I usually know a Jew when I see one?: Race, American Jewish identity, and 21st century U.S. film

While a newer, "post-race" theoretical lens has emerged in film studies to help expand notions of difference, there are questions regarding its ability to address whether racialization persists in movies, particularly in the form of cinematic stereotypes. A poignant example of this issue is the question of American Jewish racial identity in U.S. film, as recent studies of American Jewish onscreen representations have steadily dropped explicit reference to race, opting instead to use the conceptual frameworks of culture and ethnicity in their analyses. In my study, the results of a qualitative content analysis of 125 American Jewish characters from more than 50 movies released in the U.S. since the year 2000 reveal that four of the most highly racialized stereotypes of American Jewish identity from 20th century U.S. cinema persist in post-Y2K American Jewish onscreen portrayals: the "meddling matriarch" stereotype of American Jewish over-involvement, the "neurotic nebbish" stereotype of American Jewish ineffectuality, the "pampered princess. stereotype of American Jewish hyper-materialism, and the "scheming scumbag" stereotype of American Jewish deceit. While the newer versions of these stereotypes appear to include a wider diversity of characters with regard to age, class, gender and sexuality, the overall cinematic racialization of American Jewish identity embodied in these characters seems to have changed relatively little in films from the new millennium. At the same time, a highly disproportionate number of the filmmakers whose work was included in my study are American Jewish, indicating the importance of identifying these persons' possible interests in proliferating such imagery of American Jewish racial identity. Overall, my study's findings reveal the importance of adopting a dialectical approach to studying race in film, recognizing the mutual reinforcement of structure and agency as well as material conditions and ideology, in producing particular onscreen forms of racialization. Future research along these lines may branch out beyond the study of stereotypes to include textual analyses of the racialization in these films, institutional ethnography of those filmmakers involved in producing these films, as well as focus group research with spectators of these films.