Jews In Contemporary Visual Entertainment: Raced, Sexed, and Erased by Carol Siegel (review)

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• Jews In Contemporary Visual Entertainment: Raced, Sexed, and Erased by Carol Siegel
• Samantha Pickette (bio)

Jews In Contemporary Visual Entertainment: Raced, Sexed, and Erased. By Carol Siegel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. ix + 245 pp.

In Jews in Contemporary Visual Entertainment: Raced, Sexed, and Erased, Carol Siegel uses case studies from film and television series ranging from the 1970s to the present as a lens through which to consider [End Page 701] the relationships among Jewish representation, Jewish identity formation, and cultural stereotypes that draw from European antisemitic tropes that both racialize Jews as distinct "others" and emphasize their deviation from sexual and gender norms. This connection between racialization and sexualization destabilizes the cultural misconception of American Jews as a white monolith, and instead places Jews in conversation with other marginalized communities and communities of color that are similarly (mis)represented within American popular culture. Much of the book revolves around a historical deconstruction of both race and sexuality as it relates to Jews, with Siegel using the introduction to problematize the categories often employed to define Jewish identity (religion, race, ethnicity), ultimately making the case that Jews are a "racialized group" and, furthermore, that the intersection of race and sexuality in representations of Jews reveals a deep-seated antisemitism that connects Jews with other racialized Americans and threatens progressive goals related to gender and sexual freedom (21).

Siegel's book is organized not chronologically but instead categorically around various case studies from film and television that present the major themes and tropes in Jewish representation that elucidate her claims. Chapters explore the presence and function of Jewish therapist figures, many of whom are often at the center of sexual-based neuroses; the dissonance between Jewish communal structures, American assimilation, and romantic/sexual desire (usually in the form of exogamous relationships that feature either hypersexual Jews objectified by non-Jewish partners or Jews pursuing non-Jewish partners); the relationships among sex, trauma, and Jewish female identity in Holocaust film; the erasure of the Holocaust in films centering on the sexual identity formation of Jews in the postwar era; the relationships among sex positivity, sexual dysfunction, and Jewishness on television; the "minoritarian cinema" of the Coen Brothers; and the "erasure" of Jewish identity in television series featuring characters defined as Jewish but removed from any Jewish context outside the racialized stereotypes they reinforce through their actions, behaviors, and mannerisms (158, 25). The end result is a thorough if eclectic tapestry of the past fifty years of American cinema and television, framed through an engaging and necessary exploration of the ways in which Jewish representation in American popular culture can, at worst, promote antisemitic stereotypes rooted in the racialization, sexualization, and objectification of Jews as a pernicious threat to hegemonic American values and, at best, promote the "bliss," minoritarian deconstruction of stereotypes, and self-identification that come with a "Jewish" reading of a double-coded and self-aware text. [End Page 702]

Siegel's analysis is strongest in chapters where she contrasts two texts that approach the same subject matter in diverging ways. For example, Chapter Five, entitled "Two Funerals and a Wedding: Not So Nice Jewish Girls in Transparent and Broad City," identifies these television comedies as series that associate "Jewish sensibility…with progressive sexual politics" and that "[celebrate] Jews, and especially Jewish women, as leaders in the struggle against patriarchal heteronormativity" (130–131). Through the lens of Kathleen Karlyn Rowe's "Unruly Woman" archetype, Siegel then proceeds to juxtapose the two series, identifying the slapstick comedy of Broad City as an affirmation of both sexual pleasure and Jewish joy, compared to the hybrid comedy-melodrama of Transparent as a reification of the historical connection between sexual displeasure/dysfunction and Jewish misery. Ultimately, Siegel argues, the major differences between the series lie in their respective attitudes toward sex. Both "[connect] Jewishness and unconventional sexual experiences" but Broad City does so in a "decidedly sex-positive" way, while Transparent relishes in the association between intergenerational sexual dissatisfaction and inherited Jewish trauma (143).

Siegel provides similarly clear and strong analysis in the exploration of Jewish female sexuality in Paul Verhoeven's 2007 film Black Book and Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film...