America on Film. Sean Griffin
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into the male‐dominated world of stand‐up comedy.
Today, Jewish Americans remain a strong presence in the media industries, and most of them no longer fear the possibility of anti‐Semitic backlashes. While many Jewish filmmakers still focus on stories and issues central to white Christian America, there is ever‐greater room for films about the Jewish American experience or films that center on issues of historical importance, such as Avalon (1990), Schindler’s List (1993), Focus (2001), The Pianist (2002), Munich (2005), and A Serious Man (2009). A small number of independent films exploring Orthodox Jewish culture also exists: these films include the documentary Trembling Before G‐d (2001), as well as Fading Gigolo (2013), Menashe (2017), and Disobedience (2017). Still other films, like Keeping Up With the Steins (2006), use gentle humor to celebrate the peccadilloes of Jewish American culture and/or American ethnicities in general.
While such developments seem to indicate that Jewish Americans have largely been accepted as white, anti‐Semitism continues to be kept alive within various white supremacist groups and fundamentalist Christian communities. In the late 2010s, attacks on synagogues increased in the US and across the globe. The survival of demonic Jewish stereotypes in the twenty‐first century was made vividly clear with the release (and enormous box office success) of The Passion of the Christ (2004). This harrowing retelling of Jesus Christ’s torture and crucifixion, directed by Mel Gibson, acknowledges that both Romans and Jews were involved in his death, yet presents his Jewish persecutors as the more twisted and grotesque figures. Jewish communities were aghast and protested the film across the country. And although Gibson denied any anti‐Semitic intentions in his film, he was caught making anti‐Semitic comments during an arrest for drunk driving in 2006. (He later issued a public apology.) Such films and incidents highlight the fact that assimilation into whiteness is a process that is always ongoing, as well as that fear and/or hatred of the Other remains a powerful force in many Americans’ lives.
Case Study: The Jazz Singer (1927)
The Jazz Singer stands as one of the most important movies in American film history because it is considered to be the first Hollywood studio motion picture feature with synchronized sound. Produced by Warner Brothers in 1927, this silent film with sound sequences revolutionized the industry; it also deals with issues of race and ethnicity in very interesting ways. The story of The Jazz Singer focuses on the problems faced by Jewish immigrants in the first few decades of the twentieth century, and dramatizes the process of ethnic assimilation into whiteness. The film also points out historical connections between Jewish immigrants and African Americans (primarily via the blackface tradition), and even obliquely comments on the connections between Jews and Irish Americans.
As a way to foreground the use of sound, The Jazz Singer is fundamentally about two different types of music: liturgical sacred music and modern American popular song (under the catch‐all term “jazz”). Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson) has been trained by his father to follow in his profession: all the men in the Rabinowitz family have been cantors, men who lead a synagogue’s congregation in sung prayer. Jakie, however, as a second‐generation American Jew exposed to the American melting pot’s wealth of new rhythms and melodies, prefers to sing jazz. His father becomes angry that his son is seemingly forsaking the music of his Jewish heritage for American jazz. (In one inventive sequence, while Jakie is singing “Blue Skies,” his father comes in and shouts “Stop!”; just at that point, the film switches from a sound sequence back into a silent film.) Forced to choose between the two types of music and the cultures they represent, Jakie runs away from home and tries his luck singing on stage. Jakie’s interest in leaving behind his heritage in favor of American popular music indicates his aptitude for assimilation. As part of that trend, Jakie Rabinowitz changes his name to Jack Robin – in effect erasing his Jewish identity (his minority‐ethnic‐sounding name) for a more nondescript white‐sounding name, just as many other Jewish actors in show business were being encouraged to do.
Jolson in blackface as Jake Rabinowitz/Jack Robin in his most famous role, The Jazz Singer (1927).
The Jazz Singer, copyright © 1927, Warner Bros.
Intriguingly, the person who guides Jack to stardom is fellow stage performer Mary Dale. Mary actively attempts to usher Jack into the inner circle of assimilated whiteness, by helping him move up the ladder of theatrical success. The character of Mary Dale is enacted by “real‐life” Irish American actress May McAvoy, who played the Colleen type in many 1920s movies. While she kept her Irish‐sounding name, McAvoy was accepted as white, and in playing this role, she embodies a successful example of Irish American assimilation. Most audiences today would probably not even think of her character as Irish. Mary Dale/May McAvoy literally personifies the whiteness that Jack is moving toward. During the one moment in the film in which we see May perform on stage, she is wearing a fluffy white tutu and a peroxide wig that makes her hair appear to be gleaming white, literally a vision of whiteness.
On the other hand, Jack’s big chance on Broadway is tied to his performing in blackface, simultaneously emphasizing his difference from African Americans and the similarities in their marginal racial/ethnic status. Star Al Jolson was himself renowned for his blackface act. Yet the film does not introduce blackface until a key point in the story. Jack is just about to perform his final dress rehearsal before opening night on Broadway when he finds out that his father is dying and wants his son to take his place as cantor. The film draws out the emotional tug‐of‐war going on in Jack as he grapples with the lure of stardom/assimilation and his love of and sense of obligation to his Jewish upbringing. It is at this moment, as Jack is suffering through this turmoil, that he puts on blackface. The sadness and sense of difference he feels become linked to his transformation into an African American stereotype. In one shot, Jack/Jakie looks sadly in the mirror at himself in blackface, and his reflection dissolves to a vision of his father as cantor. The superimposition of the two images further strengthens the sense of Jewish blackface performance as somehow expressive of an outsider status.
The film resolves these tensions when Jakie decides to sing for his father instead of appearing on opening night – yet by the next season Jack Robin has nonetheless become a star on Broadway. The film does not bother to explain how this came to be, even though Mary and the show’s producer had told Jack that he would be finished in show business if he opted for his father instead of the play. Yet, in typical Hollywood “happy‐ending” style, Jack has been able to hold onto his Jewish heritage and still assimilate. A more consistent motif of the film that expresses the same idea is, again, tied to sound. Many people tell Jack that, unlike the average jazz singer, he sings “with a tear in his voice,” a description of his singing that associates his uniqueness directly with his training as a Jewish cantor. Jack is a better singer because of his ethnic heritage, even as he must assimilate to some degree in order to find acceptance. Produced by American Jews in Hollywood, The Jazz Singer endorses Jewish assimilation into whiteness, but not by necessarily denying Jewish identity in the process.
Veiled and Reviled: Arabs on Film in America
Like all of the cultural groups discussed throughout this book, the five million people of Arab descent living in America today are a highly diverse group of people. They can trace their national heritages to over 20 nations that stretch across Northern Africa (such as Morocco, Libya, Egypt) and onto the Arabian Peninsula (including Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq). The Arab world overlaps with the Middle East, which also includes Israel, Turkey, and Iran. Often what seems to define the idea of the Middle East in Western thinking is the Arabic language and/or the Muslim religion, although there are many different languages spoken and religions practiced throughout the entire region. In fact, there are more African American Muslims in the United States than Arab American Muslims, and most Lebanese Americans identify as Christians.