Holocaust and Jewish Film History

The problematic representation of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli films has been extensively researched over the past few decades. The subject was first thoroughly analyzed in Ella Shohat's comprehensive 1989 study, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. In her book she uses a Marxist approach, claiming that Israeli films express the views of the Ashkenazi hegemony and help preserve its supremacy. Shohat discusses the modes through which an Orientalist dichotomy dominated Eretz-Israeli and Israeli cinema from the outset. In films that portrayed an encounter between Ashkenazi Jews and Mizrahi Jews, the former represented Western values-they were rational, enlightened, and compassionate-while Mizrahi Jews were mainly depicted as primitive, inferior, and violent. Over the years, scholars have pointed to other features in the cinematic representation of Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relations in Israeli Bourekas films, which were dominant from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, but Shohat's preliminary observations regarding an Orientalist dichotomy in the 1950s have become generally accepted in Israeli film studies. This article revisits the perceived Orientalist dichotomy through an analysis of 1950s films that focus on encounters between Mizrahi Jews and Holocaust survivors (Ashkenazi Jews) and their integration into Israeli society. These films include Tent City [Ir Ha'ohalim] (Leopold Aryeh Lahola, 1951), Faithful City [Kirya Ne'emana] (Józef Lejtes, 1952), and Hill 24 Doesn't Answer [Givaa 24 Eina Ona] (Thorold Dickinson, 1955). The article claims that in these films Mizrahi Jews are shown as integrating more quickly than Holocaust survivors. Conversely, Holocaust survivors are presented in the films-much like they were in many other cultural realms at that time-as a broken people who ultimately assimilated, albeit with much difficulty.

For most of the silent movie era American studios employed a considerable number of women directors. Initially churning out low-budget shorts, the studios emulated the egalitarian practices of live theatre, where the positions men and women filled were fluid. Popular actresses like Mary Pickford and directors like Alice Guy-Blaché and Lois Weber even founded their own production companies. As the Hollywood movie industry evolved into a profitable big business dependent on the profits from star-studded feature films, it consolidated around a handful of major studios that were managed like corporations and required external investment. Their owners gradually removed women from the ranks of directors out of concern that having women in such a key role would scare off financiers. 1 The gender criteria for various filmmaking jobs negotiated by the craft unions thereafter further limited the opportunities for women to direct. 2 From the 1930s until the 1960s, Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino were the only women directing studio feature films. 3 During this period, women directors gravitated to New York, where documentary, experimental, and independent filmmaking was centered. In New York film circles there were two notable Jewish women precursors of the directors discussed in this essay. Maya Deren created avant-garde motion pictures that eventually earned her the title of being "the mother of underground film." 4 Shirley Clarke specialized in documentaries and gritty realistic feature films about urban drug and gang subcultures. Her Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World (1963) won an Oscar for best documentary feature. 5 Neither Deren nor Clarke directly addressed Jewish themes in their works.

This essay compares two early Yiddish-language responses to the Holocaust, Moyshe Nudelman's 1947 collection of feuilletons Gelekhter durkh trern ("Laughter Through Tears") and the 1947 film Undzere kinder ("Our Children") produced in Poland by Natan Gross and starring the comedians Shmuel Dzigan and Yisroel Szumacher.

Vortrag bei Filmschau/Vortragsreihe A TRIBUTE TO KIRK DOUGLAS ZUM 100. GEBURTSTAG
Gartenbau Kino, Wien, 10. Dezember 2016
(6 Tage nach dem endgültigen Wahlsieg von Alexander Van der Bellen über FPÖ-Kandidat Norbert Hofer bei der Wiederholung der Bundespräsidentenwahl in Österrreich 2016)

filmmaker Ruth Beckermann is one of Austria’s crucial essayists and documentarians. This interview is focused on the personal and political dimensions of the Jewish experience in her body of work since the 1980s, when she started a cinematic inquiry for identity and the subjects of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Her films, from 1983 onward, and particularly The Paper Bridge (1987), Towards Jerusalem (1991), East of War (1996), and Homemad(e) (2000), are a testimony to the core concerns of her generation—the second generation of Holocaust survivors. The interview also explores the themes and subjects of more recent films, like Zorro’s Bar Mitzvah (2006), American Passages (2011), and The Waldheim Waltz (2018) and gets into different aspects of her perspective on filmmaking.

Sandra Shevey takes a look at another Aryan Hollywood film and discusses how antiSemite tropes are played out in seemingly innocuous Hollywood comedies. Contrary to the view that moguls created a kind of reform Judaism Shevey believes moguls (save on the commissioning end) actively tolerated even promoted antiSemitism.