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"Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American Film."  Oxford Handbook of the History of American Immigration and Ethnicity.  Ron Bayor, ed.  New York NY: Oxford U P, forthcoming.

 

Film in Relation to Race

On 24 January 1916 and after weeks of advance publicity and adulatory reviews of showings in other cities, the highly acclaimed motion picture The Birth of a Nation (Epoch, 1915) opened for an exclusive engagement at The Majestic Theatre in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Based on Thomas F. Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman and its subsequent stage adaptation, America's first motion picture blockbuster, with its visual innovations and epic narrative spanning slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, almost immediately catapulted into popular consciousness.  Despite its reprehensible glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, the film in Janet Staiger's words became "encrusted with a history of responses and debates which make it a symbol of more than racist propaganda" (139).  That encrustation already had begun well before the film's opening in Fort Wayne, but once the film actually opened for local audiences, its immediacy created a new dimension for local audiences to make sense of the film.  The Fort Wayne Sentinel reported that at the city premiere, "audiences burst into applause as the three thousand riders of the Klan dash down the hillside . . . to the rescue of their rights."  Of course, the film narrative only could depict such vigilantism after it showed the Klan trying "to quell the uprising of the vicious and evil whites and the ignorant blacks."  The Sentinel referred to the freed slave Gus, in lascivious pursuit of the white Elsie Stoneman, not by name but as "a four legged beast."  Yet curiously the newspaper hailed the film adaptation as "a plea for peace" and "a particularly moving appeal" for greater understanding.  It found that like Dixon's book, the film afforded "Northerners . . . a new viewpoint even if their fathers fought and bled in those awful years" (6).  Whatever the film's "plea for peace" and understanding might have been, it engaged its audiences, not through its ideological purity, but through a racism mottled with pleas for tolerance and understanding.  Clearly, The Birth of a Nation was "more than racist propaganda" for The Fort Wayne Sentinel as well as for those audiences deeply moved by their first encounter with the sweep and spectacle of the film.  

 

Nearly one hundred years later, the local reception of The Birth of a Nation beyond cities like New York still has something to tell us about immigration, race, and ethnicity in film.  Films from the past can generate historical mirages for the present, not because they can, but because of what we desire them to do.  We today want these films to offer some essential expression of the past that other forms of historical evidence do not yield.   For all of their seeming promise to distill some prior cultural essence, though, films of the past do not tidy up as historical evidence for today.  As historical document, The Birth of a Nation alone cannot fully explain an effusive review of the local premiere of The Birth of a Nation in both relaying that an audience cheered the KKK, and in lauding the film's perceived message of tolerance.  The same challenge emerges for the study of immigration, race, and ethnicity in American film.  The study of immigration, race, and ethnicity themselves are messy and full of contradictions; films from the past do not eliminate these contradictions.  Any study of immigration, race, and ethnicity in film undoubtedly will contribute to this confusion, not clarify it.

 

Perhaps this confusion derives from the very desire to use films as a way to streamline this history.  Though not exclusively so, the basic premise for studying race, ethnicity, and immigration since the 1960s in film has relied on studying immigration, race, and ethnicity in films.  What of immigration, race, and ethnicity apart from film, say for example the act of attending a film or even a theatrical performance?  If we return to Fort Wayne a decade earlier, there are two tantalizing press accounts of the African-American audiences who clearly were not the target audience for The Birth of a Nation?  In 1904, The Fort Wayne Daily News reported that a judge had thrown out a court case brought by Charles Williams against Frank E. Stouder, manager of the Masonic Temple theater "for refusal to admit him . . . because he was a colored man."  Almost a year later, The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette reported on page 5 that a melée had occurred at the same theater:

 

A party of negroes which attended the Temple theater last night came nearly spending a night at police headquarters and as a result some affidavits may be filed this morning.  It seems that one swain took a strange damsel to the show and his old sweetheart was a member of the party.  After the play, the old sweetheart ran up to the beau and requested a word with him.  It is said he thereupon threatened to throw her down the stairs.  He alleges she tore his coat.  The entire company then repaired to the police station to tell of the trouble, but when the officers threatened to lock them up they dispersed.

