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Jews in America and in American cinema have faced (and still do face) a different set of circumstances than either Irish Americans or Italian Americans in their negotiation of whiteness. For example, the Jewish religion is not considered a Christian religion, unlike the Catholicism of many Irish and Italian Americans. Also, Jewish immigrants came to America from a wide variety of countries and thus claim a wide range of national heritages. And unlike most Irish and Italian people, who left their native lands for America as a matter of choice, many Jews were forced out of European nations via state‐sanctioned acts of murder and terrorism (such as the pogroms of Tsarist Russia or the Nazi‐induced Holocaust). Furthermore, while most of the US population now regards citizens of European Jewish background to be white, a small but highly vocal group of white supremacist Americans still regard Jews as a “race” that are out to destroy white Aryan purity through intermarriage. (Their use of the term “race,” rather than “ethnicity,” is further meant to exclude Jews from their definition of whiteness.) The roots of such anti‐Semitism, or hatred of Jews, are complex and can be traced back thousands of years. Even in contemporary America, people of Jewish heritage are still regularly targeted by hate crimes and hate speech. Conversely, most European immigrants from Christian belief systems have been more readily assimilated into the ideals of American whiteness.

Anti‐Semitism was an even stronger force in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. One can see this in films made during the earliest days of cinema, before the advent of Hollywood. Short films made by white Protestant men (such as those who worked for Thomas Edison) sometimes featured grotesque stereotypes of Jews as hunchbacked, hook‐nosed, and greedy cheats. Such subhuman depictions, found in films like Levitsky’s Insurance Policy (1903) and Cohen’s Advertising Scheme (1904), presented an image of Jews as money‐grubbing and untrustworthy. Jewish immigrants of the era responded in different manners to anti‐Semitic attitudes and representations. As with other ethnic groups, some Jews drew in closer to each other in urban ghettoes, where they fiercely clung to their traditions. Examples of this philosophy can be found in a number of Yiddish‐language films made during the 1920s and 1930s. These films were small‐budget, independent films made by and for the Jewish community and were rarely shown outside urban neighborhood theaters. On the other hand, many Jewish immigrants struggled to assimilate into the culture of white Christian America. (Interestingly, the term “American melting pot” itself was coined by a Jewish immigrant playwright, Israel Zangwill.) Also, just as Irish American theatrical performers had done, a number of Jewish American performers began donning blackface on stage, an act that emphasized that Jews were indeed white people who had to “black up” in order to play African Americans.

Intriguingly, many of the most popular Jewish stage entertainers of the period used blackface in complex ways. While attempting to differentiate (white) Jews from (black) African Americans, Jewish entertainers also used blackface to indicate shared oppression and outsider status. For example, under the guise of blackface, Jewish entertainers sometimes felt safe to tell jokes critical of the white power structure. Jewish entertainers also blurred boundaries between racial and ethnic categories – they may have been performing in blackface, but they sprinkled their dialog with Yiddish slang. Such tomfoolery, practiced by major stars such as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, tended to expose the artificiality of racial and ethnic categories by jumbling them all together. When Eddie Cantor made a film version of his hit stage musical Whoopee! (1930), he bounced from one racial/ethnic type to another: Jewish in one scene, then in blackface, and then Native American. The film’s story revolves around Cantor’s friends, who are forbidden to marry because the man is Native American and the woman is white. This conflict is resolved when it is discovered that the male was only raised by Native Americans and is “actually” white. The resolution of the plot, as well as Cantor’s parody of racial stereotypes, demonstrate the highly subjective and constantly fluctuating nature of racial and ethnic identities.

By the time that Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor moved from stage to film, circumstances for Jews in the American film industry had changed immensely. During the 1920s, Jews came to dominate Hollywood. Initially, a number of Jewish immigrants had opened and run nickelodeons in the urban ghettoes of large Eastern cities. From those beginnings, these same men built film production companies, moved to the West Coast, and wrested control of the industry away from Eastern entrepreneurs like Thomas Edison. Most of the heads of the major studios during the classical Hollywood era were Jewish: Carl Laemmle (Universal), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), Louis B. Mayer (MGM), Harry Cohn (Columbia), and the Warner Brothers. With Jewish men as the leaders of the film industry, many other people of Jewish heritage went into the business as directors, writers, actors, and technicians. Consequently, American Jews have had a greater say in how their images were being fashioned in American cinema than any other racial or ethnic minority.

This is not to say that mainstream Hollywood movies became non‐stop celebrations of Jewish culture. On the contrary, Jewish filmmakers had to negotiate their images (both as industry leaders and in film texts) within a larger white society. Classical Hollywood films therefore emphasized a vision of America as largely white and Christian, in order to appeal to white mainstream audiences and avoid the wrath of potential anti‐Semites. For example, there are numerous fondly remembered classical Hollywood Christmas films (A Christmas Carol [1938], It’s A Wonderful Life [1946], and Miracle On 34th Street [1947]) but, until 8 Crazy Nights (2002), there were no comparable Hollywood Hanukkah films. In fact, overtly Jewish characters rarely appeared in 1930s Hollywood films, and Jewish executives often went out of their way to efface their (and their employees’) Jewish heritage. Jewish actors were encouraged to change their names to “whiter‐sounding” ones: Emanuel Goldenberg, Julius Garfinkle, Betty Perske, Danielovitch Demsky, David Kaminsky, and Bernard Schwartz became, respectively, Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, Lauren Bacall, Kirk Douglas, Danny Kaye, and Tony Curtis. These efforts were a conscious strategy to deal with recurrent worries about anti‐Semitism. Repeatedly, Christian protest and reform groups asserted that Jews in Hollywood were destroying the moral fiber of the country. Jews in Hollywood were constantly on the defensive, ready for the shadow of prejudice to emerge and attempt to destroy their industry. It is no wonder that producer David O. Selznick (most famous for producing Gone With the Wind [1939]) told an interviewer at one point, “I’m American and not a Jew.”

