewish sexuality is negotiated. This circulation is from a Spielbergian high-culture pinnacle, one that defines Jewish masculinity by dint of the non-Jewish body (Munich), into the romantic comedy plateau of Jewish character actors seeking non-Jewish Shiksas. But Knocked Up also offers a critique of Spielbergian Universalism. All of Knocked Up’s Jewish characters are played by Jewish actors. Spielberg’s use of Eric Bana, a 6’2” Australian actor, to portray Jewish bravery after the Munich bombings of 1972 is, in Ben’s understanding, an act of resolving the problematic masculinity of the Jewish male. But director Judd Apatow’s twist is to focus on the unborn child, not the act of seduction, in his reframing of Jewish masculinity. The Christian-Jewish future child that drives the plot of Knocked Up simply foregrounds the “what next?” subtext of the entire Christian/Jewish schlemiel comedies of the 1967-1980 period. The next generation – the half Jew – is an inscription of the American assimilation myth as central and resonant to the culture. The pregnancy is now explicit, 376 the visual manifestation of what was implied when Jake Robin married Mary, the Cohens found the Kellys, Abie found his Irish Rose, and Benjamin liberated Elaine. Apatow would go on to cast the actual Eric Bana in his next film, Funny People (2009), playing the romantic obstacle to Adam Sandler’s pursuit of his ex-girlfriend, played by actress and real life wife of Apatow, Leslie Mann. Here, the configuration is more complex, but still operative. Sandler plays George Simmons, a loosely fictive version of himself that pulls from the classic Jewish comedian tradition (from George Byrnes to Larry David). George Simmons represents the neurotic, unmarried Jewish male in self-loathing midlife crisis. Leslie Mann signifies the beautiful blonde Shiksa that George lost while pursuing his comedy and film career. Continuing the thematic connections to Knocked Up, Seth Rogen appears in the film as a young, hapless protégé to Sandler, and Mann’s portrayal of the blonde, Christian sex goddess echoes Heigl. The late appearance in the film of Eric Bana himself as a hyper-energetic, Australian, rugby watching, alpha male completes the ironic and self-reflexive awareness of Spielbergian Universalism first alluded to in Knocked Up. If Bana can successfully play the Jewish protagonist in Spielberg’s high culture dramatic interpretations of history, Bana can also appear as the non-Jewish hyper-masculine male obstructing the neurotic Jewish schlemiel from his Shiksa desire. The realm of mythic cinematic “high art” has been ceded to Spielberg’s universal frameworks. But Jewish comedians can still cast an oppositional framework in the space of the comedic and parodic. The pregnancy of Knocked Up even features the delayed reveal “gross-out” joke technique utilized in both There’s Something About Mary and American Pie. At the 377 moment Alison is about to give birth, and with many of Ben’s neurotic Jewish friends waiting with him in the waiting room, Jay (Jay Baruchel) wanders in to the birthing room only to be faced with a direct glimpse of Alison’s genitals in mid-birth. As with the other films of the era, Knocked Up uses the graphic image to mark itself as firmly of the “gross-out” period, and not the 1967-1980 period it recalls. A number of other Apatow-style films played with the notion of Jewish men chasing “Shiksas.” Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) begins with the forlorn Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) being dumped by his dream girl, the blonde Sarah Marshall (Kirsten Bell). The scene when Sarah dumps Peter occurs right after Peter steps out of the shower, and is standing fully naked in front of her. The delayed reveal once again pays off in a full frontal shot of Jason’s naked genitalia, a satire of Jewish castration anxiety. The film counterpoints sad-sack Peter with Sarah Marshall’s subsequent boyfriend, the hyper-masculine rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). But the “Gross-out” factor had receded, and by the late 2000s, the romantic comedy genre seemed to have exhausted the distinct nostalgia for the schlemiel comedies of the 1967-1980 period. MEET THE FOCKERS Perhaps no film of this period better encapsulates the nostalgic hue of the 1990s and 2000s Christian-Jewish coupling cycle than Meet the Fockers (2004). 