How do you know when Jewish film characters have gone mainstream? Maybe when filmmakers relax enough to introduce a parodic action hero, like Mordechai Jefferson Carver in Jonathan Kesselman’s 2003 neo-Shaftian Jewxploitation flick The Hebrew Hammer.
Adam Goldberg plays the titular “baddest Heeb this side of Tel Aviv,” “the Semitic Stallion” recruited to help fend off an evil plot to use It’s a Wonderful Life to lure Jewish kids into abandoning Hanukkah for Christmas. Only a tattooed bar-mitzvahed bad boy like Mordechai, in league with the Kwanzaa Liberation Front, has the kishkes to go into a neo-Nazi bar and order a Manischewitz “straight up.”
The Hammer’s not alone. He—along with specimens like Jason Biggs’s post-Portnoyish fruit-filling-fond Jim Levenstein, Adam Sandler’s ex-Mossad love and hair-styling machine Zohan, and Ben Stiller’s folksily meshuga Focker family—may be on the comedic edge of Jewish characters’ “normalization,” writes Nathan Abrams in The New Jew in Film (Rutgers University Press).
But the normalization crosses borders and genres, transmuting both grotesque anti-Semitic stereotypes and bland assimilationist mensches of old into multilayered, vivid characters, many of them unapologetically unflattering. Among Abrams’s favorites after studying some 300 films, he says in e-mail correspondence about the book, are the violent, vulgar, and pious convert Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) in The Big Lebowski (1998); Minnie Driver’s smart, sensual Sephardic Rosina da Silva in The Governess (1998); and Ryan Gosling’s self-loathing Jewish KKK member, Danny Balint, in The Believer (2001).
Abrams, a 40-year-old senior lecturer in film studies at Bangor University, in Wales, grew up in London and studied modern history at the University of Oxford and then American studies at the University of Birmingham. “I had a traditional mainstream Orthodox upbringing,” he says. “I spent a year in Israel” and “long had an interest in Jewish history, culture, religion, and education.”
Lebowski started crystallizing for him the shift in Jewish characterizations away from the neurotic, aphysical, sickly men; the humorless scholars; the tragic, pitiful victims; and the Jewish-American princesses and harpies who populated much of the 20th-century Jewish filmic universe. He attributes the shift to current filmmakers’ “distance from the Holocaust and Israel not being at the center of a Jewish-diaspora identity.” “Indeed, he asks, “do diasporic Jews even feel like a diaspora any more? Do they define themselves in terms of exile?”
If a foul-mouthed powder keg like Walter Sobchak or the murderous Nazi-scalping squad in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) causes offense or misunderstanding, so be it. “Who cares?” says Abrams. “Films always allow for polysemic readings: preferred or aberrant. We can’t contain the possibilities of readings, so why try? The point is not to take issue with the representation, but the motive for misreading.” As Kesselman’s Hebrew Hammer credits reassure unreassuringly: “No animals or gentiles were harmed in the making of this movie.”
Early-20th-century films like Cohen’s Advertising Scheme (1904) caricatured Jews, the book recounts, as swarthy, scheming, hunchbacked merchants. By 1927’s The Jazz Singer, they’d become, often, sentimentalized, exotic, humorous tradesfolk. World War II “platoon” movies placed them “in a spectrum of ethnic soldiers,” a move meant to help “decrease racial, ethnic, and religious differences and emphasize similarity and unity in fighting a common enemy.” In the 40s and 50s, Jewish characters became more visible, often noble, principals, but with overt religious practice played down and gentiles regularly taking on the roles of Jewish leads (Millie Perkins as Anne Frank, for instance).
The rise of independent producers coupled with Israel’s victory in 1967’s Six-Day War fueled a period of more aggressively ethnic representations in the 60s and 70s, like Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967). Later, Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary, Shoah, and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) embodied a reawakened Holocaust consciousness. TV’s Seinfeld performed cultural jujitsu, casting Jewish humor as societal parody writ large.
That history—obviously glossed simplistically here from Abrams’s extensive and detailed references—set the stage for the late-90s shift he focuses on. The Yiddish badhkin, or jokesters, of yore become, for instance, Judd Apatow’s “Jew Tang Clan” slackers: Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Paul Rudd, and Jason Schwartzman. Inglourious Basterds’ Shoshanna Dreyfus and the 2007 horror film Hostel II’s Beth Salinger blow up passive Jewish-American-princess expectations as the heroines demonstrate their credentials as smart, vengeful, and resourceful Jewesses with Attitude, to use one of Abrams’s pet phrases. And the smothering, kvetching Jewish mother turns, in Tovah Feldshuh’s character in Kissing Jessica Stein (2001), into an understanding and open-minded nurturer who is more concerned with her daughter’s being happy than with her being hetero.
The bland, de-eroticized Jews of yesteryear morph into the spy siren Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) of Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006) and the sensitive, but lethal and studly, terrorist hunter Avner (Eric Bana) of Spielberg’s Munich (2005). The passive merchants of a century ago are now tough underdog cops, like Russell Crowe’s Richie Roberts in American Gangster (2007), or are themselves gangsters—shtarkers, Yiddish for strong ones or enforcers—like Dennis Farina’s “Cousin Avi” Denovitz in the 2000 Guy Ritchie film Snatch.
Themes of unmasking and vulnerability are treated humorously in the food-and-bathroom humor of Along Came Polly (2004), in which Ben Stiller’s irritable bowels memorably endanger his rom-com progress with Jennifer Aniston. In Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), an opulent bathroom suite is where Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), a mysterious and powerful Manhattan master of the universe, is revealed—faced with a naked, overdosed hooker—to be debauched and soulless.
Dropped masks, and the emphatic embrace of a full range of humanity, from the beatific to the psychopathic, might be the ultimate indication that anti-Semitic and stereotypic baggage has been set down. Expect more Abrams investigation of these themes in future writings, he says. He’s exploring “Stanley Kubrick as a New York Jewish intellectual ... considering his ethnicity in a wider sense than anyone has attempted.” And he’s eyeing “the reinvention of horror in the late 60s (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, The Amityville Horror, and The Shining) as secular, agnostic Jewish responses to the problem of evil in a post-Holocaust context.”
Meanwhile, see if his ideas reverberate as you watch Albert Brooks as the avuncularly sadistic Bernie Rose in Drive (2011), or Zooey Deschanel’s hypersexual, compulsive, and cocky flatmate Schmidt (Max Greenfield) in TV’s New Girl.
It’s as though, across the tonal spectrum, filmmakers are heeding the Hebrew Hammer’s heartfelt advice to Shlomo, a teen picked on by gentile classmates.
“Be proud of who you are,” the Hammer counsels. “You’re a bad, bold, big-nosed, biblical brother. You feelin’ me? ... Stay Jewish.”
