Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain [1st ed.] 978-1-137-56930-1, 978-1-137-56931-8

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Introduction (Gil Toffell)....Pages 1-19
The Spaces and Places of Jewish Cinema Culture (Gil Toffell)....Pages 21-59
Films of Jewish Interest (Gil Toffell)....Pages 61-112
The Public Lives of Jewish Stars (Gil Toffell)....Pages 113-144
The Jews Behind the Camera (Gil Toffell)....Pages 145-174
Jewish Defence (Gil Toffell)....Pages 175-200
Epilogue: The Decline of a Jewish Cinema Culture (Gil Toffell)....Pages 201-221
Back Matter ....Pages 223-227

Citation preview

Gil Toffell

Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain

Gil Toffell

Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain

Gil Toffell London, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-56930-1 ISBN 978-1-137-56931-8  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950510 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: Tom Howey This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in writing. To thank all those who have provided me with assistance or insight would require a short essay. However, I wish to gratefully acknowledge the assistance given to me by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. Colleagues who gave invaluable help include my doctoral supervisors Fran Tonkiss and Celia Lury, as well as Annette Kuhn, Janet Harbord, Ben Gidley and Nirmal Puwar. Lena Watson supplied me with first-rate Yiddish translation. The editorial team at Palgrave have been attentive, professional and hugely patient. I would like to thank Chris Penfold for originally agreeing to take on the book and to Lina Aboujieb, Ellie Freedman and Karina Jakupsdottir for seeing the project to completion. I have spent many hours in archives and was regularly impressed by both the knowledge and generosity of archivists. This was particularly the case at Tower Hamlets Local History Library, the Jewish Chronicle, the British Library and the Cinema Theatre Association Archive. Although I cannot name individuals for reasons of confidentiality, I am greatly indebted to all those that agreed to grant me oral history interviews and to those that assisted with putting me in touch with interviewees. For their unwavering encouragement and for being a welcome distraction I would like to thank my friends Renu, Tom, Ofra, Daniel and, of course, Naomi and Adam. Most of all I want to thank my family: my parents David and Judy, my sister Anat and her husband Felix. This book would not have been written without their support. v

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Acknowledgements

Some of the material from Chapter 5 previously appeared as “Awaiting with Some Anxiety”: The Jewish Response to Jew Suss (1934) in 1930s Britain in Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture, edited by Nathan Abrams. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 The Spaces and Places of Jewish Cinema Culture 21 3 Films of Jewish Interest 61 4 The Public Lives of Jewish Stars 113 5 The Jews Behind the Camera 145 6 Jewish Defence 175 7 Epilogue: The Decline of a Jewish Cinema Culture 201 Index 223

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Abbreviations

BBFC British Board of Film Censors JC  Jewish Chronicle LCC London Country Council LMA London Metropolitan Archives THLHL Tower Hamlets Local History Library

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1

Old Kings Hall, Commercial Road, London (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library) 28 Film posters on Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, London 1938 (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library) 32 Apollo Picture House, Stoke Newington, London (Image courtesy of Cinema Theatre Association Archive) 33 Rivoli Cinema, Whitechapel Road, London 1920s (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library) 36 Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, London 1920s (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library) 39 Eretz Israel Visualised (Advertisement in Jewish Chronicle, October 8, 1920. Image courtesy of Jewish Chronicle) 95 Advertisement for Loyalities (Jewish Chronicle, November 3, 1933. Image courtesy of Jewish Chronicle) 105 Advertisement for Yiddle with His Fiddle (Jewish Times, July 16, 1937. Image courtesy of British Library) 141

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

It was within the horrifying context of a growing wave of political antisemitism in Europe that the maverick anthropologist Tom Harrison first dispatched a small team of social investigators attached to his Mass Observation organisation to live for a short period in London’s East End. Arriving in the winter of 1939 they were tasked with laying the groundwork for a “comparative Sociology of Jews and Cockneys” (File Report A12) that could establish, “scientifically”, whether there existed any objective reality to the slanderous claims made against Jews by their detractors. By assessing, for instance, the relative consumption of “dirty picture machines” by Jews and non-Jews, or the preference of a given social group for gaudy neckties, it might be possible to definitively refute accusations of Jewish lecherousness or a propensity for ostentatious and vulgar personal presentation. Experiencing first-hand the notoriously insanitary living conditions of a Whitechapel tenement, one anonymous investigator recorded the grim detail of his temporary accommodation. Included in these field notes are a few paragraphs describing the bedtime rituals of a young man who could be viewed through the uncurtained window of an adjacent flat. Prior to hopping into a bed shared with a younger brother the unknowing research participant is seen throwing a combination of punches in a bout of shadow boxing, picking his nose then wiping a finger on his shirt front, and carelessly tossing a pair of shoes across the room. Voyeuristic and invasive, the ethical shortcomings of a methodology reliant on unauthorised surveillance are obvious—a critique that has been levelled at the © The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_1

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wider Mass Observation project (Hubble 2005). Yet in recording these unguarded moments, experiences of everyday embodiment in the lives of interwar working class Jews survive. Here is an individual habituated into the forced physical intimacy and lack of privacy that come with structural economic inequality. A final burst of activity before sleep involves a brief rehearsal of the rhythms of the boxing ring; pugilism then being an exceedingly popular sporting activity that commanded an almost cultish devotion amongst proletarian Jews. For Mass Observation it is clear that the research ends justified the methodological means; the surreptitious monitoring of unguarded citizens was viewed as a crucial technique in producing meaningful knowledge about Britain’s social reality. Oriented to transient moments the shifting moods of the nation would be revealed in informal conversation, aesthetic tastes and the mundane activities of work and leisure. In the writing of history it is never possible to provide a unified and panoptic account of any object of study. All historical narratives are partial, and a shift of perspective brings into view aspects of life not otherwise observable. During the interwar years the spheres of work, religion and organised politics governed much of what constituted the collective rhythms of life and the horizon of what was conceived possible for the mass of working class Jews in Britain. An examination of these contexts can variously shed light on experiences of oppression, shared moral duties, or even how those unable to transcend their individual anonymity might, as a group, become a force of history. What these do not address, however, are the unstructured activities and leisure choices of Jews unencumbered by more pressing obligation. Beyond those few fragments of data left behind by ethnographies such as Mass Observation’s the most ephemeral of those moments are unrecoverable. What does survive are the traces of a scene of shared leisure marked by its status as a commercial enterprise seeking to attract customers, its administration by agencies of the state, and by participant memory. As in much of the rest of interwar Britain, the cinema occupied a profound cultural centrality in Jewish neighbourhoods as film-going became the nation’s pre-eminent urban leisure activity. By the mid-1930s the western section of the East End—the mostly densely Jewish portion of the quarter—could support a dozen cinema theatres; a substantial number for a geography comprising approximately three square miles. In large part the Jewish consumption of film and film culture mirrored that of gentile audiences—the same stars were idolised, the same Hollywood

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productions enjoyed. Yet in an era in which significant pressure was brought to bear on Jews to assimilate culturally, the cinema auditoria of working class Jewish areas stubbornly remained as sites of cultural difference. Not only was a distinctness from the mainstream registered in cinema programmes—Yiddish film, Jewish nationalist propaganda and other items of Jewish interest were regularly screened—but the material culture and expressive norms of exhibition sites in neighbourhoods such as London’s East End, Leeds’ Chapeltown and Cheetham Hill in Manchester signalled the alterity of an ethnically particular audience. This is a vision of the cinema as a “counter-public”; a space in which participants might, against a background of coercive state and media scrutiny, articulate alternative interpretations of their identities. In the picture houses of Jewish neighbourhoods pleasure and communal solidarity came together in new and unpredictable forms. Yet the publicness of film impinged on Jewish life beyond the localised geographies of primary Jewish settlement. Film, in its prominence in British society, came to be seen as a vessel through which Jewish communal concerns might be carried to a wider non-Jewish public. As the cinema developed from an exotic sideshow into an institutionalised entertainment it became incorporated into a universal public sphere. This, as I am deploying the term, can be conceptualised as an imagined (though not immaterial) media space preceded by the bourgeois public sphere but increasingly, in interwar Britain, oriented to the mass consumer. Throughout the twentieth century new technologies of mass communication joined the print media in constituting such a space, with film quickly perceived as an important, indeed worryingly influential, site of public opinion formation. According to Habermas (1989) the ideal of a political public sphere oriented to rational-critical debate faded with the rise of industrial society and the welfare state. By the end of the nineteenth century powerful business interests had begun to corrosively retool communications media for political advantage and commercial gain, while the delineation between public and private blurred as the state increasingly intervened in civil society. In spite of Habermas’ account of the disintegration of the public sphere, Charles Taylor (2004) argues a common deliberative space remains fundamental to a definitive conceptualisation of the Western social order in modernity. Indebted to Anderson’s (1983) account of the nation as an imagined community Taylor elaborates the public sphere as a plurality of dispersed sites of discussion which are understood to

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comprise a single great exchange. Inhabiting the same social imaginary as the majority population of gentile British citizens, Jews looked to representation in the universal public sphere as a form of participation in a wider collective entity. Depending on context this might be conceived as entry into the nation, or even as an integral feature of international modernity.

Cinema and British-Jewish Historiography During the years between the conclusion of World War II and the present day, the historical study of Britain’s Jews has evolved dramatically. While few individuals beyond Cecil Roth were committed to a serious exploration of the topic at the beginning of that period, a host of major historians are now understood to have established international reputations through an examination of the British-Jewish experience. Wideranging comprehensive studies include landmark volumes by Lipman (1954), Alderman (1998) and Endelman (2002), though narrower accounts of specific aspects of British-Jewish life have been notable both in their quantity and plurality. Although far too numerous to list in any exhaustive manner here, it can be recalled that key areas of social life such as social integration (Feldman 1994), politics (Fishman 1975; Cohen 1982) and antisemitism (Kushner 1989; Julius 2010) have all received sustained attention; while topics as diverse as the Jewish youth movement (Kaddish 1995), the character of individual local communities (Black 1994; Williams 2008) and the Jewish press (Cesarani 1994) have been the subject of book length studies by experts in the field. One area that has, however, received less attention is the sphere of culture. Significant research into British-Jewish cultural output and consumption has been undertaken, though a notable majority focuses on elite literary forms rather than popular culture (Abrams 2012). Given the seriousness with which popular culture has been approached in the social sciences and humanities since the “cultural turn”, as well as the influence of the “history from below” movement on key individuals in British-Jewish historiography (Kushner and Ewence 2010), the reasons for such a lacuna are not immediately obvious. Whatever the explanation film in particular has, until recently, suffered from a near total lack of consideration. Given the prominence of cinema-going in interwar leisure lives this represents a significant blind spot in assessing the cultural preferences and social behaviours of ordinary British Jews during those years.

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It is equally true that if Jewish Studies has failed to take cinema seriously, then, for the most part, Film Studies has ignored British Jews. For sure, Jews involved in the business of cinema have not lacked the attention of biographers, but overwhelmingly these lives are not considered within the context of a British-Jewish communal existence. Individuals such as Oscar Deutsch or Isidore Ostrer were defined by their Jewishness, yet no account exists tracing their specifically Jewish trajectories into the industry or their public perception as Jews. Moreover, from Low’s (1950) foundational project until the present, discussions of a historic national film culture in Britain have a continued to elide the disproportionate contribution of Jews to virtually all arms of the industry. In regard to the interwar years Napper (2009), for instance, has recently argued for an understanding of cinema as implicated in the creation of a common national culture. Yet while his highly illuminating account remains an essential guide to the period, the tensions generated by contemporary perceptions of a Jewish, and thus alien, participation in British film production pass without comment. In recognition of such absences in the historical record some recent scholarship has sought to address a British-Jewish production and consumption of popular culture (e.g. Abrams 2016). Film during the interwar period has not been ignored, with a significant focus brought to key areas, particularly production. Gough-Yates (1992) groundbreaking work was for many years a scholarly anomaly, though has now been has been followed up by Marshall (2010), Hochscherf (2011), and Bergfelder and Cargnelli, eds. ( 2012) in their examinations of Jewish émigré production personnel during the 1930s; as well as by Spicer’s (2012) research into Jewish entrepreneurship in production, distribution and exhibition. Less attention has been brought to bear on performers, though Berkowitz (2016) has examined Bud Flanagan and the “Crazy Gang” troupe as a form of Jewish comedy. Toffell (2009, 2011) has considered British-Jewish spectatorship and audiences. The substantive object of study of this current volume is the meaning of film and cinema-going to working class and petit-bourgeois Jews living in the urban centres of interwar Britain. This will consider the material context of interwar British-Jewish film viewing, as well as British-Jewish perceptions of a national public’s reception of filmic material containing representations of Jews. More than simply an exercise in historical completism, this narrative seeks to reveal the extent to which ordinary Jewish individuals experienced an active participation in, and

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alienation from, the national family, as well as the manner in which transnational affiliations between Jews in Britain, Europe and the USA were facilitated in the everyday. That British society is now ineluctably multicultural is taken as a given by all bar a fantasist fringe. To understand how ethnic difference was first experienced in the media-entertainment sphere—now regarded a crucial feature of late modernity—both contributes to the picture of a Jewish presence in the Britain and expands the scope of study for a British sociology of mass communication as it intersects with race.

The Historical Emergence of Interwar Jewry The modern history of a Jewish presence in Britain is typically seen to begin with the informal readmission of Jews during the period of the Commonwealth in the mid-sixteenth century. A fully official emancipation would, however, have to wait a further two centuries when a raft of legislation rendering Jews equal in rights followed the passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829. As with Catholics and Nonconformists, Jews had, amongst various restrictions, hitherto been unable to take a seat in parliament since they could not swear an oath of office requiring an avowal of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism. In spite of historical structural exclusion a steady flow of Jews would migrate to Britain following the readmission, and by 1851 the country’s Jewish population had risen to approximately 32,000, around 70% of which were British-born adults (Laidlaw 2015). Diverse in composition, Jewish life in mid-Victorian Britain comprised of both “Sephardic” and “Ashkenazi” communities, with significant numbers tracing recent ancestry from southern Europe, the Netherlands, Germany and territories now identified as Poland. London has always existed as the centre of Jewish life in Britain, with the east of the city seeing the most sustained and substantial settlement. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the district of Aldgate had a sizeable and long established Jewish population. Continuing to grow throughout the 1800s the community had expanded into the neighbouring Spitalfields area by the mid-century and was spreading further east into Whitechapel. In 1882, when the first large-scale wave of migrants from the Russian Empire reached London, the East End was thus a logical destination for many. Close to the London docks—a common port of arrival—and with extensive religious and communal structures, some

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semblance of a new Jewish life might be quickly acquired. Driving the exodus from the Pale of Settlement was antisemitic mass violence set in motion by the 1881 assassination of Alexander II, an act maliciously rumoured to be the work of Jewish revolutionaries. Economic hardship, repressive legislation and further pogroms over the next quarter of a century (the most brutal of which occurred between 1903 and 1906) would ensure an ongoing flow of refugees westward. At the outbreak of World War I the East End’s Jewish population had swollen to over 100,000 (Rubenstein et al. 2011). While many of the new arrivals aspired to journey on to the USA after a temporary stay in London, large numbers found their new surroundings sufficiently bearable to put down permanent roots. Although sharing a religion with established Anglo-Jewish communities, however, cultural differences were stark. The language of Russo-Polish Jews was Yiddish, and their expressive capacities and modes of dress were regarded overtly foreign. Significant numbers were highly religious and felt alienated by the “anglicised” services of the United Synagogue, others had embraced political radicalism. The overt Otherness of the immigrant masses provoked considerable anxiety in an assimilated Anglo-Jewish elite; men (and women) who had long stood by a strategy of securing the place of Jews in Britain by designating religious difference a wholly private matter (Kahn-Harris and Gidley 2010). In an attempt to acculturate these people of the shtetl an array of charitable service provision and educative schemes were inaugurated or expanded. To some extent these projects proved immediately successful in their mission (e.g. the Jews’ Free School), but there was also much indifference to such efforts, and even outright resistance. First-generation settlers continued to speak Yiddish publically, Socialists and Anarchists expressed hostility to a Jewish ruling class, and a plethora of small self-organised places of worship refused to cede to the authority of a religious establishment. With the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914 the UK imposed a strict regime of border control. Yet despite Jewish migration from Russia reaching a near standstill the urban landscape of the interwar East End remained a visible zone of Jewish habitation. Describing the signifiers by which districts heavily populated by Jews could be distinguished from majority gentile areas John Sommerfield, in his role as an investigator for Mass Observation, identified “cafes that sell pickled cucumbers, synagogues, Turkish baths, shops with kosher signs of Yiddish writing displayed,…Yiddish heard in street, Yiddish newspaper displays”

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(62-1-B, 1939). To this list he might have added: self-help and charitable institutions, workshops and factories associated with garment manufacture, public monuments, and the Yiddish theatre. This latter entertainment remained active throughout the interwar years. During the earlier part of that period, in particular, internationally celebrated companies and actors attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, and venues such as the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel Road survived as sites of public Jewish sociability (Mazower 1996). Although the East End retained its status as the symbolic and actual nucleus of working class Jewish life in London up to, and including, World War II, it was neither homogenous in its social composition nor was it the only site of proletarian settlement in the city. As Cesarani (1998) demonstrates, a second generation of Jews, born and educated in England, differed sharply from a parental immigrant generation. While many understood Yiddish their primary tongue was English, religion was receding in importance, and the “old country” was a distant and unknown place. An active Jewish underworld with Jewish-run spielers (gambling dens) and localised racketeering has been recorded operating since the end of the Victorian period (Morton 1992; Samuel 1981), so a culture of the “street” was far from unique to the Jewish East End of the interwar years. But it became increasingly acceptable for the young to spend time in unstructured activity in public space, loitering in cafes or promenading the major thoroughfares in the search for romantic partners. Relatedly, the enthusiastic adoption of an English leisure culture of sports, dancehalls and amusement arcades similarly spoke of a loosening of ties to parental notions of propriety. It was also this second, British-born, generation that felt liberated to travel beyond the familiar boundaries of Whitechapel, Aldgate and Stepney Green, both in the search for leisure and to set up home. Migrating east to West Ham and north to Finsbury Park, Clapton and Tottenham, small extant Jewish communities in these locations expanded considerably in the interwar years. Initially, a buoyant manufacturing economy associated with military supply during the 1915–1918 period enabled a first wave of Jews to escape the privations of the poorest accommodation in the East End. Following the war changing Jewish employment patterns continued to drive the migration of Jews away from primary areas of settlement. While large numbers remained in the rag trade and furniture manufacturing the small workshops that had employed an earlier generation of workers began giving way to factory

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set-ups, many of which required larger sites more freely available in the inner suburbs. Clerical administration, retail or the distributive trades were also increasingly regarded as more attractive than monotonous and labour intensive traditional occupations. These positions, too, were often located away from the old neighbourhoods. Although the war economy did, temporarily, raise incomes, the wider trend of interwar migration should not be misunderstood as an expression of long-term and extensive Jewish social mobility. Lifestyles and accommodation in the inner suburbs were often comparable to primary areas of Jewish settlement, and, for the majority, relocation around the city represented an economic move sideways. For the minority that did meaningfully increase earnings, the terrace housing and tenements of Manor Park or Hackney were not a desirable destination. Instead success in business or entry into the professions might mean a move to the affluent communities of Hendon, Golders Green or Ilford; though it was Stamford Hill that became the emblematic neighbourhood of a Jewish nouveau riche. An even more elevated strata of Jewish wealth was concentrated in Bayswater and Chelsea. Notwithstanding any resettlement to the working class Jewish community in Soho, only a handful of Jews born in the East End would ever gain entry to the social circles of West London. The other two major centres of Jewish life in interwar Britain, Manchester and Leeds, did not experience economic expansion until the Industrial Revolution, and thus did not attract permanent Jewish settlement until the latter eighteenth century. In Manchester during the 1780s a handful of families left behind homes in Liverpool to resettle as shopkeepers in the city, thus creating the first Jewish congregation. Joining this small group in 1799, and becoming the first communal benefactor, was Nathan Mayer Rothschild, having arrived to gain direct access to local cotton markets. Throughout the early to mid-nineteenth century this community grew steadily, the newcomers seeking, like their coreligionist forebears, to set up in retail or as cotton merchants (Williams 2008). The second half of the century saw dramatic communal transformation with the arrival of increasing numbers of Eastern European Jews. Speaking little English, and without seed capital for business development, for them Manchester’s attraction was ready employment in the clothing industries, in particular, fabric waterproofing. The main areas of settlement of this new working class were districts on the northern periphery of the city centre: Strangeways, Lower Broughton and Red Bank—the latter of these described as “a sandstone

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ridge of jerry-built property (its streets held up by fragile retaining walls), industrial pollution and civil neglect” (ibid.: 32). In the interwar years the waterproofing industry was badly affected by new synthetic products, and many of the most economically vulnerable were forced to turn to market-trading and other unpredictable self-employment. As in London a second generation found themselves alienated from the social and moral universe of their parents, and the chevroth1 that connected a first generation to the culture of the “old country” while ameliorating the trials of the new became abandoned. By the early 1930s the Jewish population of Manchester stood at around 35,000. The old immigrant quarters remained populated, but had given way as the social centre of Jewish proletarian life to the neighbouring Cheetham Hill and Hightown. These were areas previously colonised by a Jewish middle class, a group that had now moved further north towards Crumpsall and Prestwich. Forging a syncretic identity that blended Jewish and English working class culture, the young Jews of the interwar years were ready consumers of the Manchester’s leisure culture, and the Lyons Café, the cinema and the street corner formed important reference points in their social existence (Cesarani 1998). Although the community continued to be subject to antisemitic harassment a more assertive generation was willing defend itself physically, notably founding the “Shaun Spidah”, a street gang that met physical abuse with equal force (Humphries 1983). A more formally organised investment of time was the utopian political projects of the twentieth century. The Zionist movement achieved an early and strong foothold (Chiam Weitzman called Manchester home from 1904 until 1916), as did the radical left. With relatively close access to the rural wilderness of the High Peak area of Derbyshire the rambling craze of the 1930s gained a significant following amongst young Jews. Politicised as the reclamation of working class birthrights from a landowning class, the celebrated 1932 mass trespass on Kinder Scout found one of its leaders in a young Communist activist from Cheetham Hill, Benny Rothman. While the Jewish population of Leeds numbered less in quantity than London or Manchester, at its estimated interwar height of 25,000 it formed a greater proportion of the overall population of its host city. A 1 A chevra(-oth) was a small society, typically set up in a single room within a private house, that served as a place of worship, a friendly society, a social hub and a point of contact for newly arrived migrants.

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small but active community, mainly of Germanic origin, was in place by the 1860s, and, as elsewhere, this expanded greatly following the events of 1881. Located between Hull and Liverpool, respectively ports of arrival and departure from the “old world” and to the USA, the town served as a stopping point on a longer migration trail, but inevitably collected permanent residents. Employment came primarily in tailoring trades and the manufacture of woollen textiles. Here, working conditions were regarded as superior to other centres of Jewish settlement, in part through the prominent Jewish involvement in the Trades Union Movement (Kershen 1995), though the years of the Depression wrecked extreme hardship on local workers. Leeds Jewish community remained clustered at the northeast periphery of the town centre into the 1920s, first in the Leylands area before spreading into the neighbouring Camp Road district. A full complement of institutions, secular and sacred, marked the social landscape, though Sterne (1989) has characterised religious life in the city as “likely the most fragmented…in the country” (15). This he attributes to an abundance of older Eastern European rabbis keen to maintain independence from any central authority. While this concentrated community contained a tendency towards traditionalism, or even insularity, a British-born generation emerged around the end of World War I that was keen to look beyond life in the Leylands. Chapeltown, lying to the north, rapidly became the centre of gravity for Jewish working class life, and by the middle years of the interwar era the population of the old Jewish quarter had plummeted. For Jews living in impoverished inner-city districts in London, Manchester and Leeds experiences of poverty, marginalisation and racist harassment were common and shared across generations. Yet while a foreign-born first generation of Eastern European Jews sought to offset the challenges and difficulties of their adopted home through traditional communal infrastructures, a second generation was increasingly oriented to the ethics, culture and institutions of British life. This is not to suggest a British-born generation of Jews was assimilating seamlessly into English society; rather new modes of hybridity, of being simultaneously Jewish and British, were emerging in an improvisatory process. Amongst the cultural material utilised for negotiating this development was the cinema. A technology of modernity, a mundane aspect of the urban landscape, as well as being both culturally central and substantively Jewish: this was a formation adaptable both as an incubator of Jewish communality and as a point of entry into the wider social collective.

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Naturally, Jewish settlement in Britain was not restricted to its three major centres. Liverpool’s Jewish population stood at 7500 in 1921, while Birmingham could boast a community of 5000. Glasgow, Cardiff and the coastal towns of Brighton and Bournemouth also contained significant numbers of Jews during the interwar period. While sharing common experiences, each of these locales possesses a unique history of migration. As will be clear as my narrative develops film and cinema held ethnically particular meanings for Jews across Britain, and a plethora of sites will receive attention. However, it is the largest concentrations of Jewish life that demand the closest study. It was in these locations that the richest cinema cultures existed, and it is thus they that left behind the strongest trace.

Sources of Data and Chapter Outline As a discipline, Film Studies emerged from intellectual traditions concerned with the analysis of the visual arts and literature (Jancovich et al. 2003). Here, knowledge is produced through close readings of texts, identifying meaning through the revelation of underlying aesthetic and ideological structures. While the textual analysis of film is not wholly peripheral to this current project, it is a technique that reveals little about lived experiences of exhibition spaces or the circulation of discursive material about Jewish studio bosses. As such, it is the disciplines of history and, to a lesser extent, sociology that have been drawn on, turning to archival and oral history methodologies to make sense of a conceptual and social environment now long vanished. The plethora of archival material examined includes municipal documentation, maps, promotional material, cinema ephemera, memorabilia and photographs. Newspaper commentary is a significant source of data, and national, local, cinema trade, and the Jewish press feature heavily. Since this latter branch of the print media plays an especially prominent role, it is worth expanding on the three British-Jewish newspapers utilised: The Jewish Chronicle, The Jewish World, and The Jewish Times (Die Zayt). Founded in 1841 and distributed nationally on a weekly basis, The Jewish Chronicle conceived itself as the official voice of BritishJewish interests: a subheading on the publication’s masthead declared the paper “The Organ of British Jewry”. Leopold Greenberg held the role of editor from 1907 until his death in 1931, during which time he modernised the publication, widening its appeal to the immigrant

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working class (a prominent writer on the staff was East End native Simon Gilbert). A committed Zionist and British patriot, Greenberg’s politics clearly informed the paper’s content, though a range of opinion was published under his reign. Later editors during the interwar years were, from 1931 to 1936 Jack Rich, and from 1936 Ivan Greenberg (Rubenstein et al. 2011). The Jewish Times was a Yiddish daily comprising about eight pages, with a small English language section on the back page. Produced in offices on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London, it had a keen awareness of the cultural dispositions of its proletarian readership. Founded in 1913 and edited from then onwards by Romanian immigrant Morris Myer, its politics were variously socialist and Labour Zionist, though much of its news-based content was oriented to a general reader. The Jewish World was a weekly magazine-style publication, originally independent but from 1913 acquired by The Jewish Chronicle. Like its parent publication its editorial stance was sympathetic to Jewish nationalism, although it was not a stridently political in content and much of its content was middlebrow light reading. It ceased publication in 1934. Methodologically, Janet Staiger’s (1992) “historical materialist” approach to “the event of interpreting a text” (81) informs much of the utilisation of press generated film commentary and its relationship to a historical British-Jewish audience. For Staiger, audience interpretations have historical bases, with the film review mediating between the on-screen text and the spectator as an aggregation of discourses mobilised to “explain” a given film. The task of the researcher is to trace “these discourses and their relation to specific historical formations and the range of reading strategies these formations employ” (92). Although a total vision of reception is never a possibility with this approach (one cannot, for instance, examine, admittedly very common, individual acts of audience resistance), a gap in which historical spectatorship has the potential to reside can be mapped out. Rather than extrapolate meaning from a film using a text-centred method, a reading of contemporary film commentary considers its potential to produce and delimit comprehension. Supplementing archival material as a source of data are oral history interviews. These have been collected from various locations, with information sought on experiences of cinema-going in London, Manchester and Leeds. With the aid of Jewish communal and religious organisations I approached ten interviewees, and these generated information on

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London and Leeds. Data on Manchester was gathered from an extant body of interviews conducted by, or under the aegis of, Bill Williams during the 1970s. This material was accessible by arrangement at the Manchester Jewish Museum. Also examined were interviews undertaken for the project Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain. This was overseen by Annette Kuhn during the 1990s, and transcripts recording some 200 hours of interviews are currently held at Lancaster University. With one exception, all of the interviews, irrespective of source, were undertaken with Jewish individuals with memories of Britain during the interwar period. The interviews conducted by myself were semi-structured, focussing primarily on experiences of film-going. Undertaken between 2006 and 2011 informants were either older children or young adults during the period under examination, though a majority of recollections do not reach back to the era of silent film. In contrast, having been recorded in the 1970s, the material pertaining to Manchester life contained information from the very beginning of the interwar years. However, undertaken as a broad record of Manchester Jewry, statements about leisure were contained within a wider set of discussion topics. Finally, despite the questioning in the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain material being oriented to a generalised national experience of cinema, some was marked by ethnic specificity. Possibly reflecting the concentration of British Jewry in London, relevant data all made reference to life in the capital. In distinction to some recent work in cinema studies that makes use of oral histories, most notably Kuhn’s pioneering An Everyday Magic (2002), reminiscences of cinema are not, for the most part, employed here to examine how film and film-going might structure the memory. With the tentative exception of a brief discussion of newsreel footage (Chapter 7), memories of exhibition spaces or the consumption of individual film titles feature as an additional cache of primary historical data. While the fallibility of memory is beyond doubt, being particularly vulnerable to subjective distortion, it remains an important tool for narrating marginal and otherwise overlooked historical moments. Here it is used sparingly and “triangulated” against archival material, textual analysis and secondary literature to put on record the possibility of events and experiences otherwise lost. The trajectory of my argument travels from a discussion of Jewish cinema culture to an account of the cinematic presence of ethnic difference in the public sphere. This begins in Chapter 2 with an exploration

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of the urban geography and sites of exhibition associated with a Jewish cinema culture. Picking up on Miriam Hansen’s suggestion that, historically, the cinema contained the potential to operate as an “alternative public sphere” for migrant audiences, such spaces are examined at the local level as communal hubs operating within an immediate social ecology. Offering a detailed account of the everyday life of exhibition spaces the chapter variously attends to: culturally specific audience behaviours, the use of exhibition spaces for a diverse range of Jewish sociocultural events, non-filmic attractions offered at a given screening in addition to a feature film and the marking of the built landscape by ethnically specific cinema publicity. Also considered are secondary sites of Jewish settlement in the suburbs, and film-going in the cosmopolitan city centre. Chapter 3 provides an overview of the multiplicity of film texts that were marketed and exhibited to British-Jewish audiences as Jewish interest productions. These include Yiddish language films, Hollywood “ghetto” dramas and European productions preoccupied with Jewish exoticism. Particular attention is devoted to the screening of documentary films depicting Zionist activity in interwar Mandatory Palestine that developed out of lantern slide lectures on the subject of Jewish life in the Levant. A partner piece to Chapter 2, this account clarifies the textual component to a Jewish cinema culture, illustrating what was screened in the exhibition spaces of Jewish neighbourhoods. Chapter 4 stages a transition away from an understanding of BritishJewish cinema culture that emphasises an introspective sphere of Jewish cultural activity, and towards a focus on Jewish communal concerns with how a Jewish presence in film made sense to a generalised non-Jewish audience. In the first instance this progresses through a discussion of Jewish film stars and their perceived movement between Jewish and non-Jewish realms. In tracing this motility it is argued that categories of public and private proved central to structuring the social imagination of British Jews around an enclaved/mainstream binary. Receiving extended discussion is the American actor Molly Picon. Embodying the Jewish social body in her screen presence it is argued that key to her appeal for British-Jewish audiences was a sense of the Jews as a people moving into visibility and recognition within the mass public sphere. Chapter 5 explores the related topics of Jewish involvement in film production and exhibition, and a Jewish concern with perceptions that the cinema was being utilised by Jews for propagandistic purposes. It is

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recorded how the British-Jewish press devoted considerable attention to the business success of Jews involved in the film industry, particularly cinema owners. By mapping this discourse it is explained how Jews found themselves at the cutting edge of creating and participating in a new cultural landscape and were taking pride in this fact. The discussion moves on to explore how the Jewish press strongly championed any film challenging antisemitism, yet expressed repeated disquiet over the possibility that such productions could be seen as a manifestation of special pleading by the alien force of “Jewish power”. Chapter 6 provides an examination of films produced in the run-up to World War II that openly militated against Nazism and political antisemitism. Particular attention is devoted to the censorship battle, and subsequent exhibition, of The Eternal Wanderer (1933)—a US-made Yiddish language production that became the first feature film to openly denounce Nazism. The chapter continues to build on themes introduced in Chapters 3 and 4, exploring how the potential to use cinema as a tool of Jewish defence was problematised and stifled by the culture and logics of a universal public sphere. Concluding the discussion Chapter 7 examines both continuities and discontinuities in Jewish patterns of cinema-going and film reception in the post-war period. In regard to the former, the continuance of screenings of Jewish interest films and the use of cinemas for Jewish communal activities in new Jewish neighbourhoods is recorded. However, it is affirmed that the singularity of the interwar period for Jewish communities remains a crucial element of the historical record, and discontinuities with an interwar Jewish cinema culture are expanded upon. In the aftermath of the holocaust Jewish life in Britain took on an introverted character—an event registered at the level of film consumption with reviewers in the Jewish press expressing scepticism over the interest a non-Jewish audience would have in films with Jewish characters or Jewish interest narratives. Additionally, the Jewish press passed virtually no comment on newsreel footage of the liberation of concentration camps despite the exhibition of the films receiving huge coverage across other UK media. This absence is interpreted in relation to the failure of the films’ narration to identify the on-screen victims as primarily Jewish; and to a wider discourse which understood the liberation of Bergen-Belsen to be a national story of British decency over Nazi inhumanity.

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Bibliography Abrams, Nathan. 2012. “Introduction: ‘Jews in British Cinema’.” Journal of European Popular Culture 3 (2): 111–15. Abrams, Nathan. 2016. “Introduction.” In Hidden in Plain Sight: Jews and Jewishness in British Film, Television, and Popular Culture, edited by Nathan Abrams, 3–28. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Alderman, Geoffrey. 1998. Modern British Jewry. New ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bergfelder, Tim and Christian Cargnelli, eds. 2012. Destination London: German-Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950. New York: Berghahn Books. Berkowitz, Michael. 2016. “A British-Jewish Film Genre?” Jewish Film and New Media, an International Journal 4 (2): 139–60. Black, Gerry. 1994. Living Up West: Jewish Life in London’s West End. London: London Museum of Jewish Life. Cesarani, David. 1994. The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cesarani, David. 1998. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Suburbs: Social Change in Anglo-Jewry Between the Wars, 1914–1945.” Jewish Culture and History 1 (1): 5–26. Cohen, Stuart A. 1982. English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry, 1895–1920. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Endelman, Todd M. 2002. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feldman, David. 1994. Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fishman, William J. 1975. East End Jewish Radicals. London: Duckworth. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gough-Yates, Kevin. 1992. “Jews and Exiles in British Cinema.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 37 (1): 517–41. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hochscherf, Tobias. 2011. The Continental Connection: German-Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1927–1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hubble, Nick. 2005. Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Humphries, Stephen. 1995. Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of WorkingClass Childhood and Youth 1889–1939. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Jancovich, Mark with Lucy Faire, and Sarah Stubbings. 2003. The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: BFI. Julius, Anthony. 2010. Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-semitism in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kaddish, Sharman. 1995. ‘A Good Jew and a Good Englishman’: The Jewish Lads’ & Girls’ Brigade, 1895–1995. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Kahn-Harris, Keith, and Ben Gidley. 2010. Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today. London: Continuum International. Kershen, Anne J. 1995. Uniting the Tailors. Trade Unionism Amongst the Tailoring Workers of London and Leeds, 1870–1939. Ilford: Frank Cass. Kuhn, Annette. 2002. An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Kushner, Tony. 1989. The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kushner, Tony, and Hannah Ewence. 2010. “Whatever Happened to British Jewish Studies? In Search of Contexts,” Jewish Culture and History 12 (1–2): 1–26. Laidlaw, Petra. 2015. “Jews in the British Isles in 1851: Marriage and Childbearing.” The Jewish Journal of Sociology 57 (1 and 2): 7–43. Lipman, Vivian David. 1954. Social History of the Jews in England: 1850–1950. London: Watts. Low, Rachael 1950. The History of the British Film 1918–1929. London: Allen & Unwin. Marshall, Edward. 2010. “‘The Dark Alien Executive’: Jewish Producers, Emigres and the British Film Industry in the 1930s.” In New Directions in Anglo-Jewish History, edited by Geoffrey Alderman, 163–87. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press. Mazower, David. 1996. Yiddish Theatre in London. 2nd rev. ed. London: The Jewish Museum. Morton, James. 1992. Gangland. London: Little, Brown. Napper, Lawrence. 2009. British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Rubenstein, William D. with Michael Jolles, Hilary L. Rubinstein, eds. 2011. The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Samuel, Raphael. 1981. East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Spicer, Andrew. 2012. “A British Empire of Their Own? Jewish Entrepreneurs in the British Film Industry.” Journal of European Popular Culture 3 (2): 117–29.

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Staiger, Janet. 1992. Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sterne, Ernest C. 1989. Leeds Jewry 1919–1929. Leeds: Jewish Historical Society of England. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Toffell, Gil. 2009. “Come See, and Hear, the Mother Tongue!” Yiddish Cinema in Interwar London.” Screen 50 (3): 277–98. Toffell, Gil. 2011. “Cinema-Going from Below: The Jewish Film Audience in Interwar Britain.” Participations Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 8 (2): 522–38. Williams, Bill. 2008. Jewish Manchester: An Illustrated History. Derby: Breedon Books.

Archive Anti-Semitism Survey. File Report A12, December 1938. Mass Observation Archive. University of Surrey. Typed report with attached letter to TH from J. Sommerfield (investigator) on his experiences and progress re 1939 Survey. 1939. 62-1-B. Box 1 Reports On Anti-Semitism East End Study 1939, Essays and Correspondence, Notes On Anti-Semitic Feeling 1939–1943. Mass Observation Archive. University of Surrey.

CHAPTER 2

The Spaces and Places of Jewish Cinema Culture

During the autumn of 1931 the Jewish World newspaper published a series of articles entitled “Communal Jewish Institutions” (November 19, 1931: 11–12). Each occupying a two-page spread, photographs of landmark community buildings in London, mostly in the East End, comprised the core of these pieces. The “Jewish Reading Room” in Whitechapel thus sat alongside charitable organisations, Jewish schools and the Bevis Marks synagogue. Given the rather worthy tone of much of the writing in the Jewish World it is, perhaps, unsurprising that no spaces of leisure were to be seen amongst the manifestations of godly and intellectual purpose. Applying somewhat conservative criteria to his consideration of what might be considered an institution, the author of the piece identifies only those longstanding organisations involved in sustaining the most respectable aspects of the social order. However, if one extends the definition to include social forms implicated in the organisation and reproduction of collective customs, behaviours and dispositions, then a fuller account would surely take in a wider inventory. Café culture, radical politics and the Yiddish theatre all contributed to a Jewish collective life, as did the cinema. Indeed, it is only as a “communal Jewish institution” that the cinema culture of interwar Jewish areas of settlement makes sense. As incubators of everyday difference spaces of film exhibition might work to designate an area of city as culturally Jewish, bring Jewish individuals together in close proximity, as well as to stabilise, reproduce and develop some of the constitutive elements of Jewish habitus. © The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_2

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In her landmark account of changing spectatorial relations in US cinema, Miriam Hansen (1991) proposes that prior to World War I the reception of film in America was a substantively shared experience. Here, she argues, the typical structure of early cinema programmes as a concatenation of heterogeneous short films, and the direct spectatorial address of many titles (i.e. overt acknowledgement of a viewing audience), combined with the presence of live performances accompanying screenings (e.g. explanatory lectures, music) to foster a self-identity as a collective entity in audiences. Rather than be drawn into the seamless fictional world of an unfolding narrative, viewers retained an awareness of their immediate surroundings and the activities of their fellow cinema-goers. Additionally, in immigrant neighbourhoods the nickelodeon took on a chameleon-like character tailoring its appeal to local tastes and consumption patterns. In Jewish neighbourhoods, for instance, lecturers providing explanatory dialogue might pepper their discourse with Yiddish phrases. As such, in locales such as New York’s Lower East Side the early cinema was one of a number of spaces that offered—and indeed, helped cultivate—an ethnically particular cultural realm at least partially autonomous from an emergent national culture of American modernity. Viewed in such a manner cinema appears a communalising rather than individualising technology. Film screenings are collective affairs, with a common minority cultural specificity elevated and made manifest amongst audience members. This is an account that sensitises us to the life of auditoria—whether that be the expressive behaviours of audience members or the extra-filmic components of the entertainment programme. Drawing heavily on the critical theory of Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993) Hansen’s ideas are also located in debates around the development and character of the public sphere. Following the cultural turn in the humanities it has sometimes been the case that writing on culture has strived to detect political praxis in even the most ephemeral minutiae of the socially marginal. While cultural resistance can spring from the unlikeliest of sources, identifying where the cultural mainstream sits is a notoriously tricky judgement call, and cultural autonomy does not necessarily equate with political opposition. In assessing whether the life of a given public space meets the conditions for participation in a counter-public, industrial-commercial public or bourgeois public at least affords a conceptual model of social structure through which to assess different registers of politicised collective life and the nature of

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any relationship to the polity. As will be evident, Hansen’s insights will inform my analysis. In addition to drawing on Hansen’s conceptual understanding of early American cinema, I begin my account of the exhibition spaces of a British-Jewish cinema culture in the USA. This may appear counterintuitive, yet there is a historiographic purpose to the manoeuvre. Naturally, the social conditions of immigrant Jews in American and Britain differed greatly. That Jewish migration was but part of a wider mass movement of Europeans to the American continent is only one factor differentiating the two contexts. However, during the first decade of the twentieth century similarities significant for narrating the emergence of Jewishrun cinemas in primary areas of Jewish settlement on either side of the Atlantic were in effect. In Britain, as in the USA, many cinema sites that emerged in Jewish working class neighbourhoods had historical associations with both established spaces of Jewish leisure (e.g. Yiddish theatre, banqueting halls), as well as recognisable bodies of elective association (e.g. landsmannschaften, political organisations) that together formed a Jewish public culture. Additionally, in the era prior to restrictive legislation governing intercontinental migration there was also significant movement between locales such as the East End of London and New York’s Lower East Side, with individuals trying their fortunes in different cities. Given this wider Jewish experience across national borders, and with only minimal historical material available pertaining to Jewish early cinema entrepreneurship in UK, it thus appears a useful point of departure.