2000’s Meet the Parents had taken the notion of the inherent suspicion of libidinal Jewish sexual deviancy by the WASP to its peak in Ben Stiller’s spasmodic performance as Greg ‘Gaylord’ Focker opposite Robert DeNiro as Harry Burns. But if there was any doubt how influential the Jewish tropes of the 1967-1980 period were on the Christian-Jewish 378 culture clash comedy, then the casting of Gaylord Focker’s parents should end it. In casting the two most famous libidinal Jewish schlemiels of the late 1960s, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, as Bernie and Rozalin Focker, Meet the Fockers conjures the specter of their younger selves in a delayed, but inevitable, return. In the 1967-1980 period, Hoffman and Streisand had never performed as a couple in the same film, nor had any of the major Jewish movie stars at the time (with the notable exception of Streisand and George Segal in The Owl and the Pussycat in 1970). Yet in a film franchise steeped in a nostalgic recall of Christian-Jewish family culture clash romantic comedies, from The Cohens and the Kellys (1905) to The Heartbreak Kid (1972), it could only be Hoffman and Streisand, the twin archetypes of Jewish sexuality, to perform as the id-like manifestation of Harry Byrnes’s (Robert DeNiro) worst anti-Semitic nightmares of what Jewish in-laws might be like. The film establishes the unleashing of the sexual id that Roz and Bernie represent right from the opening scene. As Roz and Bernie greet Harry and his wife, Dina (Blythe Danner), at the entrance to their garish home, the Fockers’ dog, a horny Chihuahua, runs up and tries to hump Harry’s foot. The Jewish animal, and all the unconstrained carnality that it represents, is introduced. Rozalin’s job, identified only as yoga instructor by Greg, is eventually revealed to be a sex therapist for senior citizens. Roz eventually instructs Dina on how to awaken Jack’s libido through the sensuous rubbing of earlobes. The cartoonish and unconstrained carnality at work in the Focker house reaches its pinnacle when, during dinner, Roz and Bernie show Harry and Dina (Blythe Danner) that they’ve saved Gaylord’s circumcision. When Gaylord scrambles to grab the dried piece of skin, 379 it pops up and lands in the fondue pot. The film’s cartoonish recall of the once threatening and highly potent sexuality of both Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand is what allows them to finally perform as a couple on their own terms. That they are both no longer young, and the fact they joyfully intend to celebrate their son’s marriage to the “Shiksa Goddess,” Pam (Teri Polo) mitigate their formulation as well. 1970s-era stalwarts such as Robert DeNiro, Blythe Danner, Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand took the WASP and Jewish sexual binary to a ludicrous extreme. The comic exploitation of their star personas foregrounded the film’s awareness of its ties to the 1967-1980 Christian-Jewish erotic interplay heyday. Meet the Fockers forms a cinematic coda to the 1967-1980 period by uniting the two most powerful forces of Jewish sexuality of that era. That their combined sexual force, so late in life, reaches absurd levels is central to the joke. Meet the Fockers is, ultimately, a parody of Harry Byrnes’s horrified anti-Semitic nightmares as embodied by the two figures of American media to best exemplify them. It is the same response many studio executives might have feared had a young Streisand and Hoffman been cast together in a romantic comedy in the late 1960s. That Streisand and Hoffman are finally brought together, decades later, to watch Gaylord and Pam marry suggest a third generation passing-of-the-torch along the Christian-Jewish marriage axis. Meet the Fockers’s delayed generational reclamation of Jewish identity echoed Streisand’s own The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), released less than a decade earlier. The film’s casting of Lauren Bacall as Hannah, Streisand’s mother, performed its own version of Meet the Fockers redemption. The “outing” of Bacall as a Jew so late in her 380 career was a generational corrective to the 1940s-era fact of her having hidden her Jewish background for so many decades, and across so many roles. The film’s central romantic story was about a beautiful but impotent WASP, Gregory Larkin, (Jeff Bridges) who seeks out a homely wife, Rose Morgan (Streisand) so he never has to worry about having sex again. Streisand, casting herself in the role of the ugly woman eventually desired by the beautiful Christian male, continued Streisand’s career-long assault on 1950s-era Teutonic beauty hierarchy. That Streisand also cast the pinnacle of 1940s and 1950s era hidden Jewish beauty, Lauren Bacall, suggest Streisand’s keen awareness of intertextual continuity of the Jewish star persona across decades of performances. The Mirror Has Two Faces not only played with the notion of Jewish beauty as a liminal and subjective state in its title (and perhaps a reference to Lacan’s mirror stage), but Streisand’s eventual love with Bridges maintained the Christian-Jewish coupling solution. Bacall finally played her long-delayed