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- Title
FILMING IDENTITY IN THE JEWISH AMERICAN POSTWAR; OR, ON THE USES AND ABUSES OF PERIODIZATION FOR JEWISH STUDIES.
- Authors
Schreier, Benjamin
- Abstract
This article takes the postwar period in the US (from the end of World War II to the mid-1960s) as represented by a handful of canonical films--both of the era and since--as an opportunity to argue for a critical Jewish Studies-based analysis of periodization. It illustrates the need in Jewish Studies to mount a sustained critique of the concept of identity that anchors its professional practices. Questions about identity are too often asked as questions about culture as the naturalized predicate of a population, and this tendency underlies and supports a dominant historicist approach in Jewish American Studies that suppresses critical alternatives. Through a series of close readings--of The Jazz Singer (1927), Gentleman's Agreement (1947), The Pawnbroker (1964), Liberty Heights (1999), and Inglorious Basterds (2009)--this paper instead proposes that we deploy a critical history of the concept of Jewish American identity--rather than a history of an empirical subject we take for granted as American Jewry--to destabilize the logic of periodization underlying the historicist self-evidence of Jewish identity.
- Subjects
JEWISH studies; AMERICAN films -- Social aspects; JEWISH identity; AMERICAN Jewish history; GENTLEMAN'S Agreement (Film); JEWS in motion pictures; HISTORY
- Publication
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2016, Vol 34, Issue 3, p76
- ISSN
0882-8539
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/sho.2016.0016