Early Sites of Exhibition Central to the mythos of the birth of cinema in the US context is the image of the nickelodeon at the heart of the immigrant neighbourhood. This was the alleged space in which the proletarian multitudes were schooled in an American collective culture. And it is from this founding moment—the story goes—that Hollywood’s essence as a populist and democratic cultural form was established. One response to this somewhat limited narrative has been a sustained corrective revisionism pointing to small town film exhibition as well as the significance of middle-class audiences, exhibitors and producers in American cinema’s earliest period. Some recent research, however, has returned to urban working class milieus. Yet rather than seeking to reassert the legitimacy of earlier fables

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of American cinema’s genesis, scholars have sought to reveal the specifically local patterns of early film consumption in places such as Chicago’s Southside, and Harlem and the Bowery in Manhattan (see, for instance, Stewart 2005; Carbine 1990; Thissen 2012). In these specific districts, at least, the ethnic identity of audiences appears to have exerted an important influence in orienting both film exhibition and reception. In Judith Thissen’s (2012) examination of New York’s Lower East Side it is a significant revelation that not only was this predominantly Jewish neighbourhood peppered with—often short lived—picture houses, but that specific exhibition sites had histories intertwined with a broader Jewish public culture. Prior to its life as a cinema, for instance, the Golden Rule Theatre on Rivington Street played host to meetings of Jewish mutual aid societies and trade unions, and was a popular location for wedding parties. Indeed, across a multiplicity of sites Jewish venue owners and managers converted their spaces to meet the changing tastes of Jewish consumers. Motivated by the evergreen appeal of “get-rich-quick” schemes enterprising individuals—far more sensitive to hyper-local conditions than any sociologist—quickly adapted the leisure landscape to maximise profits. While it is certainly the case that such a development increased the exposure of Jewish consumers to a generalised mass culture, it would be a mistake to assume—as early historians of American cinema did—that this could only lead to a dilution of ethnic autonomy. Rather, as with the adoption of other communication technologies by Jewish entrepreneurs operating in the cultural field (e.g. newspapers, the gramophone), it was wholly possible to reconfigure the product—in this case, exhibition spaces, (and, as we shall see in this chapter, film itself)—to enhance an autonomous Jewish cultural realm. Unlike the USA, the development of cinema is not a meaningful component of the national story of Great Britain. Similarly, accounts pertaining to the role of migrants in the shaping of British society have never achieved the same kind of prominence in public discourse that has—over several decades—commonly been seen in American life. It is only relatively recently that a serious scholarly attempt to recover early British cinema exhibition has been embarked upon. And within these accounts minimal attention has been devoted to the ethnic identity of audiences, exhibitors or, indeed, anyone else operating in or around the early film trades. Yet it was not the case that ethnicity operated as some value-neutral variable in relation to film production and consumption. As Andrew Spicer (2012) has demonstrated, as a new area of commerce not

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yet subject to the racist barriers of entry that marked many established trades and professions the film and cinema business was hugely attractive to British Jews. Additionally, with the exception of the most religious, it seems Jews proved enthusiastic and early users of an entertainment form less marked by any ethnically exclusionary practices—whether they be intentional or incidental—associated with traditional British public house, gastronomic and sporting activities. According to Luke McKernan (2007) London’s cinema business saw rapid expansion towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, in part modelled on the success of nickelodeons in the USA. As in New York’s Lower East Side, the Jewish districts of Edwardian London were the site of an early boom in storefront film theatres and meeting hall conversions. Within the East End a solid base of Jewish entertainment consumers could be identified as potential audience members, and Jews with business interests in commercial premises easily convertible to film exhibition did not hesitate to set up cheap accessible cinemas to cater to them. In this early period the absence of an established body of research rooted in extensive primary sources necessitates caution when offering up any elaborate characterisation of the scene of exhibition. However, trade journals attending to Britain’s emergent film industry along with business directories such as the Kelly’s, Post Office and Harrod & Co Directory provide some documentation detailing the location and ownership or management of picture houses during the period. Of the film exhibition outlets operating in the highly Jewish Aldgate and Whitechapel neighbourhoods for the years between 1906 and the outbreak of World War I, the venues “Happy Land” (located in the Commercial Road), the “Palaseum” (also Commercial Road) and the “Original American Bioscope Exhibition” (Aldgate High Street) were just a handful of many outlets run by Jews. Often situated a mere stone’s throw from one another many of these businesses were short-lived; failing due to commercial reasons, or unable to implement safety requirements necessary for licensing after the passing of 1909 Cinematograph Act. Amongst the most prominent of the small-scale East End picture theatre proprietors active during this early period was Lazarus Greenberg, and his varied business career exemplifies the opportunistic and transitory character of the cinema trade at this time. Originally from Russia, Greenberg took the western end of the Commercial Road (an established major thoroughfare through east London) as his territory, eventually opening a celebrated Yiddish theatre, The Grand Palais, in

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1926 that remained a going concern until 1970, the last of its kind in Britain (interestingly, this had been the Imperial Picture Palace from 1911—a film-screening venue run by a succession of Jewish operators). Greenberg’s involvement in film exhibition can be dated back to at least 1910 when he is recorded running The Princess Hall, a shop conversion at 120 Commercial Road. In 1914 the site was renamed the New Electric Empire and appears to have remained under his aegis until 1917, the final year it can be found listed in his ownership in the Kelly’s Directory. The following year Kelly’s Directory records the new proprietor as one Philip Skolnik, presumably, from his surname, also Jewish; though this undertaking appears rather short lived, and records for the address in the years immediately following show it as home to unrelated commercial ventures. Greenberg’s additional interests in the Commercial Road comprised two other sites. The 1914 Kinematograph Yearbook records him running Greenberg’s Pavilion (at number 98), though by 1922 Kelly’s Directory lists a restaurant in his name there. The Kinematograph Yearbook (1914: 286) also has him running a cinema at number 83a in 1914, the Electric Theatre. This began life in 1908 as part of the Electric Theatre circuit founded by New York stockbroker Joseph Jay Bamberger (McKernan 2006). Containing 225 seats it was housed in the “King’s Hall” (later the “Old King’s Hall”), an established site for social and political events, and a one-time temperance hall (Phoenix Temperance Hall). Remaining in operation for almost a decade, its closure was lamented in the December 1917 edition of the Moving Picture World, which regarded its closure the “removal of one of the landmarks of motion picture development in London” and attributed the site’s demise to the demanding competition of the local market (Sutcliffe 1917: 1770). Returning to a meeting hall and event venue in its post-cinema years, The Old King’s Hall remained under the auspices of the Greenberg family for several decades. Of the various East End sites adapted for film exhibition in the early twentieth century many were long familiar to Jewish audiences. In relation to the Old King’s Hall historical ephemera reveals an assortment of meetings, performances and celebrations organised there during the first two decades of the twentieth century were oriented to Jews. In 1905, for instance, The Brothers Sheynberg from Lemberg—celebrated actors of the day—performed a song entitled “Kishinever Pogrom” commemorating the massacre of Jews in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev in

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1903. The existence of the event is recorded in a song sheet containing the Yiddish lyrics to the piece that was sold ahead of the performance for a price of two pence. Even after films began to be exhibited at the Old King’s Hall non-filmic events continued at the venue. In 1916 the First London Achuzah Company Ltd., a Zionist organisation founded in 1913, held a banquet in honour of the organisation’s founder, Dr. J. M. Salkind, following the completion of his agricultural study in preparation for an expedition to Ottoman Palestine. Given a photograph of the façade of the building shows it to be four storeys in height, meeting rooms separate to the auditorium were presumably available for hire (see Fig. 2.1). Tracing first-hand accounts of specific film halls during the early years of cinema exhibition in Britain is not a straightforward process. Fortuitously, two separate records of audience experiences of cinemas in Greenberg’s Commercial Road empire remain in existence as a result of both the Old King’s Hall and the Princess Hall moving into the orbit of powerful institutional apparatus. Animated by widespread concerns about the content of films and the physical and moral environment of picture houses, the National Council of Public Morals set up a Cinema Commission Inquiry to institute an investigation into the effects of the cinema on British audiences. A subsequent report, The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities, was published in 1917, and amongst those who supplied testimony was Mrs. Rose Henriques. A pioneering figure in youth work in Britain, Rose Henriques, along with her husband Sir Basil Henriques, established the Oxford and St. George’s youth clubs for Jewish boys and girls in London’s East End, and it was in her capacity as advocate for deprived and vulnerable young people that she offered evidence, recounting a visit to the Old King’s Hall. Somewhat contradictory in nature, Henriques testimony offered equivocal support to cinema-going as a pastime for her young charges, believing it preferable to the “evil which surrounds the children” (239) in the streets, while expressing concern that the erotic content of “love stories” might have a warping effect on the psychology of the individual. Specifically in relation to her visit to the Old King’s Hall Henriques attested to being seated next to a man writhing and groaning in apparent uncontrolled abandon as the risqué scene of a romantic comedy played out on the screen (240). Despite this episode she contrasted the site’s physical environment favourably to other “dirty and appalling” smaller cinemas she had inspected. The hall, the commission was told, was

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Fig. 2.1  Old Kings Hall, Commercial Road, London (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library)

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“well ventilated”—an articulation of one of the key health anxieties of the day, where stagnant air was understood to function as a medium for a minatory microbiology. The audience at the Old King’s Hall— comprising “mostly of adults and boys and girls over sixteen”—were also regarded as more decorous in their behaviour than those at some other cinemas; “on the whole more seemly” (all ibid.) to use Henriques phraseology. Notwithstanding the somewhat liminal atmosphere generated by courting couples and on-screen eroticism, then, the Old King’s Hall appears in her account a well-run and largely unthreatening environment. Perhaps offering some justification for Henriques claim that cinemas in the area had acquired “bad reputations” (239), records of proceedings from a trial at the Central Criminal Court (the Old Bailey) document the Princess Hall as the locus of petty street crime. The trial concerned the prosecution of one Joe Taylor who—along with two associates—was accused of robbing and then knocking unconscious a Mr. Morris Platz. According to Platz’ testimony he visited the cinematograph on a May evening in 1910, stood at the back of the crowded hall to watch the show, had his silver watch and some money lifted and was then struck in the face by the accused in a violent confrontation outside the theatre. Although the defence attempted to discredit one witness by claiming he was infatuated with the accused’s “sweetheart” (Old Bailey Online, 1910), Yetta Zimmerman, Taylor was found guilty and sentenced to three months imprisonment. Overcrowded and populated by individuals with criminal convictions—the trial proceedings were complicated by assorted claims of maleficence between various witnesses—the Princess Hall appears not quite as salubrious as Greenberg’s flagship venue just up the road. Although limited and fragmentary, when considered accumulatively the assortment of archival data offers some insight into the emergent terrain of film exhibition in one corner of a heavily Jewish neighbourhood in Great Britain. Alongside Jewish ownership these sites were attracting large numbers of Jews as audience members. All the individuals involved in the Princess Hall fracas possessed Jewish ancestry, reportedly yelling in Yiddish as the drama spilled out of the cinema into the Commercial Road (see ibid.). The audiences encountered by Rose Henriques were also asserted to be significantly Jewish, specifically relating the experiences of the exclusively Jewish youth at the Oxford and St. George’s clubs. Additionally, some variation in consumer experience and preference was

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developing, even within a tightly bounded geography, with cleaner more respectable halls identifiable and contrastable to cheaper unruly venues potentially detrimental, at least in the Edwardian imagination, to the moral and physical health of users. This assemblage of sites was sutured onto an existing network of Jewish public spaces, with exhibition venues both superceding and simultaneously occupying established locations on the Jewish communal map. By the First World War a Jewish scene of cinema-going was thus coalescing. In the East End of London this scene would be at its richest and most sizeable, but in the major Jewish centres across the UK something of the pattern would be repeated.

Interwar Spaces Discussing the film business with the manager of an East End cinema for a 1937 article reporter Richard Carr quoted his source as stating: East End audiences are very critical…If the regular patrons don’t like a film they make a point of telling me afterwards. They say ‘B____y [sic] awful film that’ or some such remark. Or else they clap their hands during the film or shuffle their feet and whistle. They certainly let me know whether or not they like the films we show. (9)

In the East End, indeed, across Britain, film exhibitors maintained a close relationship with their clientele well into the interwar period. Looking to supply a niche product to patrons in highly competitive local environments cinema owners in Jewish neighbourhoods were quick to rent Jewish interest films. Such programmes could include Yiddish language film, Jewish nationalist documentaries, or even simply films starring Jewish actors in prominent roles. In the next chapter we will explore these and other genres, and the strategies used by various arms of the cinema trade to promote them to Jewish audiences. However, I want to begin my analysis of Jewish cinema culture by focussing on that aspect in the above quote that emphasises the lived experience of the exhibition space; the whistling and stamping of feet, the sense of ownership of a venue by audiences. More than a neutral space in which to house a projection of light onto a canvas screen, cinemas should be understood as complex and multifarious in their materiality. From their beginnings film exhibition sites have imposed a claim on public space. Bedecked in electric lights and architecturally flamboyant,

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the spectacular demand for attention as a key principle of the film hall aesthetic was established in cinema’s first decade. A strategy that quickly became central in drawing the gaze of a potential audience involved the prodigious utilisation of billboards, hoardings and flyposters. Spreading out from the picture house into local streets these enabled exhibitors to notify patrons of the latest offerings in a continuously changing programme, and to communicate some of the excitement and drama of a given production. When the Cinema Commission Inquiry called on Mr. Charles Pascall—a past president of the London and United Billposters’ Associations—to offer his expertise for their 1917 report he quoted the then recent Home Secretary Herbert Samuel’s view that “posters have a very great influence on the public life and character” (222). In concurrence the Commission expressed considerable concern about the unregulated display of “sensual and sensational” posters on the private boards and premises of cinema proprietors, perceiving them to be in many ways “more objectionable than the films themselves” (xxxi). While—from the perspective of the present—the Commission’s anxieties may seem alarmist (film posters, it was feared, could tempt children into crime), they were correct to deduce their visibility contained a power. This was a media that could recode the urban landscape. In Britain’s populous working class Jewish neighbourhoods the visual field was saturated with an ethnically particular semiotics. Shop signs, advertisements and public notices oriented to a multilingual population were a mundane feature of the streetscape from the nineteenth century into the interwar period. As early as 1853 the essayist Charles Manby Smith described a professional billsticker posting “announcements in Hebrew, addressed to our friends the sons of Israel” (119) on to London’s walls. With some cinemas using no other form of advertising, eye-catching billposters and hoardings targeted to local audiences were a crucial tool for exhibitors. In a 1938 photograph of the façade of the derelict Pavilion Theatre in the East End’s Whitechapel Road (Fig. 2.2) billposters are plastered over every available surface. Amongst the cinemas advertising upcoming attractions three posters from the Rivoli Cinema—a large picture palace almost opposite the Pavilion—can be seen pasted near pavement level. As can be made out on the left of the notice, a film called Uncle Moses (Goldin and Scotto 1932) is advertised—in both English and Yiddish—as currently screening there. This was a Yiddish language drama set in garment district New York and starred Maurice Schwartz, a celebrated Yiddish actor. Other posters

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Fig. 2.2  Film posters on Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, London 1938 (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library)

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in the photograph contain Hebraic lettering or Jewish names (e.g. the boxer Harry Mizler—hugely popular with Jews for wearing shorts emblazoned with a star of David when in the ring—is listed as featuring in some pugilistic display), and the Rivoli poster thus inhabits a mosaic of Jewish publicity. Moving to another image, and an emphatic attempt to attract a Jewish audience can be seen in a 1928 photograph of the Apollo Picture House (Fig. 2.3). Based a couple of miles north of the East End in Stoke Newington Road, the Apollo was located in a neighbourhood with a sizeable, and expanding, working class and petit-bourgeois Jewish population. As can be seen the façade is adorned with hoardings advertising a melodrama called Souls in Exile (Schwartz 1926) as the current feature title. Again starring Maurice Schwartz, this told the story of a Jewish writer forced to flee to New York from Czarist Russia. Along with the film title and programme details the intrinsic Jewish content of the narrative dominates the displays. Announced above the title bold black letters on two

Fig. 2.3  Apollo Picture House, Stoke Newington, London (Image courtesy of Cinema Theatre Association Archive)

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large boards describe the piece “an extraordinary Jewish drama” leave no ambiguity about its ethnically inflected appeals. While the interwar years saw a concerted social pressure exerted on British Jews to publically efface any cultural difference with a gentile population, the commercial imperatives of entrepreneurs sought out audiences as they were, and not as the ideal a paternalist state or Jewish elite aspired they might become. The streetscapes offered up by the Pavilion and the Apollo are stubbornly unassimilated. Events and activities on a Jewish social calendar not only took place behind closed doors, they had a life on the street. The sheer number of film exhibition venues operating in working class districts during the interwar years means that a detailed audit of every site is impossible. However, a brief synoptic description of sites that oral history or archival data demonstrate catered explicitly to Jews in the East End might be offered. We have already encountered the Rivoli Cinema and Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel Road, and these major venues can be joined by The Troxy in Commercial Road—the area’s largest and most luxurious cinema. Mid-size picture houses included the Mayfair Cinema in Brick Lane; the Mile End Empire Theatre, the People’s Palace, and The Odeon in Mile End Road; the Palaseum Cinema and the Popular Cinema Theatre in Commercial Road, and Smart’s Picture House in Bethnal Green Road. Finally, the Palacedium Cinema in White Horse Road and the Cable Picture Palace in Cable Street were smaller, cheap theatres— often referred to as “fleapits”—catering to a clientele living immediately nearby. All these sites were located within a geography of little more than three square miles, and all were largely reliant on local trade. Given a sizeable proportion of this local trade was Jewish it made economic sense to appeal directly to Jewish cultural tastes in billposters and hoardings. Something like one dozen exhibition sites—in close proximity—thus placed ethnically specific publicity material in the public realm. The display of Jewish interest film advertising did not necessarily appear simultaneously at multiple cinemas, nor did individual sites continuously utilise it in their displays, but throughout the interwar years it regularly marked the street. Along with commercial signage in Yiddish and notices for assorted Jewish cultural events, cinema-related material worked to create a visible zone of Jewish habitation. This was a territory with observable boundaries—entry and exit points perceivable by any inhabitant or visitor. However, while the streetscape featured a patchwork of advertisements and signs, it would be a mistake to understand each individual visual object as equally meaningful. Specific to the

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material associated with picture houses was its cultural centrality. Cinema was the era’s defining leisure activity—both glamorously vogue and intrinsic to the everyday lives of millions. Ethnically particular cinema hoardings and posters thus positioned Jewish neighbourhoods within the culture of modernity. These milieu were not peripheral backwaters—shtetlekh transplanted to the new world—but sites networked into the global flows of leisure commerce. Spatially heterogeneous, many exhibition sites situated within Jewish neighbourhoods are best understood as porous in relation to their immediate environment. Prior to its destruction by the Luftwaffe during the blitz in 1940, the Rivoli cinema at 100 Whitechapel Road seated over 2000 patrons and was regarded one of the premiere picture houses in East London. Designed by the architecture firm of Adams and Coles a photograph taken a year or so after its 1921 construction reveals its façade to be a rather grand neoclassical affair complete with arched doorways and Corinthian pilasters and semi-columns (see Fig. 2.4). In a series of articles published in the house magazine of Gaumont-British in 1932 Stanley Collins (2001) recalled his time as assistant manager of the recently opened Rivoli some ten years previously. While initially a commercial failure according to Collins, the cinema’s fortunes turned when new owner Walter Wagner began presenting prestige feature films and booking popular variety acts to appear as part of the programme. One particularly popular attraction in 1922 was a series of nightly exhibition bouts featuring the Jewish welterweight boxer Ted “Kid” Lewis. Born Gershon Mendeloff in an East End tenement—a professional nickname was “The Aldgate Sphinx”—Lewis was hugely popular with Jews. By the time he appeared at the Rivoli Lewis was no longer world champion, though this does not appear to have dampened the enthusiasm of the local fans that packed the auditorium for every presentation. In anticipation of Lewis’ programmed displays waves of Jewish fans were attracted to the Rivoli site in synchronisation to the rhythms of the scheduled performance. The show ran daily for several weeks, and Collins also reported crowds blocking the Whitechapel Road every time Lewis appeared at the stage door (36). More random accumulations were thus conjured together in relation to the chance glimpses of Lewis. Obstructing pedestrians and halting traffic the flows and concentrations of Jewish bodies generated by this event provided an external urban spectacle as a counterpart to the pugilistic spectacle playing out nightly inside the Rivoli.

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Fig. 2.4  Rivoli Cinema, Whitechapel Road, London 1920s (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library)

Conversely, as much as exhibition sites extended into local geography they were also subject to the force of a social ecology immediately adjacent to their walls, a force that could flow into auditoria. Following Wagner’s ownership of the Rivoli it became part of the United Picture Theatres circuit in 1928 before being acquired by Gaumont-British in 1930 (O’Rourke 2013). Despite these commercial transitions the cinema retained an intimate relationship with its sociocultural surroundings. Perhaps the most striking examples of this relationship are the Rosh Hashanah (Jewish new year) services the Rivoli hosted over several years during the 1920s and 1930s so as to accommodate the large congregation that a small nearby synagogue could not attend to during this holiday period. The episode is mentioned in a short notice in the Jewish Chronicle stating the cinema would be closed for mid-week film screenings, and that the Welfare Committee of the United Synagogue would

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be organising the event (“News About the Stars”, September 14, 1934: 42). Giving way to the sacred rhythms of the religious calendar, the secular schedule of the film programme temporarily halted as the cinema adopted the identity of its neighbour. If an enfolding of Jewish cultural specificity, urban living and spectacular modernity was realised in displays of cinema publicity, this assemblage enmeshed with an equally complicated arrangement of events and experiences that simultaneously took life within and without exhibition sites, and would situate cinemas both in and of their spatial context.

Expressive Cultures Embedded in the local area the neighbourhood cinema occupied the same social terrain as a range of proximate Jewish communal institutions. Unencumbered by a majoritarian gaze locations such as the Rivoli were experienced as home ground for many working class Jews. In this atmosphere licence was given for the transgression of middle-class standards of audience behaviour, and a range of accounts suggest the conditions for a spirited expressive culture took root. In his 1940 biography charting Jewish life in Edwardian and interwar Stepney, East End My Cradle, the writer Willy Goldman recounts an afternoon visit to an unspecified local cinema: In the half hour preceding a show they turned the place into a circus. They stood up and shouted jests to each other. Some sought out relatives and friends and when they caught sight of them screeched across: ‘Hey Becky!…Here’s a seat I saved for you—come on over!’. (139)

Once the programme is underway “the noise does not so much quieten down as change its character”. Some in the audience whistle along to a theme-tune while others shout out jokes at a moment of high drama, “and underlying these intermittent noises the incessant crackling of peanuts and the squelch of sucked oranges makes a ‘theme-tune’ of its own” (ibid.). Anarchic and unapologetic this account finds its echo in numerous descriptions of film screenings situated in non-Western milieu, and, indeed, minority ethnic and working class milieu within the West. Performances of Bollywood masala movies, for instance, are famously lively in both South Asian and diasporic contexts, with audiences

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participating in musical numbers and volubly commenting on the on-screen drama (Puwar 2007). In his celebrated account of the eighteenth-century theatre in The Fall of Public Man ([1977] 1986) Richard Sennett vividly illustrates the disorderly character of that period’s audiences, describing theatregoers as openly conversing amongst themselves, indulging in horseplay, or loudly offering advice to actors in the midst of a performance. Only in the Victorian era were audiences disciplined into stationary silence as emotionally restrained forms of spectatorship became widespread. Sennett associates this transformation with the behavioural preferences of the bourgeoisie, a class fraction then establishing its cultural dominance in Europe and America. For those whose dispositions were not in accord with this historically and geographically specific class it was far from inevitable that they would internalise alien behavioural protocols, and more unruly forms of spectatorship persisted—or found their genesis—across multiple contexts. Viewed in this way it should not be surprising that many Jews of the interwar period, still, at least partially, culturally located in the Jewish topographies of eastern Europe, should reject a spectatorship requiring bodily immobility and a curbing of vocal expression. Amongst the richest accounts of Jewish experiences of entertainment consumption in the interwar years are the oral histories David Mazower (1996) gathered for his examination of Yiddish theatre in London. These attend to individuals who had witnessed, or were involved in, performances at the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel Road, once the premier venue for watching Yiddish theatre in Western Europe. Discussing the familiarity of audiences with performers, the daughter of the Yiddish actor Joseph Fineberg explained how patrons would address her father on stage attempting to direct his actions: “anything they…didn’t like they’d shout out. When he was cursing on stage, they’d shout out, ‘Joe, shoin genig [enough already]. Enough! Enough!’” (24). Intertextual foreknowledge was a key component of consumption of the repertoire of the Yiddish stage for many, and Pavilion audience regular Louis Behr explained that during a performance “everyone practically you sat with could tell you the cast inside out, instant. If an actor forgot a line or two, the prompter wasn’t necessary really. The gallery could answer word by word exactly” (23). The Pavilion Theatre dated back to 1827, though was reconstructed following a fire in 1856, remodelled a first time in 1874 by Jethro T. Robinson, a notable theatre architect, and then again in 1894.

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Incorporating classical and Moorish themes in both its interiors and exteriors the site had long been recognised as a landmark in the East End, and its entrance was situated on a busy stretch of the Whitechapel Road (see Fig. 2.5), almost opposite the Rivoli Cinema. Equipped with complex stage machinery the venue initially featured a mixed repertoire of popular and serious theatre—opera, Shakespeare, pantomime—though this altered as the area saw increased numbers of Jews in the late nineteenth century and the site became better known for concerts, political meetings, boxing matches and Yiddish theatre. This latter attraction ran in seasons from 1906 and 1934, and with luminaries of the Yiddish stage such as the tragedian Joseph Kessler directing operations it developed a formidable reputation for quality. Also presented at the Pavilion Theatre around this time were films of Jewish interest, and the venue transformed into a cinema when some production thought likely to attract local audiences could be booked. It was at the Pavilion, for instance, that the first Yiddish talking films to be screened in Britain were presented in 1931.

Fig. 2.5  Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel Road, London 1920s (Image courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library)

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Running for a fortnight during May of 1924 E. A. Dupont’s (1923) drama The Ancient Law screened as the feature entertainment at the Pavilion Theatre. The film dealt with the then voguish topic of intergenerational tension, narrating the familial struggles that unfold when the son of a devout Rabbi rejects a life of religious orthodoxy in a Galician shtetl for a stage career in Austria. According to the Jewish Chronicle the screenings at the Pavilion involved “special musical and vocal effects” (“Music and Drama”, May 9, 1924: 28) as a supplementary enhancement adding to the appeal of the event. Reviewing the film the same paper was largely positive about the production, remarking on the sincerity of the piece and the “faithful representation of a good deal of Jewish ritual” (“Film Notes”, May 16, 1924: 30). While the reviewer endorsed the film, however, s/he was less enthusiastic about the Pavilion’s audience. At one point in the film rituals associated the holiday of Yom Kippur are depicted, and with the event regarded the most solemn day of the year in Judaism the paper asserted it “humiliating to find a picture of the Kol Nidre service being greeted by an audience which, presumably, consists almost exclusively of Jews, with stupid and unmannerly laughter” (ibid.). At the Pavilion a boisterous and iconoclastic behavioural culture appears to have been normalised for audiences across the programmed entertainments. Stating The Ancient Law “a good film and deserving of a better reception” the Jewish Chronicle’s reviewer clearly believed a representation of a sacred rite should require spectators to comport themselves in a respectful and sober manner—something more in line with the disciplined contemplative theatregoer of bourgeois preference. Yet despite his/her endorsement of the film the reviewer did acknowledge it could “benefit from judicious cutting” (all ibid.) suggesting the narrative may have dragged at times, likely irritating many in the audience. Irrespective of the nature of the show, a significant number of patrons may have felt a dreary production a poor exchange for the price of a ticket and unworthy of their limited leisure time. If regulars at the Pavilion considered a stage performance in some way unacceptable they made their displeasure known; in continuity with this principle cinematic screenings could expect a similar lack of deference. In the interview testimony solicited by Mazower, ethnic specificity textures its character. Agitated audience members remonstrating with actor Joseph Fineberg are recalled as doing so in Yiddish; and it was soliloquies from the Yiddish dramatic repertoire that patrons were reciting from their seats in the Pavilion. While the demonstrative spectator can be identified

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in a wide range of historical and geographic contexts, the actual content of expressive utterances made by real-world audience members can be often highly particular, correlating with the specifics of collective identity. Recorded in raw data for Mass Observation’s 1939 antisemitism survey one observer—identified only as “LT”—made detailed notes on a group of Jewish working class young men from Whitechapel that he accompanied as they engaged in various leisure activities. Joining them for a Friday evening visit to an unidentified cinema in the East End his diary records the response of patrons to a newsreel covering the events of the Spanish Civil War. Culminating in what the observer describes as “the glorification of Gen. Franco” this final scene was “greeted by general hisses throughout the audience which was predominantly Jewish”. The young men the observer was with are also noted to have “hissed and booed with the rest of the crowd”, with one of the group, “Charlie”, turning to comment “Fucking swine isn’t he?”. Elsewhere in LT’s fieldnotes it is recorded that “Charlie”—a prominent and assertive character within the group—possessed a strong commitment to Communism, wearing a hammer and sickle pin badge on his lapel. In many Jewish neighbourhoods during this period, far left politics was a commonplace feature of social life, with anti-fascist organisation regarded an essential activity of communal defence. Political awareness of cooperation between Hitler’s explicitly antisemitic regime and other fascist states was high, and whether an individual was as ideologically engaged as “Charlie”, or less doctrinaire in their commitments a profound opposition to any manifestation of the far right was a familiar stance for Jews. At the conclusion of the evening’s film programme the national anthem was played through the cinema’s loudspeakers, and the observer considered it meaningful to record that his group had exited during the music, and that “very few of the people stood to attention whilst it was played”. To what extent this audience felt active animosity to the conventions of demonstrating national loyalty is not investigated. It is clear, however, that during the interwar years it was not unusual for British Jews to feel somewhat excluded from participation in the national family, or that to gain entry into such an entity required a level of linguistic, cultural and religious assimilation that was too objectionable to consent to, or even be possible. Politically located in diametric opposition to the perceived address of the newsreel, and resistant to the appeals of ceremonial nationalism this group of young men—along with the majority of the audience— animated their social position in expressive behaviours. Refusing to

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acknowledge the “fourth wall” they harangued their on-screen political enemies with jeers. The conventions of the space permitted the unbridled venting of raw emotion, but this only came into being in relation to the particular circumstance of Franco’s appearance—for the duration of the two programmed narrative films the observer noted his companions stayed silent. Although a less active form of challenge than anti-fascist catcalls, an ethnically specific form of embodied dissent might also be read in the audience’s disregard for the protocols surrounding the performance of the national anthem. Wandering out into they street or remaining slumped in cinema seats when the social expectation was to remain silent, static and upright appears a performative rejection of a set of values felt distant or irrelevant by this particular ethnic group. The neighbourhood cinema could be a site of social comfort for Jews since it was a location in which expressive behaviours could be given free reign; but the qualitative content of this expression was an act of place-making in itself, coding the auditoria as Jewish space.

Jewish Entertainments As we have seen with the example of the retainment of pugilist Ted Lewis at Whitechapel’s Rivoli cinema, local cinema operators could be highly inventive in presenting non-filmic attractions to draw in local audiences. From the earliest cinematograph displays films were shown alongside other entertainments, and irrespective of whether a cinema had been adapted from an extant theatre or was purpose-built to exhibit films, most venues were equipped with some kind of stage prior to World War II. By the 1930s the grandest cinemas laid on elaborate cine-variety programmes comprising two films (usually a high production value main feature and a lesser “B” film), trailers for coming attractions, a newsreel, a cartoon as well as some kind of stage show. This could include dancers, a singer, comedians or any number of other live acts, some of which might be accompanied by the house organist—raised hydraulically to the stage—on an Wurlitzer type organ illuminated with electric lights and able to acoustically imitate the plethora of orchestral instruments. In the East End the Troxy cinema in the Commercial Road was universally regarded as the area’s premier picture theatre following its 1933 construction. A glamorous art deco building with an interior featuring ornate geometric plasterwork on walls and ceilings, black marble floors and a seating capacity of 3520 it was designed by George Coles, one of

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the architects behind the Rivoli in Whitechapel (see Berk and Kolsky 2016). Subject to significant overheads the Troxy required high ticket sales and the venue made a considerable effort in connecting to local audiences—the slogan “where east is best” appearing on all its publicity. An article in the Jewish Chronicle estimated “that about fifty per cent. of the cinema’s patrons are Jewish” (“Troxy’s First Birthday”, September 7, 1934: 66) making this demographic crucial to the successful running of the business. Clearly keen to maintain good relations with the community notices were placed in the Jewish press offering new year greetings to patrons from the cinema’s owners, the Hyams family, shortly before Rosh Hashanah of 1934 (see JC, September 7, 1934: 63). The Troxy was well known for its high-quality variety acts with many celebrated artistes appearing on its stage, and amongst these were performers and events targeted to appeal to Jews. This strategy was recalled by a Jewish interviewee offering testimony for Annette Kuhn’s investigation of 1930’s cinema-going, remarking that “being the East End they had a lot of Jewish turns…Like Sophie Tucker” (Maurice Bloom, CCINTB Archive). One high profile performance at the Troxy that sought to elicit a Jewish audience was the appearance of Molly Picon in June 1936, then touring her act in Europe. Dubbed “the most famous Yiddish comedienne in the United States” (“Molly Picon at the Troxy”, June 19 1936: 49) by the Jewish Chronicle, Picon had made a career on the Yiddish stage, before branching into film and radio. While her show was created for ethnically mixed audiences it included Yiddish songs and relied heavily on Jewish humour, presenting a series of comedic social types from Jewish New York. For the Jewish Chronicle “one of the advantages over other folk possessed by the Jewish people is…its ability to enjoy to the full the art of Molly Picon” (“Molly Picon’s Jewish Concert”, February 5, 1937: 52). The booking was thus a shrewd one for the Troxy. In September 1934 the site celebrated its first birthday, and a special cine-variety presentation was put together to mark the occasion. The venue had a house orchestra—the Troxy Broadcasting Orchestra—led by Joseph Muscant, and his musicians featured prominently in the anniversary show playing what was described an “arrangement of Jewish music” (“Troxy’s First Birthday”, September 7, JC, 1934: 66). In a landmark week for the venue Jewish culture was placed at the centre of its live entertainments. While unable to compete with the high profile acts presented by the “super cinemas”, exhibition sites in Jewish neighbourhoods of lesser

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size and prestige proved equally keen to complement their programmes with extra-filmic attractions. When the Yiddish language film The Eternal Wanderer (Roland 1933) screened at the Mile End Empire in March of 1935 the programme included a stage show featuring the Dutch-Jewish singer Leo Fuld. Developing his singing talent as a chorister in his childhood synagogue Fuld had recorded several Yiddish songs by the time he appeared at the Empire, and an advertisement for the event placed in the Jewish press carried the information that he would be “singing Jewish Melodies [sic] with Jack Goldy and Sidney May” (see JC, March 20, 1935: 52). Perhaps most idiosyncratic, however, were the theatrical performances offered alongside screenings at Manchester’s Bijou Picture Theatre in the Cheetham Hill Road. Located a short distance from the imposing Great Synagogue in a heavily Jewish neighbourhood, the Bijou was a small family run affair with seating for three hundred that catered to the local community. Listings in the 1914 Kinematograph Yearbook (346) reveal the venue’s proprietor to be Arthur Cheetham, a pioneering Welsh filmmaker that turned to cinema ownership later in his career, acquiring several interests in Manchester. Interviewed as part of a project recording the social history of Jewish Manchester organised by the historian Bill Williams respondent Joe Philips recalled the Bijou being run by a Mr. Fischer (presumably managing the site as an employee of Cheetham). Fischer, according to Joe, was an experienced and passionate actor from the Yiddish stage, and it was these talents he brought to his role as cinema manager, putting on playlets in Yiddish for his predominantly Jewish audience. As Joe recalled: …in between films he would put on sketches, and they were very good— well produced, well acted. He took a leading role. And they lasted about 20 minutes, half and hour, in Yiddish,I did speak Yiddish, and naturally I liked them, I enjoyed them. (Manchester Jewish Museum Archive, J193)

Marshalling family and friends into supporting roles, Fischer’s cinema was an intimately local space juxtaposing recognisable faces from the immediate neighbourhood with international film stars in an innovative form of cine-variety; unsurprisingly Joe thought the attraction “unique”. The Bijou, stated Joe, was his favourite cinema and he remembered a heterogeneous audience comprised of children and adults of all generations—in this blending of entertainment forms all apparently found something of appeal.

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An Alternative Public Sphere In identifying the alterity of the cinema culture of pre-World War II Jewish neighbourhoods, the possibility of producing decontextualised exotic tableau in descriptions of scenes of activity is always a potential pitfall. Jews have long provided a theme to animate the Orientalist imagination, often being framed in terms of a sensualist and emotionally demonstrative feminised Other with which to counter-pose a self-possessed masculinist European identity. It is, in fact, of both ethical and analytical importance to recall not just the transgressive disorder and vibrancy of the Pavilion, Rivoli and Bijou—now so seemingly improbable in their historic colour—but their lived everydayness. Recorded in the notes taken by the observer “LT” dispatched by Mass Observation to shadow “Charlie” and his friends around the East End of 1939 is the trace of the mundane. While the audience’s pugnacious response to the newsreel footage of Franco stands out as a moment of unanticipated drama in their evening at the cinema, this spontaneous uprising of emotion occurs within an otherwise recognisably ordinary event of film-going. Occurring on a Monday night in late February the group’s decision to see a film is somewhat last minute, with one of the friends—Mike— expressing doubt over their chances of getting entry to the programme before it begins. Despite queuing for ten minutes the young men get to their seats just prior to the start of the first film. The observer records some chatting amongst the group during the trailers but reports they remain silent for the screening of two films. Following the end of the show they pay a short visit to a favourite café before making their separate ways home. Taking place on a winter’s evening at the beginning of the working week an atmosphere of routine permeates the account. An expectation and understanding of procedure marks each stage of the event: knowledge of the programmed schedule, the necessity of queuing for tickets, taking the opportunity to speculate about future attractions in response to the trailers, and half an hour for tea in a local haunt. Prefigured by a wait in the cold and undertaken in the absence of a more stimulating activity this visit to the cinema seeks simply to kill a few hours in a familiarly pleasant way. By bringing into focus the totality of the event and the mundane procedural aspects that structure it, a way of connecting the remarkable—the public berating of Franco—with its everyday context is made

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more concretely imaginable. What we should not lose sight of, however, is the possibility that what, from the perspective of the present, seems extraordinary may have been conceived as familiar by the social actors embedded in the event. The ethnically inflected attractions on offer in neighbourhood cinema halls and the demonstrative audience may have occupied the same plain of experience as the recognisably procedural aspects of cinema-going. For sure, the specificity of a Jewish cinema culture would have stood in contrast to film-going practices of the wider society, but within the geographic context of the East End or Cheetham it may have seemed as stable and predictable as any other aspect of film consumption. Grasping the ordinariness of the lived experience of the neighbourhood cinema is crucial to understanding the political potential of the site. In his The Practice of Everday Life, Michel de Certeau (1988) argues that the resistance (tactics) adopted by individuals in their negotiation of imposed systems (strategies) can take the form of a quiet, unassuming reconfiguring of cultural forms without a conscious battle plan of subversion. Making creative use of the structures offered by the dominant can be an instinctual manoeuvre, a seemingly natural behaviour flowing from need. It seems unlikely that either patrons or cinema owners willed the mutation of spaces established to screen films into communal institutions as a deliberate act, but this is what they became. As Hansen (1991) has noted, in the early twentieth century immigrant neighbourhoods contained a host of formal and informal public spaces in which a distinct cultural life could play out. Ranging from social clubs and political groups to entertainment spaces and cafes “such institutions constituted a local, separate, and relatively autonomous sphere which, although not overtly oppositional, still presented an alternative to dominant social norms” (103). In Jewish areas the cinema thus arrived in the context of a realm of ethnically specific public spaces. Its evolution into a communal hub integrated into this landscape took place as audiences and entrepreneurs worked in a kind of unconscious collusion to improvise the remodelling of the scene of film exhibition as a space acclimatised to local habits and tastes. This understanding of the cinema as embedded in power relations rests on the idea that a cultural politics can be done without the reflective participation of social actors. The life of cinema halls is seen as a sanctuary from social contexts in which ethnic difference was met with antipathy. Individuals did not need commitment to a coherent

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ideology of opposition, merely a desire to live out a contested social being, and the creativity to meaningfully appropriate the cultural materials at hand. This “soft” form of politics—what we might term “proto-politics”—could, however, be implicated in the existence of “hard”, more self-conscious forms. We have seen how the cinema unexpectedly became a site of overt political expression in the audience response to imagery of Franco, but film exhibition spaces in Jewish neighbourhoods were booked for planned political events with some regularity. In October of 1928, for instance, the Leeds Central Zionist Council held a public meeting at the Victory Picture Palace in Camp Road, Leeds (see Advertisement, JC, October 26, 1928: 30). The Victory was located in the Little London neighbourhood just north of Leeds’ city centre, an area that had been home to a significant Jewish population since the end of the nineteenth century. Speaking at the event were various senior figures in British Zionism, including Selig Brodetsky, then a professor of mathematics at the University of Leeds and a major force in organising and raising the profile of Jewish Nationalism in the city the during the 1920s (Kent 2010). Discussing Jurgen Habermas’ famous The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) Nancy Fraser (1992) provides a corrective interpretation to Habermas’ history. While acknowledging the importance and power of his account she takes issue with his emphasis on the public sphere as a unitary form. By drawing on a series of empirical examples Fraser notes the existence of multiple discursive and material spaces in which minoritised groups could deliberate about common concerns, develop self-definition and mount campaigns for political transformation. From the outset the bourgeois liberal model was challenged by a host of excluded groups including “nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women’s publics, and working class publics” (123). The chartists, suffragettes and the anti-slavery movement might all fall under such a banner. For Fraser, these publics can be termed “subaltern counter publics in order to signal that they are parallel arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs” (ibid.). It was as host to communal events of Jewish political interest that neighbourhood film exhibition sites most clearly became part of a Jewish counter-public. Spaces such as the Victory Picture Palace were materially well suited to mass meetings and rallies, being able to hold large

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numbers of supporters and equipped with stages for speakers to address the crowd. Crucially, though, they were amongst they few suitable buildings located in proximity to sizeable Jewish populations, and they were recognised by these communities as territorially familiar. As the 1930s drew on and the fascist threat to Jewry intensified—both in Britain and mainland Europe—Jewish political involvement grew, and events were staged to raise consciousness and organise opposition to the far right. At Whitechapel’s Rivoli Cinema the Board of Deputies of British Jews staged a public meeting in November 1938 with the title “The Fight Against Anti-Semitism” (see Advertisement, JC, November 18, 1928: 41). Established in 1760 the Board of Deputies was the key representative body of British Jews and possessed sufficient resources to situate the event at virtually any meeting hall of their choosing. That it went ahead at the Rivoli demonstrates the venue’s propinquity, both geographically and imaginatively, to the mass of London Jewry.