 

Neither story had anything to do with images in film, nor even with moviegoing; in both cases, the incidents presumably took place at stage performances.  Yet such accounts usefully raise some relevant questions.  Were African-Americans regularly refused admission?  Did they regularly attend the theater in Fort Wayne, and if so, did they also attend the films frequently screened as early as 1897 at these venues?  How did both white and black audiences attend the theater?  Did these audiences sit together or separately, and did they choose where they sat, and did the theater determine seating?  Did the theater regularly refuse admission to African Americans, or only occasionally?  Were these newspaper accounts part of an attempt to diminish and marginalize African-American spectatorship?  A way to reinforce the kinds of images of African-Americans depicted in films like The Birth of a Nation?  Were these stories just anomalies?  Was the latter story perhaps an ingenious ruse fabricated by the theater to help provide additional publicity for its current dramatic offering?

 

With their sketchy accounts of an African-American audience, these early newspaper reports highlight how little we know of race as well as ethnicity and immigration as they relate to film.  Here, we might consider these identities not just as images, but as a complex cultural network inclusive of the multiple dimensions of popular entertainments.  Here, we might consider how this complex included not just films themselves, but audiences who attended these films as well; what moviegoing as cultural practice meant at the first half of the 20th century; the intertextual networks opening and limiting potential ways to make sense of these films through a cultural web of literature, stage, journalism, and other films; and what racial, ethnic, and immigrant identities might have meant to the actual production process of movie-making.

 

Furthermore, approaching immigration, race, and ethnicity as these topics relate to film must address how these relationships have changed over time and in spaces devoted to popular entertainments.  As both Vivian Sobchak and Robert Stam have observed, Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope - a configuration of textual motifs along a time-space continuum - remains uniquely suited to film analysis.  Bahktin described the chronotope where "time... thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history" (84).  Immigration, race, and ethnicity likewise do not remain static and immutable constructs, and likewise become "charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history."  Their presence in film, as well as their relation to the entirety of the social context for moviegoing, constitutes its own chronotope playing out across the changing dimensions of moviegoing that occurred in both time as well as in identifiable spaces dedicated to leisure and entertainment.  The chronotope need not exist only in the text.  It also can map out the a thickening and increasingly visible set of relationships between texts and specific audiences charged and responsive to movements taking place in both space and time.

 

The chronotope of immigration, race, and ethnicity in relation to film can reveal a great deal about the multidimensional and hybridized nature of this cultural complex.  The concept of race meant one thing at the beginning of the 20th century, perhaps a vaguer concept that conflated biology with national origin.  By the 1920s and 30s and with the advent of eugenics and race science it meant something quite different: a scientific but nonetheless arbitrary construction organizing allegedly biological traits, especially as a way to legally and socially subordinate specific groups.  Along with the treatment of immigrant and ethnic groups, race could powerfully reinforce existing attitudes - or create new ones - justifying socio-economic disparities and orders.  In more limited and contentious ways, it could help ameliorate the consequences of socio-economic subordination.

 

As social constructs, immigration, race, and ethnicity themselves have considerable overlap with one another.  Each it itself hybridized and thus inflects what moviegoing might mean to diverse audiences.  As its own construct, the concept of ethnicity today is probably closer to how people used to discuss race: simply as a way to conceive of commonalities between various groups on the basis of religion, culture, and national origin.  Immigration became a way to conceive of these groupings in terms of people displaced and dispersed from their homeland.  African-American theater-goers thus shared a common bond as an ethnic group, but social constructs simultaneously racialized their image both in films as well as in their belonging to an audience.  Just as the connotations of immigration, race, and ethnicity has changed continuously over time, so too have the cultural practices of attending a show.  The press accounts of African-American theatergoing and the city premiere of The Birth of a Nation some ten years later already mark shifts taking place locally, both in cinematic depictions of race as well as in the cultural practice of being part of an audience.  Occurring at various rates of change and scale, the dynamic relationship between film and immigration-race-ethnicity happens not just as the macro level of social and cultural trends, but at a local level that has its own distinct textures and inflections as well.

 

Is a Holocaust Film a Jewish Film?

The shifting parameters of what race, ethnicity, and immigration might mean to movies and moviegoing help delineate the multi-dimensional and multi-temporal nature of this relationship.  Newspapers helped construct a reading position for audiences that could at once invoke the mode of melodrama as audiences cheered the Klan chasing down "a four legged beast," yet also identify a message in the film of tolerance and understanding.  A decade earlier, press accounts described, however incompletely, the practice of African-American theatergoing.  To understand a shifting set of parameters for what immigration, race, and ethnicity in relation to film might mean, one must look beyond only cinematic images.  As chronotope, the relationships, spaces, and contexts between and within which audiences consumed these images continually shifted and changed.  These relationships and contexts included who saw these films, where they saw them, how people understood moviegoing as a cultural practice, the connections audiences made between films and other kinds of popular entertainments, and finally how audiences understood cultural identity as a part of the movie-making process itself.

