Jewish Stereotypes in Film and TV

Jewish Stereotypes in Film and TV

Based on European Jewish folklore, The Golem (1920), tells the story of a Jewish rabbi in the 16th-century who creates a giant creature from clay, called the Golem, and using sorcery, brings the creature to life in order to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution.

In The Jazz Singer (1927), Cantor Rabinowitz is upset because his son Jakie (Al Jolson) shows no interest in carrying on the family's traditions and heritage. For five generations, men in the family have been Cantors in the synagogue, but Jakie is more interested in jazz and ragtime music. One day, they have such a bitter argument that Jakie leaves home for good. After a few years on his own, now calling himself Jack Robin, he enjoys a great deal of success. Jakie comes home in time to sing Kol Nidre at Yom Kippur services and reconciles with his dying father.

The most notorious anti-Semitic film of all time is probably Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1939), a German Nazi propaganda film that presents itself as a documentary. The film attempts to prove that Jews have racial personality traits that, according to the Nazis, make the Jew a wandering cultural parasite. The images couldn't be more heavy-handed -- one of the sequences early in the film shows a pack of rats emerging from a sewer and that is juxtaposed with a crowd of Jews in a bustling street. The film ends with Hitler's notorious speech at the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, where he warned that a future war would lead to the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."

Jud Suss or Jude Suss or Jew Suss

Much less heavy-handed but no less effective and notorious as propaganda is the Nazi film Jud Süß, (Jew Suss, 1940) a brilliant work of film propaganda and an very revealing portrayal of Nazi attitudes towards the Jews. Juden Suss is inspired by the life of Joseph Suss Oppenheimer (1698-1738), Jewish banker and financial planner for Duke Karl Alexander of Wurttemberg. Oppenheimer is portrayed as a greedy manipulator who gains the confidence of the Duke and is appointed his tax collector. Oppenheimer then uses his influence to convince the Duke to disband the local governing council and allow the Jewish rabble who had been previously barred from entering the city unhindered access. As Oppenheimer's influence grows he becomes a rapist, torturer, and murderer. The populace becomes enraged and Oppenheimer is eventually tried for "laying with a German girl" and executed by hanging.

In Gentleman's Agreement (1947) Philip Green (Gregory Peck) is a highly respected writer who is recruited by a magazine to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism in America. He decides to pretend that he is Jewish, so that he can write his story from that perspective. Green soon finds that he won't be invited to certain parties, that he cannot stay in so-called 'restricted' hotels and that his own son is called names in the street. Green gets lost in the assignment, starts seeing himself as a Jew and struggles to maintain his composure amid all the anti-Semitism he experiences.

The Pawnbroker (1964) was one of the first films to deal with the effects of survivor guilt on Jews who endured the Holocaust. Sol Nazerman is the operator of a pawn shop, who is haunted by flashbacks of his life before and during his captivity in the concentration camps where his family was killed by the Nazis. He is emotionally closed off, full of bitterness and self loathing, and harsh and dismissive to those closest to him. When his young assistant dies trying to protect him during a robbery, the pawnbroker finally breaks down in a torrent of emotion.

The Pawnbroker

Fiddler on the Roof (1971) is a musical about trying to maintain strong cultural traditions and identity in the face of a continually changing world. It shows us the harsh realities of Jewish life in pre-Revolutionary Russia through the eyes of Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman in the tiny Russian village of Anatevka. The film depicts the close knit village life especially in relation to the threatening external forces like the pogroms of pre-revolutionary Russia. The persecution of Jews in Russia is captured in this story, as Tevye's family must leave their village after an edict from Lenin.

In Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen's character plays up the difference between his first two wives, both Jewish, and his new uber-WASP girlfriend (played by Diane Keaton), who "looks like the wife of an astronaut." Woody Allen's movie persona is a walking stereotype of a morose self-absorbed intellectual, consumed by introspection and a persecution complex who always manages to sabotage his relationships with women.

The TV miniseries Holocaust (1978), follows each member of the well-educated and affluent Jewish Family Weiss throughout Hitler's reign in Germany. One by one, the family members suffer a horrible fate under the Nazis until only one son survives at the end of World War II. The movie also follows the transformation of Eric Dorf, a young German lawyer who finds that the power and influence of being a SS officer destroys his humanity.