Curtin University Homepage
  • Library
  • Help
    • Admin

    espace - Curtin’s institutional repository

    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
    View Item 
    • espace Home
    • espace
    • Curtin Research Publications
    • View Item
    • espace Home
    • espace
    • Curtin Research Publications
    • View Item

    Not really white--again: performing Jewish difference in Hollywood films since the 1980s

    19846_Thomas, Erin full.pdf (12.60Mb)
    Access Status
    Open access
    Authors
    Stratton, Jon
    Date
    2001
    Type
    Journal Article
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Citation
    Stratton, Jon. 2001. Not really white--again: performing Jewish difference in Hollywood films since the 1980s. Screen 42 (2): 142-166.
    Source Title
    Screen
    Additional URLs
    http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/citation/42/2/142
    Faculty
    Division of Humanities
    Department of Communication and Cultural Studies
    Faculty of Media, Society and Culture (MSC)
    School
    Department of Communication & Cultural Studies
    Remarks

    This is a pre-copy-editing, author produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Screen following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version

    J Stratton

    Not really white - again: performing Jewish difference in Hollywood films since the 1980s Screen 2001 42: 142-166

    is available online at

    http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/citation/42/2/142

    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/37913
    Collection
    • Curtin Research Publications
    Abstract

    In the 1980s there was a transformation in the way Jews, and Jewishness, were expressed in American films as a function of the increasing popular acceptance of a form of multiculturalism that celebrates ethno-racial difference and of the identity politics that is its corollary. In this article I will begin by thinking through how films of the 1950s and 1960s discursively reproduced Jews as assimilated into white America. I will then take three films that, in diverse ways, articulate aspects of the transformation. I will examine Yentl and Zelig from 1983, and Desperately Seeking Susan from 1985. All these films, as we shall see, express the shift I am describing ambiguously. All three films were, in different ways, marginal to the mainstream Hollywood project and all three are by Jewish directors, two by women. Yentl, produced and directed by Barbra Streisand, who also starred in it, was the realisation of a long-term personal dream made possible only after she agreed to make the film as a musical. Zelig, a Woody Allen film, was made in black and white as a pseudo-documentary and Desperately Seeking Susan, the first film for director Susan Seidelman, started out as a low-budget, independent production.These, and later films, begin to address the problem of representing Jews, and Jewishness, in the context of a socio-political move in the United States away from the forms of identification located in the ideology of cultural pluralism and towards those of multiculturalism. As we shall see, there has been a tendency to understand this development using the distinction made by Werner Sollors between thinking in terms of descent and consent. I will argue that, as a general rule, the American nation tends to think in terms of consent while racial and ethnic groups have tended to think of themselves in terms of descent. This is as true for American multiculturalism as for cultural pluralism. However, as Jews began to distinguish themselves from white America, they have tended to do this in the consensual terms that were central to their being accepted as white. Key to this has been the trope of the double and the idea of performativity. This emphasis on 'consent', in the broadest sense, on, I would say, Jewishness as a cultural effect, operates in tandem with the religious, Judaic, use of the halachic definition of a Jew, based on matrilineal descent, which is that for a person to be a Jew their mother has to be a Jew. Consent signals the preoccupation of that paradox, the secular Jew.

    Related items

    Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

    • Buffy the vampire slayer: what being Jewish has to do with it
      Stratton, Jon (2005)
      This article examines the whiteness in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The author argues that the show’s overwhelming whiteness is a product of a generalized white anxiety about the numerical loss of white ...
    • The Beastie Boys: Jews in whiteface
      Stratton, Jon (2008)
      The Beastie Boys are usually described as the white hip hop group who helped break rap to a broad-based white audience. Rarely is it acknowledged that the Beasties all came from Jewish backgrounds. This article examines ...
    • Multicultural Australia – a critical examination of Australia’s COVID-19 communication strategy
      Wolf, Katharina (2021)
      Over the past decade(s), multiculturalism has become a defining – and often (outwardly) celebrated - characteristic of many countries around the world. The term ‘multiculturalism’ has a variety of meanings, however, within ...
    Advanced search

    Browse

    Communities & CollectionsIssue DateAuthorTitleSubjectDocument TypeThis CollectionIssue DateAuthorTitleSubjectDocument Type

    My Account

    Admin

    Statistics

    Most Popular ItemsStatistics by CountryMost Popular Authors

    Follow Curtin

    • 
    • 
    • 
    • 
    • 

    CRICOS Provider Code: 00301JABN: 99 143 842 569TEQSA: PRV12158

    Copyright | Disclaimer | Privacy statement | Accessibility

    Curtin would like to pay respect to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members of our community by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which the Perth campus is located, the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar Nation; and on our Kalgoorlie campus, the Wongutha people of the North-Eastern Goldfields.