still frequently depicted as earthy, working‐class types (as in Moonstruck [1988]), or mobsters (as in The Untouchables [1988] or the cable TV series The Sopranos [1999‐2007]). While across culture‐at‐large Italian Americans have become for the most part regarded as white, many Italian Americans still choose to maintain a pronounced ethnicity, actively celebrating the culture and traditions of their heritage. Consequently, representing Italian Americans as a distinct ethnicity remains a common practice in American film. The recent four‐part PBS documentary The Italian Americans (2015) offers a good introduction to many of the issues faced by Italian immigrants as they became part of the fabric of American culture throughout the twentieth century.
A Special Case: Jews and Hollywood
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