Jewish role. But, as with Streisand and Hoffman in Meet the Fockers a decade later, Bacall announces her own Jewishness in tandem with the encouragement of her child to seek out and acquire the Christian partner. This couched Bacall’s long delayed Jewish “outing” by contextualizing it in service to the next-generation Christian-Jewish coupling progression. By the time of Meet the Fockers, it was Streisand’s turn in the Bacall role. Streisand is finally allowed to complete her Jewish identity through marriage with Dustin Hoffman, the Jewish schlemiel. It is a next-generation retroactive resolution to the Jewish star persona long reliant on sexual entanglement with the Christian. But, just as for Bacall in Streisand’s own film a decade earlier, Streisand’s Jewish identity is only 381 made complete when participating in the generational hand-off of her child to a Christian partner. The themes of The Jazz Singer continued to resonate loudly, nearly a century later. CONCLUSION The final image of Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story (1989) is a slow dolly-in on a newborn infant, “Masha.” Masha was just born to Herman Broder (Ron Silver), a Jewish Holocaust survivor, and Yadwiga (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska), a non-Jewish Polish peasant who had saved his life during the Holocaust, and is now, in New York City, his second wife. As with Sophie’s Choice (1982), the residual traumas of the Holocaust found expression in the sexual realm. The film’s haunting tale of Jewish trauma and fracture had split Herman’s desire between memory (his first wife, Tamara), sexuality (his lover, and fellow Jewish Holocaust survivor, Masha), and loyalty and obligation (to the non-Jewish Yadwiga). As Robert S. Leventhal notes, Herman’s haunting and masochism are Freudian sublimations of his traumatic past and signs of the specters he cannot shake. 586 By ending the film on the image of the half-Christian, half-Jewish child, Mazursky presents an uneasy resolution to the trauma of Jewish identity in the post-war era. The coupling of Polish-Jewish survivors of the Holocaust is an American assimilation narrative, but an uncomfortable one. The Christian-Jewish coupling is not joyful, but necessary for Herman to try to purge the Jewish trauma of his past identity, and seek a 586 Robert S. Leventhal, “Narcissism, Masochism, and Love after the Holocaust: Paul Mazursky's Film Enemies, A Love Story” online only, (University of Virgina, 1995). < http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/enemies.html> 382 new identity in the non-Jewish Other. Mazursky was also the screenwriter of I Love You Alice B. Toklas (1968), and the director of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Blume in Love (1975), and even Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), films that connected cultural crisis, generational breakdown, and erotic confusion among fracturing Jewish couples in the hippie and post-hippie generations. By the time of 1989’s Enemies A Love Story, Mazursky had traced the sexual crises of Jews in the “free love” generation to origins in Holocaust trauma. Enemies: A Love Story connects this chapter’s examination of both Holocaust texts and romantic comedy texts of the 1990s and 2000s. Just as in 1968, Mazursky was ahead of his time in understanding what had changed within the film tropes of Christian- Jewish coupling. By the mid 1990s, Mazursky’s uneasy configuration had become ubiquitous. Jewish actors and movie stars not only began foregrounding their Jewishness as essential to their portrayals, but an increasing number of films began to not only no longer shy away from representing a biological construction of Jewishness, but to actively embrace it. The Christian-Jewish coupling emerged, for its third major cycle, as the iconography of a politically liberal reading strategy meant to challenge, and parody, the gender-normative codes of the Reagan-era 1980s. By the 2000s, performers as diverse as Sasha Baron Cohen, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, would proudly celebrate their Jewish identity as both a tool of genre parody and a signifier of disruptive challenge. In the three areas examined in this chapter, the television sitcoms of the 1990s, the “gross-out” schlemiel films of 1998-2007, and the universalized Holocaust films of the 383 1990-2005 period, Christian-Jewish coupling remained a viable framework to address numerous cultural, ideological, and social sites of contestation. Collectively, these texts demonstrated an intertextual continuation from the first generation immigrant comedies of the 1920s through the highly sexed politically tinged youth films of the 1967-1980 period and into a contemporary postmodern configuration. Even in an age with no cultural pressures against Christian-Jewish coupling, tensions were produced. Whether in sitcom structure, a gross-out comedy, or a period piece about the Holocaust, Jews and Christians, in entanglement, remained a viable signifier of cultural disruption, deviant eroticism, and generational challenge. This third wave of Christian-Jewish texts nostalgically invoked the immigrant comedies and sexed up counterculture icons that had come before. But in the postmodern era, these texts no longer challenged cultural boundaries. Instead, they used these tropes as the generative framework to create new comic barriers in an age of permissiveness. 