Beyond Primary Areas of Settlement During the interwar years British Jews were not, of course, restricted to living in working class neighbourhoods, nor were they unable to travel around the cities they inhabited. While a majority were employed in working class trades, there existed both an established Jewish middle-class population, and increasing numbers of recently affluent individuals who had been able to take advantage of a booming consumer sector, particularly in the south of the country. In London prosperous communities resided in districts lying to the west, while a professional and entrepreneurial, predominantly Ashkenazi, class clustered in Stamford Hill as well as the suburbs to the north-west of the city (e.g. Edgware, Hendon, Golders Green). In Manchester economic success typically meant a move north from Cheetham Hill to Crumpsall and Prestwich, or to a somewhat lesser degree, south to Didsbury. Chapeltown in Leeds began life as a site of middle-class Jewish settlement around the World War I period, though by the mid-1930s the area was economically mixed, and many migrating from the Leylands were exchanging like for like in terms of living standards. The suburb of Moortown—eventually the centre of Jewish life in the city—also began to see the arrival of more affluent families during the period. While the British interwar cinema audience was predominantly working class—both in overall numbers and in the percentage of regular

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attendees within each class fraction—a middle-class appetite for cinema-going was well established by the beginning of the era (Richards 1984). Some preference in taste for a literary middlebrow product may have been in evidence amongst this group (Napper 2009), but the activity itself was not proscribed as socially indecorous. Film consumption was, however, spatially circumscribed with middle-class audiences preferring to attend screenings in respectable local theatres, and for many middle-class Jews cinema visits were thus undertaken in comfortable, rather genteel, surroundings in the suburbs. As in working class neighbourhoods exhibitors worked hard to establish good relations with local audiences. In west London the Maida Vale Picture House provided an extremely pleasant environment in which to watch films. Built in 1913 the imposing exterior featured two castellated towers, each topped with a cupola. Inside the foyer was marble-floored, plasterwork on auditorium walls was gilded, and the site contained a small tea-room. According to the Jewish Chronicle the venue was “well patronised by a very large section of the Jewish community” (“Music and Drama”, November 13, 1931: 29), a reality recognised by the cinema’s management who, just prior to Rosh Hashanah of 1931, took the opportunity to publically wish “their many Jewish Patrons a Happy and Prosperous New Year” (Advertisement, JC New Year Greetings Supplement, September 11, 1931: xxvi). As Geoffrey Alderman (1992) has argued, those Jews that moved away from inner-urban sites of settlement during the interwar period were not fleeing their religious or cultural identity, but rather were seeking greener, less intensely populated surroundings. While the new suburbs were proportionally far less Jewish than the East End or Cheetham Hill, it did make economic sense for local film exhibitors to tailor their programmes, if only occasionally, to appeal to Jewish tastes. In Cricklewood in north-west London, for example, the Queen’s Hall Cinema screened Yiddle with His Fiddle (Green 1936) in November of 1937. A Yiddish language feature starring Molly Picon, the film was distributed around Britain appearing almost exclusively at cinemas with large numbers of Jews living nearby. Non-filmic attractions with a Jewish flavour might also be included as part of the programme if an exhibition site was frequented by Jews. At the Ambassador Cinema in Hendon the house organist, Mr. Edgar Peto, played “the whole of the Kol Nidre during the organ interlude” (“The Ambassador Hendon”, JC, February 22, 1935: 44) when the venue presented The House of Rothschild (Werker 1934).

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Although the programming at cinemas situated in locales with a sizeable Jewish middle class may bear some similarity to the attractions offered at working class sites, contemporary sources suggest the atmosphere and behavioural cultures differed starkly. Elaborating on the Ambassador Cinema the Jewish Chronicle noted the performance of the Kol Nidre was included as a special accompaniment, and that more typically “the music played is a mixture of classical, semi-classical and popular melodies presented with a touch of cynicism”. In addition to estimating that “about forty per cent. of the patrons are Jewish” some detail on the audience’s aesthetic dispositions was offered. “Restraint” was reported to be the principle guiding the entire operation—architecture, décor, publicity—and this was contrived to be in accordance with the “restrained tastes of those who frequent it” (“The Ambassador Hendon”, JC, February 22, 1935: 44). In contrast to East End cinemas the Ambassador was evidently not a place of spirited public expression. Self-discipline, built into the fabric of the site and apparently internally habituated in the bodies of audience members, could even be detected acoustically, echoing around the auditorium in the organist’s performance. While the house musicians at sites such as the Troxy regularly played a mixed repertoire, none were reported to possess the required ironic detachment necessary for Peto’s cynical interpretations. One further way in which cinemas were used as sites of communal Jewish activity outside the major enclaves of primary settlement was for charity fundraising drives. A diverse and well-organised charity sector had been a feature of Jewish life in Britain since the eighteenth century, attending to the bodies, minds and souls of the less privileged. Booked as special one-off events Jewish charity shows took a variety of forms including cine-variety and prerelease screenings, but also lectures and concerts. To be sure, these events did take place in long established Jewish working class areas too; the Troxy, for instance, hosting a variety matinee in aid of the London Jewish Hospital in February 1935 (see News Items, JC, February 7, 1935: 33). But in locations with proportionally smaller Jewish populations a cinema offered a public leisure setting for the occasional community gathering, reverting back to an ethnically unmarked space when the event ceased. Stamford Hill in north London contained two sizeable cinemas—the Regent Theatre and the Stamford Hill Cinema—and several charity events were presented at these prestige venues. Of the Jews that had settled in Stamford Hill many were self-made entrepreneurs, becoming affluent through running small

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businesses, and thus likely an enticing target for fundraising committees. It therefore made sense for the Stamford Hill Ladies Committee of the Jewish National Fund to arrange a local matinee concert at the Stamford Hill Cinema in aid of their organisation in February of 1927. With some tickets selling for over ten shillings, only those with a substantial disposable income could be expected to attend. In many British cities and small towns away from the major areas of Jewish settlement, small Jewish communities had become established by the interwar years. Not strong enough in numbers to found dedicated communal leisure facilities, they too hired local cinemas for fundraising events. Published weekly the Jewish Chronicle ran a regular column detailing provincial news, and it was not uncommon to see a cinema had been drawn into service for a communal activity in some corner of the country. While some events solicited charitable contributions for large organisations such as the Jewish National Fund, more immediately local causes could also be beneficiaries. In 1930, for example, a concert at the Scala Cinema Hall in South Shields—a coastal town in North East England—was used to raise money for a synagogue building fund (see Advertisement, JC, November 21, 1930: 41). As in the new London suburbs the local cinema became a temporary site of Jewish activity, fading again into an ethnically undifferentiated leisure landscape when the concert ended. The most common location for the screening of films for charity, however, was London’s West End, and barely a month passed in the latter half of the 1930s without some event taking place. Particular exhibition spaces seem to have been utilised more regularly for this purpose, with the Phoenix Theatre on Charring Cross Road proving especially popular. In essence entertainments were organised on the same model as those that occurred elsewhere, being advertised in the Jewish press and with an assortment of international, national and local Jewish causes benefitting. The centrality of the West End did, however, differentiate the events put on there from those hosted in the provinces or the suburbs, and audiences could be drawn from any area of the city using transport systems designed to move a population from periphery to core. In addition to being at the geographic heart of the city the West End also possessed a cache due to its cultural centrality. This was a glamorous fashionable space, and events that took place there were elevated out of the ordinary. Top price tickets may have come at a premium (typically around ten shillings; in contrast, the maximum patrons were asked to

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pay for charity events at the East End’s Troxy was 3/6), but the expense made sense in the context of the surroundings. It was not only the well heeled and philanthropic that were attracted to cinemas in the West End. For many Jews film-going here offered a distinct experience that could involve both an opportunity for the consumption of ethnically specific cultural material, but also a cosmopolitan mixing particular to the geography. Returning for a final time to the young men that agreed to accept a researcher from Mass Observation into their number, a Saturday night excursion is recorded as the highlight of their week. On this one evening they travel from the East End to London’s centre to attend a dance in Soho arranged to raise funds for the Westminster Communist League of Youth. While there the group encounter some Jewish young women from the affluent north London suburb of Hampstead, and they all return to the parental home of two of the girls where some minor romantic adventures take place (described in amusingly earnest detail by the observer “LT”). At the end of the night the young men begin a long walk home to Whitechapel, but fortuitously meet a Jewish taxicab driver at Euston station who, taking pity on them, offers the friends a reduced fare to the East End. On this occasion the evening does not involve any trip to the cinema. Never the less, it is a useful optic through which to view the appeal and social dynamics of the West End as a Jewish space. A condenser of social class the West End is the end point for two separate radial journeys from strikingly different areas of London. In neither the working class East End nor bourgeois north London would these two groups of young people be likely to encounter one another in such an instantly intimate manner. This is not to argue those moving into this space lost the mark of class, or that central London wasn’t shot through with ostentatious displays of wealth and class privilege. However, within sections of the West End—particularly bohemian Soho—a historic intermingling of high life and low life offered a form of transgressive, if temporary, social freedom. Within the public spaces of streets and leisure sites the hierarchies and divisions of social class were not policed by quite the same rules as elsewhere, and a permeability between class boundaries allowed for some experimentation with class identities. This applied to Jews as much as to non-Jews, and, as in the example of the dance party, could lead to new aggregations of Jewish sociability. Relatedly, a significant chunk of the West End had an identity as a cosmopolitan space (Walkowitz 2012). Around the Soho and Fitzrovia

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neighbourhoods lived established French and Italian communities; black entertainers and hosts were a feature of nightclubs; and recently paid sailors—their internationally bound cargo ships temporarily docked in east London—were drawn to the area’s sex trade. As Gerry Black (1994) has shown there was also a significant Jewish settlement in the eastern half of Soho. This was sizeable enough to support several synagogues, the Westminster Jews Free School, and ethnically specific entertainment such as Yiddish theatre. Many in the community were employed in the tailoring trades situated around Berwick Street, though Jewish restaurateurs offering kosher favourites to both visitors and local residents were also part of the local economy. Indeed, the dance visited by the Mass Observation group was housed in a room below a business described by the observer “LT” as a “Jewish restaurant”, and advertised its Kosher status with a neon Star of David in its window. Jews, then, were part of cosmopolitan spectacle of the West End, drawing in consumers looking for experiences at odds with the everyday. But this was also an environment where Jews did not experience their social being as something out of place. Difference was a fact of the geographic context; one could move between the East End and West End and retain a stable sense of ethnic self. Amongst the offerings made available in West End cinemas it was not unusual to see the programming of films that contained some Jewish interest content. On some occasions these screenings would take place at locations associated with Jewish leisure consumption, such as when the New Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street screened The Golem [Der Golem] (Wengerer 1920) for a fortnight in 1923. Used for both stage and screen productions the Scala was familiar to Jews due to its occasional presentations of Yiddish theatre; the venue gaining kudos for hosting Maurice Schwartz’s highly regarded Yiddish Art Theatre of America in 1924. While surely convenient for a local Jewish community, the venue was sizeable enough to require patrons visit from across London to remain economically viable, and the theatre thus placed a prominent advertisement for The Golem’s run in the widely read Jewish Chronicle (March 16, 1923: 46). A few years later in 1931 the same site would be first central London cinema to present Yiddish language talking films. More commonly, productions with Jewish interest themes were presented in cinemas not typically associated with ethnically specific audiences. During the interwar years several West End venues oriented their programming to art-house and foreign film exhibition, and niche

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interest titles with Jewish content (e.g. Yiddish film) were incorporated into schedules. The Forum Cinema (situated in Villiers Street), Cinema House and the Academy Cinema (both in Oxford Street) were all such spaces, with the latter managed from 1931 by Elsie Cohen, a one-time film journalist, champion of art cinema, and herself Jewish. Films with strong Jewish interest content but broader appeal were distributed throughout the plethora of those more conventional venues that oriented their bookings to popular taste, though some sites offered such fare with more regularity than others. The Rialto was one such venue, screening a series of titles with Jewish interest narratives throughout 1920s (see this chapter). Located directly adjacent to Leicester Square in Coventry Street, the Rialto was situated in the heart of London’s entertainment district. Purpose built as a cinema in 1913 the venue contained an interior with an abundance of beautifully ornate plasterwork, and, from 1924, housed the fashionable Café de Paris nightclub in its basement. It was thus an elegant and glamorous place to watch films, offering that significant proportion of the workforce that laboured producing goods or services for more affluent others the opportunity to, in turn, consume the experience of spectacular luxury. For at least some Jews in the audience the site contained the potential for additional pleasures. While, for those that inhabited neighbourhoods where Jews were the cultural dominant a trip to a West End cinema necessitated a reduction in the quantity of Jewish bodies within the immediate vicinity of the auditorium, this did not mean that one entered social marginalisation. If, given the socio-geographic context, the mixed audience could be understood as intrinsically cosmopolitan then the event involved a new kind of experience of publicness. This was a participation in a heterogeneous collective that could account for ethnic difference. For Charles Taylor (2004) the social imaginary—that is, the ­ideational shared horizon of collective life—particular to modern Western s­ocieties has been characterised by three cultural formations: the economy, the principle of self-government, and the public sphere. This latter entity can be understood as a common deliberative space that emerged in the coffee houses and print culture of eighteenth-century Europe, and expanded to include the assorted mass media that developed during the course of the twentieth century. It would be an overreach to assert that during the interwar years every film that represented Jewish life was overtly oriented to contributing to a critical discourse that sought to

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affect the polity (though as we will see later, some were). But the inclusion of Jewish interest film within the most culturally prestigious spaces of cinematic production and exhibition was an inclusion in a realm of discourse that was understood as a key manifestation of collective life. In a screening at the Rialto a position of spectatorship opened for Jewish audiences that involved an overlaying of two forms of public experience: the physical presence of the collective in the cosmopolitan audience, together with the visibility of Jewish life in the metatopic mass public sphere. In contrast to participation in the counter-public of Jewish commonality this positioned the Jewish subject as internal to a singular social entity, and not as a member of one of a host of inferior spheres structured in opposition to a larger more powerful bourgeois public. Although London’s West End almost uniquely combined cosmopolitan difference and cultural centrality to make the possibility of this utopian position of cinema spectatorship thinkable, something of this experience may have been apparent in city centre picture houses outside the metropolis. In Leeds, the centrally situated Briggate Street Picture House used an advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle to bring to prominence the detail that its presentation of A Daughter of Israel (Jose 1925) was “DIRECT FROM ITS ENORMOUS SUCCESS AT THE RIALTO, LONDON [sic]” (see October 22, 1926: 33). The Rialto’s position on the top tier of the cultural hierarchy was invoked here to establish the status of the Briggate Street Picture House. By arriving “direct’ to the site from London the film was apparently making the next most important stop in the distribution network. Leeds is understood to possess the cache of regional centre as a kind of equivalence to London’s identity as national cultural centre. Elsewhere in Leeds city centre around this time the Majestic Cinema screened His People (Sloman 1925), and the Savoy Cinema put on Kaddish (Licho 1924). Like A Daughter of Israel these too were generously budgeted feature length explorations of the Jewish experience.

Conclusion In Britain during the interwar years cinemas became a prime locus of leisure activity in Jewish neighbourhoods. In areas of first settlement— particularly working class locales—these developed into communal hubs. As Todd Endelman (2002) has argued, it was only after the mass migrations of people from ex-colonies in South Asia and the Caribbean during

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the 1950s and 1960s that Britain became less obviously homogenous in terms of ethnicity. Prior to World War II Jews were the most identifiable—and often most obsessively discussed—minority, and the social landscape could be an uncomfortable place for those marked as somehow alien. The cinemas of the East End, the Leylands and Cheetham, however, were spaces of everyday leisure where “passing”—as disciplined, as genteel, indeed as British—was not expected or even necessarily desirable. And it was the social comfort that unfolded in such spaces that formed the basic condition for a rich expressive culture to take root. These circumstances did not characterise the whole of Jewish cinema-going. Suburban halls situated on migratory routes out of primary areas of settlement appear to have been qualitatively different in atmosphere, as were city centre sites. Yet these spaces too played a significant role in Jewish public life, variously affording communal gathering facilities and an extension into the public sphere. Thus far only a handful of specific film titles have been touched on. While an exhibition site such as Whitechapel’s Rivoli Cinema could operate as a Jewish communal space irrespective of the films that appeared on its programme, this should not be taken to infer the content of the screened material was irrelevant. On the contrary, to thicken an understanding of the specificity of the life of picture houses frequented by significant numbers of Jews it is necessary to identify those films that were presented as having some intrinsic Jewish cultural resonance in their substantive content. By moving on in the next chapter to identifying such material, and considering what it meant to the Jewish audiences that consumed it, a diagram of an interwar Jewish cinema culture can continue to take shape.

Bibliography Alderman, Geoffrey. 1992. Modern British Jewry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berk, Louis, and Rachel Kolsky. 2016. Whitechapel in 50 Buildings. Stroud: Amberley Publishing. Carbine, Mary. 1990. “‘The Finest Outside the Loop’: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928.” Camera Obscura 8 (2) (May): 8–41. Carr, Richard. 1937. “Peoples Pictures and Peoples Palaces.” World Film News 1 (10) (January): 8–9.

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Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collins, Stanley C. 2001. “Two Years at the Rivoli, Lively Times in London’s East End, at Whitechapel’s Super Cinema, in the Early Twenties”. Republished in Picture House (26) (Summer): 33–38. Dupont, Ewald Andre, dir. 1923. The Ancient Law. Comedia-Film GmbH. 35MM. Endelman, Todd. 2002. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press. Goldin, Sidney M., and Aubrey Scotto, dirs. 1932. Uncle Moses. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991. VHS. Goldman, Willy. 1940. East End My Cradle. London: Faber and Faber. Green, Joseph, dir. 1936. Yiddle with His Fiddle. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1995. VHS. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hansen, Miriam. 1991. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jose, Edward, dir. 1925. A Daughter of Israel. London: Wardour Films. 35MM. Kent, Aaron M. Identity, Migration and Belonging: The Jewish Community of Leeds, 1890–1920. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The Kinematograph Year Book Program Diary and Directory 1914. London: The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly Ltd. Licho, Adolf E., dir. 1924. Kaddish. Germany: Licho-Film GmbH. 35MM. Mazower, David. 1996. Yiddish Theatre in London. 2nd rev. ed. London: The Jewish Museum. McKernan, Luke. 2006. Unequal Pleasures: Electric Theatres (1908) Ltd. and the Early Film Exhibition Business in London. Paper Given at the Emergence of the Film Industry in Britain Conference, University of Reading Business School, June 29/30. Accessed April 3, 2016. http://lukemckernan.com/ wp-content/uploads/unequal_pleasures.pdf. McKernan, Luke. 2007. “Diverting Time: London’s Cinemas and Their Audiences, 1906–1914.” The London Journal 32 (2) (July): 125–44. Napper, Lawrence. 2009. British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. National Council of Public Morals Cinema Commission Inquiry. 1917. The Cinema: Its Present Position and Future Possibilities. London: Williams and Norgate.

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Negt, Oscar, and Alexander Kluge. 1993. The Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Rourke, Chris. 2013. Wonderland. Accessed April 26, 2016. https://londonfilmland.wordpress.com/tag/whitechapel/. Prager, Leonard. 1990. Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Puwar, Nirmal. 2007. “Social Cinema Scenes.” Space and Culture 10 (2): 253–70. Richards, Jeffrey. 1984. The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Schwartz, Maurice, dir. 1926. Souls in Exile. New York: Jaffe Art Films. 35MM. Sennett, Richard. (1977) 1986. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Alfred A. Kopf Inc (Reprint London: Faber and Faber). Smith, Charles Manby. 1853. Curiosities of London Life: Or, Phases, Physiological and Social, of the Great Metropolis. London: W. and F. G. Cash. Spicer, Andrew. 2012. “A British Empire of Their Own? Jewish Entrepreneurs in the British Film Industry.” Journal of European Popular Culture 3 (2): 117–29. Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma. 2005. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutcliffe, J. B. 1917. “British Notes.” The Moving Picture World, December 22. New York: Chalmers Publishing Company. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thissen, Judith. 2012. “Early Cinema and the Public Sphere of the Neighborhood Meeting Hall: The Longue Durée of Working-Class Sociability.” In Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema, edited by Marta Braun, Charles Keil, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier, 297–306. London: John Libbey. Walkowitz, Judith. 2012. Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wegener, Paul, dir. 1920. The Golem. London: Eureka, 2003. DVD. Werker, Alfred L., dir. 1934, The House of Rothschild. Los Angeles: United Artists. 35MM.

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Archive Interview with Maurice Bloom. Catalogue Reference: 95-199-11H. The Cinema and Culture in 1930’s Britain (CCINTB) Archive. Lancaster University. Interview with Joe Philips. Catalogue Reference: J193. Manchester Jewish Museum Archive. Invitation from the First London Achuzah Co. Ltd. to a Banquet in Honour of Dr. J. M. Salkind. 1916. Catalogue Reference: GASTER/1/A/FIR/1. UCL Special Collections. Song Sheet for ‘Kinishever Pogrom’ by The Brothers Sheynberg from Lemberg. 1905. Catalogue Reference: 1986.87.1.5. Jewish Museum, London. Trial of Taylor, Joe (24, salesman). 1910. Catalogue Reference: t19100531-56. Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Accessed April 20, 2016. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t19100531-56. Working Class Jews in Whitechapel 1939. 62-2-A. Box 2 East End Survey 1939. Mass Observation Archive. University of Surrey.

CHAPTER 3

Films of Jewish Interest

In 1937 journalist Richard Carr produced a special report on film exhibition in East London for the trade magazine World Film News. Entitled “People’s Pictures, People’s Palaces” (8) the article addressed the diverse populations of the East End, assessing their preferences across a range of exhibition sites. Several cinema managers were interviewed anonymously, and the topic of Jewish audiences recurred over a number of conversations. In the conclusion to the piece Carr claimed that little difference in the cinematic preferences of Jews and gentiles could be identified, though noted Jews may be a little more “sophisticated” (9) in their tastes—whatever that might have meant—compared to non-Jewish audience members. While Carr’s conclusion may be a faithful representation of the information his respondents disclosed, it is interesting that one manager interviewed provided an account that complicated the idea of an essentially undifferentiated audience. In this proprietor’s venue—a smaller site typically presenting films on a second-run—he stated, “any film with Jewish interest will draw large crowds”, and added “a recent revival of the eight year old Jazz Singer drew record crowds” (ibid.). It is quite possible that, for both Jewish and non-Jewish East Enders, the most eagerly awaited film titles were generously financed Hollywood spectaculars with dramatic plots, top rank stars, and catchy musical numbers. Releases of films such as these were major cultural events with a broad appeal, and perhaps Carr was keen to communicate that most British Jews were not isolated away in sealed enclaves. However, as the quoted exhibitor suggests, it was simply not the case that cinematic © The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_3

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programming in areas of significant Jewish settlement paid no attention to the ethnic specificity of local audiences. Whether it was films that could command cross-ethnic appeal (e.g. prestige features from major producers with plots concerning Jewish characters, films with Jewish stars), or productions that had been made explicitly for Jewish audiences (Yiddish language film, Jewish nationalist film), exhibitors presented a raft of titles as being of particular relevance to Jews. This took place at a variety of cinemas, from older, cheaper sites with limited capacity, to plush sizeable houses such as Whitechapel’s Rivoli. That Jews could be considered potential consumers of niche product and thus drawn to specific films was a belief held by both the Jewish press and various branches of the film industry. Throughout the period Jewish newspapers regularly ran preview articles and reviews of films believed likely to resonate with their readerships. Typically appearing in entertainment pages, though occasionally also in current affairs columns, these articles were often considerably more expansive in scope than pieces about films imagined to have general appeal. Plots, performances and production details received extended discussion, and photographic stills of key scenes might also be included. These publications were also used for advertising by the exhibition and distribution arms of the film business. Promoting titles through targeted advertising regularly involved the creation of special artwork, and this could incorporate Yiddish lettering or emphasise some element of a production understood to appeal to Jews such as imagery of a favoured performer. Following prerelease trade screenings arranged by film renters, the trade press would also offer predictions about the likely popularity of a title for the benefit of exhibitors. As with continental art cinema or documentary films, the recommendation for material such as Yiddish language film tended to be that bookings should only be made for halls catering to specialist audiences. In Britain’s most populous Jewish neighbourhood, the East End, films intended to attract a Jewish audience were being presented even prior to World War I. Discussing east London’s Commercial Road exhibition scene in 1917, the Moving Picture World noted “There are theatres in this district which carry specialization to a fine art. The Polish Jews’ kinema, for instance, has a set of Russian1 titles made for every film shown 1 Given Yiddish was a more widely understood language that Russian amongst Eastern European Jews, it seems likely that the intertitles mentioned here were in fact in Yiddish.

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there” (Sutcliffe 1917: 1770). No specific name is given to this picture house for Polish Jews, but the article may well have been referring to Commercial Road’s Palaseum Cinema. This was an exotic Moorish structure complete with cupola and minarets, and contained a seating capacity for 1000 patrons. Built to stage Yiddish language drama as The Feinman Yiddish People’s Theatre, poorly managed finances rendered the site’s original purpose short lived and the theatre was forced to close its doors in 1912 six months after opening, before quickly converting to a cinema (see Mazower 1996: 72). Leonard Prager (1990) lists two silent productions with Yiddish intertitles being screened at the venue in May of 1914: Der Yid (The Jew) was set in Poland and dealt with inter-religious love, while Der Meshiekh (The Messiah) was shot in Ottoman Palestine using the novel Pathecolor process (64). Jews have featured as characters in film virtually from the genesis of the medium. During the period of nickelodeon expansion at the beginning of the twentieth century representations of Jews—along with other minority ethnic groups—often consisted of unsophisticated racist caricature for comic effect. In Edwin Porter’s Cohen’s Fire Sale (1907) the swindling protagonist arranges an insurance fraud when an initial scam fails to pay off, while A Bad Day for Levinsky (Gobbett 1909) finds humour in a Jewish man’s financial misfortune. Unsurprisingly Jewish cinema audiences saw little to be amused by in such fare. However, as Stallybrass and White (1986) perceptively note in their cultural history of transgression, that which is cast as socially peripheral has an uncanny propensity of returning as culturally central. For an array of silent film producers the outsider status of Jews meant they held an interest that could go beyond supplying the punch line to cheap jokes. For those keen to explore the boundaries (and, indeed, leakages) between the socially central and the peripheral, Jews have long proved an appealing device. Additionally, Otherness and exoticism carry an erotic charge that was central to both early European film-making traditions and pre-Hay’s Code American film, and the figure of the Jewess could be marshalled to supply that piquant ingredient.

Europe’s Other Seeking to escape the Russian advance large numbers of unassimilated Eastern European Jews entered Germany and Austria during World War I, engendering both a fascination and disgust in their difference by host

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populations. A new intimacy with Europe’s long-time internal Other came into being, and Hoberman (1991) understands the short burst of films produced in these territories during the early 1920s that deal with Jewish themes and characters as contextualised within a wider increase in discourse about Jews. The most celebrated title to have emerged from this cycle is Paul Wengener’s expressionist The Golem: How He Came into the World (Der Golem), produced in Germany in 1920. Drawing on a mythology surrounding the historical figure of Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late sixteenth-century scholar, mystic and leading rabbi of Prague, the film narrates Rabbi Loew’s creation of a Golem—a terrifying strongman fashioned from clay—as an attempt to protect his community following an edict from the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II ordering Jews to be expelled from their ghetto on the periphery of Prague. Although Loew’s scheme eventually secures the safety of the city’s Jews the unstable Golem acquires a minatory autonomy, murderously rampaging through the ghetto’s streets. In The Golem the Jews and their world are a mysterious otherworldly entity. Art direction in the film was overseen by the architect Hans Poelzig, and the atmospheric sets he created to reconstruct Prague’s ghetto comprised a jumble of crooked mediaeval houses that crowd in over labyrinthine streets. Within this uncanny space Jews are seen performing a range of occult practices, from mass incantations to halt a fire spreading through the ghetto, to sorcery and astrological prediction. This is an image of Jews as keepers of an arcane knowledge, bequeathed to them in the time of the patriarchs and transmitted down through the centuries. Mysticism is not the only form of irrationalism in the film associated with Jews, however, and Rabbi Loew’s daughter Miriam is presented as sexually irresistible as well as subject to a destructive ungovernable sensualism. Dressed in gypsy headscarf and flowing skirts she swoons in the presence of the Emperor’s messenger to the Jews— Florian, a foppish and conceited Christian knight—before recklessly agreeing to a tryst with him that will set in motion the disastrous finale. Although films that staged a forbidden love affair between a Jew and a non-Jew, or contained scenes depicting the alterity of Jewish religious ritual and the sensual Jewish body were produced for a gentile gaze, the Jewish characters that featured in these scenarios were frequently portrayed sympathetically, and many Jews were not alienated by such representations. Indeed, it is clear from contemporary sources that exhibitors and distributors believed Jews to be a useful secondary

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audience—or, on occasion, even a primary audience—for these productions, and ethnically specific aspects of such narratives were emphasised in specialist promotions. The British premiere release of The Golem was a two-week run in March 1923 at the New Scala Theatre in Central London, a site with an established relationship with London’s Jewish population. Advertising the production in the Jewish Chronicle a prominent notice asserted to the piece to be “of intense interest to Jewry” (see March 16, 1923: 46), and—declaring the film’s spiritual propriety— noted the presence of the Chief Rabbi at an advance screening. A review in the same issue of the paper echoed the advertisement, stating the film to be “of considerable Jewish interest” (“Film Plays”: 47), before going on to give details about the content of the narrative. Although the review identified sorcery as central to the plot, at no point is it suggested that associating Jews with the supernatural might be problematic, and The Golem is treated as harmless fantasy. In the early 1920s two other German films that focussed on Jewish life were discursively prominent in the British-Jewish press: E. A. Dupont’s The Ancient Law (Das Alte Gesetz, 1923), and Adolf E. Licho’s Kaddish (Kaddisch, 1924). Prefiguring The Jazz Singer (Crosland 1927) by four years The Ancient Law narrates the rejection of religious orthodoxy by the son of a Rabbi for a secular life on the stage. The film’s exhibition in Britain included a run at the Pavilion Theatre in London’s East End where it screened for two weeks in 1924. The director, Dupont, was Jewish, and as Hoberman (1991) notes he took great care in representing Jewish ritual, devoting extended scenes to the portrayal of religious practice within a synagogue. The Ancient Law’s discursive identity in the Jewish press made much of the apparently authentic Jewish content, and the Jewish Chronicle’s reviewer noted both the “faithful representation of a good deal of Jewish ritual” and the “remarkable fidelity” (“Film Notes”, May 16, 1924: 30) of the reconstruction of shtetl life. Advertised in the Jewish Chronicle notices emphasised the appeal of the film to Jews, presenting the title in both English and Yiddish, and asserting it had been “acclaimed in many of the World’s Principal Cities as THE GREATEST JEWISH PICTURE OF ALL TIME [sic]” (see May 9, 1924: 27). As in The Ancient Law, Kaddish looked to rural Poland for a setting. A tragedy involving inter-communal suspicion and violence following the disappearance of a Christian child last seen near to the site of a Jewish wedding, the narrative culminates in the vengeful murder of a young

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Jewish bride; the child is, of course, found safe and well. Films exploring the persecution of Eastern European Jewry had been in production from as early as Pathe’s 1905 Anti-Semitic Atrocities (Zecca), with a subset exploring the theme of “blood libel” following the “Beilis affair”2 of 1913 (Hoberman 1991). Produced in 1924 Kaddish was a later addition to the genre, but exhibitors clearly believed its subject matter remained of interest to Jewish audiences and prominent notices were placed in the Jewish press during its 1927 release in Britain. It first screened at the Avenue Pavilion in Central London during August of that year where a new policy of presenting unusual films was being trialled, and advertisements for its run there contained a line drawing of Askenazi familial affection, the Star of David, and included the information the film would be accompanied by “Isadore Berman’s Male Voice Choir” (see Jewish Times, August 5, 1927: 5). Berman had founded his Jewish choir in 1926, having established his reputation as Music Director at Whitechapel’s Pavilion Theatre, and his participation in the event would have enhanced a sense of the screening as a Jewish communal activity. Positively reviewed in Jewish newspapers the Jewish Times described Kaddish a “beautiful Jewish moving picture” (“Kaddish”, August 22, 1927: 3), recounted its plot and gave details of show times. For this Yiddish language publication film reviews were a rarity, and only those productions believed to be of significant relevance to its readership received comment. In the Jewish Chronicle it was remarked that the title had been produced with the “co-operation of a well known continental Rabbi” (“Variety and Cinema News”, March 4, 1928: 45), an observation that suggested Jewish participation was integral to the production’s realisation and that Jews were thus not situated simply as objects of anthropological curiosity. Further to its West End release Kaddish moved to provincial and local screens, appearing at the Mile End Empire in the East End during November of 1927, and the Stamford Hill Cinema a few weeks later where the film was advertised as being accompanied by “Radom’s Male Vocal Quartette [sic]” performing “Old Jewish Folk Songs [sic]” (see JC, December 2, 1927: 36). Some seven months after 2 A key theme of Jewish persecution the term ‘blood libel’ refers to the longstanding accusation that Jews kidnap and murder Christian children to make use of their blood for ritual purposes. The ‘Beilis Affair’ involved the imprisonment, trial and subsequent acquittal of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew accused of killing 13-year-old Andrei Yushchinsky in 1911.

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its London premier the film screened at the west London Maida Vale Picture House in March of 1928, where again Radom’s Quartet provided live accompaniment. While a post-World War I interest in Jewish difference was registered most distinctly in the cinema cultures of Germany and Austria, producers in other territories recognised the commercial potential of Jewishthemed narratives. In France La Terre Promise (Roussell) went into production in 1925, exploring the familial strife between two brothers, one a rabbi the other a moneylender, and their sisters who have fallen in love with the same Christian aristocrat. Released under the title Her People an advertisement for its presentation at the Maida Vale Picture House described the film “a wonderful Passover drama” (see JC, April 18, 1927: 28). Also produced in France during 1925 Le Puits de Jacob (Jose) narrates the story of Agar, the granddaughter of a Turkish rabbi who turns to cabaret dancing in Constantinople before travelling to Palestine to live as a Zionist pioneer. Adapted from a Pierre Benoit novel the film was saturated with Orientalist fantasy, a recurrent trope in Benoit’s writing. Offering the mystique of the East to European cinema-goers some of the action was filmed on location in Mandatory Palestine, and the lead role of Agar was taken by the American star Betty Blythe, a performer famed for appearing scantily clad in diaphanous costumes. As the Cinema News and Property Gazette wrote “she is both desirous and desired, and is seen in various stages of dress and undress in a picture appealing more to the eye than the mind” (quoted in ibid.). Released in Britain in August 1926 as A Daughter of Israel the Kinematograph Weekly felt the production would appeal “chiefly to Jewish audiences” (quoted in ibid.). While the Bioscope did not concur with this analysis, believing “Betty Blythe’s name will appeal in popular houses” (quoted in ibid.), those responsible for promoting the film decided to hedge their bets and placed a sizeable half page notice in the Jewish Chronicle. Advertising the film’s premier presentation at the Rialto cinema in Coventry Street—a site used to screen Jewish interest film with some regularity during this period—the notice combined the ethnic and star appeal of the production by setting a photograph of Blythe’s face into a prominent Star of David symbol (see August 20, 1926: 25). From London the film moved to the major provincial towns exhibiting in city centre cinemas in Manchester, Cardiff and Liverpool. By October it was screening at the Coliseum Cinema in Glasgow, and later in early 1927 received its Birmingham premier at the Regent Picture House—a

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cinema, like London’s Rialto, used on a number of occasions to exhibit films with Jewish themes. These latter two presentations were accompanied by direct solicitations for Jewish audiences with dedicated advertisements in the Jewish Chronicle, the Regent notice claiming the title possessed “exceptional Jewish appeal” (see January 21, 1927: 30). It was also advertised in the Jewish Press when distributed to screens in suburban sites with a significant Jewish presence; in April of 1927 a notice in the Jewish Chronicle established its exhibition at the Maida Vale Picture House (see April 1, 1927: 58). By the mid-1920s the post-World War I cycle of European films that took Jewish particularity or exoticism as subject matter had petered out. Other films from this cycle were produced—Henrik Galeen’s Judith Trachtenberg (1920) and Carl Dreyer’s Love One Another (Die Gezeichneten, 1921) being, perhaps, the best known of the clutch— though they do not appear to have generated discussion in the BritishJewish press, nor were they promoted to Jewish audiences as holding some ethnically specific appeal. However, during the early interwar period films containing Jewish characters or Jewish-themed narratives were not restricted to exploring Otherness and life at society’s margins, nor were they limited to the industries of Central and Western Europe. The Bible had been a significant source of cinematic material from the “one-reeler” films of the beginning of the century, and with its intrinsic high drama and miraculous events the Old Testament was especially suited to the spectacular capacities of the medium. As such, an entire genre of cinema contained Jewish heroes and heroines in the shape of prophets, sages and warriors.

Ancient Jews In the 1920s a number of biblically inspired films were directly ­promoted to Jews in Britain. Since the representation of Jewishness in these titles was often more incidental than in films such as Kaddish or The Golem advertisements were usually only placed in the Jewish press when, following a premier release, a given title was being distributed on general release and had arrived at a cinema located in an area of significant Jewish settlement. The Queen of Sheba (Edwards 1921), starring Betty Blythe in the title role, appeared at the Hackney Pavilion in 1922. Situated on the major thoroughfare of Mare Street, the Hackney Pavilion was a sizeable purpose-built cinema with an ornate Edwardian Baroque

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interior. The working class inner-suburb of Hackney in East London was home to a large number of Jews, and the cinema management clearly felt that a tale of romance involving King Solomon would likely attract this local audience, placing a notice in the Jewish Chronicle utilising both English and Yiddish lettering (see April 7, 1922: 33). Also promoted more heavily to Jews on a secondary run was Salome (Edwards 1918) at the Hackney Pavilion in 1920, The Wandering Jew (Elvey 1922) at the Maida Vale Picture House in 1923 and again in 1927, and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Niblo 1925). The premier release of this latter title took place at the Tivoli Theatre in Central London, where this epic story of an enslaved Jew who rises to become a celebrated charioteer in Imperial Rome proved hugely popular, running for ten months from November 1926 until September 1927. Given its success it is not surprising that promoters did not feel it necessary to allocate much expense to chasing a secondary audience and merely placed a modest listing in the Jewish Chronicle. However, when the film moved to the Maida Vale Picture House in October 1927 and then to the Stamford Hill Cinema in December both exhibitors placed prominent notices in the Jewish Chronicle. The Stamford Hill Cinema advertisement featured an attractive still of a brooding Judah Ben-Hur (Ramon Novarro) nuzzled against his love interest Esther (May McAvoy), and notified readers that the film was being presented “in response to an Unprecedented Number of Requests [sic]” (see December 9, 1927: 43). Adapted from the LewWallace bestseller the narrative of Ben-Hur is deeply Christian in sensibility, and it is instructive that exhibitors seemingly believed Jewish audiences would bracket the message of Christ’s sovereignty and selectively take pleasure in the representation of a handsome and courageous Jewish hero. During their premier releases in Central London both Moon of Israel (Die Sklavenkönigin, 1924)—directed by Michael Curtiz during his years in Vienna—and The Wanderer (Walsh 1925) were given some limited promotion in the Jewish press, the former film also being advertised for its later exhibition at the Maida Vale Picture House with a notice that pointed out the “stupendous background” to the story included “the escape of the Israelites out of the land of bondage” (see Jewish Chronicle, April 17, 1925: 24). More prominently promoted on its premier run was Noah’s Ark (Curtiz 1928), a melodrama set primarily in Europe during World War I but with a parallel narrative detailing biblical events— mostly the story of the great flood. Advertised in the Jewish Chronicle

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in a succession of attractive notices, these featured an assortment of illustrations relating only to the Noah story. All the notices were for the film’s 1929 presentation at the Piccadilly Theatre in London’s West End, a plush art deco venue that, equipped with Warner’s Vitaphone system, was one of Britain’s early sound cinemas. The biblical film that received the most vigorous promotional campaign to Jews was Cecil B. de Mille’s (1923) epic The Ten Commandments, which opened at the London Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus in March 1924. Divided into two narratives the first third of the film constitutes a prologue recreating the Exodus story, while a second section transitions the action to a contemporary setting for a morality tale of two brothers: John, an honourable carpenter who faithfully lives by the Ten Commandments, and Danny, a wealthy property developer who disastrously breaks them. In common with many reviewers the Jewish Chronicle regarded the biblical narrative by far the superior piece of film-making, describing the prologue an “extraordinarily impressive spectacle” and picked out key scenes for praise. In contrast the “very much less distinguished” modern story was judged “paltry” and “full of sentimentality” (“Film Notes”, March 21, 1924: 32). Apparently wise to the film’s strengths, promoters placed large eye-catching advertisements emphasising the prologue’s biblical content in the Jewish Chronicle. These were dominated by line drawings of Moses parting the Red Sea and the Israelite slaves hauling some enormous stone statue. Accompanying the imagery was copy referencing “the splendours of the Pharaohs” and the “tribulations of the children of Israel” (see March 21, 1924: 33). Clearly it was desired to give the impression that the Moses episode formed the core of the film, and only a brief mention of the modern story was included in the promotion. The Jewish Chronicle also devoted commentary to those aspects of the production and exhibition of The Ten Commandments believed to be of relevance to their readership. Included in scenes requiring a vast army of extras, it was reported, were some two hundred and fifty Yemenite Jews who “sang their ancient hymns” and then “broke down and cried” during the filming of the Jews’ passage through the Red Sea—an event, it was claimed, resultant from the power of “racial memories” (“Film Notes”, March 14, 1924: 34). A somewhat less mystical connection between the production and the Jewish people was seen in the fortuitous timing of the London exhibition of the film. It is the Exodus story that is recalled in the festival of Pesach (Passover), and the paper was

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keen to point out that given the eight day holiday was then about to begin “the exhibition of this picture at this present moment is singularly appropriate” (“Film Notes”, April 18, 1924: 34). This was a synchronicity the exhibitor did not fail to miss, and a second sizeable advertisement was placed in the Jewish Chronicle. Bluntly declaring “WHY YOU SHOULD SEE Cecil B. de Mille’s Wonderful Picture ‘THE TEN COMMANDMENTS’ DURING PESACH [sic]” (see April 18, 1924: 33), the notice went on to claim that taking children to see the film would help fulfil the religious injunction of explaining the why the first night of the festival is different from all other nights. A highly successful booking for the London Pavilion, The Ten Commandments ran for four months before being released for general distribution. In March of 1925 an advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle showed it to be screening at the Kenninghall Cinema, a mid-size unpretentious picture hall in the east London district of Clapton. Appearing at the site for a second run, copy on the notice claimed the film had returned to the venue “due to a number of repeated requests received from our patrons, and the enormous success scored at the former presentation” (see March 20, 1925: 36). Discussing cinema-going in the 1920s Manchester in an oral history interview, respondent Julius Süss recounted taking his father to see The Ten Commandments at the Temple cinema, a neighbourhood landmark in Cheetham Hill with a significant Jewish customer base. …I took him to the Temple, for the simple reason, there was er, The Ten Commandments were on. I says to him ‘Dad’, I said, ‘if you want to see a picture, if you want to see Moses, then come with me’. (MJM 242)

Explaining that his father was a conservative and religious man, somewhat alienated from secular modernity, Julius believed this to be his only foray out to the cinema. Apparently a popular booking at local cinemas with significant Jewish audiences it seems likely that many British Jews—particularly those most comfortable within the confines of an area of Jewish settlement—saw The Ten Commandments at a neighbourhood venue, whether for a first time or to enjoy a repeat performance.