 

If the texture and inflection of the local emerges as one site among many to examine the chronotope of how film exists in a relationship to immigration, race, and ethnicity, another potential site involves the popular practice of cataloguing and inventorying of images depicting immigration, race, and ethnicity.  To illustrate the need to reflect upon the culturally constructed nature of this practice, let us jump ahead some thirty years to consider this deceptively simple question regarding ethnicity and film: is a Holocaust film necessarily a Jewish film?  As I have argued elsewhere, the answer is not so simple (Carr).  Does this body of films include only features which depict recognizably Jewish characters?  Anti-Nazi films of the 1930s and 1940s with few identifiably Jewish characters, but whose contextual meanings were readily identifiable to Jewish audiences?  Films which overtly depict the Holocaust or Nazi anti-Semitism?  What about non-theatrical titles screened only in churches, schools, and the military?  Films not necessarily Jewish, but specifically marketed to Jewish audiences, or films popular with these audiences?  Films widely understood by audiences to be about Nazi anti-Semitism, but without overt reference to it?  Or films made by Jewish creative personnel, but without overt depictions of Jewish characters or themes?

 

Because the basic question of what is a Jewish film engenders such varied and protean responses, we must move beyond only cataloguing these films and consider a multi-faceted approach to the topic.  This approach must account for moviegoing in all of its dimensions.  More than viewing images of Jews or the Holocaust, it involves overlapping methods of textual analysis, production history, and audience reception.  In another essay, I have proposed a normative framework that seeks not only to expand the canon of "usual suspects," but one that also seeks to expand our definitions of what studying moviegoing in relation to ethnicity - as well as immigration and race - might involve.  For each mediated text, these norms include evaluating each film on the basis of the following criteria:

 

• Significance of artistic achievement
• Facticity and authenticity of representation
• Influence upon subsequent films and genres
• Notable conditions of production, such as on-location shooting or use of survivor re-enactments
• Critical reception at the time of release
• Influence upon audiences and subsequent audience expectations regarding how to represent Judaism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust 

 

Establishing a transparent set of conventions for discussing the impact and qualities of these films potentially opens new possibilities for which films and what aspects of them merit discussion.  Rather than rely upon a relatively limited canon established mostly through popular reviews or auteurist scholarship, these discussions might pay more attention to the material forces establishing that canon.  If we can discuss artistic achievement on a par with facticity and authenticity, for example, we can appreciate a relatively low-budget film such as The Last Stop (Times, 1948), shot on location at Auschwitz by a team of female survivors.  Neither ignoring nor dwelling upon a specifically Jewish dimension of Nazi anti-Semitism, this foreign film was for many American audiences the first encounter, after documentary newsreels, with a Holocaust film.

 

If some discussions regarding Holocaust-themed films involve more than considering what makes these titles "great masterpieces," others alternatively focus upon decidedly mimetic and ethical questions regarding how well these mediated representations performed.  Were they "realistic?"  Do they engage in stereotypes?  Do they, in Lawrence Langer's words, "universalize" the Holocaust into a series of digestible yet banal lessons for us to learn (8-10)?  Or worse, do they trivialize the Holocaust as a form of mere entertainment?  Just as questions of aesthetic value and canon inclusion have no permanent resolution, questions of mimesis and representational ethics are impermanent because our norms and conventions for what constitutes a "realistic" or "ethical" treatment also remain in flux.  Upon release, Holocaust "comedies" routinely generated controversy over tastelessness, but films such as To Be Or Not to Be (United Artists, 1940) to The Producers (AVCO, 1967) to Life Is Beautiful (1997; Miramax, 1998) all eventually merited a place in the canon of Holocaust-themed films, and in some cases even Jewish-themed ones.

 

While both aesthetic and mimetic approaches to these films will and should continue to discuss and debate the merits of individual films, these discussions should not operate to the exclusion of a more systematic approach to considering how these films represent Holocaust and Jewishness, or how actual audiences might have perceived these representations.  Tastes change; standards of realism shift according to conventions of the time; and methods of evaluating a film, whether by director, genre, or individual film, all go in and out of style.  If the study of Holocaust and Jewish films is to maintain credibility, it must be able to historicize and account for these shifts, rather than simply perpetuate or naturalize them.