384 CONCLUSION: RETHINKING THE COUPLING NARRATIVE This dissertation has argued that there have been three significant historical waves of Christian-Jewish coupling narratives in American film and television. The first was the multicultural, pro-immigrant first wave of the ghetto love stories of the 1910s and 1920s. The second, emerging from literature, comedy, and the avant-garde, was the 1967-1980 libidinal counterculture period. The third, let by sitcom television and “gross out” film comedies, was the 1990-2005 self-reflexive, nostalgic third wave. Each of these periods positioned themselves as emancipatory, progressive responses to the nativist, conservative political climates of the 1910s, 1950s, and 1980s, respectively. As part of this analysis, the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative has been positioned as a recurring template found throughout American history. It is one that articulates an American progression narrative as a distinct response to European nativism and eugenics theory in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. This formulation first emerged from political events in England and France, artistic and literary modernists, and the rise of the machine age. With the invention of cinema in 1895, the immigrant waves into America through Ellis Island in the 1890s through the 1920s, and the development of Hollywood by Jewish moguls in the 1910s, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives became one of the most privileged frameworks to negotiate issues of ethnicity, sexuality, class, and gender. In the study of each of these historical eras, there is also a theoretical argument taking place. In introducing the notion of a relational Christonormative structure, 385 Christian-Jewish couplings can be read as not only responding to the specific political and cultural events depicted in their texts, but also speaking to broader themes of identity and desire. By focusing on the coupling, rather than individual representations, my hope with this project is to introduce a new framework for examining media that breaks down overdetermined assumptions about single bodies, and singular representations. In terms of the body, and specifically the Jewish body, three main discursive areas of study were introduced. These can be grouped under the following headings: The Relational Body, The Technological Body, and The Historical Body. The Relational Body considers the coupling narrative as a single ideological representation. The Technological Body refers to the work done in chapters two and chapter three examining how Jewish bodies seeking Christian partners signified both corporeal and technological transformation. This was seen in films such as The Jazz Singer (1927) and The House of Rothschild (1934) that aligned Christian-Jewish couplings with the shift from silent to sound, and black and white to color, respectively. The Historical Body refers to couplings that invoke specific historical periods, while resolving the events of those periods through the emancipatory tale of the erotic union of Jew and Christian. This includes films such as Exodus (1960), Fiddler on the Roof (1971), The Way We Were (1972), The Front (1975), and Dirty Dancing (1987). Each of these theoretical approaches is not specific to the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative. It is my hope that future work can build off them to examine how coupling narratives function as sites of power, dialectic, and historical renegotiation. Before I conclude, let me offer a few brief examples of how these areas of theoretical 386 inquiry can move beyond Christian-Jewish specificity and into other areas of academic studies. THE RELATIONAL BODY In my introduction I introduced the concept of Christonormativity. By examining so many disparate texts and historical eras, the goal of this project is to demonstrate how the relational coupling can form recurring patterns. These patterns appear within many different cultural and political circumstances. Christonormativity and Jewish alterity contest historical events, representations, and narratives