Possibly the one studio to show some commitment to upholding its Jewish heritage was Warner Brothers. Consistently hiring more Jewish actors than did other studios, Warner Brothers also made films about Jewish characters on a somewhat regular basis. The studio won a Best Picture Oscar for The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a film that focused on the notorious “Dreyfus affair,” a major French military trial that pivoted on anti‐Semitism. Warner Brothers was also the first studio to repudiate Nazi Germany in its films, several years before the United States entered World War II, most memorably in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939). Executives at the other studios refrained from making films critical of Nazi Germany so that they could maintain their European film distribution deals. While these decisions were thus partly fueled by capitalist desires, Jewish industry heads were also worried that taking a forthright stand against Hitler could reawaken anti‐Semitic sentiment against Hollywood. In fact, that is exactly what happened in the wake of films like Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Special US Senate committee hearings were held, accusing Hollywood of trying to push the United States into World War II. The transcripts of these hearings are filled with ugly anti‐Semitic rhetoric, a good example of how pervasive (and acceptable) such feelings were during this era.

After the war, as American citizens learned the extent of the Holocaust, re‐evaluations of American anti‐Semitism began to occur. Yet many Jewish Hollywood moguls feared tackling the subject. It took the one non‐Jewish studio head (Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century‐Fox) to make the first social problem film about American anti‐Semitism. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) starred Gregory Peck as a gentile reporter going undercover as a Jew in order to expose prejudice. The film was a critical and commercial success, and won a Best Picture Oscar. That same year, a film about an anti‐Semitic murder, Crossfire (1947), was released. Sadly, many of the people involved in making it were soon targets of suspicion and hatred themselves. Director Edward Dmytryk and actor Sam Levene (along with many other Jewish people in the film industry) were accused of being communist agents by HUAC, the House Un‐American Activities Committee. The ensuing Red Scare threw studio executives into a panic. These allegations of communist influence in Hollywood were again tinged with (and, some have argued, fueled by) the anti‐Semitism of prominent politicians and social commentators. The results of this postwar paranoia did put a disproportionate number of Jews in Hollywood out of work. Fear of being considered un‐American also curtailed the production of social problem films. Images of Jews in Hollywood films did not disappear in the wake of the Red Scare, but they were now rarely shown as part of present‐day America. Rather, Hollywood films of the 1950s tended to represent Jews as oppressed minorities in Biblical epics such as The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben‐Hur (1959). These films addressed social prejudice, but from a safe historical distance and within the framework of mainstream Christianity.

Contemporary Jewish American characters returned to American films during the 1960s. Just as the countercultural critique of whiteness resulted in a new generation of Italian American film actors, so too did a number of Jewish American performers become stars at this time: Barbra Streisand, Elliot Gould, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen. However, unlike their counterparts of earlier generations, these actors did not have to efface their Jewish identity by changing their names, revamping their looks, or playing only Christian characters. Many of these stars have gone on to Oscar‐winning performances and careers that have lasted for decades. One of America’s most prolific filmmakers (as a writer‐director and sometime star), Woody Allen has written and directed over fifty films since the late sixties. His multiple Oscar‐winning film Annie Hall (1977) announced his arrival as a major American filmmaker, and not just a Jewish comedian skewering Hollywood science fiction films (Sleeper [1973]) or Russian novels (Love and Death [1975]). Over the course of five decades, Allen has directed art‐house pastiches (Star Dust Memories [1980], Shadows and Fog [1991]), searing domestic melodramas (Interiors [1978], Another Woman [1988], Blue Jasmine [2013]), and charming nostalgia pieces (Radio Days [1987), Midnight in Paris [2011]). His existential bent is on full display in films like Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Irrational Man (2015), both of which tackle the moral conundrums of crime and what it means to be human. Despite personal issues which have tarnished his career in many peoples’ eyes (an affair with and later marriage to his then‐girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Sun Yi Previn), Allen has continued to make diverse kinds of films that nonetheless show the stamp of his unique auteur sensibility.

Egyptian‐born Omar Sharif, seen here as Jewish entrepreneur Nicky Arnstein opposite Barbra Streisand as Jewish comedienne Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. Who is white and who is not?

Funny Girl, copyright © 1968, Columbia.

Jewish American writers, directors, actors, producers, and comedians continue to thrive in the American film industry. Writer‐director‐actor‐producer Mel Brooks began his long career as writer for the seminal TV comedy Your Show of Shows (1950–54), and later created the spy spoof Get Smart (1965–70). His cinematic comedies The Producers (1967), Young Frankenstein (1974), Blazing Saddles (1974), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) have made generations of movie fans laugh out loud. Jewish American entertainers continue to thrive on television as well, especially in sitcoms. Back in the earliest days of TV history, The Goldbergs (1949–57) was a popular sitcom focusing on the titular Jewish family. Adapted from a successful radio show by its creator and star, Gertrude Berg, The Goldbergs had to recast a central character when actor Philip Loeb was accused of being a communist. Although Berg fought to keep Loeb on the show, he allegedly accepted a settlement and withdrew from the show; he died in 1955, another casualty of the anti‐communist (and anti‐Semitic) Red Scare. More recent decades have given us enormously popular TV sitcoms like Seinfeld (1989–98) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–), both of which draw humor from the foibles and neuroses of their urban Jewish characters. The recent Amazon Prime series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017–) examines life for a young Jewish woman in the late 1950s as she attempts to break 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.