 

In addition to moving beyond the established practice of attempting to inventory these films, we also must move beyond what I call the "reflection paradigm."  Annette Insdorf's groundbreaking Indelible Shadows offers a telling example of just how difficult it is to define a Holocaust film.  The films included in her survey are not Holocaust films, but films that stand in relation to the Holocaust.  Defining the Holocaust film as that which "illuminates, distorts, confronts, or reduces the Holocaust," Insdorf explores this relationship thematically, in terms of "cinematic language," "narrative strategies," depictions of Nazi atrocity, and those films that shape "documentary material through a personal voice" (xvi).  Maintaining this distinction between the totality of an event which can never submit fully to representation and the representation itself has a long and respected tradition which we should continue to observe.  But how does this tradition help us to make sense of a science fiction action adventure film like X-Men (20th Century-Fox, 2000), with its opening explicitly set in a Nazi death camp?  As Laurie Baron has noted, some critical responses concluded that this was yet another trivialization of the Holocaust.  As Baron's essay argues, however, the film functions on multiple levels, appealing to a teenage male audience while simultaneously reflecting allegorical connections between the Jewish-American experience and dialectical anxieties over state-sanctioned discrimination in both the U.S. as well as in Nazi Germany.  Baron noted that that the comic books on which the film is based are even more explicit in making these connections (45-46).  Clearly no one looks to X-Men for an accurate depiction of a concentration camp.  But can we so easily dispense with its allegory or its complex networks of historical meaning simply because it comes from a comic book and appears to trivialize the Holocaust in ways that higher brow documentary and fiction don't?

 

The identity politics of what constitutes a Jewish film move us even further from a clear answer to this deceptively simple question.  Hollywood's Image of the Jew, a 1982 pioneering study of representations of Jews in American film, made a similar argument to Insdorf: film exists in relation to the American Jewish experience rather than embodying some part of that experience.  To understand Jewish film, one had to understand "how Jews had been portrayed in American films."  By doing so, one "could say something about Jews as well as about Americans" (xviii).  Two years after the publication of Friedman's book, Patricia Erens proposed a more systematic genre-oriented framework to examine representations of Jews in American cinema.  Like Friedman, she conceived of film narratives as "incorporating Jewish elements" that "relate to American society in general and to the American-Jewish community in particular."  And like Friedman, she argued that these films reflect something of "actual experiences and latent attitudes" both toward and among the Jewish community (xi).

 

Insdorf, Friedman and Erens all staked out an important and necessary distinction at a time when film studies still had to achieve respect as an academic discipline: the cinematic representation is not interchangeable with the thing represented.  Furthermore, being able to distinguish between cinematic depictions and what those depictions represent can yield greater insight into protean subjects like the Holocaust or Jewish identity.  And while these pioneering works have their limitations, as any scholarship has, they helped set a paradigm for analyzing film as reflection.  This essay thus is not so much a critique of that paradigm, as much of an attempt rethink a different set of possibilities outside the reflection paradigm.

 

The Life of Emile Zola (Warner Bros., 1937) illustrates the limitations of this paradigm.  Does it constitute a Jewish film?  An anti-Nazi one?  An example of how Hollywood treated anti-Semitism?  Save for a single fleeting close-up of the word "Jew" appearing in a shot, the film makes no explicit reference to Zola's involvement in combatting anti-Semitism during the infamous Dreyfus Affair.  Yet in depicting an event that audiences absolutely would have recognized as being about the infamous Dreyfus affair, Warner Bros. actively marketed the film to Jewish audiences and encouraged them to draw the topical and relevant parallels to contemporary Europe.  The problem is not that there is a "reflection" paradigm.  The problem is that this dominant paradigm cannot fully account for what The Life of Emile Zola actually did with audiences in 1937.  And yet for Holocaust- and Jewish-themed films, the reflection paradigm operates largely to the exclusion of other production- or audience-oriented paradigms that might better explain what audiences did with films like The Life of Emile Zola.

 

Immigration and the Hollywood Question

The Life of Emile Zola demonstrates how the reflection paradigm as a dominant mode of studying immigration, race, and ethnicity in film can only account for explicit representations.  Within the chronotope of immigration, race, and ethnicity in relation to film, the paradigm cannot account for the range of meanings immigrant and ethnic audiences could have made, or the ways in which motion picture studios attempted to market these films to specific audiences.  In addition, as Fort Wayne African-American spectatorship and the exhibition of The Birth of a Nation in the city has demonstrated, issues of race - and, by extension, immigration and ethnicity - extended well beyond cinematic representation to suffuse a divergent set of practices and meanings characterizing spectatorship.