through the relational dialectic created by their oppositional binary. This holds true for the majority representation, Jewish men and Christian women, but also in the Jewish female and Christian male coupling that appears in the 1910s, 1960s, and 1990s. However, analyzing how entangled bodies form a relational dialectic in media can extend to any number of configurations. While this dissertation has focused specifically on Jewish identity as a counterpoint to Christonormativity, the ideas explored within the “coupling narrative” can be extended into any number of academic configurations. The study of the erotic entanglement of two figures is one way to broaden the discussion. Coupling narratives introduce a Foucauldian understanding of sexuality as an act of both power and resistance within media artifact. The privileging of erotic couples - how a culture decides what is, and is not, acceptable in terms of representation – is an important area for scholarly investigation. Issues of transnationalism, displaced bodies, and many forms of diaspora, can function as the “Jew” in a similar academic interrogation. Couplings as signifiers of the tendrils of history, displaced into a 387 contemporary erotic entanglement, can extend outward to any number of configurations. We can think of the ideological underpinnings of human-alien love stories in films and television shows such as V (1983), Enemy Mine (1984), and Alien Nation (1989) to name one potential area of exploration. The exotic “native” as a transgressive expression of white desire in everything from the film versions of Pocahontas and John Smith (1924, 1995, 2005) to Avatar (2009) could be reconsidered through a Christonormative framework as well. THE TECHNOLOGICAL BODY In chapter two, I examined the role of the Jewish diaspora as metaphor for technological transformation in films such as The Jazz Singer (1927), Abie’s Irish Rose (1928), and The House of Rothschild(1934). I argued that the specificity of Jewish cosmopolitan identity in modernity privileged Jews to serve as a liminal signifier of transformation and change. This privileging of Jews as a mediation point between nativist 19 th century Victorian-era mores and the modern world also appeared in literature as diverse as works by Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Orwell, and the postwar American writers, Malamud, Bellow, and Roth. It engages understandings of the “animal” as a challenge to constructions of both human and technological. This was seen in literature from Kafka to Roth, and explored by filmmakers as diverse as Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino. A contemporary filmmaker such as David Cronenberg is one example of an auteur whose work could be examined from this perspective. Cronenberg has been theorized as a Canadian filmmaker, a horror filmmaker, and a filmmaker focused on the psychoanalytic repercussions of the body in gender crisis, what Murray Forman describes 388 as a “masculinity that is mediated by modern technology.” 587 Far less explored is the role of the Jewish body in Cronenberg’s films. In 1986, Cronenberg thematized Kafka’s Metamorphosis in The Fly. Cronenberg cast the Jewish actor Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle, an Einstein-like neurotic and socially awkward scientist. Upon becoming genetically fused with the DNA of a housefly, Seth Brundle’s corporeal decay echoes the very notion of early 20 th century Jewish body deviancy that Kafka has thematized in the form of talking animals and insects. Brundle, or as he begins to call himself, “Brundlefly,” attempts to solve his crisis by trying to genetically fuse with his pregnant lover, Veronica Quaife, (Geena Davis). When the experiment goes wrong and Veronica escapes, Brundfly ends up fused with the “telepod” technology into a creature that is equal parts insect, man, and machine. Cronenberg’s deviant Jewish body engages both animality and technology as expressions of its deviancy. It locates the solution to this deviancy in the form of Christian-Jewish genetic union. The Fly is thus an engaging text to be considered through this dissertation’s work on technology, monstrosity, Jewish sexual deviancy, and the Christian-Jewish coupling narrative. In 2007, Cronenberg was one of thirty four notable directors commissioned to write and direct a short film for the 60 th Anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. Included as part of the Chacun Son Cinéma (To Each His Own), Cronenberg wrote, directed and starred in a four minute shot-on-video single take short film, At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World (2007). The short film played with 587 Cronenberg has been read as a Canadian filmmaker, a horror filmmaker, and a filmmaker focused on the psychoanalytic repercussions of the body in gender crisis, what Murray Forman describes as a “masculinity that is mediated by modern technology.” See Murray Foreman, “Boys Will be Boys: David Cronenberg’s Crash Course in Heavy Mettle” in Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the end of the Twentieth Century, ed. Murray Pomerance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 120. 