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American Modernity In her encyclopaedic account of the Jewish presence in American cinema, Patricia Erens (1984) argues that the 1920s represents a golden age in the creation of film narratives featuring Jews. If an exploration of a Jewish uncanny was a primarily European trend, and the biblical world was an industry staple on both sides of the Atlantic, then the city of modernity was a milieu used overwhelmingly to thematise American films about Jews. Coined the “Ghetto Film” by Erens, productions exploring the difficulties of Jewish life in the unforgiving neighbourhoods of the new world metropolis—predominantly New York’s Lower East Side—dated back to around the 1910 mark, with titles such as Griffith’s A Child of the Ghetto (1910). Drawing on sources including Victorian literary traditions, as well as then recent trends on the American stage (Westgate 2014), narratives were typically highly melodramatic, reliant on unlikely events and coincidences to reach resolution, often focussed on the dynamics within a single family, and featured a stock set of character types (e.g. the “Rose of the Ghetto”, the “Stern Patriarch”). According to Erens the Ghetto Film went into hiatus in 1915, largely dropping out of production for half a decade until the genre was reinvigorated in 1920 with the release of the Frank Borzage directed Humoresque. A highly sentimental adaptation of a short story by the Jewish popular novelist Fannie Hurst, Humoresque charts the rise of one Leon Kantor from a poor childhood in Lower Manhattan to artistic success and high society; a journey enabled through his natural talent for the violin and the unwavering support of his mother. Thematically, the second phase of the Ghetto Film still dealt with the trials of surviving the economic precarity and slum housing of immigrant quarters, but increasingly incorporated social mobility and intermarriage—and the intergenerational tension this would cause—into the plot. As such, narratives became preoccupied with exploring the possibilities, and difficulties, of Jewish assimilation into America’s social body. Exhibited in Britain in 1920 Humoresque received a review in the Jewish Chronicle—a rare honour for any film at this early date—where it was asserted it was not often that “a ‘Jewish’ film receives such enthusiastic reception” (“Music and Drama”, August 20, 1920: 25). Somewhat more preoccupied with the plaudits the title had won than the potential pleasures offered to Jewish audiences, the column went on explain that President Wilson had seen the

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film at a special screening in New York, though “scenes of the New York Ghetto” (ibid.) were singled out for praise. The milieu of the “ghetto” was an enticing object for the gaze of a generalised cinema audience. A curiosity in the urban interior was not restricted to the most daring flaneurs and social reformers prepared to embark on real-world explorations, and a market for vicarious journeys into the dark continent of the immigrant neighbourhood had been engendered since the nineteenth century (Walkowitz 1992). Previously revealed in photographs, novels, plays and journalistic reports, the cinema was only the latest in a plethora of media to describe this habitat. When Humoresque appeared at the Hackney Pavilion on its general release an advertisement placed in the Jewish Chronicle noted the “glamour of the great Ghetto [sic]” (see June 10, 1921: 32) as a component of the film. From the perspective of the present, it is not immediately obvious how to interpret this use of the term “glamour”. Was the intention to convey the seductive excitement of an exotic setting, or did the word retain something of its archaic meaning as a magical spell and suggest life in the Lower East Side contained qualities that could enchant or charm? For sure, some more affluent Jews may have been as distanced—socially and physically—from primary areas of Jewish settlement as audience members who remained ethnically unmarked. For these spectators the hustle of street life and the raw struggle of economic survival might be said to contain a titillating glamour. However, for many British Jews—particularly in east London—the “ghetto” was home. The term “ghetto” had been a feature of discourse describing the Jewish East End of London—and, indeed, the sites of primary settlement in Leeds and Manchester—since the end of the Victorian period. Across a series of books author Israel Zangwill—himself a denizen of Spitalfields for some years—used the word “ghetto” to refer to the East End, his 1892 Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People being the earliest of the works. The term remained in use well into the interwar period; the East London Observer newspaper, for instance, ran a regular column detailing Jewish communal matters called “Ghetto Gossip”, and for their eightieth anniversary issue the Jewish Chronicle commissioned the journalist George Robert Sims—a well-known chronicler of London’s slums—to write an impressionistic account of the East End under the title “Glimpses of the Ghetto” (December 2, 1921: 27). With British Jews living the space of the ghetto as an everyday familiarity, it might make more sense to read the term “glamour” in the

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Hackney Pavilion’s advertisement for Humoresque as connoting a kind of captivating charm. The warmth and support offered by the Kantor family to the young Leon, in the context of financial impoverishment, are the locus of an epic emotional drama casting a spell over audiences. At the end of the advertisement’s blurb came a warning about the immersive capacities of the film. So overwhelming were performances that the emotionally repressed or fragile might not wish to attend: as the copy had it “if you can’t stand a good cry, you had better stop away” (see JC, June 10, 1921: 33). Far from taking on the position of voyeuristic detachment, the spectator conjured through the promotional discourse in the Jewish Chronicle was almost dangerously proximate to the action. Rather than an invitation to marvel at the alterity of New York’s Jewish quarter Humoresque was promoted to Jews as a flattering representation of a recognisably Jewish mode of living. Attending to an audience desire for self-representation promotions of further “Ghetto Films” placed considerable emphasis on the common transnational experience of new world Jewry, even going so far as to elide the location setting of a fictional narrative and the geographic context of exhibition. Distributed in Britain in late 1925 His People (Sloman 1925) was probably the “ghetto” narrative most heavily promoted to British Jews. A high production value title from Universal—one of the company’s prestige “Jewel” releases—the focus of the film is the Cominsky family, living hand to mouth in the Lower East Side. Exploring the theme of intergenerational tension, the main thrust of the story concerns the moral superiority of David and Rose Cominsky’s least favoured son—a streetwise boxer called Sammy—over his brother, the pampered and self-serving Morris, a lawyer. By the end of the film Sammy’s qualities are allowed to shine through; not only does the winning purse of a prize fight allow his sickly father to travel to a sanatorium, but he drags the disloyal brother from uptown Manhattan back to the old neighbourhood to repent before his parents. After receiving its premier screening at the London Pavilion in early December of 1925, His People immediately moved a few hundred yards to the Rialto cinema where it stayed for some two months. It was during its exhibition here that a sustained promotional campaign targeted Jewish cinema-goers, and numerous prominent notices were placed in the Jewish press. The first of these contained an illustration of actor Rudolph Schildkraut, who featured in the film as David Cominsky. A familiar figure to Jewish audiences, Shildkraut had grown up in a Jewish

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family in Romania, was a veteran of the Yiddish stage and had previously appeared in other prominent film roles as a Jewish character. Dominating a notice in the Jewish Times an illustration of the star staring solemnly from the page in skull cap and bushy white beard had him every bit the declining patriarch (see December 20, 1925: 3). While this advertisement clearly established the Jewish interest content of the title, a fullpage notice placed in the Jewish Chronicle a few weeks later suggested an equivalence between the social and physical geography of Jewish London and New York. Although the film was set in Manhattan advertising copy read “East End—West End—everywhere you’ll find HIS PEOPLE” (January 15, 1926: 32). Reconfiguring New York’s Jewish topography to reference points more familiar to the local audience the distinctness of the filmic locale is absorbed into a single surface of experience. The ghetto is imagined a multisited space; the East End, Lower East Side, Southside Chicago, Cheetham Hill are interchangeable nodes on a distributed network. His People, like many Ghetto Films, explored—and espoused—a melting pot ideology through staging a zone of contact between Jewish and Irish characters. One common plot device had second-generation migrant characters reject endogamy for intermarriage, and in His People Sammy has an Irish sweetheart, Mamie, who lives in a neighbouring tenement. Pinpointing this aspect of the drama to further suggest a universalised transnational Jewish mode of life, another line of copy in the advertisement reads “Half Jewish—half Irish—All British—that’s HIS PEOPLE” (ibid.). The “people” of the local audience and of the filmic diegesis are rendered interchangeable, with both figured a hybrid group who simultaneously find unity in a national identity. While such a structure may plausibly have made sense in regard to the American context (half Jewish—half Irish—all American), it was a stretch to apply it to Britain. Popularised in America in the early twentieth century—notably in relation to a Zangwill play—the idea of a societal melting pot became animated in a nation rapidly expanding and transforming with the ongoing arrival of multiple new nationalities and ethnicities. The image of a national identity actively in a process of fusing together was contingent on mass migration. In Britain the dominant discourse shaping expectations about appropriate behaviour for the much smaller Jewish minority advocated assimilation into an established and stable dominant culture—a process typically referred to as Anglicisation (see Kahn-Harris and Gidley 2010).

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The suggestion that British and American national contexts were interchangeable may have been fanciful, but, for British exhibitors, there was an obvious commercial logic to asserting the immediate relevance of American films. To be sure, His People did contain ethnically specific material that many British Jews could identify with. Speaking English as a first language and alienated from the values and hierarchies of the “old country” large numbers of second-generation British and American Jews shared the same qualitative experiences. However, as is clear from the copy in the advertisement it was not only Jewish generational specificity His People addressed; the status of the national identity of Jews was also somehow germane. In the film American Jews were represented as uninhibited and active participants in the making of a harmonious common culture; one scene has Rose Cominsky’s Irish neighbour Kate Shannon request a recipe for gefilte fish so she may prepare it “for Father O’Malley”. For the mass of Ashkenazi heritage British Jews, who were expected to passively adopt the existing manners and mores of the dominant society, this subject position was never offered to them by either Jewish or gentile elites. Being sold in the suggestion that Jews occupied an equivalent place in the social order of America and Britain, then, was a vicarious experience of national inclusion. In the Ghetto Film the capacity of holding agency, of taking a creative role in the shaping and cultivation of the national family was presented as a possibility to a British-Jewish audience. The conceit of using the interactions of Jewish and Irish characters to play out the dynamics of the melting pot was also central to two more dramas of the ghetto that screened in Britain: Private Izzy Murphy (Bacon 1926) and For the Love of Mike (Capra 1927). The former title sees George Jessell as Isadore Goldberg, a Russian Jew who adopts the “Murphy” surname when he opens a delicatessen in an Irish neighbourhood before going on to join an all-Irish regiment during the Great War. For the Love of Mike added even more ethnic diversity to the cultural mix when a German, a Jew, and an Irishman adopt an abandoned infant (the eponymous “Mike”). Mike, for his part, falls in love with Mary, a local Italian girl. Exhibited in London in 1928 For the Love of Mike received a brief mention in the Jewish Chronicle, and unobtrusive advertisements in the paper listed the film screening at the Stoll Picture Theatre in Kingsway on the fringe of the West End, and at the Maida Vale Picture House. Private Izzy Murphy received a similarly modest notice for its 1927 exhibition at the Stoll.

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Why exhibitors promoted these titles to Jews with only minimal enthusiasm when so much advertising space in the Jewish press was devoted to His People is difficult to determine. As with certain biblical films, exhibitors may have reckoned some productions simply unlikely to attract much revenue irrespective of any apparent Jewish content. Director Capra, who claimed never to have received payment for his work on For the Love of Mike, regarded the title an artistic failure and it is possible that cinema owners concurred with his assessment that the film “just stunk” (Poague 2004: 43). Of course, smaller local cinemas were unable to invest in expansive and costly advertising campaigns, though they could enhance a programme with ethnically specific live performances. Two further Ghetto Films are worth devoting some attention to in this regard: Souls in Exile and The Jazz Singer. In contrast to Humoresque and His People—titles with Hollywood backing—the Maurice Schwartz directed Souls in Exile was made in New York by the short-lived independent Jaffe Art Films. Despite not having Hollywood backing, the makers were able to secure the services of the top-tier star Lila Lee to appear in the lead female role as Ruth, a cantor’s daughter living in New York. Maurice Schwartz himself plays the lead male as Benjamin Rezanov, a writer who flees Tsarist Russia for the Lower East Side, where he and Ruth fall in love, much to the consternation of her father. Premiering in London in 1928, the film first exhibited at the centrally located Astoria Theatre in Charring Cross Road where it appeared as the less attractive “B” film, screening alongside a light-hearted German romance. Although taking a subordinate place on the bill, Souls in Exile was promoted as an attraction in its own right in the Jewish press, with the generic identity of the film clearly described as “an emotional drama of the ‘Melting Pot’ order” (see JC, March 23, 1927: 59). Together with a short blurb notices featured that ubiquitous symbol of Jewishness, the Star of David, to signal the ethnically specific content of the production. From London the film travelled around Britain and, judging by advertisements in the Jewish Chronicle, appeared in Cardiff at The Queens Cinema (a site that had previously screened A Daughter of Israel) and The Pavilion Cinema; at the end of May 1928 it was exhibited at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. Accompanying the film across the country was the Jewish choir the Radom’s Male Voice Quartet. Enhancing the “Jewish” atmosphere of screenings their live accompaniment comprised a prologue performance and “special folk-lore songs” (see JC, May 18, 1928: 32). By August the film had returned to London

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and was screening at the Apollo Picture House in Stoke Newington. Radom’s Quartet were apparently not contracted to appear with the film here, though the screening was advertised in the Jewish press and, as we have seen, prominent custom-made cinema hoardings established the title’s Jewish appeal. As in Souls in Exile, misunderstood offspring rejecting the authority of a rigidly religious father provided the ground for a generational standoff in The Jazz Singer. An adaptation of Samson Raphaelson’s stage play about the early life of Al Jolson, this time the rebellious child is Jakie Rabinowitz who refuses to follow in the family tradition of taking the role of synagogue cantor, instead opting to escape from the Lower East Side and hit the road as Jazz performer Jack Robin. Famously the film is credited with inaugurating the “talkie” revolution in cinema, and using Warner’s Vitaphone system the title featured synchronised sound recordings for several musical performances and two short dialogue scenes. In England the film premiered at the Piccadilly Theatre in London’s West End in September 1928, the site having recently been taken over by Warner Brothers and equipped for sound. It was distributed in both silent and sound versions, the latter only becoming widely seen in Britain in 1929 when more venues had installed the required technology. Previewed in advance of its premiere by the Jewish Chronicle, a significant proportion of the column was devoted to the innovative use of sound, though there was also some comment on the Jewishness of the production, particularly in relation to the ethnicity of several performers (“Variety and Cinema News”, September 21, 1928: 31–32). Targeted promotions for a Jewish audience were a part of the marketing strategy for the film’s run at the Piccadilly Theatre, and simple but prominent advertisements were placed in the Jewish press. Predictably these identified the Vitaphone technology and Al Jolson’s presence in the lead role, though they also stated “CANTOR ROSENBLATT HIMSELF, SINGS KOL NIDRE [sic]” (see JC, September 28, 1928: 25). Cantor Rosenblatt was Josef “Yossele” Rosenblatt, a Ukrainianborn cantor who commanded an unprecedented reputation and celebrity amongst the Jewish diaspora. Performing both secular and religious music Rosenblatt toured Europe and America to huge acclaim throughout the 1920s, and in the film the Jolson character happens across a matinee concert featuring the star. Appearing on stage singing the Yiddish song Yahrtzeit Licht Rosenblatt’s performance has Rabinowitz/Robin mesmerised, an inner turmoil provoked by memories of his father’s

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liturgical recitals embodied in his agitated state. Thematically key to The Jazz Singer’s narrative is the tension between Rabinowitz’s emotional bind to family, religion and the Lower East Side, and the careerist Robin’s yearning for an assimilated secular identity. After much angst the renegade Jew returns to the old neighbourhood to recite the Kol Nidre at the Yom Kippur service, his father expiring in his deathbed within earshot of the synagogue. The film ends, however, on opening night of a vaudeville show on Broadway with Robin the headline act. Appearing in blackface singing “Mammy”, his make-up affords him a radically transformative assimilation: perversely in communion with America’s ‘negro’ spiritual essence he simultaneously aligns with a whiteness that is the precondition for applying the burnt cork of blackface (see Rogin 1992). As we saw at the beginning of the chapter, The Jazz Singer was able to draw significant Jewish audiences in sites of primary settlement even eight years after its premier release, suggesting the title’s appeal was in excess of its temporary technological novelty, and that its themes connected powerfully. Yet whatever actual Jewish audiences made of the representation of the conflict of assimilation that formed the core of the film, the complexity of the drama was not foregrounded in the discourse or events promoting the title to British Jews. In the advertisements for the screening of the film at the Piccadilly Theatre the performance by Rosenblatt was advanced as a key attraction for Jewish audiences. No mention was made to the challenge to tradition by modernity, rather the promotion was positioned to appeal to identifiably conservative Jewish cultural tastes. Similarly when the title was released for general distribution exhibitors with a significant Jewish clientele utilised established extra-filmic attractions to orient the presentation of the film. Unequipped to offer synchronised sound local cinemas were forced to find some substitute for the novelty of hearing Jolson perform. When the film appeared at the Apollo in Stoke Newington “MUSICAL ITEMS IN THE FILM RENDERED BY THE CELEBRATED RADOMS MALE CHOIR [sic]” were an advertised attraction (see JC, February 2, 1929: 31). In the same week the title screened at the Maida Vale Picture House, the venue notifying customers they had booked the bass singer Enrico Garcia to “chant the KOL NIDRE at each performance [sic]” (ibid.: 33). For Hoberman, The Jazz Singer may have been “the bluntest and most resonant movie Hollywood ever produced on the subject of American Jews” (1981: 32), but in its localised marketing and presentation British-Jewish spectators were addressed as still inhabiting an

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ethnically specific sphere of cultural activity, rather than the contested, fractured social landscape Jack Robin finds himself in. While the classic Ghetto Films were essentially melodramas, not all titles in which the milieu of the immigrant neighbourhood and the figure of the urban Jew were central played out as lachrymose sagas of economic hardship. Comedies featuring Lower East Side life became a fairly common feature of American production during the twenties, and many were distributed in Britain. The first to appear was Solomon in Society (Windom 1922), which was identified as “of interest to Jews” when it screened at the Maida Vale Picture House (“Film Notes”, JC, January 4, 1924: 29). This tells the story of a dressmaker who opens a successful shop on Fifth Avenue, but must win back the affections of his wife when she falls for a scheming pianist. A significant number of ghetto comedies found humour in interethnic interactions—primarily between Jews and Irish. These were by far the most common type to be distributed in Britain, possibly hoping to attract a large ethnically Irish audience. In Kosher Kitty Kelly (James W. Horne 1926) it is an Irish heroine that is the key figure in the plot, and the Jewish Chronicle paid homage to both ethnicities noting the film was one “in which the wit and humour of the Irish and Jewish races play so merry a part” (“Notes and News”, October 28, 1927: 40). Clancy’s Kosher Wedding (Gillstrom 1927), and Frisco Sally Levy (Beaudine 1927) were other examples of the subgenre directly promoted to Jews, the former billed as “ANOTHER HILARIOUS IRISH-JEWISH COMEDY [sic]” (see JC, March 9, 1928: 33) when its exhibition at the Avenue Pavilion was advertised in the Jewish press. As with the more earnest Ghetto Films intermarriage was a key plot device for bringing together different ethnicities, though shared or rival business interests could also provide the motor for humorous interactions. The most celebrated of the interethnic comedies was the Cohens and Kellys series of films, the first of which—simply titled The Cohens and the Kellys (Pollard 1926)—sees two warring families move from open enmity, to intermarriage, and finally a shared fortune and business partnership. This was assertively advertised to Jews when on premier release at the West End’s Rialto cinema in April of 1926. Exhibited a couple of months after His People was presented in the same venue, the half page notice included copy tying the title to the earlier film: “YOU SAW ‘HIS PEOPLE’ SEE THIS ONE & LAUGH FOR A MONTH TO COME” (see JC, April 30, 1926: 21). Some months later in early 1927 the film

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screened at the Regent Picture House in Birmingham. Again following shortly after His People, this venue too became an ongoing site of Jewish leisure, advertising its attractions in the Jewish press. The later films from the series were The Cohens and the Kellys in Paris (Beaudine 1928), The Cohens and Kellys in Atlantic City (Craft 1929), The Cohens and the Kellys in Scotland (Craft 1930), The Cohens and the Kellys in Africa (Moore 1930), The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood (Dillon 1932), and The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble (Stevens 1933). All were exhibited in Britain, and all were advertised in the Jewish press, though not with the same prominence as the initial film. While Ehrens argues the triumph of assimilation in The Jazz Singer brought the Ghetto Film to its logical conclusion, it is clear from the longevity of the Cohens and the Kellys films that producers still saw some mileage in the subgenre. Although by the end of the 1920s the production cycle had diminished significantly, key elements of the Ghetto Film aesthetic returned to a greater or lesser extent in titles into the 1930s, and several of these were considered worthy of distribution to Britain. Produced in 1930 by Columbia—then still regarded a lesser studio—Around the Corner (Glennon) traded on the success of the Cohens and Kellys films, utilising its lead male stars, George Sidney and Charles Murray, as, respectively, a Jewish pawnbroker and Irish policeman who raise an abandoned baby girl together. Sidney’s performance received a positive write-up in the Jewish Chronicle where his “soft-hearted and unselfish” (“Variety and Cinema News”, December 19, 1930: 38) character was compared favourably to other cinematic representations of Jews. Various cinemas advertised the title in the paper including the Maida Vale Picture House (see ibid.: 36). Working the same vein was another low-budget Columbia film, Divine Love (Seiler 1932), about an ageing Jewish deli owner who adopts a physically disabled Irish girl. Originally titled No Greater Love, its derivative quality was obliquely acknowledged in advertising copy for its exhibition at the Dominion Theatre in Central London: “Irish and Jew team up again in a combination of Pathos and Comedy [sic]” (see JC, September 2, 1932: 25). Films that were more serious in tone were Melody of Life (La Cava 1932) and Forgotten (Thorpe 1933). The former production (original title Symphony of Six Million) was based on a Fannie Hurst short story and explores the estrangement of a talented Jewish doctor from his family and community when he neglects the poor of the Lower East Side to attend to the wealthy hypochondriacs of Park Avenue. While the film does

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not explicitly stress the characters’ ethnicity in the manner of His People or The Jazz Singer, musical motifs, “ghetto” street scenes, and the inclusion of Jewish prayers unambiguously establish the cultural milieu. Reviewed in the Jewish Chronicle the paper assured there “no gainsaying the fact that this is rightly described as a Jewish film” (“Melody of Life at the Tivoli”, June 10, 1932: 25), identifying the settings, acting and “sincere if abundant emotion” (ibid.) as evidentiary. Publicity material prepared for the Jewish press was similarly title would go “STRAIGHT TO THE HEART OF EVERY JEW [sic]”, and identifying cast member Gregory Ratoff as “America’s Greatest Hebrew Actor [sic]” and Anna Appel as “America’s Greatest Hebrew Actress [sic]” (see JC, June 3, 1932: 33). Exhibited in Britain at the Gaumont-British circuit of cinemas the film made its London premier at the Tivoli Theatre in the Strand, before moving on to local screens and the provinces. A number of venues were situated in Jewish neighbourhoods (e.g. Maida Vale Picture House, Whitechapel’s Rivoli, Stamford Hill Super Cinema, Dalston Picture House), and many of these advertised the programme in the Jewish press. Melody of Life’s general release coincided with Rosh Hashanah of 1932 and Gaumont-British took the holiday period as an opportunity to promote the film directly to Jews, placing a full-page notice in the Jewish Chronicle’s New Year Supplement. In addition to a large still of key cast members this declared the company wished “patrons a happy and prosperous new year” (see September 30, 1932: v), gave details for all screening venues, and described the title “THE GREATEST PICTURE OF JEWISH FAMILY LIFE [sic]”. A major release from RKO, this was the last of the ghetto melodramas screened in Britain to receive serious financial backing. Only Forgotten—a product of Hollywood’s “Poverty Row”—came after. Like its prestige predecessor it too explores the corrupting effect of money on the Jewish family. A “B” film running at only sixty-five minutes, Forgotten was used to support the moralistic exploitation film Damaged Lives (Ulmer 1933) at the East End’s Troxy Cinema in 1933. Despite the title’s humble status, however, it was both advertised and reviewed in the Jewish Chronicle (see November 24, 1936: 39). American films about Jews were not exclusively preoccupied with life on the Lower East Side; The Good Provider (Borzage 1922) and Surrender (Sloman 1927) being two titles that looked beyond this setting during the 1920s. Others were produced, though apparently not promoted directly to Jews on anything but an ultra-local level if

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distributed in Britain. In The Good Provider a small-time pedlar turned successful businessman is forced to swap his life in a provincial American town for a New York Hotel suite by a family hungry for metropolitan living. Surrender, a reprise of the pogrom drama, is set entirely outside of America, concerned instead with a Jewish village on the AustroHungarian border during the outbreak of World War I. Both films were identified as being of particular relevance to Jews in much the same way as the Ghetto Films with advertisements in the Jewish press (during its run at the West End’s Rialto Cinema Surrender was billed “THE GREATEST HEBREW STORY EVER TOLD [sic]” [see JC, October 21, 1927: 33]). The Jewish World was also supplied with stills from The Good Provider that they published shortly after its premier run (see December 28, 1922: 14). Interestingly, this took place in central Leeds at the Scala Cinema, and it is notable that while the film’s initial release was outside of London—a somewhat unusual occurrence—it screened in a city with a large Jewish population.

Yiddish Film As with the Ghetto genre, the 1930s saw a downturn in production of non-ghetto based films about Jews. As a general trend Hollywood was looking to turn away from ethnic specificity as a theme in itself. Away from the established centres of film production, however, the rapid conversion to sound opened possibilities for new forms of cinema. Yiddish language talking pictures were one such form. Judith Goldberg (1983) has estimated that approximately 130 feature films and 30 short Yiddish language films were made between the years 1910 and 1941. Several histories of Yiddish film have been written, with Hoberman (1991) isolating four distinct stages in its development. The first of these encompasses the period 1911 to the middle of the World War I with Warsaw providing a focus for production. The main source of material was the work of New York based Yiddish writers, perhaps with plays by Jacob Gordin proving most popular. According to Hoberman numerous films were produced, virtually none surviving to the present day. The next period began with the success of the revolution in Russia and a remapped Europe following the end of the war. Poland, Austria and the newly communist Russia all housed important studios. During this time films based on Yiddish plays were somewhat less prominent; instead the work of Jewish novelists Shalom Aleichem, Isaac Babel and Joseph Opatoshu

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was drawn on. It was during the final years of the 1920s that this phase of production came to an end. In distinction to the above, the third stage of Yiddish cinema, coinciding with the early development of talking pictures, took place almost without exception in the USA. Several original well-produced features were made—Uncle Moses (Goldin and Scotto 1932) perhaps standing out as most technically accomplished—though many titles were designated shund, that is, trash. Typically, shund movies were set-bound overwrought melodramas with poor sound recording and awkward camerawork. The cheapest films were merely old silent pictures that contained some Jewish interest and had been over-dubbed in Yiddish. Importantly, however, shund—as Nahma Sandrow ([1977] 1986) notes—“was the first art form to express the distinctively American Yiddish community” (129). It was also widely distributed, and films made in this phase of production were regularly exhibited in countries other than that of their origin. Of all the Yiddish language sound films shown in Britain a majority were produced in America during the first half of the 1930s. The fourth and perhaps most widely known phase of Yiddish film production can be dated to begin with the release of Yiddle with His Fiddle in 1936 (Green). Production centres were in Poland and America, and a steady flow of notable films came from both sides of the Atlantic until the outbreak of war in Europe. During this period Yiddish plays and novels were again adapted for the screen, though much new material was originated. This was reflected in the diversity of the films that went into production at this time. Features rooted in a tradition of Yiddish modernist enterprise, vied with jolly musicals and favourites from the Yiddish stage. In comparison to primitive earlier efforts at a Yiddish language cinema, these films contained relatively high production values. The directors working on these films were also increasingly keen to stamp a mark of authorship on their creations. Discussing his approach to making the landmark Green Fields (1937), Edward G. Ulmer stated “I’m going to have my own style and I’m going to do it like I see it” (quoted in Goldberg 1983: 84). As home to a thriving Yiddish theatre it is perhaps slightly surprising that no Yiddish films were produced in Britain. Nevertheless, from the early part of the twentieth century a number of Yiddish language titles were shown in the country. As detailed above, Prager (1990) lists several silent productions with Yiddish intertitles being screened in the East

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End’s Palaseum Cinema as early as 1914. Further north “Eddie”, an oral history interviewee from Leeds, had vague recollections of occasional silent Yiddish films exhibiting at the Alexandra Picture Palace during his childhood in the 1920s. A small venue seating about four hundred and situated in the Leylands district of the city, the “Alex”, like the Palaseum, catered to a significantly Jewish and highly local clientele. There is, however, something of a question mark that hangs over the “Yiddishness” of these silent titles. Throughout the silent era a single film might be tailored to allow it to be exhibited in different ways to different ethnic groups and nationalities. Thus, it is entirely possible that films with little to distinguish them as relating in any way to a Yiddish culture were screened with Yiddish intertitles. Conversely, there may have been some films exhibited that contained a Yiddish element to the show that has now been overlooked. Exhibited in Britain during autumn of 1927 Henryk Szaro’s The Chosen People (Lamedvovnik, 1925) is one clearly identifiable silent title that can be brought to demonstrate this somewhat ambiguous space with regard to Yiddish content. Shot on location in southern Poland the film is set in a Jewish shtetl during the 1863 January Uprising that saw a patriotic insurrection against the Russia Empire. Drawing on the Jewish mystical notion that at all times thirty-six anonymous saints ensure the continued existence of mankind, the film sees a humble woodcutter— one of these hidden righteous individuals—selflessly give his own life to save fellow villagers from execution by occupying Tsarist troops. The film’s premier release in Britain came in October 1927 when it appeared at the Academy Pavilion in Central London, shortly after Kaddish’s run at the same venue. Here its exhibition was accompanied by “special Jewish music” (“Notes and News”, JC, September 25, 1927: 54), and advertisements stated a proportion of the proceeds would be donated to the “Home for Aged Jews” (see JC, October 7, 1927: 30). From London it moved directly to Manchester’s Temple Pictorium cinema in Cheetham Hill, where it received a short run of four days. In commentaries on Yiddish cinema, The Chosen People is not considered a controversial inclusion in the canon. Much of the cast was attached to the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theatre (VYKT), and Henryk Bojm, a photographer and writer who had traded a Chasidic life for Warsaw’s Yiddish literary scene, wrote the script. In Britain promotions for the title explicitly associated it with Yiddish culture, with a notice in the English language Jewish Chronicle using Yiddish lettering to spell out the

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film’s Yiddish name—Lamedvovnik (see JC, September 25, 1927: 54). However, as Silber (2012) explains, produced in the context of Poland’s emergent interwar nationhood the film attempted to suggest a shared nationalist history between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. Somewhat too goyishe for Yiddish critics in Poland the title was accused of lacking “Jewish spirit” (44). Moreover, when exhibited in Britain the film was presented with English rather than its original Yiddish intertitles. As such, the address of The Chosen People was not straightforwardly that of a film for Jews by Jews. Insufficiently particularistic for some, and with an intrinsic mutability to its structure that enabled exhibitors to widen its appeal, the title occupied the borderlands of two cultural zones. Only with the coming of sound could a film seeped in Yiddish culture be fully anchored in its orientation to a Jewish audience. What were advertised as “the first Jewish talkies in Great Britain” (see JC, 17 April, 1931: 41) were screened at the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel over a fortnight in April and May of 1931. Following a business trip to London by the New York based Judea Films representative Moe Goldman in 1930, distribution deals appear to have been struck with Morris Susman, a Latvian-born Jew who divided his time between his East End printing and book-selling business and work as an impresario for the Yiddish stage. Screened at continuous performances between the hours of 2.00 p.m. and 11.00 p.m. the programme comprised various Judea Film productions directed by veteran Yiddish filmmaker Sidney M. Goldin. In the first week these were: Oy Doctor! (Oy Doktor!, 1930) a comedy starring the “Yiddish Charlie Chaplin” (ibid.) Menasha Skulnik; Style and Class (1930) a “two reeler” revue with comic dancers Marty Baratz and Goldie Eisman; a presentation of folk songs called The Jewish Melody (Der Yidisher Lid, 1930) featuring celebrity cantor Louis “Leibele” Waldman, and a feature length adaptation of a Harry Kalmanowitz melodrama entitled The Eternal Fools (Di Eybike Naronim, 1930). The following week consisted of a double bill with Natasha (1930), described by the Jewish Chronicle as a Russian romance (“Variety and Cinema News”, May 1, 1931: 30), together with His People—the feature length silent film that first had a British release in 1925. Six months later a fresh batch of Sid Goldin directed Judea Films productions were distributed in Britain, first screening at the Charlotte Street New Scala Theatre in the West End of London. The feature length My Yiddishe Mama (Mayn Yiddishe Mame, 1930)headed the bill, with advertisements describing it a “powerful drama of mother love!”

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(see JC, 18 September, 1931: 23) in eye-catching notices utilising both English and Yiddish type. Taking its title from a Sophie Tucker song, the film was a melodrama of discord between first and second generations with ungrateful children rejecting a dutiful mother. Screened alongside the main feature were four two-reelers: The Jewish Gypsy (1930) featuring husband and wife dancers Hymie Jacobson and Miriam Kresyn; the musical The Land of Freedom (Dos Land fun Frayhayt, 1930); Oy Doctor!, and a cantorial film called Kol Nidre (1930) with “Leibele” Waldman and boy singer Samuel “Shmulikel” Kelemer. The cultural impact on contemporary London Jewish life by this first phase of Yiddish talking films seems to have been considerable. Deploying that key mark of self-identification for Ashkenazi Jews—language—the first advertising notices carried a prominent header reading (in Yiddish) “COME SEE! AND HEAR! THE MOTHER TONGUE!” (see Jewish Times, April 19, 1931: 3). In the Jewish press their appearance received heavy coverage. In relation to the first two weeks of presentations in April 1931 the Jewish Chronicle ran two articles about the films, while the Jewish Times printed eight pieces—four of which made the front page. These were highly complementary of the films, gave details of star appearances and plot lines, and urged readers to attend screenings noting how they “were nice to hear”, and how one should “support the Yiddish word” (“Today the New Yiddish Talkies in Pavilion Theatre”, Jewish Times, April 20, 1931: 1). The films were also given the imprimatur of institutional support when the Mayor of Stepney—a councillor Davis—presided over the opening ceremony at the Pavilion Theatre. According to the Jewish Times his speech noted the importance of showing films in the Yiddish language (“The Yiddish Talkies in Pavilion Theatre”, April 21, 1931: 3). The later screenings were similarly well reviewed, the Jewish Chronicle reporting that My Yiddishe Mama was “a wonderful success at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York” (“Variety and Cinema News”, September 18, 1931: 25), while the Jewish Times asserted that “nobody should miss seeing the films at the Scala Theatre” (“The Yiddish Talkies in the Scala Theatre”, September 25, 1931: 4). As with the first batch of Yiddish films emphasis was placed on the mother tongue—mama loshn—this time in advertisements for My Yiddishe Mama (see Jewish Times, September 25, 1931: 5). Following their London runs the Judea Films titles were distributed to exploit the large Jewish populations in the northern cities of Manchester and Leeds. Arriving first in Cheetham the Temple Pictorium

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played host to the films in late November and early December of 1931. They then moved directly to the Leylands district in Leeds where the Alexandra Picture House became their next site of exhibition for a fortnight, apparently reopening for the event after a period of closure. While the Jewish press did not cover the release of the films on the provinces, their arrival received comment in the local Manchester and Leeds press. Although supportive of the venture coverage was oriented to an ethnically mixed readership, and the perspective taken was that of an outsider sympathetically observing another social group’s rituals. Thus, reporting on the first week’s screenings at the “Alex”, the Yorkshire Evening Post commented that My Yiddishe Mama “appeared to touch the hearts of the children of Israel” (LM, “An All-Yiddish Talkie Bill”, December 12, 1931: 6). Over the next few years Yiddish sound films appeared with a degree of regularity on the cinema screens of London’s East End and West End, as well as in provincial centres of Jewish life. Described “the first all-Jewish musical comedy talking picture” (“Variety and Cinema News”, JC, December 4, 1931: 34) His Wife’s Lover (Zayn Vaybs Lubovnik, 1931) was another Sidney M. Goldin directed effort. It screened in December of 1931 at the Windmill Theatre, a small venue in Soho near Piccadilly Circus with a history of exhibiting foreign titles (it would become notorious a couple of years later when nude tableaux vivants became the site’s premier attraction). Starring the well-known Yiddish comedian Ludwig Satz the piece is a somewhat convoluted farce involving Satz disguising himself as a rich but repellent old man, marrying an impoverished shop girl, and then testing her fidelity by wooing her in his true identity as stage star Eddie Wein. The title attracted the attention of both Jewish and mainstream press, receiving most extensive coverage in the Yiddish language Jewish Times which regarded the film’s Yiddish dialogue “pleasant for the ear” (“Ludwig Satz in Yiddish Talkie”, December 8, 1931: 2). A little over a year after its American presentation Uncle Moses (Goldin and Scotto 1932) arrived in Britain. Written by Sholom Asch and published in the New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts, Uncle Moses first saw light as a serial, being released in book form a year later in 1918. A popular, if minor, addition to the canon it then became adapted for the stage by the actor Maurice Schwartz who presented it, with himself as the titular lead, during the 1930–1931 New York theatre season before proceeding with a filmed version. Set in the Lower East Side Schwartz appears

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as a philandering sweatshop owner who falls for an employee’s teenage daughter, Masha. Despite being in love with a union organiser Masha agrees to wed the older man for the financial security he offers, though the marriage falls apart as Moses’ disillusionment with both his own myth and the American dream becomes overwhelming. In its aesthetics Uncle Moses draws on the Ghetto Film, opening with location footage of a Lower East Side street scene, and employing character archetypes long associated with the genre. Unlike the Ghetto dramas no deus ex machina arrives to transform the difficult lives of the characters, and the film ends with the clamour of the sweatshop—a cacophony that would accompany many audience members in their working lives. The film undertook two cycles of distribution in Britain. In February 1933 it was released in London screening at Whitechapel’s Pavilion Theatre for one week. Here it was accompanied by comedy short The Bailiffs (Cadman 1932) starring the variety duo Flanagan and Allen. Shot at west London’s Ealing Studios for a British audience this contained no Jewish content, though the Jewish Bud Flanagan (real name Chaim Reuben Weintrop) was a local boy, having been born and brought up in the East End. In 1938 Uncle Moses was given a second release, first appearing at the art-house Academy Cinema in Central London for three weeks, and then moving directly to the Rivoli Cinema in Whitechapel. Later, in April of 1939, it was advertised for a one-off exhibition in a midnight matinee at the Essoldo Theatre, a large luxurious cinema in central Newcastle. The venue was owned by Solomon Sheckman, a prominent Jewish exhibitor based in the North East, and the screening was put on to raise funds in aid of the resettlement of refugees fleeing Nazism (“Theatres, Cinema and Entertainment”, Evening Chronicle, April 4, 1939: 8). Filmed in 1931 Sid Goldin’s The Voice of Israel (Di Shtimer fun Yisroel) was another early Judea Films production, though it had to wait until 1933 to be exhibited in Britain. An idiosyncratic piece it presented performances by nine renowned Jewish religious singers (cantors/chazan). Singing liturgical pieces their performances were intercut with a Yiddish narration recounting Jewish history, and a diverse assortment of visual material cribbed from old silent movies. This included dramatic shots of erupting volcanoes, Jews praying in Eastern Europe and Jerusalem, and documentary footage of Zionist work in Palestine. Reviewed in rather purple prose—suspiciously similar to advertising copy used to promote the title—the Jewish Chronicle described it a “dramatic talking motion picture presentation

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of the experiences of a people whose life throbs with endless drama and tragedy” (“Variety and Cinema News”, February 17, 1933: 36). Its premiere run was at Cinema House at Oxford Circus in London’s West End in February 1993. It then moved to the Gaiety Theatre in central Manchester, returned to London for exhibition at the East End’s Rivoli cinema in August of that year, before moving to Leeds for a short run at the Newtown Picture Palace (situated on the edge of the Leylands). A few years later in 1937 it also featured as part of a “cine-concert” in aid of the Palestine Pioneers fund. Screening at the West End’s Phoenix Theatre it was presented alongside various stage acts and the recently produced British musical comedy Underneath the Arches (Davis 1937) starring Bud Flanagan (see JC, April 9, 1937: 47). Reflecting a downturn in the US-based industry 1934 proved a quiet year with no Yiddish films arriving in Britain, a situation that remained until March of 1935 when The Eternal Wanderer (Roland 1933) received its premiere release in London. Recounting the persecution of a Jewish painter in the 1930s Germany, the film obtained much coverage in the Jewish press due to the use of documentary footage of the then recent Nazi book burning in Berlin. It also garnered some notoriety due to its uncertain certification status. Considered political propaganda the British Board of Film Censors refused to certificate the title meaning that screenings required the special permission of municipal authorities and local Watch Committees before they could go ahead.3 The first run of the film took place over two weeks at the Forum Cinema in Central London. Situated in railway arches underneath Charing Cross Railway Station foreign language films and oddities were not alien to the venue, making it an eminently suitable place to host the title. After its presentation at the Forum The Eternal Wanderer moved to the East End’s Mile End Empire where it screened alongside a live musical stage show featuring Leo Fuld, the Dutch-Jewish singer who specialised in Yiddish songs. From London the print travelled north to Manchester, exhibiting at the Gaiety Theatre in early April. Returning briefly to the capital the film’s final 1935 screening in London seems to have taken place at Woburn House in Bloomsbury, then a centre of British-Jewish communal life. By the mid-summer it had moved to Scotland, showing first at the La Scala Cinema in central Glasgow, and

3 See

Chapter 6 for a full history and discussion of The Eternal Wanderer.