 

Because immigrant identity is itself the most hybridized among race and ethnicity, as a part of the chronotope of film in relation to these identities its discussion poses some distinct challenges.  Immigrants never are just immigrants alone; they are immigrants, plus something else.  In relation to film, immigration almost always involves discussions of race and/or ethnicity as well.  It is possible, on the other hand, to discuss race and racism or ethnicity and ethnic groups without discussing immigration.  Any discussion of immigration in film, therefore, must account for how perceptions of immigration frequently express overlapping attitudes regarding race and ethnicity.

 

As I argued in Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, fears of immigration stoked what I called the Hollywood Question.  A stock set of ethnic and even racialized Jewish stereotypes, the Hollywood Question was more than just representations in films, though it certainly included those images.  The Hollywood Question encompassed a whole set of social and cultural issues articulated beyond film, expressing its fears and desires through popular literature, debates over censorship, political cartoons, legislative testimony, and other discursive modes.  The Hollywood Question only explicitly conveyed anti-Semitic attitudes on occasion.  More often, it politely questioned whether Jews working within the film industry suffered too greatly from their immigrant parvenu backgrounds and ethnic motivations to handle the awesome responsibility of arriving at the helm of the most powerful media industries of public influence.

 

The film industry of course responded to this widespread perception of ethnic motivation in a variety of allusive ways, for to confront it directly would have given these perceptions additional credibility.  One way to gauge the industry response to the Hollywood Question is to examine its depictions of the immigrant and the ghetto.  In "Wretched Refuse: Watching New York Ethnic Slum Films in the Aftermath of 9/11," I argued that along with Richard Slotkin's frontier myth, "the myth of the city as a cramped, stifling breeding ground for antisocial and even pathological behavior has blinded us to the additional consequences of suburban revolutions, the rise of transnationalism, and the forces of globalization" (231).  The essay argued that two United Artists films, Street Scene (1931) and Dead End (1937) represented paradigmatic shifts popularizing the view of the immigrant ghetto as a harsh, filthy, and animalistic environment of human beings inhumanely crowded into tenements.  Despite the potential for sordid narrative details, both films possessed extraordinary cultural pedigree.  Adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Elmer Rice, the film featured the familiar trope of an Irish-Jewish romance, set amid the harsh, violent and even murderous conditions of the ghetto.  Thematically and stylistically similar to Street Scene, Dead End self-consciously engaged social issues through its recombination of these elements with the gangster film.  Also adapted from a popular Sidney Kingsley play by fellow playwright Lillian Hellman, Dead End was justly celebrated for its elaborate recreation of the Lower East Side on a studio sound stage.

 

In addition to drawing upon the prestige of their origins as well-respected plays, both Street Scene and Dead End operated squarely within the conventions of the social problem film genre.  Rather than indict the immigrants themselves, both films asserted that the harsh living conditions depicted breeded such undesirable behaviors.  The notion that one could take the immigrant out of the ghetto, but never the ghetto out of the immigrant, carried over popular literature about Hollywood.  In Budd Schulberg's classic Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run?, the book's narrator Al Mannheim answered the eponymous question by returning to the Lower East Side, the "breeding ground for the predatory germ that thrived in Sammy's blood, leaving him one of the most severe cases of the epidemic."

 

Novels like What Makes Sammy Run? offer a kind of codex to decipher how films like Street Scene and Dead End depict immigrants.  The immigrant ghetto represented the antithesis of assimilation for which many American Jews strove.  When Mannheim visited Sammy's birthplace, he only could imagine

 

Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy little puppy in a dog-eat-dog world.  I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to the societal.  I no longer even hated Rivington Street but the idea of Rivington Street, all Rivington Streets of all nationalities allowed to pile up in cities like gigantic dung heaps smelling up the world, ambitions growing out of filth and crawling away like worms.

 

As I argued in "Wretched Refuse," the logical consequence of such attitudes was the physical erasure of human "dung heaps" and in their place, urban renewal projects like the World Trade Center.  Built atop a haphazard patchwork of ethnic immigrant urban neighborhoods and markets, such revitalization projects obliterated the ghetto, and in its place, erected modern, sleek, and streamlined architectural monuments to a burgeoning internationalism, modernity, technocracy, and global capital.