389 notions of surveillance culture, Jewish identity, and the self-destruction of the auteur. The film’s sole image is a live “video” close-up of Cronenberg himself. Two off-camera news reporters narrate the events as they’re taking place, presumably in a live television feed format. Cronenberg is identified only as the “last Jew” left on earth. Cronenberg has locked himself in what is announced as the last movie theater, the “last cinema.” Cronenberg has decided to take his own life, on-camera, on live television. Cronenberg’s conflation is clear; without cinema, there is no Jew. Without the Jew, there is no cinema. Cronenberg’s final act of self-immolation will occur not on 35mm film, but shot on video and in a live-television format. In his final moments, Cronenberg has been reduced from his auteur status into simply that of an unnamed and anonymous “last Jew.” Cronenberg’s use of his own body as that of the “Last Jew,” reaching the moment of collective Jewish extinguishment in the act of suicide, recreates modernist understandings of Jewish identity from Joyce and Kafka to Woody Allen and Philip Roth. Cronenberg, famous as an auteur who deals with issues of body horror and technology, echoes the eugenics paranoia of genetic difference in the early machine age of the late 19 th Century. By setting his own body in front of the camera, and televising his suicide from within a cinema, the conflation of apparatus, body and Jewish negation at the core of Cronenberg’s work becomes textually foregrounded. A Dangerous Method (2011), Cronenberg’s film about the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) also plays with distinctions between Jewish body and Jewish absence. Cronenberg’s examination of the famously displaced homosocial interest between Freud 390 and Jung produces the Christian-Jewish coupling through sexual sublimation. The story thematizes the transference ideas of psychoanalysis by relocating the desires of both Freud and Jung onto the female body of the neurotic Jewish female patient and student, Sabina Spielrein. Yet Cronenberg, whose “last Jew” and “last cinema” had come together just a few years earlier, displaces the Jewish body through the casting of non- Jewish actors Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightly. In this work, Cronenberg’s famous understanding of body horror, technology, and subjectivity, locates a Jewish body not as presence (as in Brundlefly and Cronenberg himself) but as psychoanalytic absence. These Cronenberg examples are just one brief aside to suggest how this work can apply to different textual analyses moving forward. But nor is this limited to the Jewish body. Extending how bodies signify technology and apparatus through erotic coupling can apply to any number of texts and configurations. Film such as James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009) were intended to represent the triumph of technology in filmmaking. This triumph was thematized through the coupling narrative of its two protagonists. Theorizing coupling narratives could apply to Cameron’s virtual Na’vi as well as robot-human love stories in films such as Blade Runner (1981). This perspective can be broadened to incorporate a number of areas of technology and apparatus studies. THE HISTORICAL BODY The third central idea of this dissertation is the notion of the Jewish body as historical disruption. By this I mean that the Jew reminds the spectator of the past at the same moment they mark generational transformation in coupling with the Christian. This was seen as early as Méliès’s Dreyfus films in 1899, as I argued in chapter two. It was 391 seen in the first generation of immigrant transformations taking place in the Ghetto Love Stories of the 1910s and 1920s. It can also be located in texts as diverse as Holocaust dramas, and the historical parodies of Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. In our contemporary moment, it can be located in the coded ethnic satire performed by Sasha Baron Cohen in films such as Borat (2005), Bruno (2009), and The Dictator (2012). Whether provoking secessionists in the American south or anti-Semites in a rural bar, Cohen’s use of his own Jewish body satirizes anti-Semitic anxieties that can be traced back hundreds of years. In 1994’s Pulitzer Prize winning two-part play Angels in America, Tony Kushner used a relational interplay between Jewish and Christian bodies to thematize two historical traumas, the 1980s AIDS crisis in New York, and the 1951 trial and execution of the Rosenbergs on espionage charges. Kushner’s play presents the ghosts of the Rosenbergs as a haunting specter of the past appearing at the moment of the AIDS crisis in the mid 1980s. Kushner links the two traumatic frameworks through the character of the closeted Roy Cohn, the Jewish lawyer who had prosecuted the Rosenbergs in 1951. Cohn was famously known as Joe McCarthy’s Jewish “pit bull,” the Jewish face meant to give cover to Senator Joe McCarthy to inure him from charges of anti-Semitism during the trial. 