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then at the La Scala Cinema in Edinburgh’s old town. Distributed for a second run in 1938, the title exhibited around the country in a series of one-off or limited run screenings. In the July the Forum Cinema in the Chapeltown district of Leeds gave the film a late night performance, with proceeds going to support refugees from Nazi Germany. A day later in London the Phoenix Cinema in Charing Cross Road hosted the title for two screenings. The final prewar screening in Britain seems to have been in Liverpool. Shown at Central Hall in Renshaw Street in September, the event was organised by the Zionist Society. Also screened in 1935 was Bar Mitzvah (Lynn 1935), featuring the Yiddish theatre star Boris Tomashevski as a widower who returns to his homeland from America to attend his son’s bar mitzvah. Taking its British premiere in Leeds—a testament to the city’s vital and autonomous Jewish cultural life—the title appeared at the centrally located Academy Cinema. It then moved south to London screening at the Mile End Empire. While the narrative is set in an unspecified location in the “old country”, advertisements for the piece were concerned with the geography of the film’s production, referring to it as an “American all-Jewish talkie” (see JC, December 13, 1935: 48). America had long been a prominent feature of the discourse surrounding Yiddish film in Britain; noted in advertising material for the first batch of Yiddish sound films was the appearance of “the greatest American stars” (see JC, 17 April, 1931: 41), while Uncle Moses was reported to have backing by “major American producers” (“Maurice Schwartz’ Yiddish Talkies at the Pavilion”, Jewish Times, February 6, 1933: 4). By the early 1930s the US industry had established a reputation as the world leader in quality popular cinema, and it made sense for advertisers to associate their product with this marque. However, given it was widely accepted in the Jewish press that Yiddish film was technically lacking in comparison to the Hollywood mainstream—Hoberman (1991) describes Bar Mitzvah’s editing as having the appearance of being “assembled with a trowel” (206)—the repeatedly asserted American provenance of the films should, perhaps, not simply be seen as a claim of film-making competence. By the interwar years America was always already Americanism: a symbolic archive of cultural material. As Hansen (1995) has noted, this “encompassed everything from Fordist-Taylorist principles of production…through new forms of social organisation…to the cultural symbols of the new era – skyscrapers, jazz, boxing, revues, radio and cinema” (367). America was a composite

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image of a new democratic culture; sweeping away what came before aesthetic forms and social practices overlapped as one apparently irresistible force of history. A voguish topic during this time, an explosion of discourse on Americanism attempted to gauge what this new society heralded. Amongst the most celebrated of these analyses—at least on the political left—is Antonio Gramsci’s essay Americanism and Fordism ([1971] 1991), in which he argues an Americanisation of European processes of production would require the abolition of the parasitic class of rural landowners; what he called “pensioners of economic history” (281). Although it would be fanciful to suggest that audiences read American Yiddish film in Gramscian terms, this materialist interpretation of historical events does offer some insight into the liberatory sheen of the American way of doing things. The USA was not only present in the promotions and reviews of Yiddish cinema that appeared in the British-Jewish press, an “atmosphere” of America suffused the content of the films; it is in the way characters move, the way they speak. In Uncle Moses and His Wife’s Lover characters unselfconsciously pepper their Yiddish with American-English phrases; greetings start with “Hi”, arguments get defused with a placatory “okay, okay”. In the latter film the protagonist “Eddie” completes a stuttering acquaintance’s attempt to articulate some word beginning with the letter “K” (“Ka-Ka-Ka-”) with the suggestion “Coca-Cola?” Just as the Hollywood produced Ghetto Film went into decline, then, British-Jewish cinema-goers were presented with a continuation of the vision of a successful Jewish entry into the West. Taking life both in the real-world collaborative efforts of film production and in the fictional environments of on-screen narratives, a syncretic Jewish-American culture could figure as a counterpoint to European modes of life that remained shackled to entrenched hierarchies. The Yiddish film with the most profound impact on Jewish audiences was, however, a Polish/American co-production shot entirely on location in Europe. A musical comedy, Joseph Green’s Yiddle with His Fiddle charts the adventures of a young woman and her father in the Polish countryside. Forced by poverty to leave their shtetl “Yiddle” disguises herself as a boy to avoid unwanted attention, and the pair try their luck as travelling musicians. The title received its premiere in London’s West End at the Academy Cinema on July 21, 1937, where it was retained for an impressive nine weeks—a record for the venue. In late September it then began a lengthy local and provincial release—primarily in sites

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of significant Jewish settlement—moving first across town to the Rivoli in Whitechapel, and Smart’s Cinema in Bethnal Green Road (a small East End venue). It then moved to Leeds for one week at the Forum Cinema before returning to the capital for exhibition at the Stamford Hill Cinema, only to travel north again for its Manchester premiere at the sizeable Riviera Cinema on Cheetham Hill Road. Returning to London it played at the East End’s Mayfair Cinema in Brick Lane and the Queens Cinema in Cricklewood during November, then the Popular Cinema in the Commercial Road (the fourth East End venue to exhibit it) and Stoke Newington’s Ambassadors Cinema the following month. Its final appearance in 1937 was at the Academy Cinema in the seaside town of Brighton in late December. In 1938 three sites can be identified as hosting the title: the Forum in Leeds put on second run in late January; the left Zionist organisation Paole Zion organised a fundraising screening at the Central Hall in Liverpool on April 20; and the Envoy Cinema in Kilburn area of North London ran the film for a few days in the November. With considerable production values, good songs and a memorable turn by its star, Molly Picon, Yiddle with His Fiddle received ecstatic reviews in the Jewish press. It also successfully staged a cultural crossover with significant numbers of non-Jews reported to have attended screenings. If publicity material is to be believed over ninety thousand tickets were sold when it was exhibited at the Academy, ten thousand of which went to gentile cinema-goers (see JC, September 3, 1937: 93). The final Yiddish film to be distributed in Britain on a first run was Mamela (1938), another collaboration between director Joseph Green and performer Molly Picon. Again filmed in Poland the title had Picon a dutiful daughter neglecting her own emotional needs to attend to the concerns of her family. First exhibited at the Academy in February 1940 it moved on to the Rivoli in May of that year. Although receiving its British exhibition during the “phony war” months of early World War II Jewish cultural life had already been irrevocably altered, the Jewish Chronicle noting Mamela was “the last film to be made in Poland before the invasion” (“Cinema”, February 16, 1940: 31). The article also reported that “Molly Picon is now in New York, but many members of the cast have not been heard of since the war” (ibid.). The Yiddish markets would, of course, never recover.

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Zionist Film Yiddish language film was not the only cinematic form that was put into production primarily for consumption by Jewish audiences. The publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State in 1896 and the convening of the First Zionist Congress a year later saw the genesis of political Zionism as almost coterminous with the birth of cinema, and as the movement developed the moving image was successfully exploited as a resource to propagandise the ideology amongst the masses of the diaspora. The trope of vision, of gazing on the homeland, was a recurrent feature of the discourse of early Jewish nationalism. Numerous public events espousing the Zionist cause drafted in some recent visitor to Ottoman or Mandatory Palestine to recall what they had witnessed in lectures with titles such as “What I saw in Palestine” (“Jewish National Activities”, JC, April 2, 1926: 21) and “Glimpses of Palestine” (“Glimpses of Palestine”, JC, January 28, 1927: 28). However, despite the ambitions of individuals such as the Polish Zionist Adolf Neufeld, during the first two decades of the twentieth century (see Tryster 1999) Zionist film-making was only minimally pursued and the visuality of the culture was expressed through already established technologies of the gaze. The most widely employed medium was photography, and the still camera played an important role in constructing an image of Eretz Israel as raw material to be moulded, as well as depicting the dramatic advances being made by the pioneering chalutzim in working the soil and installing the technology of twentieth-century civilisation (see Oren 1995). Such imagery was included in the British-Jewish press with some regularity. In February 1923, the Jewish Chronicle included a special “Land of Israel” supplement with shots of industrial, construction and agricultural work dominating. Although overtly propagandistic in character, the consumption of visual material was understood as a diverting leisure activity, and Dan Kyram (1995) has demonstrated that thousands of stereoscope images of Palestine were produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One such set was advertised directly to Jews under the title “Eretz-Israel Visualised” (see Fig. 3.1). Containing the motto “And ye shall see the Land” copy explained scenes included both historic sites and modern Jewish Palestine, and that the domestic consumption of this imagery might substitute a real-world visit (see JC, October 8, 1920: 11).

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Fig. 3.1  Eretz Israel Visualised (Advertisement in Jewish Chronicle, October 8, 1920. Image courtesy of Jewish Chronicle)

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Amongst the most ideologically influential use of photographs of Palestine was in magic lantern shows. Typically these accompanied and illustrated public lectures given on some aspect Jewish nationalism, a common topic being recent developments in colonisation work. For the most part these shows were arranged by Zionist organisations, such as an event staged by the East London Young Zionist League at the Working Lad’s Institute in Whitechapel Road during January of 1920. Here the Secretary of the Palestine Restoration Fund, Mr S Lipton, gave an address on a series of images entitled “Palestine of Today” (“Palestine Slides”, Jewish Chronicle, January 9, 1920: 28). These sorts of presentations were an extremely common feature on the Jewish communal calendar, occurring in Britain at any location that could support a Jewish congregation well into the mid-1930s. With magic lantern projectors an accessible and transportable technology all manner of premises could accommodate events. Cinemas were amongst such spaces, and set up for audience spectatorship and embedded in local communal life must have seemed especially well positioned for this use. In March 1922 the Bijou Picture Theatre in Cheetham Hill, played host to the Jewish Working Men’s Club when a lantern lecture entitled “A Tour Through Palestine” was given (see “Literary Societies”, JC, March 31, 1922: iii). Emergent from this model the exhibition of Zionist film mirrored many of the key aspects of the magic lantern lecture. Events were largely staged by Zionist organisations such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF) or Keren Hayesod (Jewish Foundation Fund, JFF), and these bodies would often have funds invested in producing the film on display. Lectures were a regular accompaniment to the film, sometimes taking the form of a supplementary narration adding contextual information and detail, or an invited speaker would discuss the philosophy of Jewish nationalism or encourage attendees to intensify their activism. Fundraising was also a feature of the occasion, with organisations such as the JNF soliciting monies for the purchase of land. As in the imagery presented in lantern lectures the content of films typically focused on picturesque sites of historical importance to Jews such as the “Western Wall”, or looked to the new utopia being created by the pioneers. In regard to this latter theme the transformation of the land paralleled the transformation of the Jew. As physical labour would bring the parched soil to life, so it would remake weakened bodies, denuded by the urban slum, into ruggedly muscular material. Culture, the body, the

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environment—a complete national rebirth was depicted as taking place in Eretz Israel. The first film containing imagery of Mandatory Palestine to be promoted to Jews in interwar Britain seems to have been a commercial travelogue rather than propaganda. In 1923 With Allenby in Palestine (1919), produced by the American writer and correspondent Lowell Thomas during the Great War, went on exhibition in central London at the Philharmonic Hall and was advertised in the Jewish press. As well as covering the British advance the title featured footage of Jewish life in Jerusalem. Also recording Palestine’s transition from an Ottoman territory to a British Mandate was the pioneering Jewish filmmaker Ya’acov Ben-Dov. A Ukrainian who had arrived in Palestine in 1907 as part of the Second Aliyah he would become a dominant figure in Zionist film production during the silent era. Ben-Dov—together with collaborator Joseph Gal-Ezer—was largely responsible for establishing the genre’s thematic and visual format imitated by the overwhelming majority of propaganda titles. In December 1924 it was Ben-Dov’s Land of Promise (Banim, Bonim, 1924) that confirmed the significance of the moving image as tool for advancing the Jewish nationalist cause in Britain. While at least one other title was in circulation and subject to some discussion in the Jewish press at this time (referred to as The New Palestine), Land of Promise was the first to receive a high profile premiere in the West End. Appearing at the Marble Arch Pavilion for a Sunday afternoon screening what was described as a “large and enthusiastic audience” (“Land of Israel Filmed”, JC, December 26, 1924: 16) was in attendance at the event. Picked out for mention in a review of the film was imagery of the arrival in Palestine of Jewish immigrants, agricultural work, and a display of gymnastic activity (see ibid.). At the end of the film it is reported the audience sang the Hatikvah as well as the British National Anthem. Land of Promise was produced by the Keren Hayesod, and while Zionism was yet to become a majoritarian discourse in BritishJewish life the logistical capabilities of the body ensured the film had a lengthy and extensive distribution, screening both at venues with an established Jewish clientele—such as the Kenninghall Cinema in Clapton and the Maida Vale Picture House—and further afield in Brighton, Middlesbrough and Sunderland. The next major film to arrive in Britain was another Ben-Dov and Gal-Ezer production, and was given the English title Young Palestine:

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Eretz Israel in 1926 (Hanoar be’Erez Israel, 1926). Again organised by the Keren Hayesod this exhibited at least as widely as the earlier title, and at several performances was accompanied by an address by Josiah Wedgwood, the Labour Party’s Member of Parliament for Newcastleunder-Lyme who had recently returned from a visit to Palestine. A conviction politician known for his support of the Suffragettes and Indian self-government, Wedgwood had met Jewish soldiers in the Zion Mule Corps while serving in World War I, and the experience engendered a sympathy for the Zionist cause that would remain for the rest of his life. At a screening in March 1927 at the Alexandra Theatre in Stoke Newington, he is recorded telling the crowd that despite Jews comprising a minority population in Palestine their industry had essentially rendered the country Jewish, and that the city of Tel Aviv was functioning as a “Jewish republic” (“Zionism in North London”, JC, March 18, 1927: 30). Wedgwood was also said to have argued this “building up of Palestine was the joint job of Jews and Englishmen”, and that the endeavour would mark the “beginning of an alliance between the two races” (ibid.). At an earlier screening in the January of that year he was reported to have expressed embarrassment that Britain had done so little to establish Jewish colonies within the Empire (see “The Jew at Home”, JC, January 28, 1927: 28). As in other contexts of Jewish film-going in Britain during the period the national status of British Jews was ambiguously positioned at these screenings. Although it will be recalled that the premiere of Land of Promise saw both the Hatikvah (in which the hope of declaring a sovereign nation in Eretz Israel is expressed) and “God Save the King” performed—suggesting that for many Zionists British patriotism and participation in the Jewish national project were not in contradiction—Wedgwood’s thinking reinscribed the raciological distinctness of the Jewish and English peoples, and conceived the shared destiny of the two groups as taking place beyond the British mainland. The two main news publications of British Jewry—The Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Times—both took a pro-Zionist editorial stance, with the former paper collecting Jewish Nationalist-related news in a weekly subsection. Around the time the first batch of interwar Zionist films were being released the exhibition of occasional fictional films were also discussed in these pages. The first of these was Otto Kreisler’s Theodor Herzl, Standard Bearer of the Jewish People (Theodor Herzl, der Bannerträger des Jüdischen Volkes, 1921), an Austrian production that

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sees a young Herzl transform politically as he digests the world history of Jewish persecution. Exhibited at Whitechapel’s Rivoli Cinema in March 1922, it was described by the Jewish Chronicle as a film “made by Jews for Jews” (“Zionist Film”, March 10, 1922: 32) and was accompanied, according to advertisements, with “Special Jewish Music composed for the occasion [sic]” (see JC, March 3, 1922: 30). The screening was organised by the Keren Hayesod, and showing as a one-off presentation on a Sunday afternoon was treated as an event on the political calendar. Later, in 1925, production information about the French title Jacob’s Well (detailed above) was also provided under the banner of Zionist news in the Jewish Chronicle. With significant scenes set and shot on location in Palestine it was stated these sequences were “expected to arouse much interest in Palestinian activities” (“A Palestinian Film”, October 23, 1925: 27). Interestingly, according to Tryster (1999), only in Britain were the film’s distributors willing to include any significant amount of imagery depicting Jewish nation building in the print. At least eighteen propaganda films were recorded in the Jewish press as exhibiting around Britain during the interwar years. Land of Promise and Young Palestine were the most heavily promoted of the early films, though another Ben-Dov production—Springtime in Palestine (Aviv B’Eretz Yisrael, 1928)—did get distributed, and a title associated with the Jewish Agency for Palestine called New Life in Palestine was widely shown. An account of the 1930 premiere of this latter film was given in the Jewish Chronicle. Appearing at the Regal Cinema in central London a succession of notable scenes were listed, and the report offered the detail that “whenever there was anything shown with the purpose of rousing the audience to a pitch of enthusiasm, the organ played Maoz Tsur” (“New Life in Palestine”, February 21, 1930: 23). Although the reviewer acknowledged the film might be informative for those new to the cause, the production was considered technically lacking and hackneyed in its content. By the beginning of the 1930s it was not uncommon for the Jewish press to air the idea that the medium of film was not living up to its potential as an instrument to forward the Zionist agenda. The integration of sound technology seems to have gone some way in revitalising the genre, and a series of productions in the mid-thirties received significant financial backing in order to raise their appeal. Four of the most celebrated films from this period can be confirmed as exhibiting in Britain. Sabra [Tzabar] (Alexander Ford 1933), a narrative feature, includes

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performers from the Habima theatre company and was first screened in London in 1935 by the Film Society; This is the Land (Zot Hi Ha’aretz, Baruch Agadati 1935) was an independent documentary later purchased by the JNF that integrates an assortment of visual material—including early footage taken by Ben-Dov—to recount a half century of Jewish settlement in Palestine; Helmar Lerski’s Soviet influenced Avodah (1935) focuses on pioneers toiling in the search for water; and The Land of Promise (L’Chayim Hadashim, Leman 1935) represents the culmination of the Keren Heyesod’s production efforts in a polished, if conventional, format. With the JNF and Keren Heyesod involved, respectively, with the promotion of This is the Land and The Land of Promise, it was these two films that were most effectively disseminated, though the latter was more positively reviewed. As Tryster (1995) notes, the preproduction for The Land of Promise was a rather tortuous process marked by communal infighting and numerous reworked treatments, and the finished film ran way above initial budget projections. It was, however, a competent piece of film-making that, with its sound narration, could function as a self-contained product of political communication. Familiar in content with earlier productions, an opposition is set up between the primitive modes of production and cultural antiquity of traditional Arab life, and the civilising modernity of a new Jewish settler society. Thus picturesque imagery of bazaars, camels and ancient agricultural methods is contrasted with scenes of pioneer women taking on industrial labour, institutions of higher education, and the application of up-to-date machinery to gather the harvest. The other key theme of the piece is the future of the nation as expressed in its human capital. Young children are seen caring for livestock and nourishing themselves on the fruits of their labours—fresh milk and eggs in the canteen of a Kibbutz; youth, marching in file with agricultural tools rested on shoulders like troops with rifles trudge home at the end of a working day. The address of The Land of Promise was straightforward: an inventory of the miraculous development already accomplished, as well as an indication of the happy future to come in Eretz Israel. As with a number of earlier Zionist films the British premiere of The Land of Promise was held in London at the Regal Cinema in Marble Arch. Taking place in December 1936 the event was prominently advertised in the Jewish press as (erroneously) “the first Palestinian Sound Film” [sic] (see JC, November 27, 1936: 22), and noted the

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Marchioness of Reading4 would deliver an introductory speech. A report on the screening commented on the gratifyingly large audience in attendance, and asserted the film promoted the “Jewish case” (“The Land of Promise”, JC, December 11, 1936: 30) more effectively than a public lecture. Exhibited widely throughout the first half of 1937 the title appeared at numerous one-off presentations, and also—unusually for this type of film—as a booking over multiple days at some sites. At the Riviera Cinema in Cheetham Hill, for instance, the film was exhibited for three consecutive days as part of the daily programme in the May of that year. After ten months of screenings the film was declared a success. Addressing a Manchester conference for Zionist workers S. Temkin, of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain, expressed enthusiasm for the title regarding it a significant asset for transforming the “sympathetic indifference” (“The Zionist Case”, Manchester Guardian, October 18, 1937: 11) of unpoliticised Jews into active support. Devised to be distributed across the diaspora, prints of The Land of Promise were prepared with the narration supplied in several different languages. In Britain two separate cuts of the film were also released. According to Tryster (1995) Mark Oster, then chairman of the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, had expressed concern about the title to the General Secretary of the Keren Hayesod in London, Lavy Bakstanksy, as early as May 1935, stating that the original cut was too stridently propagandistic, and that the contrast drawn between Jewish and Arab work might prove provocative in this particular territory. After approximately two years of distribution on the Zionist circuit it was felt the film should be given a more conventional release, and Oscar Deutsch—founder of the Odeon Cinema chain—arranged for an abridged cut to be made. This included a new narration more sensitised to the context of the British administration of Palestine, with any usage of the term “colonies” replaced with the more neutral “settlements”. The amended version of the film first went on show at the London Pavilion in November 1938, later moving to a limited number of suburban screens and the provinces. Reviewed afresh in the film pages of the Jewish Chronicle the verdict was highly positive, with the new cut said to move at a brisker pace and tell a “more coherent story” (“Premieres”, 4 Stella Isaacs, married to Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading, until his death in 1935. One time Viceroy of India, Rufus Isaacs was the first Jew to be Lord Chief Justice of England, and the first British Jew to be raised to a Marchionesse.

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November 11, 1938: 49). It was also noted that the film was appearing at a “very appropriate moment”, “had an excellent reception on the night”, and held the attention of an audience that included many who “obviously knew nothing of Jewish achievements” in Palestine (ibid.). The context of these comments was, of course, primarily related to the deteriorating situation for Jews in Nazi Germany and the urgent need to secure support from a broad coalition for a scheme that could see them flee to a place of asylum. When the title exhibited at the Tatler News Theatre in central Manchester daily collections were made for settling German-Jewish refugees on land purchased in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund. In addition to the professionally produced titles sponsored by major Zionist organisations, footage of Mandatory Palestine filmed by non-professionals was also distributed for consumption by Jewish audiences. As international travel became more accessible, at least for sections of the middle class, Jews increasingly undertook tours of Palestine during the 1930s. Affordable 16 mm “cine” equipment and film stock for amateur hobbyists was entering the consumer market in greater quantities around this time, and ideologically minded individuals began to put together their own propaganda assembled from material shot when travelling. Amongst the most dedicated of amateur propagandists was Fred Nettler, a Glasgow-based Zionist and communal representative. Nettler’s filming dates back to at least 1934, and accompanied by a commentary delivered by S. Temkin of the Zionist Federation, his work was exhibited at several Zionist meetings in north London during May of that year. In 1937, he shot and distributed The Holy Land and the Jewish Pioneer, an early example of colour footage of Palestine. Part travelogue and part document of development work, the piece segues from quaint scenes of Jerusalem’s old city and camel trains to irrigation canal construction and agricultural yields. With the expansion of non-professional film-making smaller, portable projectors enabled Zionist films to screen in non-traditional exhibition spaces. The domestic setting, if sufficiently capacious, could be used for communal functions, and numerous “at home” meetings took place in the sizeable houses of middle-class Zionist leaders. In March of 1939, for instance, Nettler’s colour film was shown at the Kensington home of Harry Sacher, a prominent lawyer and businessman, and a close friend of Chaim Weizman. Although more frequent during the 1930s, such meetings were taking place as early as the 1920s; indeed, in January 1928 a

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Mr and Mrs Levine screened a film entitled Public Life in Palestine at their Hampstead residence. Events held in the bourgeois parlours of prestigious London neighbourhoods were doubtless somewhat exclusive affairs, though the same technology could transform more egalitarian spaces into exhibition sites. Synagogue halls became popular and convenient locations to convene screenings, with the communal hall attached to Stoke Newington Synagogue used to present a variety of Jewish Nationalist films, including The Land of Promise in March 1937. As occasions oriented to congregation members, activities organised by the host institution might accompany films. When the JNF production Eretz Yisrael Building Up the Jewish National Home (Best 1934) appeared at Walthamstow and Leyton Synagogue in northeast London, children from the synagogue’s Hebrew class sang a selection of Hebrew language songs. Although the major sites of Jewish settlement in London, Leeds and Manchester were naturally home to the largest congregations such events took place across Britain, and synagogue halls in Bristol, Dundee and Southend-on-Sea are all recorded as being used for screenings.

Jewish Persecution and Jewish Personalities In sharp contrast to the 1920s not one of the major national cinema industries of the following decade displayed much interest in producing films about Jews. The exception to this trend was the release of a limited series of titles dealing with antisemitism, the most prominent of which were released during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the first half of the 1930s. Since the discourse surrounding several of these films is subject to a sustained examination in Chapter 4 a brief consideration of their appearance on British cinema screens will suffice here. E. A. Dupont’s Two Worlds (1930), regarded by St. Pierre (2010) a companion piece to his earlier drama of Jewish life, The Ancient Law, narrates the impossible love of a young Jewess for an Austrian military officer on the Eastern Front of World War I following an attempted pogrom. Essentially a British production, a version was also made in the German language version with a German cast and titled Zwei Welten. Not dissimilar in theme was Fox’s The Yellow Ticket (Raoul Walsh 1931), released in Britain in 1932 under the title The Yellow Passport. An adaptation of Michael Morton’s 1914 play—previously remade as a silent film in the USA in 1916—this story of government injustices against Jews in prerevolutionary Russia is regarded

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by Erens (198) as an anachronistic final example of the pogrom film. In spite of being thematically situated in an earlier phase of production both titles were identified as being of interest to Jewish audiences in the Jewish press. Two Worlds attracted the greater comment during its 1930 release, though the latter film was more prominently advertised in the Jewish Chronicle. More fully located in the historical moment were Loyalties (Dean 1933), The House of Rothschild (Werker 1934) and Jews Süss (Mendes 1934). Based on John Galsworthy’s 1922 stage production, Loyalties explores antisemitic prejudice amongst the English upper class with a plot that sees the reputation of a wealthy Jew sullied following the theft from him of one thousand pounds at a weekend party. Both The House of Rothschild and Jews Süss take a historical setting. The former chronicles the emergence and rise of the Rothschild banking dynasty, and the role of Nathan Rothschild in financing the British war effort against Napoleonic tyranny; the latter, a tragedy, explores the rapid ascension, and subsequent imprisonment and execution of Joseph “Jew Süss” Oppenheimer in the eighteenth-century Wurtemberg Court of Karl Alexander. Although set many years prior to the rise of National Socialism, the depiction of Jewish persecution in Germany in The House of Rothschild and Jews Süss was widely understood to resonate with current events. Subject to extensive discussion across the Jewish press, it was suggested the mass appeal of these three mainstream films might assist with the battle against racial discrimination at a pivotal time. In addition to drawing a gentile gaze, however, the titles had a presence in a defined Jewish cultural sphere. They were exhibited extensively in areas of Jewish settlement, and all assertively advertised to Jewish audiences upon release: promotions for Loyalties, for instance, contained the slogan “The Picture All Jews Should See” (see Fig. 3.2). Shot on location in Prague, Julien Duvivier’s French language The Golem (Le Golem, 1936) was conceived as a sequel to Wengener’s 1920 Der Golem. Emperor Rudolph II, declining physically and mentally, has become obsessed with recovering the Golem that the now deceased Rabbi Loew had hidden in the attic of Prague’s New-Old Synagogue. Again the Jews of Prague suffer indignity and oppression, with many rounded up and awaiting execution until Rachel, the wife of communal leader Rabbi Jacob, reactivates the clay monster so he can wreck havoc on the Jews’ enemies. The film received two releases in Britain. The first came in April 1937 when it exhibited exclusively at the Forum

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Fig. 3.2  Advertisement for Loyalities (Jewish Chronicle, November 3, 1933. Image courtesy of Jewish Chronicle)

Cinema in Central London. This was advertised prominently in the Jewish Chronicle with weekly notices emphasising the film’s Jewish content. The title of the film was provided in both English and Yiddish, and the piece described “the greatest Yiddish story ever produced for the screen” (see May 14, 1937: 45). Well reviewed in the Jewish press, the film was kept on at the Forum for some two months due to, according to advertisements, popular demand. A year later in April 1938 a new version of the film dubbed into English received a wider distribution. This time the premiere took place at the People’s Palace in the East End’s Mile End Road. A repeated slogan in the film is “revolt is the right of the slave”, and as the Yorkshire Post commented at the time, such content ensured the piece had “special appeal for a strongly Jewish neighbourhood” (Our Film Correspondent, “The Cinema World”, 12 April, 1938: 6). Screening in Britain on the cusp of war, the Russian propaganda title Professor Mamlock (Rappaport and Minkin 1938) mounted a direct attack on Nazi antisemitism. Loosely based on Friedrich Wolf’s stage production, the narrative concerns the persecution by Nazi authorities of an apolitical Jewish surgeon and his communist son, Rolf. As with the earlier Yiddish title The Eternal Wanderer, the censor refused to grant certification for Professor Mamlock believing to do so risked inflaming tensions between Britain and Germany, and a special licence to screen it had to be obtained from local municipalities. With permission

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granted by the London County Council the film had its public premiere at the art-house Academy Cinema in Central London in August 1939. Unsurprisingly the title received support from the Jewish press, with the Jewish Chronicle covering its ordeals with the BBFC and affording it a substantial review in which political quietism was condemned (see “Premieres”, September 1, 1939: 29). Finally, though not featuring Jewish characters or examining antisemitism, several films dealing with the minatory character of German fascism were addressed to Jewish audiences as being of topical relevance. The most prominent of these was Warner Brother’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak 1939), about an FBI investigation into Nazi espionage in prewar New York. Upon its release in June 1939 the Jewish Chronicle’s response was especially animated, urging every “Jewish man, woman and child” to see the film, though warning that “however tempting it is to boo or hiss a Nazi…there is the rest of the audience to consider” (“Confessions of a Nazi Spy”, June 16, 1939: 51). News films and documentaries also attracted much attention. These included episodes of the March of Time series of short films, and the feature length Whither Germany (1933). Made by Mansfield Markham—the scion of a distinguished industrial family who entered the film business—this offered a pictorial history of Germany from the build-up to World War I through to Hitler’s successful assumption of power. Imagery of Nazi storm troops parading was included, and the piece implied the possibility of a return to aggressive militarism. Forcefully advertised to Jews a notice in the Jewish Times read “It is every Jew’s duty to see the most powerful peace film that has ever been made” (see January 26, 1934: 5). Audiences were reported to have been enthused by such a public warning about the perils of Hitlerism, with the Yorkshire Post remarking that Jewish patrons expressed their satisfaction “even to the unusual point of applause” (“Leeds Cinemas”, 21 April 1934: 9) when the film was screened in Leeds. … Across a range of generic forms Jewish consumers were offered, and took up, narratives that claimed to represent the lives of Jews. These encompassed films that were produced for the generalised audiences of new mass consumer markets, and niche titles narrowly oriented to ethnically marked dispositions and interests, such as Yiddish language film. Exhibitors operating cinemas in, or near to, areas of significant Jewish settlement were foremost in booking and promoting such fare,

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organising programmes that might generate a healthy return in ticket sales. Produced across the discursive space of film reviews, news articles, promotions and advertisements, and the material space of exhibition site was something that might be termed a Jewish cinema culture. At its most distilled this constituted a social scene; an assemblage of intertextual and filmic address, extra-filmic entertainments oriented to Jews, and the context of a Jewish audience culture and a familiar topography. Narrative is not, however, the only form through which ethnic specificity can be inflected in a filmic text. Yet to be considered is the place of star performers in the meshing of British-Jewish life with the institution of cinema. Several significant personalities of the cinema operating during the interwar years were practicing Jews, or possessed some Jewish ancestry. That both the Jewish press and film promoters felt it meaningful to inform Jewish audiences of the presence of such individuals is the subject of the next chapter. As we shall see, figures such as Eddie Cantor and Molly Picon can be understood as the pivot point at which an autonomous sphere of Jewish leisure was balanced against a more fully public culture. Understanding British-Jewish perceptions of the boundaries of these two zones is key to recognising the horizons of the social imaginary of both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Britain at this time.

Bibliography Agadati, Baruch, dir. 1935. This Is the Land. Palestine: AGA Films. 35MM. Bacon, Lloyd, dir. 1926. Private Izzy Murphy. USA: Warner Bros. 35MM. Beaudine, William, dir. 1927. Frisco Sally Levy. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). 35MM. Beaudine, William, dir. 1928. The Cohens and the Kellys in Paris. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. Ben-Dov, Ya’acov, and Gal Ezer, dirs. 1924. Land of Promise. Palestine: Keren Hayesod. Ben-Dov, Ya’acov, and Gal Ezer, dirs. 1926. Young Palestine: Eretz Israel in 1926. Palestine: Keren Hayesod. Ben-Dov, Ya’acov, and Gal Ezer, dirs. 1928. Springtime in Palestine. Palestine. Best, Joseph, dir. 1934. Eretz Yisrael Building Up the Jewish National Home. Jewish National Fund (JNF). Borzage, Frank, dir. 1920. Humoresque. USA: Paramount Pictures. 35MM. Borzage, Frank, dir. 1922. The Good Provider. USA: Cosmopolitan Productions. 35MM.

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Cadman, T. E. F., dir. 1932. The Bailiffs. UK: Associated Talking Pictures (ATP). 35MM. Capra, Frank, dir. 1927. For the Love of Mike. USA: Robert Kane Productions. 35MM. Carr, Richard. 1937. “People’s Pictures and People’s Palaces.”World Film News 1 (10) (January): 8–9. Craft, William James, dir. 1929. The Cohens and Kellys in Atlantic City. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. Craft, William James, dir. 1930. The Cohens and the Kellys in Scotland. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. Crosland, Alan, dir. 1927. The Jazz Singer. Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD. Curtiz, Michael, dir. 1924. Moon of Israel. Austria: Sascha-Film. 35MM. Curtiz, Michael, dir. 1928. Noah’s Ark. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. 35MM. Davis, Redd, dir. 1937. Underneath the Arches. UK: Julius Hagen Productions. 35MM. De Mille, Cecil B., dir. 1923. The Ten Commandments. USA: Famous PlayersLasky Corporation. 35MM. Dean, Basil, dir. 1933. Loyalties. UK: Associated Talking Pictures (ATP). 35MM. Dillon, John Francis, dir. 1932. The Cohens and Kellys in Hollywood. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. Dreyer, Carl, dir. 1921. Love One Another. Germany: Primus-Film GmbH. 35MM. Dupont, Ewald Andre, dir. 1923. The Ancient Law. Germany: Comedia-Film GmbH. 35MM. Dupont, Ewald Andre, dir. 1930. Two Worlds. UK and Germany: British International Pictures (BIP), Greenbaum-Film. 35MM. Duvivier, Julien, dir. 1936. The Golem. Czechoslovakia: AB. 35MM. Edwards, J. Gordon, dir. 1918. Salome. USA: Fox Film Corporation. 35MM. Edwards, J. Gordon, dir. 1921. The Queen of Sheba. USA: Fox Film Corporation. 35MM. Elvey, Maurice, dir. 1922. The Wandering Jew. UK: Julius Hagen Productions. 35MM. Erens, Patricia. 1984. The Jew in American Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ford, Alexander, dir. 1933. Sabra. Palestine: Sabra Film. 35MM. Galeen, Henrik, dir. 1920. Judith Trachtenberg. Germany: Neos-Film. 35MM. Gillstrom, Arvid E., dir. 1927. Clancy’s Kosher Wedding. USA: Robertson-Cole Pictures Corporation. 35MM. Glennon, Bert, dir. 1930. Around the Corner. USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation. 35MM. Gobbett, T. J., dir. 1909. A Bad Day for Levinsky. USA: Precision Films. 35MM.

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Goldberg, Judith. 1983. Laughter Through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. Oy Doctor! USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. Style and Class. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. The Jewish Melody. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. The Eternal Fools. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. My Yiddishe Mama. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. The Jewish Gypsy. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. The Land of Freedom. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1930. Kol Nidre. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1931. His Wife’s Lover. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1995. VHS. Goldin, Sidney M., dir. 1931. The Voice of Israel. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M., and Aubrey Scotto, dirs. 1932. Uncle Moses. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991. VHS. Gramsci, Antonio. 1991 [1971]. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Green, Joseph, and Jan Nowina-Przybylski, dirs. 1936. Yiddle with His Fiddle. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1995. VHS. Green, Joseph, and Konrad Tom, dirs. 1938. Mamela. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1995. VHS. Griffith, D. W., dir. 1910. A Child of the Ghetto. USA: Biograph Company. 35MM. Hansen, Miriam. 1995. “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hoberman, J. 1991. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. New York: Museum of Modern Art and Schocken Books. Horne, James W., dir. 1926. Kosher Kitty Kelly. USA: Robertson-Cole Pictures Corporation. 35MM. Jose, Edward, dir. 1925. A Daughter of Israel. France: Productions Markus. 35MM. Kahn-Harris, Keith, and Ben Gidley. 2010. Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today. London: Continuum International. Kreisler, Otto, dir. 1921. Theodor Herzl, Standard Bearer of the Jewish People. Austria: Helios-Filmproduktion. 35MM. Kyram, Dan. 1995. “Early Stereoscopic Photography in Palestine.” History of Photography 19 (3): 228–30. La Cava, Gregory, dir. 1932. Melody of Life. USA: RKO Radio Pictures. 35MM.

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Leman, Judah, dir. 1935. L’Chayim Hadashim. Palestine: Keren Hayesod. 35MM. Lerski, Helmar, dir. 1935. Avodah. Palestine: The Palestine Picture Ltd. 35MM. Litvak, Anatole, dir. 1939. Confessions of a Nazi Spy. USA: Warner Bros. 35MM. Lynn, Henry, dir. 1935. Bar Mitzvah. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 2009. DVD. Markham, Mansfield, dir. 1933. Whither Germany. UK. Mazower, David. 1996. Yiddish Theatre in London. 2nd rev. ed. London: The Jewish Museum. Mendes, Lothar, dir. 1934. Jews Suss. UK: Gaumont British Picture Corporation. 35MM. Accessed via BFI National Archive YouTube Channel, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=dMTHwuQnIKA. Moore, Vin, dir. 1930. The Cohens and the Kellys in Africa. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. Nettler, Fred, dir. 1937. The Holy Land and the Jewish Pioneer. UK. Niblo, Fred, dir. 1925. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. USA: Metro-GoldwynMayer (MGM). 35MM. Oren, Ruth. 1995. “Zionist Photography, 1910–1941: Constructing a Landscape.” History of Photography 19 (3): 201–10. Poague, Leland, ed. 2004. Frank Capra Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Pollard, Harry A., dir. 1926. The Cohens and the Kellys. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. Prager, Leonard. 1990. Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Porter, Edwin, dir. 1907. Cohen’s Fire Sale. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991. VHS. Rappaport, Herbert, and Adolf Minkin, dirs. 1938. Professor Mamlock. Soviet Union: Lenfilm Studio. 35MM. Rogin, Michael. 1992. “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice.” Critical Inquiry 18 (3) (Spring): 417–53. Roland, George, dir. 1933. The Eternal Wanderer. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1999. VHS. Roussell, Henry, dir. 1925. Her People. France: Exclusivités Jean de Merly. 35MM. Sandrow, Nahma. (1977) 1986. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. New York: Harper & Row (Reprint New York: Limelight Editions). Schwartz, Maurice, dir. 1926. Souls in Exile. New York: Jaffe Art Films. 35MM. Seiler, Lewis, dir. 1932. Divine Love. USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation. 35MM.

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Silber, Marcus. 2012. “Motifs as Seismograph: Kazimierz, the Vistula and the Yiddish Filmmakers in Interwar Poland.” Gal-ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry (23): 37–57. Sloman, Edward, dir. 1925. His People. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991. VHS. Sloman, Edward, dir. 1927. Surrender. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. St. Pierre, Paul Matthew. 2010. E.A. Dupont and His Contribution to British Film: Varieté, Moulin Rouge, Piccadilly, Atlantic, Two Worlds, Cape Forlorn. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Stevens, George, dir. 1933. The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble. USA: Universal Pictures. 35MM. Sutcliffe, J. B. 1917. “British Notes.” The Moving Picture World, December 22. New York: Chalmers Publishing Company. Szaro, Henryk, dir. 1925. The Chosen People. Poland: Leo-Forbert. 35MM. Thomas, Lowell, dir. 1919. With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia. USA: Lowell Thomas. Thorpe, Richard, dir. 1933. Forgotten. USA: Invincible Pictures Corp. 35MM. Tryster, Hillel. 1995. “‘The Land of Promise’ (1935): A Case Study in Zionist Film Propaganda.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15 (2): 187–217. Tryster, Hillel. 1999. “Silent Films in Palestine.” The Israel Review of Arts and Letters (109). http://www.israel.org/MFA/MFA-Archive/1999/Pages/ Silent%20Films%20in%20Palestine.aspx. Ulmer, Edgar G., dir. 1933. Damaged Lives. USA: Weldon Pictures Corp. 35MM. Ulmer, Edgar G., dir. 1937. Green Fields. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1981. VHS. Walkowitz, Judith. 1992. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago Press. Walsh, Raoul, dir. 1925. The Wanderer. USA: Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. 35MM. Walsh, Raoul, dir. 1931. The Yellow Ticket. USA: Fox Film Corporation. 35MM. Wegener, Paul, dir. 1920. The Golem. London: Eureka, 2003. DVD. Werker, Alfred L., dir. 1934, The House of Rothschild. Los Angeles: United Artists. 35MM. Westgate, J. 2014. Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage: Class, Poverty, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in American Theatre, 1890–1916. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. Windom, Lawrence C., dir. 1922. Solomon in Society. USA: Cardinal Pictures Corp. 35MM.

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Zangwill, Israel. 1892. Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People. London: W. Heinemann. Zecca, Ferdinand, dir. 1905 Anti-Semitic Atrocities. Pathe. 35MM.

Archive Interview with Julius Suss. Catalogue Reference: MJM 242. Manchester Jewish Museum Archive.

CHAPTER 4

The Public Lives of Jewish Stars

The emergence of a star system in cinema has been well documented. While the key film companies that came together to make up the Motion Picture Patents Company sought to restrict detailed information about performers leaking into public discourse during the earliest phase of commercial production, the star actor had become a crucial aspect of film promotion by the beginning of World War I. Such was the consumer appetite for imagery and information about actors that a secondary industry emerged devoted to disseminating performer related material to consumers. Posters, postcards and fan magazines comprised the greater part of the merchandise, with some of the latter also publishing hardback “annual” books as an enhanced version of their weekly publications. In Britain the film magazine Picture Show was launched in 1919, and began producing a yearly annual shortly after—an event that continued throughout the interwar period. Typically these would include short biographies of stars and production information about the year’s major titles, though most space was devoted to still images of popular performers—many of which were full-page portraits. Amongst the plethora of star photographs in the 1935 edition Picture Show Annual was an assortment of stills of the Marx Brothers (see 1934: 15). These included shots of the troupe in their vaudeville days as “The Six Mascots”, as well as a zany group photo (Harpo complete with curly wig and maniacal expression). Accompanying the images was a potted history of the brothers’ entertainment careers—the copy being restricted to a few banal facts with no suggestion of Jewish origins. © The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_4

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Many Jewish film fans perusing the publication, however, would have brought intertextual knowledge gained from Jewish news sources, and an awareness of the ethnicity of Jewish performers would have been common. As we have seen, exhibitors placing film advertisements in the Jewish press regularly emphasised any ethnic specificity of their programme to Jewish audiences, and this could apply to the inclusion of Jewish performers as much as to narrative content. In an advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle for the Marx Brothers’ debut feature The Cocoanuts (Florey and Santley 1929) their act is billed as the “World’s Funniest Hebrew Comedians [sic]” (see July 8, 1929: 39). The identification and promotion of Jewish film actors in the Jewish press was in effect from the beginning of the interwar period, though the trend became more pronounced from the outset of the sound era when titles with narrative content relating to Jewish life began to fall from fashion in mainstream American film. Given the cultural impact of The Jazz Singer (1927) is it unsurprising the Jewish Chronicle was keen to inform its readership that in addition to the intrinsic Jewish appeal of the plot, they shared Al Jolson’s religious heritage. He was, it was reported, a “native of Leningrad” and the son of a “Chazan whose family had sung at the synagogue for five generations” (“Variety and Cinema News”, February 24, 1928: 37). Amongst the most sustained discussion of a Jewish performer was that relating to the Hollywood star Paul Muni. Born Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund in 1895 in Lemberg, Galicia (then a province of Austria-Hungary), Muni had travelled with his family to the USA at an early age and embarked on a career on the Yiddish stage when still in his teens. Moving to film in the late 1920s success came quickly and he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy 1932), a development noted by the Jewish Chronicle under the title “Jewish Film Star Honoured” (March 4, 1934: 52). Although reputedly somewhat reserved in his personal life, Muni was never bashful about his ethnic identity, a quality the Jewish press enthusiastically endorsed and repeatedly reported on. In the estimation of one critic his “honesty, modesty and racial loyalty…[were]…perhaps even finer than his acting ability” (“Paul Muni Is Here”, JC, March 18, 1938: 58). In 1938 he made a public visit to Tel Aviv where he was said to have told journalists “he had come to see what Jews had achieved in the country” (“Paul Muni in Tel Aviv”, JC, February 25, 1938: 26).