 

The topic of immigration, race, and ethnicity in film obviously encompasses much more than a single essay can cover.  What this essay does offer is a different way of thinking about these topics, considering the texture and flavor of what moviegoing might have been for diverse audiences, and how this experience was mediated through other activities, like attending a play or reading literature.  I've also suggested some strategies to move beyond the limits of canonical films that often get discussed because of their explicit representations.  Instead, we might do well to consider the multiple meanings and interpretations diverse audiences might have derived from a wider range of films that may or may not have explicitly depicted immigration, race, or ethnicity.  And finally, I have suggested that the depiction of immigrants in film may have operated as part of a larger discourse that negotiated perceptions of Hollywood as being essentially ethnic and immigrant.

 

Other scholarship would do well to explore further the chronotope of immigration, race, and ethnicity in relation to film.  Although this essay does not address depictions of other groups, such as Asians or Native Americans, we must move beyond the reflection paradigm, and consider how such images operated within the political economy of the film industry according to production, distribution, and exhibition.  We also might consider how criticism of stereotypes in film at the time helped mediate audience interpretations.  Additional scholarship might further explore the relationships between a film like The Birth of a Nation and other live performances, such as minstrel shows or the use of blackface.  How did immigration, race, and ethnicity operate within the Hollywood industrial mode of production?  How did representations of immigrants, race, and ethnicity draw from intertextual sources, such as theater and literature?  How did the industry work to exclude stereotypes and regulate ethnic representations?  How did attitudes toward other ethnic groups, such as Germans immediately after World War I, influence popular perceptions of the film industry?  How did such practices as segregation or publicity for specific films regulate audiences and audience meaning-making?  How did specific genres inflect common themes of immigration, race, and ethnicity?  And finally, how did films other than the Hollywood feature depict immigration, race, and ethnicity?  In addition to the work of independent African-American filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux, a variety of short subjects and non-theatrical films also existed.  Much scholarship already has begun to address a number of these questions, and continues to question established paradigms of where to look and what to see when studying immigration, race, and ethnicity in film.

 

Primary Works Cited

 

"Colored Theatre Party Ends in a Row."  The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette 21 Feb. 1905: 5.

 

Schulberg, Budd.  What Makes Sammy Run?  1941.  New York NY: Random House, 1952.

 

"Thrown Out of Court: The Case Brought by Negro Against Theater."  The Fort Wayne Daily News 8 Mar. 1904: 3.

 

"A Wonderful Picture, The Birth of a Nation."  The Fort Wayne Sentinel 25 Jan. 1916: 6.

 

Secondary Works Cited

 

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich.  "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics."  The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays.  Michael Holquist, ed.  Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans.  Austin TX: U of Texas P, 1981.  84-258.

 

Baron, Lawrence.  "X-Men as J Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie."  Shofar 22:1 (2003): 44-52.

 

Carr, Steven A.  "Holocaust and Jewish-Themed Films Not on DVD: The Endangered Species List."  http://stevenalancarr.pbworks.com.

 

---.  Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II.  Cambridge Studies in the History of Mass Communication.  Cambridge UK: Cambridge U P, 2001.

 

---.  "Wretched Refuse: Watching New York Ethnic Slum Films in the Aftermath of 9/11."  The City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination.  Murray Pomerance, ed.  New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers U P, 2007.

 

Erens, Patricia.  The Jew in American Cinema.  Bloomington IN: Indiana U P, 1984.

 

Friedman, Lester D.  Hollywood's Image of the Jew.  Ungar Film Library.  New York NY: Ungar, 1982.

 

Insdorf, Annette.  Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust.  3rd ed.  1983; Cambridge UK: Cambridge U P, 2003.

 

Langer, Lawrence J.  Preempting the Holocaust.  New Haven CT: Yale U P, 1998.

 

Slotkin, Richard.  Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860.  Norman OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1973.

 

Sobchak, Vivian.  "Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir."  Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History.  Nick Browne, ed.  Berkeley CA: U of California P, 1998. 129-70.

 

Staiger, Janet.  Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema.  Princeton NJ: Princeton U P, 1992.

 

Stam, Robert.  "Palimpsestic Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage."  Performing Hybridity.  May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink, eds.  Minneapolis MN: U of Minnesota P, 1999.  59-78.