588 In Kushner’s play, the ghost-like visitation of Ethel Rosenberg reflects the return of repressed trauma in both a Freudian and Brechtian context. Rosenberg’s ghost is 588 Weingarten, Aviva. Jewish Organizations' Response to Communism and to Senator McCarthy, Trans. Ora Cummings, Valentine Mitchell: United Kingdom, 2008. P. 87 392 a reminder of Cohn’s Jewish self-hatred. She return to haunt Cohn as his body dies from AIDS. 589 Counterpointing Cohn’s Dickensian existential struggle is the Christian-Jewish pairing of two young, urbane, and gay New Yorkers, Prior Walter and Louis Ironson. Prior and Walter represent body opposites. Prior is a WASP, generous, good looking, and very confident, (played by blond, German-looking actors in both the original Broadway cast and the HBO miniseries). But Pryor is also HIV positive. Pryor’s lover, Louis, is Jewish, highly verbal, neurotic, self-centered, and HIV negative. Through the representations of both Roy Cohn and Louis, Kushner creates what Alisa Solomon and James Fisher had termed the “metaphorical Jew,” a liminal construction that allows Kushner to mediate between thematic, historical and philosophical ideas within these characters. 590 Cohn is the hidden and displaced tragic Jew of the 1950s. Louis is the neurotic and self-destructive Jew of the 1980s. By introducing the young, beautiful, and tragically doomed character of Prior, Kushner also introduces a Christ-myth in his episodic play structure. It is Prior who sees the Benjaminian-esque Last Angel as he begins to die from AIDS, as the neurotic, selfish Louis abandons him. The 2003 HBO miniseries version of Angels in America was directed by Mike Nichols. Nichols cast Hoffman contemporary Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, one of the most 589 Before becoming sick, Cohn remains in denial about his AIDS, his gayness, his Jewishness, and his past sins working for McCarthy. Cohn instructs his doctor to describe his condition as “liver cancer.” The gap located between the irrefutable truth of Cohn’s dying body and the fictive constructs created by the power structures that Cohn signifiers ultimately comes home to root in the decaying body of Cohn’s own immutable corpus. 590 James Fisher, “Tony Kushner’s Metaphorical Jew,” You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture, ed. Vincent Brook (Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2006), 76-77. 393 famous Italian-American actors of his generation. Pacino-as-Cohn produces the very same affect of displaced Jewishness that Hoffman had as not-Redford, only in complete inversion. Cohn’s displaced sense of self could only be embodied by the non-Jew-as- Jew, just as The Graduate challenged McCarthy-era body hierarchies by introducing the Jew-as-Redford. Nichols continues this inversion of casting expectations by utilizing the most famous “Shiksa” actress of her generation, Meryl Streep, in, not one, but two Jewish roles. Streep performs as both the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as well as in Hasidic drag as the wizened, male Jewish rabbi sage, Rabbi Chemelwetz. Streep’s performances as not one, but two, iconic haunting specters of Jewish identity (the Yiddishe mama and the ancient and wise rabbi) represent the ironic completion, and simultaneous mocking, of Roy Cohn’s 1950s Gregory Peck dream. In Nichols’s satirical casting inversions, the Jewish body was absent, transformed into the realm inhabited by the movie star. 591 Nichols’s link between the Jewish body and generational break in casting Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate over thirty-five years earlier had produced the same historical corrective. Hoffman was both Benjamin Braddock and also “not-Redford,” the moment of generational break from the ethnic hierarchies of the McCarthy years. The same generational break with Jewish sublimation of identity that Kushner depicts plaguing the soul of Roy Cohn. In 2004, Nichols flipped the script of 591 Further connecting the two in Nichols’s metatextual use of star persona, Streep, the proverbial blonde Shiksa movie star of the 1980s, had starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in 1979’s tale of divorce, Kramer vs. Kramer. 