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It was also noted he was greeted by cheering crowds, addressed port workers in fluent Yiddish (congratulating them on their nation’s achievements) and donated money to a JNF campaign. Following his trip to Palestine Muni arrived in London though avoided publicity, apparently stating he could not imagine his presence being regarded significant given the “shocking things…happening on the continent” at that time (quoted in “Paul Muni Is Here”, JC, March 18, 1938: 58). This combination of humility and social responsibility was key to the manner in which his character was portrayed in the Jewish press, suturing seamlessly on to his “man of conscience” roles in the biographical film titles The Story of Louis Pasteur (William Dieterle 1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (William Dieterle 1937). Amongst the more curious discussions of film star ethnicity in the Jewish press was that of Charlie Chaplin’s disputed Jewish identity. Although not Jewish Chaplin had presented himself as such on the music hall stage early as 1907, and continued to make occasional, if oblique, references to his supposed Jewishness throughout his career. Additionally, his screen persona of the “little tramp”, peripatetic and dexterously negotiating uniformed authority, was often read as possessing a spiritual affinity with the Jewish experience. As such, it was not uncommon for the mainstream press to misattribute a Jewish heritage to the star, a habit picked up by the Jewish press in the early 1920s though later called into question. In 1923 it was reported in the Jewish Chronicle the writer Israel Zangwill had discussedChaplin’s roots when delivering a speech at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, irritably asserting “Of course Chaplin is a Jew” (quoted in “Charlie Chaplin a Jew?”, JC, November 16, 1923: 18), before going on to chastise him for not being clearer on the matter and suggest that antisemitism was rooted in Jewish attempts to efface ethnic identity in a quest for gentile approval. In 1931 the matter was again raised when a visit by Chaplin to Berlin rendered the question of his ethnicity particularly germane. The Jewish Chronicle published two articles about his trip, one filed by their own correspondent, the other by an independent writer. The latter piece was more committed to the narrative of Jewish ancestry, remarking that when questioned about his origins Chaplin replied “I am certainly a son of father Abraham” (quoted in “another Correspondent”, “A Son of Father Abraham”, March 20, 1931: 22), and claimed to have “experienced the sufferings of a people treated as racially inferior” (ibid.). The paper’s official correspondent was, however, rather more

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sceptical. While noting with some amusement the Nazi vexation with the notion of a Jewish film star with international standing, it was asserted the performer had personally divulged the fact of his Christian parentage (see our Correspondent, “Charlie on the Continent”, March 20, 1931: 22). A few months later the publication laid to rest any ambiguity when a recent biography of the actor was quoted giving detailed information about his background. Expressing some discomfit with the ongoing preoccupation withChaplin’s ethnicity the piece suggested “We Jews have an incorrigible habit of annexing ourselves celebrities”, and accounted for this predilection by way of an “inferiority complex” (“Charlie Chaplin”, June 5, 1931: 7). Despite his designation as gentile Chaplin remained regarded an important ally. When his films screened in cinemas located in areas of Jewish settlement they were advertised in the Jewish press, and a strong interest in his affairs persisted. Particularly newsworthy was his status as a hate figure for German National Socialists. Irrespective of the reality ofChaplin’s ethnicity Nazi propaganda continued to categorise him as Jewish, and as the Nazi control of public discourse intensifiedChaplin’s oeuvre were excised from German public life. In 1935 the Jewish Chronicle reported that Das Shwarze Korps (the official newspaper of the SS) had objected to the display of postcards of Chaplin next to those of Adolf Hitler (“Hitler and Charlie Chaplin”, November 29, 1935: 17), and a few months later observed that, as with other Chaplin titles, the recently released Modern Times (Chaplin 1936) had been banned (“German News Items”, February 28, 1936: 17). The only German audiences permitted to see his films were, in fact, Jewish. Reported under the headline “GOOD FOR THE JEWS! To Be Allowed to See Charlie Chaplin [sic]” (JC, July 17, 1936: 16) this special dispensation was arranged by Der Jüdische Kulturbund,1 and took place at a “ghetto cinema house” (ibid.) that required identity documents for entry. That a public figure as popular as Chaplin was so openly aligned with Jews against the Nazis clearly contained a symbolic value for the Jewish press.

1 The Cultural Federation of German Jews was formed in 1933 to put on artistic events across Germany and employed Jewish entertainers who were no longer permitted to perform in public. Its activities went ahead with the permission of the German state who sanctioned it as a pretence confected to camouflage the true extent of oppression.

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Bodies in Public In addition to being a source for information about Jewish actors involved in mainstream film production, the Jewish press supplied news about the stars of the Yiddish stage as well as celebrity cantors made famous from radio performances and phonograph recordings. These performers, all—obviously—openly Jewish, had loyal followings, and audiences hankered after news of their appearances and upcoming plans. Always already international Yiddish culture operated across a geographic circuit based around Jewish patterns of settlement. Thus, Yiddish performers moved between traditional centres of Jewry in Russia and Eastern Europe, the new communities in Western Europe and the US, and the furthest reaches of the diaspora: Canada, South America, South Africa, Australia. As Nahma Sandrow (1986) has written “it was not uncommon for a Yiddish actor to have played in all these places – and not along a neat geographic route, but constantly criss-crossing” (85). One of the ways that Jews entered and inhabited modernity was in mass transmigrations across the globe, and the peripatetic quality of the Jewish experience was allegorised in the patterns of travel of Yiddish performers. A distinctly Jewish leisure and artistic culture comprised of multiple interconnected zones of public performance helped define a separate sphere of Jewish life. Situated as separate to (but within) the public culture of host societies, Shandler (2003) has gone some way to conceptualise the collectivity of these zones with the term “Yiddishland”. For Shandler Yiddishland can be defined as “a virtual locus construed in terms of the presence or usage of the Yiddish language, especially – though not exclusively- in its spoken form” (125). It is thus a product of a Yiddish imaginary, a homeland which, in the absence of an actuality existing Jewish state, can notionally come into being through language. In advertisements for explicitly Jewish entertainments the cosmopolitan status of star performers was brought to the fore. When Jacob Adler arrived with his troupe to present a Yiddish play at the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel he was billed “The World’s Greatest Jewish Actor” and was noted to have arrived “direct from his own theatre in New York” (see JC, September 26, 1919: 17). Similarly, in a promotion of David Roitman’s first appearance at the same venue notices referred to him as “The one and only World-Cantor” and listed locations in which he had been engaged to sing: “Petrograd-Odessa-Vilna-New York” (see JC, June 3, 1927: 39). At the mundane level of the everyday British Jews

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were addressed as located, spatially and imaginatively, in a distributed network. As cinema became an increasingly significant cultural form Yiddish performers were offered, and took up, opportunities to feature in motion pictures. These included both mainstream and Yiddish language titles, and with reasonable frequency a well-known player from the Yiddish stage would appear in London closely in time to the screening of a film with which they were linked. Joseph Schildkraut—the actor son of His People (1925) star Rudolf Shildkraut—made a public visit to the Pavilion Theatre in May 1931 shortly after his father’s film screened there as part of the first Yiddish talkies programme. A photograph published in the Jewish World recorded the occasion (May 28, 1931: 11). Similarly, Ludwig Satz caused something like mild hysteria in the Jewish press when his on-stage appearance at the Pavilion coincided with the London release of His Wife’s Lover during late 1931. In response to Satz’s performance in the play All for Children the Jewish Times commissioned an ink sketch of the actor to be published on the front page (see December 4, 1931: 1). Accompanying the drawing was a report on his visit stating Satz had “excited a storm in the London public” (ibid.). The paper was equally enthusiastic about his film release, producing lengthy reviews in which the acting, music and technical standard of the film were praised. “Satz is not only the greatest character actor on the Jewish stage” it was asserted “but he has also created the first musical comedy in a talking film” (“Satz’s Talkie”, December 4, 1931: 2). Likewise, the Jewish Chronicle wrote the film featured “the famous American Jewish actor Ludwig Satz, who is at present making a very successful personal appearance at the Whitechapel Pavilion” (“Variety and Cinema News”, December 4, 1931: 34). As Yiddish actors and celebrity cantors began appearing on film they facilitated the entry of cinema on to the circuit of interconnected zones of Jewish public life. Venues that presented the actual bodies of star performers in plays and concerts also now screened imagery of the star body. Moreover, the logic of celebrity value suggests that the exposure of a given individual to greater numbers of consumers leads to greater recognition and thus elevated worth. As performers, such as Satz and Roitman, were encountered by increasing numbers of Jews through their appearances in His Wife’s Lover and The Voice of Israel, the symbolic value of their actual real-world presence in live events was amplified. Not only did the shift to film production eventuate in increased instances of Jewish star appearance through their virtual presence as a projection of light, but when performing live or making public visits to Jewish centres any

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elevated status accrued by an individual increased the significance of the event. Thus, the presence and boundaries of a Jewish public culture were reaffirmed in promotional discourse, and in the enhanced material activity of the scene of event. In the Jewish social imaginary two spheres of public cultural life operated across the diaspora: there was a Jewish public culture, and the cultural activity of a generalised public. While figures such as Charlie Chaplin inhabited the latter, performers like Ludwig Satz existed primarily in the former. However, the lines of division between these spheres, while clearly defined, were not absolute. It was well known, for instance, that Paul Muni had begun his career playing to Jewish audiences, but had progressed to taking parts in prestigious Hollywood features. The star performers that, in fact, proved most interesting to the BritishJewish press were those that commanded popular appeal, yet seemed entirely at home in the discursive and material enclaves of Jewish life. Britain was a society in which the ethnically marked struggled to have their interests recognised as being of general relevance, and any individual that contained the potential to universalise Jewish concerns was afforded significant attention. Born in New York in 1892, the American comedian Eddie Cantor began garnering the interest of the British-Jewish press in the late 1920s. In the USA he had already found fame on Broadway and with phonograph recordings of comedy and popular songs, but it was in relation to his film roles that his name initially started appearing in the Jewish Chronicle. His Jewishness was first identified in an article about the popularity of his film Whoopee! (Freeland 1930) with audiences at the Astoria Theatre in central London, where it was reported public demand had led to the rebooking of the title for an extra week (“Variety and Cinema News”, December 26, 1930: 23). Whoopee! was also heavily advertised in the same publication, with a prominent caricature of Cantor—complete with trademark oversized eyes—dominating the promotion. Over the next few years Cantor developed a strong following from British Jews, his films being regularly reviewed and advertised in the British-Jewish press. In 1935 he travelled to London, and while there visited the East End with his wife and daughters. News of his visit quickly spread and a crowd estimated at around 5000 assembled outside the Jewish restaurant he was dining in—“Feld’s” in Whitechapel. The incident was covered in both Jewish and mainstream papers, with the New York Post adding some amusing colour. Whitechapel Road, it was reported, was jammed for

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several blocks by Cantor’s admirers, and the Hollywood star still had a herring in his hand when making good his escape (“Eddie Cantor; Good Cockney Act”, January 7, 1935: 9). During this visit to London Cantor granted the Jewish Chronicle an interview in which presented his Jewishness as a public matter. The article began with a declaration of ethnic self-affirmation: “I am proud to be a Jew”, he stated, “I should have been broken hearted had I been born of any other race” (quoted in “Eddie Cantor”, January 11, 1935: 20). Later in the piece he approvingly asserted that he had recently witnessed Jewish-American acquaintances becoming more forthright about their religious affiliations. He also identified two interrelated political causes to which he was committed. Firstly, he was reported to be “deeply interested in the Zionist movement” (ibid.) and had donated money to establishing scholarships at the Hebrew University. Additionally, his role in the raising of funds to aid German-Jewish refugees was mentioned. This was clearly a matter of huge concern to him, and more than any other entertainment figure he was associated with leadership in this area - later devoting significant personal effort in assisting Jewish children escape Nazi territory for a new life in Palestine. It was this campaign that brought Cantor back to Britain in 1938 when he spearheaded a drive to raise £20,000 over sixteen days on a national tour. Naturally the trip was of tremendous interest to the Jewish press, and they followed his journey around the country delivering updates about the events he attended. Significantly, he visited locations and organisations explicitly associated with Jewish life, as well as sites undifferentiated ethnically. In London he spent time in the East End, again eating at Feld’s where again he was mobbed, before visiting the “Oxford and St George Club”—a Jewish youth organisation. Here he clowned with club members, enjoyed a game of ping-pong and was photographed wearing a wide-brimmed boy-scouts’ hat (see “Eddie Cantor at St. George’s”, JC, July 22, 1938: 46). Travelling to the provincial centres of British Jewry, Manchester and Leeds, he availed himself of communal hospitality. In the former location he attended a reception at the Midland Hotel organised by the Zionist Central Council of Manchester and Salford, while in Leeds he received a “riotous welcome” (“EDDIE CANTERS HOME” [sic], JC, July 29, 1938: 17) by Jewish workers at a garment factory. Of course Britain’s Jewish communities would be an important source for donations, but as a major star Cantor’s appeal was broad and he

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undertook several high profile public engagements not specifically aimed at Jews. In Glasgow he attended the Empire Exhibition—an international exposition held in one the city’s public parks—where he delivered a speech endorsing democratic values to an enthusiastic crowd. Most culturally significant was a midnight entertainment gala where he played the role of compere. This took place at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn, north London, a recently opened venue with a vast seating capacity of over 4000. The event brought together an impressive array of the most popular British acts including Gracie Fields, George Formby, and Lupino Lane (together with his troupe performing the “Lambeth Walk”—then a full blown national craze). Discussed across the press the event achieved significant publicity for Cantor’s cause. In the specialist entertainment publication, The Era, it was regarded as history making in its ambition (“History Made at Kilburn”, July 28, 1938: 14). By the time Cantor had finished his tour of Britain over £100,000 had been raised, far in excess of his original target. Even in his absence, however, the fundraising continued in his name. In the East End a boxing event at the Mile End Arena saw M. C. Lew Cohen joined in the ring by the Jewish-American comedy actor Harry Green to solicit funds. The Hull Judeans—a Jewish social club—also staged a concert for the charity at the Yorkshire town’s Regal Cinema, and included amongst the acts were the Peter Sisters, an African-American vocal trio that had appeared in the Cantor comedy Ali Baba Goes to Town (Butler 1937). According to the Hull Daily Mail the star himself cabled the organisers stating: “Best wishes for the huge success, and I mean that huge” (quoted in “Eddie Cantor’s Cable to Hull”, December 30, 1938: 5). Most high profile was a phonograph record put out by the Decca label featuring Cantor performing a version of “The Lambeth Walk”, the advertisements for the disc reading “BUY A RECORD! HELP SAVE A CHILD! [sic]” (see JC, August 12, 1938: 6). As with the personal appearances Cantor attended during his tour these later events appealed variously to a predominantly Jewish public as well as to a mass public. Able to move between these spheres effortlessly, he appeared equally at home in Jewish or ethnically unmarked space. Key to this motility was his simultaneous insistence on both particularism and universalism with regard to his ethnicity. Emphasised in an interview conducted with the Jewish Chronicle was Cantor’s belief that it was the duty of “every Jew to act as though he were an ambassador for his people” (quoted in “Eddie Cantor in England”, July 15,

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1938: 20) as a tactic to combat antisemitism. Although rightly located in her difference, the ideal Jew should be mindful of producing a favourable impression amongst gentiles since the individual would be read as standing for the collective. Across the press it was felt relevant to identify Cantor’s involvement in public campaigns and charitable causes not specifically oriented to assisting Jews. Upon his visit to Leeds the Yorkshire Evening Post ran an article which mentioned his American charitable work had secured over one million pounds for “non-Jewish causes” (“Eddie Cantor’s Busy Holiday”, July 23, 1938: 4), while the Jewish Chronicle detailed his contribution to an American national road safety campaign and to Roosevelt’s New Deal (“Eddie Cantor”, January 11, 1935: 20). It should also be remembered that while Cantor’s outspokenly principled stance against Nazism was explicitly situated in his Jewishness, his film persona was contingent on an identification with whiteness rather than difference. Blacking up had long been an aspect of his repertoire, perhaps finding its most famous expression in the performance of a celebrated musical scene in Roman Scandals (Tuttle 1933). Covering his skin in mud to conceal his identity and evade capture, Cantor—appearing as a Roman slave assisting with his master’s schemes—allows himself to be mistaken for an Egyptian beauty therapist and performs the song “Keep Young and Beautiful” accompanied by a chorus of attractive women. With a host of young black women attending to the needs of a roomful of blonde-haired maidens race saturates the scene, and one gag has Cantor raise his tunic to reveal white thighs contrasting with mud-caked shins and knees. At the end of the number Cantor plunges into a bathing pool, his improvised make-up washing away to reveal his authentic “white” skin tone. Like Jolson in The Jazz Singer, the act of blacking up moved this Jewish performer closer to whiteness, a position still not unproblematically offered to Jews in the raciological thinking of the period. As Cantor’s image travelled across the discursive space of the pages of the Jewish press and those of the mainstream press, intertextual knowledge of the Cantor’s membership of the community of whiteness formed something of a continuity between these sites. The particular appeal of Cantor to the British-Jewish press was as the embodiment of his philosophy of the Jew as an ethno-ambassador. In his habitation of the mass public sphere he staged a demonstration to Britain’s gentile population that a Jewish performer possessed the popular appeal and talent to secure a prominent position within the era’s most culturally significant entertainment arena. Not only did his status enable

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him to raise awareness about a political event disproportionately damaging to Jewish life and ensure some meaningful action might ameliorate something of the emergent disaster, but it suggested that the forces that posed a threat to his co-religionists posed a threat to him and thus to the cultural formation of which he was part. This was a decisive centring of matters that were often cast as peripheral Jewish interests. However, in Cantor’s movement between Jewish and generalised publics his journey began very much in the latter sphere. This was, of course, key to his appeal; the pleasure Jews took in his personal appearance in locations such as the East End was contingent upon the glamour and prestige he carried with him from the world of the culturally elevated.

A New Yiddish Talkie For a brief moment the excitement that surrounded the figure of Molly Picon during the British release of Yiddle with His Fiddle (1936) was an outcome of the reverse process. Originating in a Jewish alternative public, her appearance in the most celebrated Yiddish film of the period saw Yiddishland elide with the cultural mainstream. To be sure, Picon was not unknown to a British non-Jewish public. Indeed, not long before Yiddle with His Fiddle’s release in 1937 she presented her live act to mixed audiences at the Holborn Empire in cosmopolitan central London. Nevertheless, from her earliest appearances in Britain during the 1920s venues in areas of Jewish settlement such as the East End’s Rivoli Cinema and Shoreditch Town Hall hosted the bulk of her tour dates, and she participated in several Jewish charity fundraisers. Moreover, from performers to creative staff Yiddle with His Fiddle was a product steeped in the Yiddish cultural world. Using Yiddish dialogue throughout and featuring songs written by celebrated Yiddish poet Itzik Manger, the primary audience for the title was always imaged to be Jews for whom some cultural autonomy remained a lived reality. Typically described a musical comedy Yiddle with His Fiddle begins in the Polish town of Kazimierz with scenes of financial desperation. Quickly introduced is the protagonist, Molly Picon, raggedly dressed and trying to earn a few copecks entertaining people in the town square so that she and her ageing father, Abie, might have something in the way of an evening meal. Returning home with barely enough to feed one person the pair take stock of their dire situation and decide to take their chances on the road as travelling musicians. With Picon adopting

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the name Yiddle and disguised as a male youth in order to ward off unwanted attention they begin their journeying—in the words of the accompanying song—“Yiddle with a fiddle, Abie with a bass”. After arguing with rival musicians, Froim and Isaac, in a nearby shtetl the four rapidly realise that playing together will yield the most cash and in a short time the team are living well. All is not simple for poor Yiddle, however, as she soon falls in love with the handsome Froim and begins dreaming of romantic situations in which they both figure. Such a union is unlikely to reach fruition, though,—as Yiddle states: “who ever heard of a man falling in love with another man”! With the addition of another member to the troupe the scenario is complicated still further. Having developed a sound reputation Yiddle, Abie, Froim and Isaac are employed to provide music at the wedding of the rich Saul Gold, a local bigwig in one of the towns. His bride, however, is the considerably younger Tauba, whom unbeknownst to him is in love with a younger but poorer man who has left the provinces for the city. Seeing her distraught after the ceremony has taken place, the musicians take pity on her and allow her to accompany them and flee the miserable life she has found for herself. Tauba, remarkably, has a wonderful singing voice and the musicians achieve even greater success with her help. Yiddle, though, is less than enthusiastic about her presence, believing that Froim will be inevitably attracted to her. With a fiancée in Warsaw Isaac persuades his friends to accompany him to the city, a move that initially spells disaster for Yiddle and Abie. It is not long before Tauba is spotted by an impresario as an essential new act for his theatre. To Yiddle’s dismay she leaves the group accompanied by Froim who has, with Tauba’s help, secured a job playing in the theatre orchestra. The band then rapidly drops from three to two members when Isaac declares his fiancée has persuaded him to hang up his clarinet. Just when all seems lost Tauba makes contact with her true beloved and leaves for a life with him minutes before her debut performance. Yiddle is drafted in at the last moment, proves hugely successful with an improvised act, and dramatically reveals her true gender identity on stage. With inevitability she and Froim duly fall in love and she goes on to conquer first the Warsaw and then the New York stage. The cogs to the making of Yiddle with His Fiddle were set in motion when the Yiddish performer Joseph Green made a trip to Poland in 1933. As Hoberman (1991: 236) recounts, Green had been born in Poland in 1901, but had spent recent years in America on the Yiddish stage, as a bit player and extra in Hollywood and as a minor distributor of Yiddish film. Passing through Warsaw while on tour he showed a print of

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George Roland’s (1932) Joseph in the Land of Egypt [Yoysef in Mitsraim] (an Italian silent film that had been dubbed into Yiddish) to some Jewish film exhibitors who insisted he sign a contract with them to screen it. The movie proved hugely successful with Poland’s sizeable Jewish population, so much so that Green wired a friend in the USA requesting he send him another Yiddish film. The Boris Thomashevsky vehicle Bar Mitzvah (1935) was duly dispatched in 1936 and this too was received with enthusiasm. Convinced there was money to be made from Yiddish language productions Green set up “Green Films” and resolved to invest $40,000—$50,000 of his own money on a debut feature. In what seemed like a stroke of good fortune an old acquaintance of Green’s, the Yiddish actor Maurice Schwartz, was performing in Warsaw during the 1935–1936 theatre season. However, although Schwartz agreed to star in a Green made movie the pair could not agree on a project and Green was forced to look for another lead. With a keen eye for an opportunity he switched focus to the New York based comedy actress Molly Picon, who was touring Europe with her show at that time. Despite being somewhat down on her luck with several failures ventures to her name Picon had experience in front of the camera and was highly recognisable to Jewish audiences. A contract was signed and a script provided by Polish-Jewish actor and writer Konrad Tom was reworked to give Picon a substantive role. Green struggled with a title for the piece eventually telegraphing Picon in with the name Yidl mit’n Fidl. She is said to have cabled back “we emptied twelve bottles of champagne on that title” (quoted in Goldberg 1983: 106). Filming took place in Warsaw and Kazimierz during the summer of 1936 and the finished piece was released in Poland in the September of that year. One of the top three grossing Polish films of 1936, Green’s picture was a hit. In December it moved on to New York screening on the last day of 1936, then recrossed the Atlantic to Western Europe and on to South Africa, Palestine and Australia. Perversely, through mediation with Der Jüdische Kulturbund, it even screened to Jews in Germany. In London the film received its British premiere following several anticipatory notices in the Jewish press. Throughout the mid-1930s Molly Picon had visited the English capital on various occasions while on tour. It was in relation to articles publicising her stage appearances that news of her involvement in a Yiddish film was first reported. On June 19, 1936, a notice in the Jewish Chronicle alerting readers to an upcoming stage appearance of the star at the Troxy also noted that “Miss Picon is to make an all all-Yiddish film in Warsaw at the end of the month”

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(“Molly Picon at the Troxy”: 49). Similarly, six months later, along with information relating to an upcoming concert appearance by the actress at Shoreditch Town Hall, the same paper reported that Picon had made a film entitled Yiddle with His Fiddle, that it had screened in New York, and that it would soon arrive in London (“Molly Picon’s Concert”, January 29, 1937: 45). The film did indeed duly arrive, screening at the West End “art-house” Academy Cinema on July 21, 1937. As elsewhere the film was a major success, and after nine weeks in Oxford Street moved to suburban and provincial picture houses, exhibiting at four cinemas in the East End and receiving two successful runs at Chapeltown’s Forum Cinema in Leeds (see Chapter 2 for a full exhibition history).

Potential Fulfilled Receiving attention rarely devoted to Yiddish language films Yiddle with His Fiddle was reviewed across the press. Specific to the Jewish press, though, was a notion that the film had managed to fulfil a promise; that a material manifestation of something long hoped for was finally in existence. Such a trend was most strongly felt in the Yiddish language daily Jewish Times. In an extended review one writer described the film as an “important achievement that has long been aspired to” and announced that “perhaps for the first time here in Western Europe a good, realistic, romantic depiction of the folkloristic Jewish life has been successfully achieved with the film Yiddle with His Fiddle” (“The Interesting Yiddish Film”, July 21, 1937: 3). Similarly, in a later lengthy article on the picture (“special for the Jewish Times”) by Vilna Troupe actor Wolf Zilberberg, the author admitted a “feeling of doubt came over me when I was on my way to see Green’s film” due to past experiences of Yiddish cinema. But then felt he “must state straightaway that the film Yiddle with His Fiddle right from the onset took the right path of film art” (“Yiddle with His Fiddle”, August 12, 1937: 3). In large part the favourable comparisons to earlier efforts at Yiddishfilm-making were surely rooted in an appreciation of Yiddle’s production values, and the talent and professionalism of its creative team. However, since much of the discussion in the Jewish press focussed on content it might also be suggested that the success of the film with Jewish audiences went beyond style. In contrast to the “wrong roads” of earlier titles this film expressed something of the Jewish experience hitherto unarticulated with clarity. In The Long Revolution (1961) Williams’s formulation of the notion of structure of feeling emphasises the experience of contradiction. Social

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change produces a sense of unevenness as old, once hegemonic, ideas are forced to occupy the same ground as newly emergent beliefs. The structure of feeling “is the register of the living result of all the elements in the general organisation” (1961: 64). The interplay and antagonism between these elements are in many ways the distinct and commonly felt character of any historical period. Like tectonic plates moving into one another the grinding together of differing sets of concerns and interests produce surface disturbances. And like volcanic eruptions and earth tremors, cultural forms are both the outcome and the record of these abrasive meetings. While a little overblown such a geographic metaphor seems appropriate here given that an uneasy and unresolved relation to space is apparent in the film Yiddle with His Fiddle. Three contrary positions are invoked in conjunction with homeland, all of which were themes identifiable in the contemporary Jewish cultural palette. The first and second of these of these positions, as described by Jeffrey Shandler (1999), are nostalgia and anti-nostalgia, the last an assertion of internationalism. In contrast to the earliest Yiddish sound films Yiddle with His Fiddle is set in the diasporic “old world”, and in the British-Jewish press it was reviewed as a locus for nostalgic reflection. For the Jewish Times part of the appeal of the film seems to have been as sentimental travelogue. “Everyone who sees the film is inspired by the…everyday scenes from the old home in Poland” (“Molly Picon in Yiddle with a Fiddle”, August 5, 1937: 3) read one report. Likewise: “the picture Yiddle with His Fiddle is full of …warm Jewish sensation that anyone can remember from the old country” (“A Yiddish Film in the West End”, Jewish Times, July 20, 1937: 3). Exactly when in the film these feelings might be provoked is not detailed. There are no individual scenes cited in which an appeal to homesickness was staged. Viewed in relation to production this is not particularly surprising. Since the movie was intended to play to a large population of Polish Jewry as well as to American and Western European audiences, a straightforward invocation of nostalgia for place would have been unlikely. Yet recognition of a diffuse desire for a plenitude figured around geography is not entirely misplaced. What is apparent in the film is an ambiguous melancholy of the central character played by Molly Picon. Central to her performance is the emotional quality of yearning. Already extant across the variety of popular Yiddish entertainments in the diasporic setting was a tradition of nostalgic reminiscences of the old country. The American Yiddish theatre was full of productions

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featuring songs describing homesickness. To name a few titles one can note Ludwig Satz and Joseph M. Rumshinsky’s I Yearn for Home, Rubin Doctor’s I Yearn for My Little Shtetl, and Jacob Silbert’s I Yearn for and Remember My Home (see Shandler 1999). Unsurprisingly, the articulation of experiences of dislocation from the environments of childhood and youth was a cultural commonplace. However, while some virtual return to Eastern Europe might have been facilitated by Yiddish film such desires were not extensively thematised, and there is minimal translation of expressions of homesickness from song into celluloid. Curiously, though, a similar emotional frame is occupied by many characters throughout Yiddish cinema. Land may not have been lost or longed for but love is. From Celia Adler pining for the son she gave up for adoption in Where Is My Child (Lynn and Leff 1937) to the tragic unrequited love of Zygmunt Turkow in The Jester (Green 1937) a yearning for an absent other provides a key element in numerous narratives. In Yiddle with His Fiddle Molly Picon is besotted with the musician Froim. In the guise of a male youth, however, her romantic ambitions will only be frustrated. This forms the basis for an ongoing anguish of unrequited love. Of course, there is no simple correlation between the representation of similar emotional states in the genres of nostalgic song and popular film. Presumably, unrequited love is—in Yiddish cinema— sometimes just unrequited love. In the Picon film, though, the introduction of the theme is staged in a peculiarly distinct manner. After Abie and Yiddle join forces with Ikey and Froim the latter pair invite the heroine and her father to stay with them in a barn in which they are sleeping. Ikey shows Abie around the place, some minor slapstick is played out, and then, incongruously the scene shifts in tone. A few chords are heard playing on a harp and the image cuts to three artfully framed shots of a wide river. The camera lingers on ripples on the water, the play of light on its surface and lily pads. We are, it is understood, now in a place far removed from the pratfalls of Ikey. It is at this point that a violin begins a plaintive melody. The image cuts to a close-up of the instrument, the bow moving over the strings. A medium-long shot shows Yiddle contemplating the tune and looking to see where it is emanating from. A return shot of her point of view allows us to see Froim is playing the instrument. We are again shown some idyllic views of nature, this time rays of light cut through beech forest and clouds move across the sun. Yiddle now begins a song. “Play my fiddle play” she sings, “sing to me a song of love…nobody knows

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but you…what is in my heart”. The camera holds on her, her song continuing with instruction for the fiddle to “play until the strings break”, and she tells how she feels “so lonely today”. The piece enters a crescendo and once again the image cuts to a montage of shots of natural beauty. Now, though, it is the drama of a storm. Lightening snakes across the sky and a strong wind batters reeds at a river’s edge. Finally, the intensity fades and the number finishes with a return to calm, Yiddle once more repeating “play my fiddle play”. Although the object of Yiddle’s longing is unambiguously depicted— the shot-reverse-shot sequence between Yiddle and Froim firmly establishes this—the lines “nobody knows but you…what is in my heart” and “I feel so lonely today” are attached to referents located outside of the narrative logic. Juxtaposed in these moments is the presentation of the inner life of Picon’s character and striking images of rural Poland. Land and emotion are figured as one, they occupy the same plane. As the intensity of affect increases in her performance so does elemental instability. The film now enters a space that both accords with the plot and exceeds it. A sense of the overwhelming is mobilised that must express more than fledgling romance. Like the storm something destructive is at work, evinced by Picon’s demand the violin “play until the strings break”. Some aspect of experience is striving for articulation, though there is acknowledgement that it might finally be unrepresentable. The absence of homeland felt by diasporic viewers returns in coded form. As Shandler (1999) has noted, an impulse towards anti-nostalgia was present in Yiddish literary forms from the middle of the nineteenth century. Such a history can be traced through the satirical destruction of folklore in writers such as Isaac Meyer Dik and Y. Y. Linetski to the modernist poetry of Yiddish writers in the early part of the twentieth century. Across a range of materials a desire to belittle Jewish custom, to lampoon tradition and to generally stage some dissociation of modern Jewry from its rural Eastern European past was evident. The poet Moyshe Leyb Halpern even ended his poem My Home Zlotshov by asserting how glad he felt holding the knowledge that he wouldn’t be buried in the village of his birth. Interestingly, a tendency for anti-nostalgia can be seen in Picon’s first screen appearance in the silent Austrian Yiddish film East and West [Ost und West] (Goldin and Abramson 1923). A veritable exhibition piece of anti-nostalgia, the viewer is treated to anarchic scenes in which Picon variously gorges on food during the Yom Kippur fast and cross-dresses as a Hassidic boy. Although, such extreme transgression

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could not be said to exist in Yiddle with His Fiddle there is evidence that moments of nostalgia for the old country might be tempered by a residue of anti-nostalgia. According to Shandler a common literary genre of early twentieth-century Yiddish culture was the immigrant memoir. Typically, in these accounts, “the mud filled streets, the lack of electricity, indoor plumbing or central heating, the limited diet, the reliance on horse and wagon…are key images for codifying the disparity between the Old World and the New” (1999: 77). Shots of emaciated horses, along with documentary style material of ragged children and bedraggled old men (one dribbling into his beard) seem thus as likely to have corresponded to a cultural archive of primitive squalor for diasporic spectators as they would have been to activate the naïve picturesque. In contrast to English press reports on the film Jewish newspapers certainly recognised the dire situation of Yiddle and Abie. The Jewish Times noted that “the action of the film begins with a tragic picture of Jews” (“The Interesting Yiddish Film”, July 21, 1937: 3), while the Jewish Chronicle understood the simple fact that “Yiddle accompanied by her father, takes to the road with her fiddle to avoid starvation” (“Yiddle with His Fiddle”, July 16, 1937: 45). Cutting across tendencies both for nostalgia and anti-nostalgia is something like an affirmation of the migratory history of contemporary Jewry. With its episodic structure the film is not dissimilar to a road movie; and in common with this later cinematic genre the journey itself is an object of representation. The tramping feet of the players are shown, and montages depicting the developing success of the troupe communicate their movement across space. Moreover, the most significant musical number, which proved for many to be the film’s high point—the singing of the title song “Yiddle with His Fiddle”—thematises the experience of travel. Sitting atop a hay cart Yiddle and Abie begin their journey in high spirits proclaiming the freedoms of their new life. “This existence is a song”, they sing, “Why should I be upset?”. And as they travel their progress is marked out. The lyrics “A goat stands in the meadow…A bird flies by - ‘Good morning’” is accompanied by footage of the pair passing these features along with agricultural workers who wave them on their way in the fields. Ultimately, to keep moving means new opportunity; misfortune should be met with humour and then left behind - the final line of the piece proclaiming: “Laughing in the wind’s face…Yiddle travels on!”

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An ongoing joke in Yidl involves the character of Ikey asserting his cosmopolitan status. Any situation is sufficient for him to begin reminiscing about some location he claims to have visited. Informing the group “I’ve been wandering around the world for 30 years” he lists Paris, Constantinople and Tel Aviv as just a few of his one-time homes. Whilst in justifying his decision to settle in Warsaw the group is told “I’m a man of the world - city lights are what I need”. Such a relation to geography brings to mind Zhiklinsky’s Yiddish poem The Weather. Recording the author’s pleasure in an international imaginary the poem takes as its subject a radio weather forecast, and in the second verse imitates an excerpt of a broadcast systematically cataloguing expected temperatures for Paris, London, Mexico and Puerto Rico. As Shandler (2002) notes an inventorying of the diaspora’s international distribution was a key motif of interwar Yiddish poetry. In A. Almi’s 1930 poem Yiddish, for instance, he produces a topography of the Yiddish-speaking world: Along the Vistula, along the Dniester and the Dnieper. Along the Thames, Hudson, Mississippi… …In the tropical heat of Africa and in Rio de Janiero, In Mexico, in Cuba and Canada. (quoted in ibid.: 134)

Thus, part of a project of defining “Yiddishland” was an “inventorying of its international diaspora” (ibid.). As background to the comedy of Ikey’s insistent rostering of nations was a developed set of reflections on the value of a supra-national consciousness. A discourse of internationalism surrounded the film in the Jewish press. The Jewish Times began one extended review by commenting on the relevance of Yiddle with His Fiddle “to all the nations in the world” (“The Interesting Yiddish Film”, July 21, 1937: 3) and later reported that the film was subject to “major interest in the whole world” (October 18, 1937: 4). Prior to the release of Yidl much attention was devoted to the Molly Picon’s cosmopolitan profile, with her status as an American and New Yorker frequently referenced. Continuing this trend once the film was on screens the Jewish Chronicle noted that she had been “specially brought over from New York, her home town, to play the lead” (“Yiddle with His Fiddle”, July 16, 1937: 46), while the Jewish Times frequently attached the label “famous international actor” (“A Yiddish Film in the West End”, July 20, 1937: 3) to her name. Max Bozyk’s performance as Ikey with his constant claims to travel

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was also reflected upon. Remarking on his “tales of romantic visits to Vienna, Constantinople and Tel Aviv” (“Premieres”, July 23, 1937: 48) the Jewish Chronicle was charmed. For Raymond Williams ([1961] 2001) the notion of structure of feeling was situated within a broader theoretical understanding of the communal formation of symbolic meaning. As Filmer states “structures of feeling are generated through the imaginative interactional social and cultural practices of initiation and response – quintessentially social practices of reflexive communication of experience which are at the root of the stability of social order and changes in human society” (2003: 201). While the earliest “practices of initiation and response” result in the emergent quality of structures of feeling, a secondary phase of reflection has a potential for the production of ideology. After communal consciousness is recorded in cultural forms its symbolic distinctness is available as an externalised resource for contemplation. For Jews in the late 1930s the dark clouds of Churchill’s “gathering storm” were all too apparent on the horizon. No one could, of course, predict the full extent of the coming disaster, but the Jewish press was constantly running stories on the rise of fascism across the European continent, the increasingly hostile climate for the Jews in Poland and, naturally, the commonplace atrocities of Nazi Germany. If a structure of feeling organised around conditions of life for Jews had existed in a characteristically inchoate mode throughout the thirties, history was demanding some more explicit assertion of community. By 1937 conditions were ripe for the emergence of material cultural forms in which some version of Jewish self-determination could be understood to be staged. It is thus my suggestion that a productive understanding of the film Yiddle with a Fiddle might look at the film as a moment in which to discern a conversion of “the most delicate and least tangible” (Williams [1961] 2001: 64) parts of Jewish experiential activity into something altogether more public. This is the sort of work that Fraser (1992) understands as taking place in alternative public spheres—a creative practice of identity formation. However, for Fraser a key challenge for minoritised groups is the gaining of recognition in a bourgeois public sphere avowedly opposed to particularised interests. Although articulated using a wholly different discourse the Jewish press understood the importance of Jewish cultural material in a way not totally dissimilar to Fraser. In a series of articles Yiddle with His Fiddle

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was advanced as a kind of vanguard manoeuvre in the placing of Jewish publicity in the realm of a generalised British publicity. Implicit in the logic of their statements was a belief that Jewish difference might be legitimated through acknowledgement. In an article on the film in the Jewish Chronicle much was made of the potential for a kind of universal identification with the characters and their situations. It was a film, the reader was told, that “manages to arouse a greater sympathy for the Jew by showing him as an ordinary human being, liable to the same humorous and tragic misfortunes as any other human being” (August 20, 1937: 34). This factor, however, was not of importance in itself, rather its value was in relation to the high profile the film had achieved. Central to the discourse produced in relation to Yiddle with His Fiddle was a discussion of its popularity with a broad range of cinema-goers, and its extensive discursive and material visibility. Titling the piece that the above quote is taken from is the headline “Success of ‘Yiddle with His Fiddle’, Appreciative Audiences”; the thrust of the article being the film’s long run at the Academy and the expressions of appreciation given to the cinema’s manager by “many people, Jewish and non-Jewish” (ibid.). In the Jewish Times the film’s high profile and enthusiastic reception were also seized upon. Through a series of articles published over five months a kind of template for describing the film was created in which the film’s popularity and its widespread public recognition were inevitably referenced. In addition to one-off statements such as the gushing “everyone who sees the film becomes inspired” (“Molly Picon in Yiddle with His Fiddle”, August 5, 1937: 3), certain phrases were repeated. Implying broad critical approval “shown to great acclaim” (“The English Press About Molly Picon’s Film”, July 23, 1937: 3) quickly became a cliché in these pieces. “Screening to full houses” (“Yiddle with His Fiddle”, August 17, 1937: 3) was a common way to point to movie’s popularity, though given the its long exclusive run at the cosmopolitan West End art-house Academy cinema it could additionally suggest a recognition and enjoyment of the film by an audience with a diverse range of ethnic and class backgrounds. And imparting a sense of the film as a public event of some cultural importance was the often-stated exhortation “don’t miss the chance to go and see Yiddle with His Fiddle” (“Molly Picon in Yiddle with His Fiddle”, August 5, 1937: 3).

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As details in the basic outlines of these articles were a variety of facts or incidents that would exemplify or highlight assertions of the popularity and visibility of the piece. Both the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Times reported on visits to the film by the “greatest personalities” (“Great Praise for Yiddle with His Fiddle”, Jewish Times, August 26 1937: 3), including special reference to the then Liberal MP for Ely, James De Rothschild. The popularity of the film was also discussed in relation to the apparently objective measure of ticket sales. Echoing publicity material (e.g. JC, September 3, 1937: 33) the Jewish Times ran an article specifically to report the significant box office returns during the film’s run at the Academy. In addition to noting that “many people have seen the film many times” it stated that “by now the film has been seen by 80,000 Jews and 10,000 non Jews” (“The Big Success for Molly Picon”, September 8, 1937: 3). Exactly how such figures were arrived at—especially in relation to the calculation of ethnic breakdown—was not explained. Later, in an advertisement for upcoming screenings, the sense of the film as an event of mass-participation was again invoked in ticket sales with the reporting of “35,000 admissions in one week at the Rivoli” (see JC, October 22, 1937: 51). There was also much discussion in the Jewish press relating to the film’s coverage by non-Jewish mainstream newspapers. The Jewish Times was quick to run an article entitled “The English Press About Molly Picon’s Film” which reported that the film had been discussed “with great interest in the English press” (July 23, 1937: 4). The film’s publicists wasted little time in harnessing the widespread reviews for promotional purposes, quoting The Star, Today’s Cinema, The Evening Standard and The Times under the headline “What the press says” in an advertisement for the movie (see JC, July 30, 1937: 37). Irrespective of the content of the reviews, the fact that they existed at all, that the English press acknowledged the existence of a Yiddish film, was an event considered noteworthy. Certainly some of the quotes from British papers seem rather meagre in their praise. Taken from an actually somewhat lukewarm piece in The Times, for instance, is the hardly superlative filled sentence “the dances are new to us” (see “A Jewish Comedy”, July 22, 1937: 9). It is in relation to contemporary reflective conceptions of a discrete sphere of Jewish publicity, and its relationship with a more dominant British public sphere, that further discussion of the discursive identity of the film in Jewish newspapers might be contextualised.

