<- FrontPage | Slides

"'I Am Not Certain C.C. Is Not a Jew': Reception, Perception, and the Identity Politics of Charlie Chaplin's Jewishness During the Making of The Great Dictator (United Artists, 1940)." The Sixth Biannual Conference of the Reception Study Society. Indiana U - Purdue U Fort Wayne, Fort Wayne IN. Proposed.

Allegations of Charlie Chaplin's Jewishness have provided an ongoing and self-regenerating font of speculation, at least since the 1920s when author Israel Zangwill publicly outed the celebrity after asserting to have seen a picture of him underneath a chupa in a prayer shawl (New York Times). Hannah Arendt saw in Chaplin's persona "clearly Jewish traits" that ultimately lost favor with the rise of fascism (Arendt). Maurizio Viano more recently invoked Chaplin's oft-quoted "I do not have the honor of being Jewish" claim to mount a vigorous defense of Roberto Benigni against Jewish opposition to Life Is Beautiful (1997; Miramax, 1998) and the latter film's supposed trivialization of the Holocaust.

That Chaplin's Jewishness has functioned as a kind of durable cipher for reading all kinds of things, from secret Jewish identities to the rise of fascism to fears over pop culture trivialization of the Holocaust, is well-documented, no more so than in popular culture itself. Much of this attention has focused on biographical details and close analysis of Chaplin's dual role in The Great Dictator, both as a Jewish barber and as the Hitlerian Adenoid Hynkel. Yet scholarship has made little effort to historicize the actual perception of Chaplin as Jewish, especially in how this perception exists and functions in its own right and separately from the fictionalized characters of his films. Rather than emerging causally from The Great Dictator, speculations over whether Chaplin was Jewish had raged throughout the 1930s as a fluid, dynamic, and participatory site of exchange, both in public as well as in relatively private communication.  Before Chaplin's anti-fascist comedy had even gone into production, speculation over his identity was already guiding and shaping reception of the film to be. Furthermore, questions over whether Chaplin was or was not Jewish, at least throughout the 1930s, pointed to a particular set of underlying identity politics that could constantly regenerate its relevance by repeatedly coming back to the same self-recursive and unanswerable question. Or, as when faced in 1939 with evidence from a confidante that Chaplin was not Jewish, producer Walter Wanger put it far more succinctly than a verbose film historian could accomplish in 2015: "I am not certain C.C. is not a Jew." [orig. emph.]

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. "The Jew As Pariah: A Hidden Tradition." Jewish Social Studies 6.2 (1944): 99-122. JSTOR. Web. 11 Apr. 2015.

Viano, Maurizio. "Life Is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory, And Holocaust Laughter." Jewish Social Studies 5.3 (1999): 47-66. Academic Search Premier. Web. 11 Apr. 2015.

"Zangwill Berates Jewish Congress." New York Times (1923-Current file): 1. Nov 04 1923. ProQuest. Web. 11 Apr. 2015.