394 1967, denaturing Jewish identity as a satire of the historical trauma of Jews under HUAC in the 1950s. A decade earlier, Robert Redford had explored a similar understanding of the relationship between Jewish bodies, Christian beauty, and historical trauma. Redford, perhaps the preeminent idealized masculine, blond beauty of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, expressed these ideas in 1994’s Quiz Show. Redford’s recreation of the quiz show scandals of the 1950s was ostensibly about how a nebbishy, intellectual Jew, Herbie Stempel (John Turturro), was replaced by the conventionally handsome, erudite WASP intellectual, Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes). The film was based on actual events that took place on the game show Twenty-One in 1958. Redford’s film addressed notions of Christian-Jewish beauty hierarchies and body-hatred in the character of the investigating reporter, Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow), a brilliant Harvard graduate who goes out of his way to protect Van Doren. For these actions, Goodwin is accused by his wife of being “the uncle Tom of the Jews.” Likewise, the Jewish network executives (Hank Azaria and David Paymer) who replace Stempel with Van Doren Quiz Show are implied to have done so because they are embarrassed about Stempel’s obnoxious Jewish characteristics. As with Nichols’s Angels in America, Quiz Show is a meditation on Redford’s own career through a Christian-Jewish relational framework. The Italian Turturro, as Stempel, echoes Nichols’s use of Pacino as Cohn. Both are self-reflexive and aware commentaries on casting choice and Jewish identity. Redford’s role as the normative Christian beauty alternative to Jewish alterity opposite Barbra Streisand in The Way We 395 Were (1972) and with Dustin Hoffman in All the President’s Men (1975) has positioned him as a throw-back to 1950s-era understandings of movie star beauty. Redford may have felt a kindred spirit in the undeserving celebrity that the conventionally beautiful Van Doren experiences simply because of what he is not (the neurotic and “ugly” Stempel). The fact Dustin Hoffman had replaced Redford for the role of Benjamin Braddock, and subsequently launched the power of Jewish movie stars in the 1967-1980 period presents Quiz Show with a number of thematic metaphors. Redford’s examination of the cultural forces at work defining beauty in the 1950s was a late-career acknowledgement of what Redford had always signified. SPECTERS TO COME As history has shown, actual Jews are not necessary for the reception of a cosmopolitan body of alterity. In his study of the eruption of anti-Semitism among the Muslim underclass of Indonesia, notable because no actual Jews live there, James T. Siegel describes a phenomenon he terms “the Jewish uncanny.” 592 Playing off the old joke that if they didn’t have Jews, they’d have to invent them, Siegel describes a construction of a national self image that relies on the dread of an abstract global menace. This threat, a place in which “Jews” are so removed and ill defined, they can’t even be thought of as haunting specters. Instead, they are, as Siegel puts it, “the threat of specters to come.” 593 592 James T. Siegel, “Kiblat and the Mediatic Jew,” Religion and Media, ed. Hent De Veries and Samuel Weber (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2001), 302. 593 Ibid., 302. 396 Coupling theory, as I have presented it here, can engage how the specters, and “specters to come” are located within any culture’s folkloric or media tradition. This process can move beyond Christian-Jewish specificity to consider any number of racial, gender, class, ethnic, and national configurations. The goal is to analyze these patterns not as individual representations, but as an entanglement between two figures: Martin Buber’s I and Thou writ cinematic as part of the Christonormative structure. Christonormativity is a broad term, one with inherently problematic and overdetermined assumptions if pushed too far. But it is also a framework that I hope will open up theoretical work on representation beyond race, class, gender, sexual discourses. It is a discourse of power and resistance located in the narrative of the couple, and one which can apply to any number of global sites of power that find contestation through media representation. While the “Jew” has served as the privileged figure of contemporary understandings of displacement, neurotic fracture, and comedic sexual deviancy and inadequacy, Jews are by no means the only figure to stand-in for the Christonormative Other. 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