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On several occasions the film’s technical accomplishments were praised. The Jewish Chronicle referred to the “fine camerawork…excellent acting” and “delightful” direction of the piece (“Premieres”, July 23, 1937: 48). Likewise, the Jewish Times believed that while past Yiddish film had not looked to the “rich equipment…of …Hollywood technique” (“The Interesting Film Yiddle with His Fiddle”, July 21, 1937: 3) this had now changed. Contrary to previous amateurishness the paper asserted that director “Joseph Green went with serious responsibility to his task” (Zilberberg, “Yiddle with His Fiddle”, August 12, 1937: 3), an attitude that had resulted in a film “worthy of Rene-Clair’s artistry” (ibid.: 3). Such a paean was not, however, sung in the English press. Compared to “the early Viennese talkies” in The Star (“Music-Hall Star in a Film”, July 21, 1937: 7) and considered to have “an amateur feeling about it” by the Evening Standard (Ian Coster, “Yiddish Musical”, July 24, 1937: 9) the film’s production values were not something that caught the eye of British critics. In fact, whilst a couple of scenes are well constructed—in particular, the wedding scene—the majority of the film is merely an adequate display of classical narrative cinema techniques. Writing on the conditions required for participation in public discourse Nancy Fraser notes the tendency for dominant spheres to “privilege the expressive norms of one cultural group over others and thereby make discursive assimilation a condition for participation in public debate” (1992: 126). To talk with those in hegemonic ascendancy, one must talk as those in hegemonic ascendancy. Perhaps then, the obvious pleasure taken in the stylistic elements of Yiddle with His Fiddle by Jewish reviewers was not so much a delight in groundbreaking aesthetics—the film was not conceived as taking cinematic form in new directions—rather, the excitement displayed devolved on the ability of Yiddish film producers to cover the same ground as mainstream cinema. Put slightly differently, the groundbreaking aesthetic of Yiddle with His Fiddle was in its mirroring of those filmic techniques that had become the established standard. One major payoff of such a development would be the ability to enter into a realm of British social life from which many Jews—particularly those of first or second-generation immigrant status—were structurally excluded. To be represented as one wishes to be, within a space in which it is imagined mass opinion is constructed, contains a promise of recognition the power of which cannot be underestimated.

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A Star of the People We have already seen that in articles about Yiddle with His Fiddle published in the Jewish Times a sort of template through which the film was discussed quickly emerged. However, in addition to the film’s popularity and widespread recognition a third element was ubiquitous in these reports. This was the figure of Molly Picon. From July of 1937 to November of that year fourteen articles about the movie were published with Picon referenced in them all. In some articles her acting skills were analysed, remarking, for instance, on her “nice unforced humour” (Zilberberg, “Yiddle with His Fiddle”, August 12, 1937: 3). Elsewhere she is attributed the status of authorship, such as in the headline “…Molly Picon’s Film Yiddle with His Fiddle” (August 6, 1937: 5). In others articles still she is mentioned simply because she had to be—she and the film were inextricably linked. Even after the film had been screening for several months it remained relevant to point out “The famous Jewish film Yiddle with his Fiddle…(had)…Molly Picon in the lead role” (“Yiddle with His Fiddle Again in the East End”, November 1, 1937: 3). In the Jewish Chronicle it was much of the same. The film was referenced as “the Molly Picon Polish Yiddish production” (“Premieres”, July 23, 1937: 48), and her “natural vivacity and charming singing voice” (“Yiddle with His Fiddle”, July 16, 1937: 46) were commented upon in reviews. She was, it became unequivocally understood, the star of the piece. The appeal of film stars is a curious thing. The classic account of star popularity is given by Richard Dyer in his book Stars ([1979] 1998). Here he asserts that the power of certain iconic film actors is their potential to mobilise dominant discourses of personhood. Through a combination of intertextual knowledge and a concatenation of key film roles particular stars become embodiments of such ideological constructs as, say, honourable individualism, dangerous otherness, or in the case of John Wayne, an “easy and confident masculinity” (40). It may be entirely possible to write a similar star study of Molly Picon. This would necessarily look to how her persona was built throughout a long career, with its beginnings as child actor and construction across genres of stage, variety, and film and radio comedy. However, my interest in Picon is not to do with any staging of one facet of identity. Rather, in specific relation to Yiddle with His Fiddle there appear to be elements of her role through which she was made available as a trope of a far more generalised expression of the social: the Jews as a people. She is, in other words less a

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representation of an inhabitable mode of being or habitus, and more a presentation of a mass body. Two factors seem to be central in this presentation of abstract oneness within the logic of the film. Firstly, there is a kind of simultaneous offering and deferment of individual identification with her character. Historically, Molly Picon’s stage act had consisted of a schematic display of a series of metropolitan social types. A reviewer for The Times noted that in her show “the New York Symphony she shows the power to create not only individual figures, but an impression of the figures in action, leading us deeper and deeper into a half fantastic, wholly convincing region that is born of the persistence of the Old World into the life of the New” (“A Jewish Comedy”, July 22, 1937: 9). Key to this act was cross-dressing: the playing of male characters in masculine attire. Indeed, so strong was her association with cross-dressing, in 1982 she even accepted an award wearing a bow tie, dinner jacket and trousers. This dimension of her stage repertoire determined the writing of her role in the film, her performance, and its reception by Jewish audiences. Wolf Zilberberg, for instance, noted her “specific Molly Picon-ness” (“Yiddle with His Fiddle”, August 12, 1937: 3) in his Jewish Times review. However, while her past performances influenced her role it was not simply a reprisal. As contemporary commentators noted, her on-screen behaviour was somewhat less intense in comparison to her stage act; the Jewish Chronicle remarking how a “greater restraint…softens her personality” (“Premieres”, July 23, 1937: 48). Called on to play a singular figure she turned down the volume in the name of continuity. Yet with her established brand her essential appeal she had to retain the essence of her routines. Thus, drawing on her talent for a quick fire presentation of different social types she switched rapidly between different emotional registers and characterisations within the same part: from lovesick maiden to tipsy youth; and from sassy girl to cocky adolescent and then to mature woman. At the end of the film this oscillation occurs in a telescoped form when she takes to the stage and in the space of a few minutes re-enacts key episodes from the story. The emotions are portrayed in rapid succession: in one moment she is cracking wise, the next weeping desperately. The effect of this is to make her both available and unavailable for audience identification. In relation to a particular dramatic situation the character invites empathy—who has not experienced some unrequited love or worried for their future? Yet the diversity of these routines is overwhelming; even if there is something for everyone sustained identification is

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impossible. As such, in the character of Yiddle the narcissism of spectatorship and the distance of abstraction sit in fine balance. The use of the name “Yiddle” for Picon’s character also seems to open up a possibility for reading her as sort of meta-character. The literal translation from Yiddish for the word Yiddle is “small Jew”. Yet tracing some of the grammatical nuances that were at work in the speech community of the film’s original Yiddish-speaking audience suggests a richer meaning for the word. In Yiddish the word Yid simply means Jew. However, for Yiddish speakers, to refer to an individual as a Jew—a Yid—is not to dwell on difference. On the contrary it is a general category of personhood—a way of articulating the universal. Thus, the common Yiddish phrase “fun vanen kumt a yid?” (“from where comes a Jew?”) simply means “where do you come from?”. Of course, such a phrase could only be used when addressing someone Jewish, but perhaps that bespeaks the conditions of a priviliged insider sociality for this diasporic speech community that required a sharp conceptual definition of identity from a host culture, but where possible, physical interaction with it. Additionally, in Yiddish the adding of the Hebrew letter “lamed” (equivalent to the letter “L” in the Roman alphabet) to the end of a noun forms the diminutive. A small nose (“nos”) would be referred to as a “nesl”. However, placing something in the diminutive form can also connote affection for the object of the statement. Children’s names are often formed in the diminutive for this reason. In the name Yiddle, then, in addition to a reference to Molly Picon’s small stature there is a possible signification of a generalised personhood, and tenderness for it. Certainly there would seem to be an implication of such a reading in the last lines of the rousing and hugely popular eponymous title song. When hearing the defiant lyrics “Dem vint a lakh in ponem, un Yidl, Yidl for!” (“Laughing in the wind’s face, Yidl travels on!”), it is hard not to imagine a collective history of transnational and intranational migration, or to think of the future trials that Jews were readily acknowledging were well on their way. In an essay entitled The Mass Public and the Mass Subject, Michael Warner (1992) discusses the particular appeal of iconic public figures in contemporary western life. For Warner a key feature of the public sphere of letters that emerged in eighteenth century Europe was the “routine form of self abstraction” (381) employed by those that participated in the discursive circuit of publicity. Through a mediating rhetoric of publicness the status categories of those that contributed within such a space might be bracketed. In public debate it was what a person said that was judged—and possibly attacked—not who he was. The public sphere

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was thus conceived as kind of prosthetic body inhabited at the moment the speaker/writer became disincorporated from the particularity of his embodied identity. As Warner states however, “the ability to abstract oneself in discourse has always been an unequally available resource”. Only those “white, male, literate, and propertied” (ibid.: 382) might go unmarked as the universal subject. All those others: women, the poor, people of colour—those who defined the parameters of the universal—“could only be acknowledged in discourse as the humiliating positivity of the particular” (ibid.). According to Warner “a residue of unrecuperated particularity” (ibid.: 384) has always been left behind in the process of self-abstraction. Both participants and non-participants in public discourse were placed in unsatisfactory relations to their own bodies. Privileged subjects—white, male, free citizens—“found themselves abstracted from the very body features that gave them the privilege of that abstraction, found themselves in a relation of bad faith with their own positivity” (ibid.). To recognise their privileged particularity would designate it as less than public and thus entail its loss. For the minoritised, on the other hand, of the “few strategies open to them…one was to carry their unrecuperated positivity into consumption” (ibid.). Without access to a discourse in which to express particularised interests as legitimate concerns, consumption offered (particularly for women) entry into a form of “publicness that would nevertheless link up with the specificity of difference” (ibid.). It is through this bind, in the face of a contradictory “dialectic of embodiment and negativity” that Warner locates what he calls “the appeal of mass subjectiviy” (ibid.). Leap forward two hundred and fifty years and the media of publicity has undergone massive change. With a rhetoric of consumption occupying the same ground as political discourse a display of bodies is now apparent across the visual media. “To be public in the West” says Warner, “means to have an iconicity, and this is equally true of Qaddafi and of Karen Carpenter” (ibid.: 385). The modern political personality, par excellence, is that which Warner (borrowing from Claude Lefort) calls the “Egocrat” (ibid.: 388). Prior to the bourgeois revolution the power of the state was made manifest in the publicly displayed corporeality of the prince. There has recently been something like a return to this embodiment of publicity that existed in feudal Europe. In the Egocrat, however, “the otherwise indeterminate image of the people is actualised” (ibid.: 388) in his person. Offered by the state is a fantasy image

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of social plenitude, of popularity itself. But the Egocrat is a perverse figure collapsing within himself categories that must logically remain discrete. Blurring a distinction between the normative disembodiment of self-abstraction and the mass accessibility of branded consumables he stages a promise of an impossible reconciliation. This is the myth of the mass public sphere: inclusion—a stake in recognition while retaining particularity. Warner’s interest in public personalities is located in the televisually mediated publicity of the post-war period; writing in the early 1990s his ideal typical Egocrat is Ronald Reagan. However, his use of Lefort implies a potential to apply his ideas to a slightly earlier point in history. Apparently influenced by Solzenitsyn, Lefort was writing about totalitarian publicity and thus about a moment when the masses were first becoming organised in relation to spectacle. It may be an imperfect fit, but it is my assertion that there is something of the transitivism of mass publicity that Warner speaks of in the discourse surrounding Yiddle with His Fiddle. In the figure of Molly Picon some symbolism appears to have been at work. There is an emphasis on her performance, her critical reception, and her very image in the Jewish press and in the film’s publicity that borders the obsessive; invested in her is a quasi-sacred quality. Deployed within a context of spectacular mass publicity she was able to offer an image a Jewish social body moving into mass public space. If it can be sustained that an idea of the Jews as a people was articulated through the figure of Molly Picon in the film, a supplementary counterpart was available in news images. As with other film stars of the era Picon’s image was used extensively in publicity for Yiddle with His Fiddle. In advertisements for the film placed in the Jewish press a medium close-up of her head and shoulders was a standard component accompanying the exhibition details. Smiling and with her head tipped back (laughing in the wind?) her features were on daily display in the Jewish Times (see Fig. 4.1). Given the text heavy nature of the paper—it often comprised of little other than six pages of solid Yiddish writing— the picture achieves a particular prominence. Equally arresting was a still from the film published in both the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Times. Picon is shown full body in long shot playing her violin alongside her fictional father Abie, who is accompanying her on his double bass. In the Jewish Times the image is captioned as “a characteristic picture from the film Yiddle with a Fiddle in which the famous actress Molly Picon plays the lead role” and appears under the headline “Interesting Picture”

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Fig. 4.1  Advertisement for Yiddle with His Fiddle (Jewish Times, July 16, 1937. Image courtesy of British Library)

(August 6, 1937: 5). The text thus acts as framing device directing the reader to the presence of Picon. However, as way of bringing the film off of the screen and into the realm of personal possession the photograph appears as an item of interest in itself, the wording remaining subordinate. As the photo-filmic representation of her body crossed the pages of newspapers and the cinema screens of London, it is a provocative to consider whether it carried the idea of the (Jewish) people as one with it. While other Jewish star images appeared on the pages of the Jewish Times and Jewish Chronicle throughout the 1930s none had the sustained presence of Picon’s during the release of her film. Moreover, Picon’s image was visible in the plurality of the mainstream British press. In The Star a still taken from the film depicted her playing her violin (“Music-Hall

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Star in a Film”, July 21, 1937: 7) while The City and East London Observer carried a standard publicity portrait (“Molly Picon”, September 18, 1937: 3), and The Illustrated London News used a group shot of the four main players with Picon front and centred (Orme, “The World of the Kinema”, August 7, 1937: 244). Across a period of months the serial reproduction of her photographic representation offered a body in publicity. The visual theorist W. J. T. Mitchell (1995) has written on in the unsuitability of a Saussurian-based semiotics to analysing images, stating that linguistic texts and pictures are apprehended wholly differently. Certainly it is true that in sharp contrast to the text articles in newspapers the images of Picon offer an immediacy and continuity of recognition. For a public brought into being through the media and discourse of consumption all the elements were in place for it to be activated in this way. With the release of Yiddle with His Fiddle in London Molly Picon became the first star of Yiddish cinema to acquire a strategic role in Jewish cultural life. In the Jewish press she was invested with a capacity to enable a Jewish participation in a generalised public sphere. Eagerly noting the visibility of her film outside the enclaved environments of Yiddish culture, some process of legitimating Jewish difference was believed to have been enacted. Other performers such as Eddie Cantor and Paul Muni were fascinating in their secure and settled position in the phantasmic space of consumer based mass publics. Simply raising questions about the rights and destiny of Jews in such a place was felt to lend credence and gravity to these questions. In short, if Judaism was going to thrive in an increasingly mediatised society it was seen as essential the interests of Jews could circulate in some broader forum than an alternative public sphere. Star performers were perceived as vessels for such a mission. A fine line was being walked in this manoeuvre, however. In his autobiography the Jewish playwright Bernard Kops—who spent his boyhood in London’s East End—recalled his attendance in the crowd that laid siege to Eddie Cantor’s Whitechapel restaurant visit in 1935. Despite being “the fabulous Jewish boy, the star of our dreams” ([1963] 1973: 33), Kops recalled the shock he experienced when overhearing a nearby woman mutter “Bloody Jew-boy!” (ibid.) about the actor. A little later he witnessed fascists hurl stones at the Jewish singer and actress Sophie Tucker as she left the Troxy Cinema following a personal appearance. Although these two individuals were undeniably popular with mainstream audiences their visibility could become a site for communal tension. Not

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all welcomed the rise of Jewish stars, believing the meanings and messages they carried in their being a symbolic and unwelcome intervention in national life. As we shall in the next chapter, the industry and institution of cinema was itself perceived as a Jewish entity, and its increased significance became increasingly framed as a threat to British cultural sovereignty as the interwar years progressed.

Bibliography Anon. 1934. Picture Show Annual for 1935. London: Amalgamated Press. Butler, David, dir. 1937. Ali Baba Goes to Town. USA: Twentieth Century Fox. 35MM. Chaplin, Charles, dir. 1936. Modern Times. USA: Charles Chaplin Productions. 35MM. Crosland, Alan, dir. 1927. The Jazz Singer. Burbank: Warner Home Video, 2002. DVD. Dieterle, William, dir. 1936. The Story of Louis Pasteur. USA: Warner Bros. 35MM. Dieterle, William, dir. 1937. The Life of Emile Zola. USA: Warner Bros. 35MM. Dyer, Richard. (1979) 1998. Stars. London: British Film Institute. Filmer, Paul. 2003. “Structures of Feeling and Socio‐Cultural Formations: The Significance of Literature and Experience to Raymond Williams’s Sociology of Culture.” British Journal of Sociology 54 (2) (June): 199–219. Florey, Robert, and Joseph Santley, dirs. 1929. The Cocoanuts. USA: Paramount Pictures. 35MM. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press. Freeland, Thornton, dir. 1930. Whoopee! USA: Samuel Goldwyn Company. 35MM. Goldberg, Judith. 1983. Laughter Through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Goldin, Sidney M. dir, 1930. The Voice of Israel. USA: Judea Films. 35MM. Goldin, Sidney M. dir, 1931. His Wife’s Lover. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1995. VHS. Goldin, Sidney M., and Ivan Abramson, dirs. 1923. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991. VHS. Green, Joseph, dirs. 1937. The Jester. Poland: Green Film. 35MM. Green, Joseph, and Jan Nowina-Przybylski, dirs. 1936. Yiddle with His Fiddle. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1995. VHS. Hoberman, J. 1991. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. New York: Museum of Modern Art: Schocken Books.

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Kops, Bernard. (1963) 1973. The World Is a Wedding. London: Vallentine Mitchell. LeRoy, Mervyn, dir. 1932. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. USA: Warner Bros. 35MM. Lynn, Henry, dir. 1935. Bar Mitzvah. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 2009. DVD. Lynn, Henry, and Abraham Leff, dirs. 1937. Where Is My Child. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991. VHS. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roland, George, dir. 1932. Joseph in the Land of Egypt. USA: Guaranteed Pictures Inc. 35MM. Sandrow, Nahma. (1977) 1986. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. New York: Harper & Row. Reprint New York: Limelight Editions. Shandler, Jeffrey. 1999. “Ost und West, Old World and New: Nostalgia and Anti-Nostalgia on the Silver Screen.” In When Joseph Met Molly: A Reader on Yiddish Film, edited by Sylvia Paskin. Nottingham: Five Leaves. Shandler, Jeffrey. 2003. “Imagining Yiddishland: Language, Place and Memory.” History and Memory 15 (1): 123–49. Sloman, Edward, dir. 1925. His People. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991. VHS. Tuttle, Frank, dir. 1933. Roman Scandals. USA: Samuel Goldwyn Studios. 35MM. Warner, Michael. 1992. “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press. Williams, Raymond. (1961) 2001. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. Reprint Peterborough, ON: Broadview.

CHAPTER 5

The Jews Behind the Camera

From the mid-1930s the Jewish Chronicle newspaper included an annual overview of the year’s notable film releases in its entertainment pages. Published to coincide with the Jewish New Year (typically occurring during the month of September in the Gregorian calendar), the focus of these pieces was primarily on Jewish interest film narratives, or the inclusion of Jewish personnel in a given production. Much space was, of course, devoted to film stars with some Jewish heritage, and gushing praise was offered in appreciation of performers such as Paul Muni, Elisabeth Bergner and Luise Rainer. With Jews situated in significant roles across the industry, however, acclamation was not restricted only to the most visible individuals. In 1935, for instance, an extended section was devoted to the achievements of Jewish directors, whom, it was argued, had brought an admirable level of skill to their craft despite a lack of quality source material. More than just names on a page two of these figures were afforded the honour of photographic representation, and accompanying the article’s text was portraits of directors Karl Gruner and George Cukor, having, respectively, worked on Abdul the Damned (1935) and David Copperfield (1935) in the previous twelve months (see “Not a Vintage Year”, September 27, 1935: 20). With film a glamorous and pre-eminently popular aspect of Britain’s leisure culture the substantial Jewish presence behind the camera was figured as a source of pride by the Jewish press, and an interest in Jewish creativity and influence in this area was not restricted to a onceyearly audit. In both film reviews and stand-alone articles scriptwriters, © The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_5

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producers and other talented types of Jewish origin were all subject to discussion. At the leading edge of transforming what was often regarded a low-brow and juvenile aesthetic form into something more serious, German cinema had acquired a prestige unrivalled by most other national film cultures by the early 1920s. Jews played a substantial role in the advancement of the industry there, and given the elevated status of German film the achievements of Jewish artists and executives cropped up in the pages of the British-Jewish press with some regularity. Tragically, in 1927 the pioneering Jewish producer, Paul Davidson, committed suicide following a period of psychological distress (see Prawer 2005). Having founded the first publically traded film company in the country (PAGU), and sat on the board of UFA the Jewish Times considered the event to be significant enough to carry a piece about his death in their English language section. Remarking on his achievements it was noted he had discovered the Jewish director Ernst Lubitsch (see “Death of Jewish Pioneer of Film Industry”, July 22, 1927: 6). Following the Nazi rise to power many in the German film industry went into exile, looking to re-establish a career overseas (see Bergfelder and Cargnelli 2012). Hollywood was, of course, a popular destination, though a number of important figures sought new lives in Britain. Having been involved in bringing many of the most innovative and celebrated German expressionist titles to the screen while at the Decla and UFA studios, producer Erich Pommer justifiably generated ongoing comment when he immigrated to Britain in 1936 to work for Alexander Korda’s London Films. Upon his arrival the Jewish Chronicle secured a short interview, and the resultant piece began by contextualising his career in terms of geopolitical events remarking that “Hitlerism in Germany has unintentionally benefitted many countries by reason of the large number of splendid intellects it has…expelled” (“Erich Pommer”, April 17, 1936: 42). Central to the significance of the man was his Jewishness, a fact reiterated in subsequent articles in the same publication, where it offered an apparently meaningful supplement to the reportage of his many successful endeavours.

Spectacular Exhibition One area of the film business subject to extended discussion throughout the interwar years was exhibition. Jews comprised a significant proportion of cinema owners, whether operating as local independent traders, or running regional and national circuits of venues under a recognisable

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brand. In Chapter 1 we saw how the streets around the western end of the Commercial Road in London’s East End were dominated by Jewish exhibitors. Regarded as a rapidly expanding area of the economy where fast money could be earned the ubiquity of the business amongst Jews was recorded in the Jewish Chronicle. Reporting on an overheard conversation between a Petticoat Lane market trader and his customer, the paper’s communal gossip column detailed how this apparently indigent fowl dealer had a controlling interest in a local picture house and, from his kerbside stall, encouraged shoppers to take advantage of his other business - ensuring them “you’ll have a good time there” (“Children of the Ghetto”, June 6, 1919: 27). A month later the same column claimed that of an average synagogue congregation at least a third was “either directly or indirectly interested in film enterprises” (“Children of the Ghetto”, July 25, 1920: 40). As minor trivia such anecdotes may not qualify as primary historical evidence. What is clear, however, is that by the immediately post-World War I period a Jewish perception of widespread Jewish involvement in cinema ownership was common and mundane. From the early 1920s Jewish entrepreneurship in film exhibition became a recurrent topic in the entertainment and home news pages of the British-Jewish press, and the opening of a new cinema was often thought worthy of comment if Jewish individuals could be identified as financing or managing the concern. As Jeffrey Richards (1984) has shown, these years saw the beginning of a boom in cinema building. Venues, specifically designed for film consumption, became larger and more luxurious. The overall number of cinemas increased, and many existing older cinemas—often converted theatres—were remodelled and upgraded. An example of this latter trend was the transformation of the Theatre Royal in Birkenhead into the Scala Picture House in 1921; the Jewish Chronicle detailing the cost of the works as reaching an impressive £75,000 (see “Music and Drama”, May 20, 1921: 30). The project was taken on by local Jewish businessman Alfred Levy, and the paper seemed pleased to be able to report the warm words offered to him by the town’s Mayor upon the venue’s official opening (see ibid.). With audiences for film rising throughout the 1920s, some involved in the exhibition business were able to acquire multiple sites and establish cinema chains. In the East End Phil Hyams began his trade working evenings in the Popular Cinema in the Commercial Road, a venue his father, a local baker, had helped to finance in 1912. Joined by younger brothers Sid in 1919, and later Mick, the team put together a small

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London circuit, eventually building their first “picture palace” in 1927 in Stratford, East London, by converting a huge tramshed into the Broadway Super Cinema. After selling their circuit to Gaumont-British the following year, the Hyams entered into partnership with Major A. J. Gale to form H&G Kinemas, and went on to construct some of the grandest picture houses in Britain (see Eyles and Skone 1992). This period—from the late 1920s until the outbreak of World War II—saw the creation of ever more ambitious and spectacular venues, with architectural and interior design aesthetics adopted from America and Continental Europe, though home-grown styles also emerged and the neoclassical exteriors of an earlier period remained popular. The H&G Kinemas’ empire grew to comprise six opulent cinemas, mainly located in inner-London’s working class boroughs. This portfolio included the Metropole Kinema in Victoria, the Trocadero Cinema in Elephant and Castle (the venue’s opening night featuring three live elephants), and the colossal 4004 seat Gaumont State in Kilburn. As Jewish entrepreneurs the Jewish Chronicle was keen to report on all the Hyams brothers’ projects, though it was their Troxy venture that commanded the most attention. Designed in art deco style by their long-time architectural collaborator, George Coles, this venue situated luxury modernity in the Jewish heartlands of the East End’s Commercial Road. Upon its 1933 opening a series of articles were published detailing every extraordinary feature and statistic associated with the site. A fortnight prior to its launch a piece previewing some of these attractions asserted that on “stepping into the auditorium from the drabness of the street…patrons will be confronted by a vast and airy spaciousness and unusual décor” (“Variety and Cinema News”, August 25, 1933: 29). A tribute to the site’s transformative potential the materiality of the building was seen as a segregated zone within which claustrophobic clutter and the mundane was banished. This vision of the Troxy was central to the discourse used in a souvenir brochure distributed by the cinema as a promotional giveaway upon the venue’s opening. With “graceful sweeping lines and vast airiness” the auditorium was said to be a space of “beauty and spaciousness”, and the objective of the project was to “provide an entertainment centre which… created a new high standard of Cinema luxury and comfort [sic]” (THLHL, 794.1). Several pages were devoted to profiles of key figures involved in the construction and running of the establishment, allowing for an extended focus on the technological complexity and innovation of the site. Building Services engineer, H. A. Stirzaker, contrasted

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the blighted grey lungs of city-dwellers with the healthy pink respiratory system of one who breathes country air as a lead into lauding the purification capabilities of the venue’s air conditioning; while electrical consulting engineer Major C. H. Bell O.B.E explained how the “mighty force” of electricity had been harnessed to control everything from innovative lighting schemes, to Wurlitzer organ and stage machinery. The imagined awe that the cumulative effect of these technologies would evoke in the consumer was suggested in the repeated use of the term “wonder”. The article in the brochure discussing the use of electricity in the cinema was subtitled “The Wonders of Modern Equipment”, and the house Wurlitzer was a “wonder organ”; the venue was, in fact, a “wonder theatre” (ibid.). Following the Troxy’s launch the Jewish Chronicle published an extended article evaluating the site. As with their earlier reports nothing was to be found lacking. Describing the venue a “palatial edifice for the entertainment of the inhabitants of East London” (“The Troxy”, September 15, 1933: 69) the piece went on to catalogue an impressive array of data. The screen was the largest in the country, no other London theatre had so many dressing rooms backstage, and the much vaunted ventilation system was said to pump and filter over two hundred tons of fresh air every hour. Accompanying the copy was a photograph of the interior of the auditorium—the deco uplighters, ornamental grille work on walls, and geometric plaster mouldings of the stepped ceiling all clearly visible. Much was also made of the “romantic” (70) endeavours of the Hyams brothers in the cinema trade, of which the opening of the Troxy was regarded a culminating triumph. Described in terms of poetic symmetry it was pointed out the family’s involvement in the picture house business had begun precisely twenty years previously a few hundred yards up the road at the humble Popular Cinema. Professional and personal lives were presented in continuum, and it was revealed that, like all devoted Jewish sons, the inspiration for the Hyams’ achievements was the “potent force” of their “energetic mother” (ibid.). A similarly breathless assessment was made of other Jewish exhibition ventures. In November 1937 the Odeon chain opened a flagship venue in central London’s Leicester Square, the symbolic centre of film exhibition in Britain. Situated on the site of the nineteenth century Alhambra Theatre, the new building was uncompromisingly of the moment with an imposing polished black granite façade outlined in neon lighting, and a modern interior. According to the Jewish Chronicle the guiding

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principle behind the project was “everything of the latest and everything of the best” (“The Odeon, Leicester Square”, November 5, 1937: 48), and a “new type of screen”, a “sound-intensity meter”, and an “organ with five keyboards” were just a few of the “wonders” (ibid.) listed as installed. As with the Hyams’ Troxy project the launch of the Odeon Leicester Square provided an occasion to elaborate on the background of the Jewish exhibitor - Oscar Deutsch, the founder and Governing Director of Odeon Theatres, Ltd. Born in Birmingham, his status as Warden President of the city’s prestigious Singer’s Hill Synagogue was identified, as was his engagement in communal charitable activities. These included assisting Jews exiled from Germany, and, as detailed in a later report, support for Jewish Nationalism (see “Appeal For Persecuted Children”, JC, October 28, 1938: 38). As Annette Kuhn (2002) has noted, the picture palace became a site powerfully imbued with affect, with consumers deriving pleasure from the ambience and materiality of the space. Interviews conducted for Kuhn’s investigations into the experience of film audiences during the 1930s contain repeated accounts of feelings of excitement that accompanied an atmosphere of “busy-ness, activity and energy” (221) at these venues, as well as sensations of dreamlike immersive escape. Such a response was echoed by “Raymond”, a Jewish octogenarian from Leeds that I questioned to assess specifically Jewish experiences of cinema-going. Of the Forum Cinema, which opened in the Jewish neighbourhood of Chapeltown in 1936, he stated: I lived in Leeds in a very, very working class area…and when the cinema opened I was thrilled. I don’t know particularly why. I was a nine or ten year old schoolboy and to me to have this modern…smart building in the middle of…where we lived was wonderful.

Even more emphatic was his response to The Paramount Theatre in the city centre (taken over by Odeon Theatres Ltd. in November 1939). Here, his recollections concentrated on specific fixtures and fittings. Of the carpeting he described its sumptuous deep pile asserting: “I can still remember the feeling of wonder”. Enquiring if other respondents had mentioned the washrooms at the venue, he spoke of these with particular relish: “I used to go there just to marvel…at the toilets”. Using terms such as “fabulous” and “marvellous” he contrasted the almost

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preposterous opulence of this normally base and peripheral space with the unsanitary primitive plumbing of everyday proletarian housing. Across personal experience, promotional material, and newspaper discourse the picture palace was imagined a place apart from its immediate topographic and temporal context. Contrasting Berlin’s picture palaces with reactionary neo-gothic Wilhelminian architecture, Siegfried Kracauer (1995) discussed the architectonics of the city’s interwar modernist cinemas in terms of surface-level expressions of the social order. Although not Kracauer’s primary interest, it might be useful to consider the picture palace a materialisation of modernity’s teleological structure. As actually existing expressions of a utopian future, sites such as the Troxy and the Odeon Leicester Square presented urban populations with an inhabitable manifestation of then pregnant fantasies of the collective imagination. That Jews were demonstrably active in this project was of particular interest to the Jewish press. Not only did a successful Jewish participation in this most glamorous area of the burgeoning consumer economy position Jews as culturally central, but a location from which one could conceive of Jews as involved in a new rational and democratic culture to come was mapped out. Like Gramsci, Kracauer saw a challenge to old Europe in the arrival of Americanism in Germany (following the 1924 Dawes Plan), with cinema a privileged figure of this cultural force (see Hansen 1995). In the Jewish Chronicle’s paeans to the new “super cinemas” an affinity with a spectacular, distinctly twentieth century, modernity was affirmed. Although never stated boldly, it is possible to pressure a reading of this discourse as a strategic manoeuvre within a culture war. At stake was a claim for a more participatory engagement in collective life that could only emerge in a remade society. Numerous other Jewish exhibitors and their venues were identified and discussed in the same publication. These included Sidney Bernstein, an anti-fascist, passionate cineaste and owner of the Granada circuit of cinemas; Arthur Segal, whose Astoria Theatre in north London’s Finsbury Park contained the first “atmospheric auditorium” in the city (evoking an Andalusian village at night); as well as several owners of minor circuits such as the Kay Brothers, whose interests were situated in the expanding suburbs around London’s eastern periphery. These men, and others, were decisive in creating destinations where architecture and design were attractions in themselves, irrespective of any advertised entertainment programme.

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Executive Decisions While there is clear evidence that audiences visited exhibition sites based on the specific appeal of their atmospheric charisma, it would be a mistake to assume that individual film titles were of minimal consequence to patrons. When, for instance, the Troxy held its gala launch in September 1933, the already hugely successful King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1993) was selected to screen as the opening feature, and this attraction figured as prominently in advance publicity as the dazzling fixtures and fittings of the new venue. On both sides of the Atlantic film companies that contained noticeably abundant numbers of Jewish senior executives undertook production of the most celebrated titles of the era. For the Jewish press the affairs of these Jewish individuals, at the apex of the film industry, were naturally considered worthy of comment, and details of their professional endeavours and personal lives were regarded as being of interest to a Jewish readership. Within the British film industry the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation was widely considered the pre-eminent organisation during the 1930s. The president of the company was Isidore Ostrer, a Jewish East Ender who entered the business through production finance. Gaumont-British was originally the British subsidiary of the Gaumont Film Company, and Ostrer worked with brothers A. C. and R. C. Bromhead to acquire the company in 1922 and, together with his own four brothers, expanded the outfit during the late 1920s following the imposition of film quota legislation laid out in the Cinematograph Act of 1927 (see Spicer 2012). Evolving into a complex vertically integrated combine GBPC absorbed and amalgamated with an assortment of established production, distribution and exhibition companies, many of which were similarly operated by Jewish entrepreneurs. As noted above, the Hyams brothers were one of several exhibition chains that sold out to Gaumont-British. In the sphere of distribution Charles Woolf arrived with his W & F Films Service and became Deputy Chairman, while Michael Balcon took the role of General Manager of Film Production when his Gainsborough Pictures became a sister company in 1928. Formed with film director Victor Saville, a fellow Birmingham Jew, Gainsborough had been financed with backing from Oscar Deutsch (also from Birmingham) and Charles Woolf in 1924. While professional frustration and acrimony would later see major figures depart from GBPC, at the time of its dominance the organisation’s power was, at least in part, rooted in the long established business and personal relationships of key individuals.

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The prevalence of Jews in the upper echelons of Hollywood studio management has been amply documented (see, for instance, Gabler 1988). With the sole exception of Daryl Zanuck at Twentieth Century Pictures (later Twentieth Century Fox), Jews were studio heads at all the Hollywood majors during the industry’s so-called Golden Age, and the men that established this remarkable monopoly remained an object of fascination for the British-Jewish press throughout the period. In 1929, for instance, an announcement delivered by William Fox explaining that Fox Films would no longer produce silent moving pictures was reported in the Jewish Chronicle under the headline “Jewish Movie Magnate’s Lead” (April 19, 1929: 21). At no point was the particularity of Fox’s ethnicity relevant to the story; it was, apparently, of interest in and of itself. Such was the enthusiasm for the public prominence and success of these individuals that writing on the subject could become somewhat unrestrained. Indeed, one piece on “Jewish film magnates” considered their “rise from obscure beginnings…a romance of the films in itself”, before going on to describe Harry and Jack Warner as “Napoleons of the picture world” (VEE, “Miscellany”, May 17, 1929: 12). With the passing of the Enabling Act in Germany’s Reichstag and Reichsrat on 24 March 1933, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party secured control over the Reich government. This was the culmination of an extended campaign for power set against a background of social disorder, physical violence and vicious rhetoric. A day of obvious tragedy for German Jewry, the events leading to it had long been by tracked in the British-Jewish press, initially with dismissive disbelief around the time of the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, and later with intense anxiety as the appeal and influence of Nazism could be seen to expand. Increasingly, the precarity of Jewish life in Europe and the reality of antisemitism became a feature of everyday discourse, not only in enclaved Jewish settings, but also in a generalised British public sphere. Despite being integral to that country’s descent into fascism, the fate of the Jews of Germany famously went unrepresented by the mainstream cinema. Even with a significant number of power players in Hollywood claiming Jewish ancestry, the major studios produced no explicitly anti-Nazi feature films until the end of the decade. For Gabler (1988) the studio bosses’ political conservatism and financial concerns over foreign markets proved crucial in this thematic purging. Further, as Felicia Herman (2001) has shown, key Jewish organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the

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American Jewish Committee (AJC) had back-channel access to the US film industry. In contrast to the combative approach involving public denunciation, mass rallies and boycott campaigns taken by Rabbi Stephen Wise and the American Jewish Congress, these groups feared emphasising the centrality of antisemitism to Nazi ideology would appear as particularist special pleading to gentile audiences, and they encouraged Jewish producers to steer clear of attacks on Germany. Meanwhile, in the UK, the official censor refused to certificate any film considered politically sensitive. Although Gaumont-British submitted two scripts to the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) during the early 1930s that were straightforwardly critical of Nazi antisemitism, through fear of their inciting public disorder on home soil or provoking offence abroad both were rejected at the preproduction stage. However, for those British Jews, or anyone else, believing a cinematic endorsement of Jewish humanity or a challenge to blind prejudice was desirable at this time, not all was lost. At the moment of Hitler’s ascension to power a short burst of mainstream titles exploring antisemitism did appear on British cinema screens. The films in question were Loyalties (Dean 1933), The House of Rothschild (Werker 1934), and Jew Süss (Mendes 1934). Also released in this period were The Yellow Ticket (1931) and The Wandering Jew (Elvey 1933), though neither of these latter titles was subject to much discussion in the British-Jewish press despite examining the collective oppression of Jews. It should be remembered that, as we saw in Chapter 3, the figure of the Jew had a representational history in narratives engaging with themes of social marginalisation. Indeed, the “Pogrom Film”, emergent in the first decade of the twentieth century and reappearing into the 1920s, is treated as a form of subgenre by Erens (1984). As such, there was a precedent for the productions that did surface in the early 1930s, and it would be prudent not to assume that they would be inevitably perceived as a response to political developments still unfolding and uncertain in outcome. However, of the three films that achieved significant attention in the British-Jewish press, all were subject to commentary that contextualised their public status as contingent on the historical moment. The first to receive a release was Loyalties, an Associated Talking Pictures production made at Ealing Studios, which premiered in London in May 1933. An adaptation of John Galsworthy’s 1922 philosemitic play of the same name it starred Basil Rathbone as Ferdinand De Levis, a wealthy Jew who has a large sum of money stolen by a fellow guest, Captain Dancy, at a weekend party in an English country house.

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Following the theft De Levis is ostracised by his society friends for refusing to ignore the matter, is accused of slander and is later blamed for Dancy’s subsequent suicide when the culprit’s guilt is revealed. Although De Levis is simply concerned that his property rights be respected, his position as outsider sees him refused the status automatically granted to “authentically” English gentlemen. While the gentile characters demonstrate a ruthless allegiance to their class and race, De Levis is unwilling to forsake his ancestral identity. In January 1933 Galsworthy died following a period of ill health, and a year after his death, when Loyalties was still on cinematic release, his play was evaluated in a tribute article in the Jewish Chronicle by the leftist writer Maurice Edelman. Much of the analysis was devoted to the complexity of De Levis’ character, identifying his determination to express and preserve the honour of the Jewish collective, once insulted, a privileged form of Jewish selfhood. The tragedy of De Levis, it was stated, is that in spite of his efforts to assimilate, his belonging is never absolute. De Levis’ ordeal was contextualised within an eternal conflict between justice and injustice in human affairs, with the then current mistreatment of Jews in Nazi Germany cited as a manifestation of this ongoing battle. Like De Levis these Jews, while having expended “money, energy and not least soul” on gaining entry to German social life, were likely to “reap a harvest of weeds instead of the corn which they sowed” (“A Study in Loyalties”, January 1934: v). During the initial release of the film Edelman’s article was not the only instance of the Jewish Chronicle explicitly associatingLoyalties’ narrative with Nazi antisemitism. The title was subject to ongoing commentary in the publication, and in one overview this story of a “clash between races” was considered to be of “particular interest” due to “prevailing conditions” (“Variety and Cinema News”, Jewish Chronicle, November 3, 1933: 37). As the euphemistic terminology would suggest, this reading was not a dominant feature of the discourse surrounding the film, though it did legitimate a frame of reference through which interpretation of the text might take place. A more overt entry of the forces of history into the on-screen events was De Levis’ apparent embodiment of “a new type of galut1 Jew” (GJ, “Loyalties Filmed”, Jewish Chronicle,

1 The Hebrew term galut expresses the notion of the Jewish people as a people in exile of their ancestral homeland.

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May 26, 1933: 43). Playing out at the level of individual bearing, the figure of De Levis “standing with dignity” was contrasted to “the cowering, mean, prideless, unmanly specimen” (ibid.) bred in the ghetto. Expanded upon in a lengthy review, this dispositional transformation had supposedly taken place in British Jewry through the activities of the Jewish nationalist movement, though it might be argued that De Levis better represents an ethos of European patrician honour. Whatever the genealogy of De Levis’ habitus, presented as key to the pleasures of the film for Jewish audiences was the portrayal of an individualistic and assertive Jewish masculinity. Marketing for the title echoed this idea, with advertisements quoting the Jewish Chronicle’s assertion that “Everyone who is proud of his Jewishness should welcome this performance” (see JC, June 30, 1933: 48). Ironically, although the Zionist ontology of personhood valorised by the Jewish Chronicle’s reviewer was a rallying call for Jewish self-determination, a significant aspect of the discursive framing of Loyalties made reference to a gentile reception of the film. Rathbone’s De Levis was predicted to “win the warm appreciation of every intelligent Jew and Gentile” (“Variety and Cinema News”, May 26, 1933: 43). Here was a demonstration to non-Jews of the equal worth of the Jewish moral actor. Additionally, non-Jews would be impressed that “the problem of what Zangwill called ‘the dislike of the unlike’ is handled with a just appreciation of both sides of the question and shows a conflict which reflects prejudicially on neither side” (“Basil Rathbone in Loyalties”, JC, July 7, 1933: 45). Unlike, for instance, the minor titles of Yiddish cinema, Loyalties’ audience was understood to be ethnically mixed, and its Jewish spectatorship was positioned as contingent upon the character of its non-Jewish reception. A kind of “being-for-others” was described in the Jewish Chronicle’s preoccupation with a gentile audience’s purported assessment of the production. Famously, W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) developed his notion of “double consciousness” to describe the divided identity of black Americans, perceiving the self through the optical regime of the white gaze. This idea has been extended to a variety of social contexts where asymmetric power relations play out. Specific to a Jewish concern with a gentile observation of Jewish characters on the screen was the fact of the centrality of Jews to the business of making and exhibiting films.

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This reality could legitimate an argument that Jews occupied a position from which a privileged area of public culture could be tendentiously influenced. An anxiety about the circulation of such ideas makes sense of the gesture by the Jewish press to endorse narratorial impartiality. If cinema was to have any role in combating the rising tide of antisemitism, an objective narrative address was essential. Such a position was affirmed with even greater force with the release of Twentieth Century Pictures international success, The House of Rothschild. Telling a highly fictionalised account of the rise of the Rothschild banking dynasty the title is set predominantly against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. The main focus of the film is Nathan Rothschild (George Arliss) as head of the London branch of the business, who finds himself frozen out of society even after funding the British Government in their struggles against the French autocrat. Despite this rebuff it is Nathan and his brothers that come to the aid of the allied European powers once again when Napoleon returns from exile and resumes his campaign for continental hegemony. Stabilising the London stock exchange through massive personal investment Nathan risks all, but when Wellington triumphs at the Battle of Waterloo Nathan secures immeasurable personal wealth, the gratitude of Europe, and dignity for the continent’s Jews. Throughout The House of Rothschild narrative drama is intensified through Nathan’s interactions with his chief adversary, the Prussian Count Ledrantz. Explicitly antisemitic, Ledrantz attempts to exclude Nathan from a lucrative deal to supply a recovery loan to France and then instigates riots against Prussia’s Jews when his plot fails. Ably played by Boris Karloff—who draws fully on his capacities to intimidate— Ledrantz embodies Germanic antipathy towards the Jews, and is thus the vehicle by which contemporary events are introduced into an otherwise historical narrative. The title received its British premiere in May 1934, well into Germany’s period as a one-party state, and the on-screen action was widely, if not uniformly, read as resonating with recent geopolitical developments. In her Observer review, for instance, C. A. Lejeune associated Count Ledrantz with “the figures of Hitler, Goering and Goebbles”, and went on to note “the plea of Nathan Rothschild for his people is palpably directed towards a persecution very much less remote than that endured by the Jews in Prussia on the eve of Waterloo” (“The House of Rothschild”, May 27, 1934: 14).

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In the Jewish press the context of current events was present, though not for the most part explicit, in reviews. The film’s premiere took place at the Tivoli Theatre in central London, and in both the Jewish Chronicle and Jewish Times it was noted that a proportion of the profits from the gala would be directed to the Central British Fund for German Jewry. Also drawing together the temporality of the nineteenth century fictional setting and real-life events in the present was an emphasis on the title as a public object. For the Jewish Times the film was: particularly relevant to the present day in that it shows the great services of the Rothschilds to England at the time of the war with Napoleon not only as bankers, but also as friends of peace and as Jews. In that particular respect the film is a piece of Jewish propaganda. (“House of Rothschild”, May 24, 1934: 3)

The use of the term “Jewish propaganda” was not pejorative in this instance, instead merely suggesting a dissemination of facts that demonstrated the meritorious behaviour of a defined social group. Jews and Englishmen had a lineage of shared values, and the topical urgency of the circulation of such an idea was the condition upon which its dissemination rested. Reviews in the Jewish press for The House of Rothschild were largely positive. The Jewish Chronicle did quibble over several historical inaccuracies, but dubbed the film the most significant Jewish achievement in cinema for the Jewish year 5694 (see “The Year on the Screen”, Jewish Chronicle, September 14, 1934: 40). Less enthusiastic, however, was that paper’s opinion writer “Watchman”, who discussed the title’s British reception in his regular column.2 In contrast to colleagues writing in the entertainments pages—where it was asserted the production would “wield happy influence on the many that will see it” (“The House of Rothschild”, Jewish Chronicle, May 25, 1936: 31)—Watchman expressed concerns about its public status. Noting “it is a film about money”, and that through the events depicted “the Jew’s cash nexus with the outer world is solidly planted in the audience’s mind” (“The Rothschild Film”, JC, June 8, 1934: 13) he argued a non-Jewish audience might be left 2 A long-time contributor to the Jewish Chronicle Watchman was Simon Gilbert. A native of the East End, Gilbert was an energetic community activist, a political Liberal and was an insider to the British film industry having spent a decade (1921–1931) as a publicist.

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with a negative perception of the Rothschilds’ influence on national affairs. The ancient slur of the manipulative Jewish ursurer was seen as worryingly proximate, and despite the inclusion of scenes that depicted Nathan Rothschild committed to a humanitarian mission, it was an image of Jewish economic power that might “linger longest in the mind of the Gentile observer” (ibid.). Picking up on the idea that The House of Rothschild was propagandist in nature, Watchman identified himself as unopposed in principle to the notion of “Jewish propaganda”. His intention, rather, was to question any representation of Jewish characters to which the “tricky Hitler’s retort…[might be]…‘I told you so’” (ibid.). Yet in spite of a purported support for a cinematic promotion of Jewish collective interests, Hollywood itself—or rather, public knowledge of the biographical details of its senior executives—was also found to be problematic. In the final paragraph of his article he explained: …the film is largely, probably predominantly, in Jewish hands. The non-Jewish world is quite aware of that. Will it not always discount heavily on that account any pro-Jewish screen propaganda… (ibid.)

Compromising any film sympathetic to Jewish disadvantage that was produced in the USA (and, indeed, Britain) was a widespread perception of large numbers of Jews in the industry. A claim for universal justice and equal citizenship could all too easily be imagined, and rejected, as the special pleading of particularist interests. With specific reference to The House of Rothschild, the extent to which Watchman’s analysis characterised everyday discourse is not easy to gauge. The film did receive attention across the press, and discussion of it often moved beyond an appraisal of its formal dimensions. Identifying what language and ideas might marginalise or diminish Jews was uncertain and highly contested, and the film was situated within a broader public debate about the place of Jews in British society and the nature of racialised thinking. In the Evening Standard it was judged objectively “anti-Jewish propaganda” (quoted in ibid.), while a Daily Mail editorial assessed its popularity with British audiences as indicative of an absence of antisemitic feeling in Britain (see “Vindicating the Jews”, June 30, 1934: 12). Watchman’s fears about perceptions of the title’s production background do not appear to have been realised, at least in relation to the popular press. However, his instincts on this matter were not flawed

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and a concern with bias and objectivity continued to be a feature of the commentary around future titles dealing with the victimisation of Jews.

Jew Süss In October 1934, the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation released Jew Süss, a historical tragedy starring Conrad Veidt as the eighteenth-century Stuttgart “court Jew” Joseph Süß Oppenheimer. As Richards (1984) asserts, during the early 1930s Gaumont-British had been determined to produce a film denouncing antisemitism. Indeed, BBFC scenario reports record the company submitting two synopses overtly critical of political antisemitism for assessment by the censor in mid-1933. A German Tragedy narrated the ostracism of a brilliant Jewish doctor from German society following the imposition of Nazi legislation, while City Without Jews explored the devastating cultural and economic consequences that befall a fictional contemporary Austria when the country’s Jews face banishment. Both synopses were rejected by the BBFC as political propaganda, with fears raised that A German Tragedy “might easily provoke a disturbance” (BBFC Scenario Report for A German Tragedy, May 10, 1933) given the strength of public feeling in regard to recent events in Germany. Refusing to drop its commitment to putting out a feature dealing with the persecution of Jews, Gaumont-British submitted the scenario for Jew Süss to the BBFC in November 1933. Based on Lion Feuchtwanger’s best-selling 1925 novel Jud Süß and having had a successful run in London as a 1929 stage production, it seems likely that its status as legitimate culture—together with its historical setting—helped protect the script from the censor’s knife. Mainly concerned with toning down assorted expressions of sexual desire deemed too direct, the BBFC recommended only minimal amendments (Scenario Report for Jew Süss, November 2, 1933), and the film went into production in early 1934 with the full financial weight of the company behind it. When completed, Jew Süss boasted a first-rate cast, finely detailed sets and lavish costumes. With such production values, the film was guaranteed to attract significant critical attention, and every section of the British press—national, trade, local—devoted column space to reviews or photographic stills of notable scenes. Although notices were not uniformly gushing, many were extremely positive. Writing in the Evening Standard, a young John Betjeman declared it “undoubtedly the best film of the week” and praised Veidt’s “outstanding performance” (“A Great Thrill

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Film”, October 6, 1934: 8). Some of the most complimentary comments came in the Jewish press. For the Jewish Times the piece was “one of the grandest films ever to be created” (Myer, “Film Triumph of Jew Süss”, October 7, 1934: 2), while the Jewish Chronicle labelled it “A Stupendous Production” (G. J., “‘Jew Süss’ at the Tivoli”, October 12, 1934: 43). As in Feuchtwanger’s novel, the movie Jew Süss portrays the ascendancy, and brutal fall, of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer in the Württemberg court of Duke Karl Alexander. The story begins with Süss confessing his hunger for power to his loyal friend Landauer, explaining his desire to secure respect not just for himself but for all Jews. The opportunity for advancement soon presents itself when Süss ingratiates himself with Alexander through a gambling loan, and he quickly becomes incorporated into the duke’s household. Proving himself an indispensable servant, Süss rises to the point where he is able to secure the release of a poor ghetto Jew falsely accused of ritual murder. However, this charmed existence is not fated to last, and following the death of his daughter Naomi—who falls from a high roof while attempting to escape the advances of the lascivious duke—Süss plots the duke’s ruin. Although successful in his plan to sabotage the duke’s attempts to do away with the Diet and grasp absolute rule, Süss becomes scapegoated during the inquiry into the affair and dies a tragic hero, reciting the Shema on the execution scaffold. With eighteenth-century Württemberg as the film’s setting, it is unsurprising that no direct reference to Hitler is made throughout. An absence of references to Nazism notwithstanding, the piece is described by Rachael Low as “loaded with obscure significance” (1985: 142), and textual allusion to the contemporary position of German Jews is apparent at several moments, albeit delivered at an oblique angle. During the film’s opening, a title card reads, “It was a time of universal intolerance and the Jews above all suffered oppression and boycott”. As Susan Tegel (1995) has noted, the boycott was very much a tactic of Nazi antisemitism, and the embargo of Jewish shops in Germany had received significant attention in the British news media in the spring of 1933. Further title cards refer to the unfinished nature of Süss’s efforts in breaking down the ghetto walls, stating “his story lives”. Perhaps most pointed is a sequence of dialogue between Süss and Landauer. Dismissing his friend’s report of anti-Jewish persecution, Süss asserts, “Ach! Old fables… we are now in 1730!” To which Landauer responds, “They can do it in 1730, they can do it in 1830, they can do it in 1930!”

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To what extent the import of such references was readily decoded, or proved too subtle for contemporary viewers, is now impossible to judge. What is clear is that both the mainstream and British-Jewish press positioned the film as inevitably located within the context of the mounting crisis in Germany. Although mention of Nazism was provided in only a minority of reviews in mainstream British news sources, its relevance to Jew Süss was unambiguously stated. The Observer referred to the “present political situation in Germany” (C. A. Lejeune, “Jew Süss”. October 7, 1934: 18) in its review, while the Spectator claimed, “But for Hitlerism, this film would perhaps, never have been made” (quoted in Tegel 1995: 227). Interestingly, parallels with contemporary events were offered somewhat guardedly in appraisals of Jew Süss in the Jewish press. The Jewish Times gave some details about the persecution suffered by Feuchtwanger in Germany (Myer, “Film Triumph of Jew Süss”, October 7, 1934: 3), while the Jewish Chronicle made reference to the film’s “valuable lessons” (G. J., “Jew Süss” at the Tivoli, October 12, 1934: 43). Jew Süss, it was claimed, “lays bare certain foundations of modern European popular opinion on which have been built the Jew hatred that we know today” (ibid.). Why Germany was not singled out is ultimately unknowable, but, as we will see, much coverage of the film in the Jewish press was marked by a clear hesitancy. It is somewhat paradoxical that some of the clearest discursive associations of Jew Süss with Nazi antisemitism came into being through accounts of its censorship in Austria. Shortly after its release in London, the film exhibited in Vienna. Quickly arousing the ire of both Roman Catholic groups and Austrian Nazis it was removed a mere six days after its opening. Again, only a minority of British mainstream newspapers covered this development. The Daily Mail ran a few lines noting the proscription, though it was attributed only to Catholic disapproval (see October 23, 1934: 11). The Manchester Guardian was somewhat more expansive, stating that there had been “considerable propaganda” directed against the film from “both Nazi and Clerical [sic] sources” (“Austrian Ban on ‘Jew Süss’ Film”, October 23, 1934: 12). Also covering the story was the Jewish press. The Jewish Chronicle recorded the involvement of various reactionary groups—including National Socialists—and remarked on the irony of the situation, given the trouble Austrian distributors were having in getting their films shown in Germany (see “‘Jew Süss’ Banned”, October 26, 1934: 29), while the Jewish Times added that the “scene in which Jew Süss is executed

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particularly provoked antisemitic demonstrations” (“Film Jew Süss Banned in Vienna Due to Anti-Semitic Demonstrations”, October 23, 1934: 3). That the Jewish press was keeping a close eye on Jew Süss is not a surprise, and the production was subject to comment well before it reached cinema screens. In early 1934 the Jewish World reported on production developments and set design, noting “a complete replica of the Ghetto of Frankfort [sic] has been built” (“Kinema, Gramophone and Broadcasting Notes”, January 11, 1934: 17). The Jewish Chronicle’s interest went back even further. In 1928 the paper was reporting that film rights had been sold to the Jewish inventor, cinema owner and would-be studio magnate, Ludwig Blattner, and that an anticipated production was expected to cost one hundred thousand pounds (“Variety and Cinema News”, February 3, 1928: 34). Following the passing on of rights to Gaumont-British the same publication listed the film as the first item in a piece on upcoming titles in 1934. Addressing the reader as a distinctly Jewish consumer, it was stated that “Jewish patrons of the cinema will assuredly be intrigued by “Jew Süss”, which is announced to be released in the autumn” (“Some British Films for 1934”, October 20, 1933: 43). Upon the film’s release it was not only the Jewish press that believed Jews would be interested in the picture. Those areas of the film industry dedicated to marketing and exhibition clearly felt that there was a significant Jewish audience for Jew Süss. Both the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish Times featured large pictorial advertisements announcing the film’s exhibition at the West End’s Tivoli Cinema. Three months after opening in central London, the film moved to local screens and the provinces, and it was again advertised in Jewish newspapers. In the Jewish Times one ad carried copy declaring that the film had been “praised in two continents”, featured choice reviews (translated into Yiddish) from both London and New York–based newspapers, and listed the picture houses at which the film was screening (see January 4, 1935: 8). This list of local cinemas exhibiting the title is itself instructional. Of the six at which it appeared in London, four were in neighbourhoods with significant Jewish populations (Whitechapel, Stamford Hill, Dalston, and Hendon). The wisdom of such a strategy seems to have been validated in anecdotal data. Investigating exhibition in London’s East End, reporter Richard Carr was informed that Jew Süss did “good business…mainly because of its Jewish interest” (1937: 9).

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Double Consciousness Anticipated as an event on the Jewish social calendar and consumed in locations coded as Jewish spaces, the contours of Jew Süss as site of Jewish cultural consumption are beginning to come into view. Yet film reception is not wholly reducible to these extratextual factors of exhibition context, and as Henry Bial (2005) has argued, minority ethnic readings of cultural texts are frequently marked by specialist knowledge unavailable to majority audiences. Reviewing the film in the Jewish Times, for instance, Morris Myer remarked that while Cedric Hardwicke delivered a first-rate performance, “his Rabbi is a little gentile” (“Film Triumph of Jew Süss”, October 7, 1934: 2). However, while Jewish audiences doubtless took interest and pleasure in the film’s formal qualities for a host of reasons, one specific aspect of its reception discourse is particularly striking. Overshadowing the Jewish papers’ coverage of the film was a keen awareness of its non-Jewish consumption. In addition to any appraisal of aesthetics (including script and acting quality, production values apparent in the mise-en-scène) evident in mainstream news titles, the Jewish press expressed concern with the majority’s reception. By taking the perspective of the outsider, speculation over how gentile audiences would respond to the piece was articulated at various registers. This represented a signal moment in the animation of a specifically Jewish reception of the film. A repeated trope in the Jewish press was the status of Jew Süss as a public object. Noting the piece’s origin in Feuchtwanger’s novel, the Jewish Chronicle referred to its transformation into a feature film as a rendering “into ultimate visibility” (G. J., “‘Jew Süss’ at the Tivoli”. JC, October 12, 1934: 43). Such a characterisation was entirely accurate. Not only was the film reviewed extensively, but the presence of Prince George, Duke of Kent, at the London premiere ensured that a large crowd gathered in the Strand for the opening at the Tivoli Cinema, and the event received coverage in the news pages—rather than just the entertainment columns—of the mainstream press. The film also had a significant presence in public space through the display hoarding mounted on the exterior of the Tivoli. The design was felt worthy of an article in the Kinematograph Weekly, and under a photograph of the cinema’s facade the decorations were described. Said to match the lavish interiors of the film, the design consisted of “a frieze richly embellished with plaster decorations in gold relief” that extended along the front of the theatre. This frieze was accompanied by a mildly risqué still from the film—showing Conrad Veidt attending a bathing Benita Hume (as the

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Duchess Marie Auguste)—displayed across the entire facade, which was framed “in a setting richly adorned in relief work” (“‘Jew Süss’ display at Tivoli”, October 11, 1934: 40). As Richards (1984) has observed, the 1930s represented something of a high point in exhibition site film promotions. Often imaginative and elaborate, billboards and displays in or around a cinema would typically reproduce some key aspect of a featured film; a spilling of the fictional world into reality. The promotional displays for Jew Süss at the Tivoli were designed and built by the banner specialists Suprema Publicity Service, and the designers apparently decided to emphasise the opulence and decadence of court life and the high production values required to effectively recreate this spectacle. A common criticism of the film was its lack of popular appeal—even the staid and stately Times newspaper described the piece as slow (see “Jew Süss”, October 5, 1934: 12)—and it thus seems probable that the display of the immediately hedonistic pleasures of rococo excess and sexual frisson was somewhat cynically utilised to entice a mass audience who might not otherwise be interested in this rather dour and literary production. Although the trade press enthused about the promotional decorations at the Tivoli, not all the attention the cinema’s eye-catching marketing strategy received was positive. Writing in the Daily Herald, the left-leaning journalist Hannen Swaffer primly chastised “the film industry” (“I Heard Yesterday”, October 16, 1934: 12) for the suggestive billboard of Süss conversing with the bathing duchess. While nothing in his article gives reason to believe that Swaffer’s objections were motivated by antisemitism, it does warrant considering to what extent the public display of a Jewish figure interacting with an obviously flirtatious gentile woman might prove discomfiting to non-Jews, particularly those individuals with minimal sympathy for a Jewish presence in Britain. While the satirical magazine Punch did not discuss the Tivoli’s marketing tactics, one article did concentrate on the physical space of the cinema following Jew Süss’s opening. In a supercilious piece listing Jewish-themed films recently shown at the Tivoli (in the twelve months prior to Jew Süss’s exhibition, The Wandering Jew and The House of Rothschild were both screened at the Tivoli.), it was provocatively asserted that the location “must begin to Aryanise itself or it will be thought of as the abode of Hebraic eminence and idiosyncrasy” (quoted in Tegel 1995: 227). For Punch the ongoing presence of ethnic difference had polluted the site, and if this undesirable mark were not to be made permanent, some purification had

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to occur. As much as Jew Süss’s overt presence in the public realm could confer legitimacy, then, this same visibility could be antagonistic enough to Jewry’s adversaries to provoke them into comment. Given the social context of Jew Süss’s release, it is not wholly surprising that prior to the film’s exhibition, the Jewish Chronicle’s film writer, “G. J.”, expressed some doubt over the venture, noting that s/he was awaiting it “with some anxiety” (“Judaism on the Screen”, January 12, 1934: 42). This apprehension was founded on the idea that the film’s content would provide a catalyst for anti-Jewish sentiment. As the article continued, the film could, “if handled with anything but the most expert discretion … produce an impression upon the minds of the masses very different from that desired by authors” (ibid.). While G. J. did not expand on what this impression might look like, it does not require much imagination to understand why the representation of a Jew as a cunning manipulator of powerful men could sound alarm bells. According to Tegel (1995), Süss’s life was subject to a variety of literary treatments during the nineteenth century, both philosemitic and antisemitic—the latter imagining Süss a sexual predator. This contradictory status continued into twentieth-century adaptations, with the Süss story variously presented on the Yiddish stage in New York under the direction of Maurice Schwartz in 1929 and used by Veit Harlan as the basis for his infamously antisemitic 1940 Nazi propaganda film. Drawing on Wilhelm Hauff’s 1837 novella of the same name, Harlan’s Jud Süß would see him twice tried for crimes against humanity in the years following the war. Highly ambiguous, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer was a figure open to widely contrasting artistic interpretations. It should also be recalled that only a few years previously, Jews on both sides of the Atlantic considered Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) a dangerous libel in its blaming of Jews for Jesus Christ’s death (Ohad-Karny 2005). Indeed, the Jewish Chronicle branded the film “the lie of lies” (“The King of Kings”, December 9, 1927: 12), conducting an ongoing campaign against the piece. For the Jewish press, films featuring Jewish characters were generally to be welcomed, but this did not mean they did not contain a minatory aspect, and it was often regarded as wise to approach their exhibition with some caution. There was a sense of relief, then, when upon Jew Süss’s release it could be confirmed that it contained “nothing that could give rise to or intensify anti-Semitism” (G. J., Jew Süss at the Tivoli, JC, October 12, 1934: 43). Indeed, its depiction of Süss’s honour and courage, and

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the irrational brutality of racism, were seen to offer “valuable lessons” and “throw open the whole ugly, disgusting mentality of persecution and mass hatred” (ibid.). Far from presenting a threat to Jews, then, the film’s highly public nature—its “ultimate visibility”—was to be welcomed. It was the condition on which the text’s moral instruction could take effect. The spectre of antisemitic representations was not the only menace the Jewish Chronicle was glad to dismiss. Equally significant was the declaration that Jew Süss contained “nothing that could be classed as pro-Jewish propaganda” (ibid.). Of great importance to the paper’s reviewer was the quality of restraint apparent in the production, its “tact”. This “tact” was attributed to directorial choice, with Lothar Mendes asserted to adopt “the method of the intelligent observing eye… ingeniously giving that impression of factual recording which… [is]… the best suited method to the subject” (ibid). Unfortunately, however, the finale of the film struck a wrong note, contrasting unfavourably with the composure of the overwhelming majority of the film. As the review continued, the gravity of the execution scene was “marred… by the incontinent howling of Suss’s Jewish friends” that left the audience feeling “as though our bosoms had been roughly pummelled in a street row” (ibid.). The Jewish Times was similarly dissatisfied with this ending, complaining that “the great wailing of the crowd” detracted from the self-possession of Veidt’s performance (Myer, “Film Triumph of Jew Süss”, October 7, 1934: 2). Thus, for the Jewish press, the film was divided into two segments. The overwhelming majority of the film could be considered a success through its rejection of the manipulation of emotion; because the dramatic ending employed an appeal to affect, though, the final minutes were viewed as a failure. In distinction to some of the mainstream British press that unfavourably compared the bulk of film to the engaging American style of product but enjoyed the “Great Climax” (Daily Mail, October 8, 1934: 9) of the finale, the Jewish press saw virtue only in the aesthetic of detachment. The Jewish press expressed the feeling that aesthetic austerity was the most appropriate form for this film. In short, its reviewers liked the first eighty-five minutes, which many viewers found boring, but disliked the final five minutes, which were highly dramatic. That a detached and austere aesthetic might be understood as an appropriate expressive mode for a film dealing with the subject of Jewish persecution should be understood within its specific historical context.

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As we have seen, Jewish involvement in the film business was positioned as a source of communal pride in the Jewish press. However, as Watchman suggested in his article commenting on the reception of House of Rothschild, the perception that Jews were central to the business of film production was recognised beyond the enclaves of Jewish life. Discussions of such an idea operated at various registers. More benign articulations merely noted the high numbers of Jews working in the trade. In the Daily Film Renter, for instance, several articles published around the time of the 1938 Jewish New Year recorded the significance of the holiday for the business. In addition to wishing readers a happy Rosh Hashanah (Commentator, “Wardour Street Gossip”, September 24, 1938: 2), it was noted that the Wardour Street area of Soho (then the centre of the London film industry) was lacking its customary bustle (Tatler, “Wardour Street Gossip”, September 27, 1938: 2). Somewhat more malevolent, however, was the meshing of the idea that cinema was seen to possess an almost supernatural power to exert influence over audiences with the antisemitic canard that Jews were in control of the entertainment industry and mass media. The most extreme manifestations of this idea came from organised fascism, with Arnold Lees, founder of the virulently antisemitic Imperial Fascist League, referring to Gaumont-British as “Gaumont-Yiddish” in his newspaper The Fascist (Issue 65, October 1934). That Jew Süss might be understood as an outcome of the prevalence of Jews in the film business was not an unrealistic possibility. At the beginning of 1934, the Observer published a piece titled “Judaism on the Screen” in which critic C. A. Lejeune lauded several upcoming productions featuring Jewish characters, stating, “In England and America the epics of Jewry have begun” (January 7, 1934: 23). With a subheading to the article reading “The Significance of ‘Suss’” Jew Süss was singled out for special attention, and production information (cast, set detail) was given along with quotes from the director, Mendes, and the assertion that the film could be read as “a protest of a whole race against barbarism” (ibid.). At the end of the piece the writer expanded upon her theme of righteous propaganda, concluding: For nearly half a century they [Jews] have been using the motion picture as a mouthpiece for the ideas and interests of other races. It is not unreasonable that at last, now that the right moment has come, they should contemplate using it for the justification of their own. (ibid.)

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For Lejeune, then, to make sense of Jew Süss was to understand it as a collective Jewish response to Nazi persecution. Jew Süss, together with The House of Rothschild and the aborted Victor Saville project Magnolia Street, was part of what she saw as a wider propaganda strategy involving both US and British producers to promote Jewish interests. Lejeune’s article was acknowledged and discussed at least twice in the Jewish Chronicle, and although greeted favourably—the piece is referred to as “excellent”—one senses some discomfit in the author, and Lejeune is said to merely “allege” (rather than state) that Jews are “using their own medium as a racial manifesto” (G. J., “Judaism on Screen”, January 12, 1934: 41). Ambivalence around the notion of film as Jewish medium was an ongoing feature of the Jewish Chronicle’s coverage of the issue, and as the 1930s developed, the newspaper’s take on the matter shifted between contradictory positions. In addition to a boosterish attitude to the prevalence of Jewish talent in the film business, there was significant investment in the idea that cinema had the power to corrupt and that Jews involved in the industry had a moral responsibility to curb film’s deleterious effects. In early 1931 the Jewish Chronicle’s editor (presumably L.J. Greenberg) used his column to condemn “undesirable films” in the hope that his “calling attention to the matter, would be useful, in view of the large influence, at almost every point, upon the cinema industry of Jews” (“Undesirable Films”, March 20, 1931: 13). A few months later, a letter submitted to a “Los Angeles journal” by an anonymous “Hollywood Jew” was discussed at some length in the same paper. Denouncing “Jews who control the movie industry”, the writer claimed that Hollywood’s moguls were “engaged only in the feverish acquisition of wealth by pandering to the worst instincts of humanity” (“Jews and the Film Industry”, October 9, 1931: 16). Far from condemning such a position as objectively antisemitic, the editor’s column again appealed to ethics, stating that “this call to Jews to behave justly … is but part of the Jewish mission” (“Jews and the Films”, October 16, 1931: 7). Guiding British understandings of Hollywood during the interwar years was a wider cultural debate that has come to be known as the “battle of the brows”. While self-appointed spokespersons for a modernist intellectual elite—the “highbrows”—derided the cultural tastes and modes of living of those in the socioeconomic middle, “middlebrow” cultural producers and critics took issue with both the avant-garde pretensions of continental Europe and the profit-driven populism of the

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USA—instead arguing for a national British aesthetic able to eschew outright commercialism yet awake to public taste (see Napper 2009). The aesthetic dispositions of the Jewish Chronicle were located well within the middlebrow band of the spectrum, and in the early 1930s the paper’s comments on cinema aligned with this vision of the cultural landscape. For Dick Hebdige (1988), the profound social and economic changes brought about in interwar Britain (namely, the growth of a lower middle class and the rapid expansion of consumer markets) were registered most keenly at the level of culture, and the USA—conceived as an alien force eroding British cultural and moral values—was understood to be the key catalyst of this upheaval. It was from such a perspective that the editor of the Jewish Chronicle was to assert that “films sent across here from America were largely demoralising and disgusting, and designed to play upon the worst passions of those for whom they are provided” (“American Films”, August 21, 1931: 6). By 1932, however, increasingly vituperative attacks on an allegedly Jewish film industry appear to have become a feature of public discourse. Far from being merely the preserve of the political extreme right, this notion was articulated at various levels of authority: culture, state, the church. In his poem “Naaman’s Song”, Rudyard Kipling transposed Hollywood for the biblical river Jordan and recounted the Syrian general Naaman’s obstinate refusal to bathe in it when the prophet Elisha suggested doing so as a cure for his leprosy. Responsibility for the supposedly demoralising influence of cinema was laid squarely with Jewish producers, with one line stating how Jordan’s banks/Hollywood was “Commanded and embellished and patrolled by Israelites”, while another sinisterly warned that “Israel watcheth over each”3 (1932). Somewhat less cryptically, the Conservative M. P. George Hartland was in no doubt over who was to blame for the “ruin” of “millions of boys and girls in this country” (quoted in “Give a Dog a Bad Name…”, JC, May 13, 1932: 7). Elaborating on his conspiracy theory, he was recorded referring to “a syndicate of dirty American Jews—the Hollywood 3 The poem “Naaman’s Song” accompanied a short story, ‘Aunt Ellen’, in Kipling’s Limits and Renewals. The verse from which the second quotation is taken reads as follows: And here is mock of faith and truth, for children to behold; And every door of ancient dirt reopened to the old; With every word that taints the speech, and show that weakens thought; And Israel watcheth over each, and—doth not watch for nought…

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magnates; what fine English names most of them have got—who take damned good care they observe their own Sabbath [sic]” (ibid.). Finally, both individuals and publications of the church were implicated in a series of calumnies. In a meeting of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Rev. T. B. Stewart Thompson was said to have delivered a diatribe on the Jews that included the accusation that “The Jew largely controls the places of amusement” (The Editor, “Damn the Jew”, JC, June 10, 1932: 7). Later it was reported that Canon Patrick Palmer of Ilford, in east London, had, in an interview, referred to cinema as “Jewish filth” (The Editor, “A Clergyman’s Lapse”, Jewish Chronicle, August 17, 1934: 6). All too often, then, antisemitism became a feature of debates and campaigns around film morality. Within this discourse American and Jewish alterity could coalesce, introducing some ambiguity into the identity of the cultural invader infecting vulnerable young British minds via cinema screens. In response to this development, the Jewish Chronicle directly challenged the blatant antisemitism of the worst offenders, designating, for instance, Canon Palmer’s comments “Nazi language” (ibid.). But the newspaper also seems to have become increasingly careful to moderate references to Jewish control of the industry, drawing a sharp distinction between the recognition of a prominence of Jewish production personnel and the notion of a coordinated Jewish film monopoly. The existence of this latter entity was readily questioned, voicing doubt that George Hartland M. P. possessed evidence for his assertions (The Editor, “Give a Dog a Bad Name…”, JC, May 13, 1932: 7) or—as we have seen—prefiguring Lejeune’s suggestion of cinematic Jewish collective action with the adjective “alleged” (G. J., “Judaism on Screen”, JC, January 12, 1934: 40). Any move by the Jewish press to read Jew Süss as a sober and considered presentation of reality, and not a tendentious piece of emotional manipulation, is thus wholly comprehensible. Given the context of a widespread belief in the idea of Jewish media dominance, any perceived deviation from an objective and neutral narrative within Jew Süss might risk a public dismissal of the piece as the special pleading of minority interests or, worse, attract the reputation of conspiratorial propaganda. Whatever judgment the Jewish Chronicle reached, this could not stabilise or limit readings of Jew Süss proffered elsewhere in the British news media. Despite claims that the film evinced no pro-Jewish tendency, at least two mainstream British newspapers came to the opposite

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conclusion. Writing in the Evening Standard, John Betjeman considered Jew Süss “obviously a film of propaganda” (“A Great Thrill Film”, October 6, 1934: 8); and as we have seen, the Observer’s C. A. Lejeune was an enthusiastic advocate for conducting Jewish defence through cinematic means, believing Jews to have “the clearest claim of all to a national drama of the screen” (“Judaism on the Screen”, January 7, 1934: 41). Interestingly, Lejeune registered a distinction between “this new Jewish movement in the cinema” (ibid.) and the propaganda produced by Russia, the USA, or fascist governments. For her, the dividing line, or what she called Jewish propaganda’s “odd and peculiarly characteristic quality”, was in “its diffidence. It is the only deliberate propaganda on the screen that is reluctant to admit its authority” (ibid.). In an era in which English clergymen were denouncing cinema as “Jewish filth”, it should, perhaps, have been less of a surprise that films dealing with antisemitism might be marked by hesitancy. The naïveté of liberal newspaper columnists aside, both film producers and the Jewish press seem to have been united in the recognition that in Britain one had to tread gingerly when dealing with Jewish communal concerns in film. For some Jews, it was wholly desirable that film might act as a vessel to transport Jewish concerns into the gaze of a generalised public. What they had to reckon with was the risk contained in the moment of rendering a given production visible. This risk was fully recognised by Jewish newspapers and was explicitly reflected on. If, as Raymond Williams ([1961] 2001) suggests, lived “structures of feeling” can be discerned in the cultural detritus of the past, a discomfiting social uncertainty appears as a signal characteristic of the everyday experience of Jews in interwar Britain. Although we can never reconstruct the precise relationship between press discourse and actually existing audiences, it is clear that readers of the British-Jewish press were addressed as a distinct kind of spectator in the writing about Jew Süss. Offered to them was a position—a space of habitation in the social field—from which reception of the film might be oriented. This position of reception was intrinsically contradictory—while a cinematic indictment of contemporary Jewish persecution was presented to offer some moral satisfaction to Jewish audiences, it was tempered by imagined projections of gentile consumption as potentially suspicious of the machinations of a Jewish film monopoly. As source material, the Süss story had historically been

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subject to opposing interpretations in various ideological contexts— as it would continue to be. It seems fitting that the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation’s one intervention into the precarity of Jewish life drew on such a mercurial narrative.

Bibliography Bergfelder, Tim, and Christian Cargnelli, eds. 2012. Destination London: German-Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950. New York: Berghahn Books. Bial, Henry. 2005. Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carr, Richard. 1937. “Peoples Pictures and Peoples Palaces”. World Film News 1 (10) (January): 8–9. Cooper Merian C., and Ernest B. Schoedsack, dirs. 1993. King Kong. USA: RKO Radio Pictures. 35MM. Dean, Basil, dir. 1933. Loyalties. UK: Associated Talking Pictures (ATP). 35MM. DeMille, Cecil B., dir. 1927. The King of Kings. USA: DeMille Pictures Corporation. 35MM. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. G. McClurg. Reprint London: Penguin Books, 1996. Elvey, Maurice, dir. 1933. The Wandering Jew. UK: Julius Hagen Productions. 35MM. Erens, Patricia. 1984. The Jew in American Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eyles, Allan, and Keith Skone. 1992. London’s West End Cinemas. Sutton: Keytone Publications. Gabler, Neil. 1988. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York: Crown Publishers. Gough-Yates, Kevin. 1992. “Jews and Exiles in British Cinema”. The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 37 (1): 517–41. Hansen, Miriam. 1995. “America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harlan, Veit, dir. 1940. Jud Süß. Chicago, IL: International Historic Films, 2008. DVD. Hebdige, Dick. 1988. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. London and New York: Routledge. Herman, Felicia. 2001. “Hollywood, Nazism, and the Jews, 1933–41”. American Jewish History 89 (1): 61–89.

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Kipling, Rudyard. 1932. Limits and Renewals. London: Macmillan & Co. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Annette. 2002. An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Low, Rachael. 1985. The History of British Film 1929–1939: Film Making in 1930s Britain. London: Allen and Unwin. Mendes, Lothar, dir. 1934. Jews Suss. UK: Gaumont British Picture Corporation. 35MM. Accessed via BFI National Archive YouTube Channel: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=dMTHwuQnIKA. Napper, Lawrence. 2009. British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Ohad-Karny, Yael. 2005. “‘Anticipating’ Gibson’s the Passion of the Christ: The Controversy Over Cecil B. De Mille’s The King of Kings.” Jewish History 19 (2): 189–210. Prawer, S. S. 2005. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933. New York: Berghahn Books. Richards, Jeffrey. 1984. The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul. Spicer, Andrew. 2012. “A British Empire of Their Own? Jewish Entrepreneurs in the British Film Industry”. Journal of European Popular Culture 3 (2): 117–29. Tegel, Susan. 1995. “The Politics of Censorship: Britain’s ‘Jew Süss’ (1934) in London, New York and Vienna.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15 (2): 219–44. Walsh, Raoul, dir. 1931. The Yellow Ticket. USA: Fox Film Corporation. 35MM. Werker, Alfred L., dir. 1934, The House of Rothschild. Los Angeles: United Artists. 35MM. Williams, Raymond. (1961) 2001. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus. Reprint Peterborough, ON: Broadview.

Archive BBFC Scenario Report for A German Tragedy, May 10, 1933. British Board of Film Censors Collection Fonds—BBFC, Scenario Reports 1933 File—BBFC1-2 1933, British Film Institute, London. Troxy Souvenir Brochure. 1933. Catalogue Reference 794.1. Tower Hamlets Local History Library, London.

CHAPTER 6

Jewish Defence

On September 26, 1936, a small group of Mosleyite fascists decided to spend an evening distributing propaganda and parading outside the Troxy cinema in the heart of London’s East End. Upon leaving the theatre patrons were greeted with cries of “Read the Blackshirt. The only British paper not financed by Jews”. As the Jewish Chronicle asserted, this “was an act of undoubted and deliberate provocation”. The East End was the centre of Jewish life in London, and as the paper continued, “it is well known that Jews compose a large proportion of the Saturday night audience at the Troxy”. While “loud shouts against the Blackshirts” are recorded, a large police presence apparently ensured no more than a few scuffles broke out. Indeed, more than one bystander is reported to have commented “It’s lucky the police are here to protect them, or else those Blackshirts would receive such a lesson that they wouldn’t come again” (“Fascist Provocation in Commercial Road”, JC, October 2, 1936: 4). A mere eight days later the area would explode into violence at the famous “Battle of Cable Street”. Revealed in this historical vignette is the profound cultural centrality of the cinema in 1930s Britain. The BUF men did not conduct their antisemitic jolly at a public transport intersection or adjacent to a place of worship; instead they chose the neighbourhood’s premier “picture palace”. It is thus something of a bitter irony that this same site could never fully transform into a base from which anti-fascist action might take place. From the period 1933 to 1939 the sensitivities of the British censor and the squeamishness of Hollywood conspired to ensure the © The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_6

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most significant mass communications medium of the era—the cinema— would remain remarkably free of denunciations of fascism. That said, the same spirit of popular confrontation that animated Jewish defence in the East End was felt by many Jews across the globe—including those involved in the film industry. Recognising the “propaganda” potential of film a few savvy individuals were able to navigate their way around the dead ends of Britain’s censorship maze, and occasionally some film with a critical take on Hitler’s regime slipped into the public gaze. As we saw in Chapter 5, a few major films with scripts covertly critical of Nazism evaded the censors’ radar, the most prominent being The House of Rothschild (Werker 1934) and Jew Suss (Mendes 1934). These did not, however, comprise the full extent of cinematic material positioned as revelatory of German antisemitism. Situated as conceptually distinct from narrative feature productions was documentary imagery produced for inclusion in newsreels and other factual film. Although the newsreel was still understood to be a supplement to print-based forms of news media well into the interwar period, the footage of real-world events presented within it was conceived as epistemologically distinct to the fictional contrivances of film studios. As such, any circulation of actuality film demonstrative of the menace posed by National Socialism was eagerly discussed and publicised by the British-Jewish press. Amongst the most striking use of such material was in George Roland’s (1933) The Eternal Wanderer.1 Now virtually forgotten, this extraordinary production was the first narrative film anywhere in the world—and the only Yiddish language feature— to launch an unambiguous attack on the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Film as Response to Nazism Following the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 Jewish organisations throughout the world quickly sought to respond to events in Germany. The Jewish press issued regular reports on antisemitic movements, and the rise of National Socialism had long been followed. The name “Adolf Hitler” was familiar to readers of the Jewish Chronicle since the failed 1 The Eternal Wanderer was the title chosen for the UK distribution of the film; its original US title was The Wandering Jew (in Yiddish: Der Vanderer Yid). Presumably the name was changed to ensure it was not confused with The Wandering Jew directed by Maurice Elvey in 1933. The film was also exhibited in the USA under the titles: Abraham Our Patriarch, Jews in Exile, Nazi Terror, The Jew in Germany.

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“beer hall putsch” a decade earlier, and many British Jews were alert to the peril he posed to their co-religionists. In the USA Rabbi Stephen Wise and his American Jewish Congress had been quick to mobilise, organising a range of protests and enacting a boycott of German products. Mirroring this strategy British Jews gathered in mass meetings and refused to buy anything carrying the label “Made in Germany”. Since the films of Ufa were a significant and high profile export much was made of the need to purge British cinema screens of them. In a publicity notice placed in the Jewish Chronicle by the “World Alliance for Combating Anti-Semitism”, for example, specific emphasis was placed on the need to “Boycott German Films” (see April 28, 1933: 25). Film was also brought into protest activities in an active sense, and an early example of the utilisation of cinema to supplement public protest can be seen in the creation of a “film record” (see JC, July 21, 1933: 10) of a march of 50,000 on Hyde Park. Taking place in the symbolic heart of the nation in central London, this demonstration formed a key activity during a day of anti-Nazi protest on July 20, 1933. An advertising notice in the Jewish Chronicle carried the information that the film was to be screened at the Plaza Theatre near to Piccadilly Circus a few days following the real-world events (see ibid.). Visibility politics taking place in the material location of the street could thus receive an extended life and even greater prominence when transferred to the virtual space of the cinema screen. As Kushner (1994) has explained, in 1930s Britain a commonly articulated slur against Jews was they could be found constantly complaining about some perceived slight, as well as seeking special treatment not extended to the social plurality. While Kushner argues that it would be mistaken to assert the existence of some all encompassing antisemitism poisoning English life during the period, it would not be an overstatement to posit that Jewish anxieties about the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the persecution of Jews because of it were frequently dismissed as “atrocity propaganda” (see 41–42). From government reports to the pages of the popular press such notions were in wide circulation. In this social context it was virtually impossible for Jewish writers or campaigners not to have the veracity of their claims—about, say, concentration camps—questioned by some commentators simply because of the ethnically marked status of the speaker. For the Jewish press any public discourse that highlighted the plight of Europe’s Jews and could remain untainted by cultural particularity was thus understood to be valuable currency.

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During the early 1930s the Jewish press began to take an interest in a specific category of newsreel story and documentary film. Although a narratorial tone of political impartiality was strictly adhered to, the British newsreels traced the rise of Nazism in Germany throughout the decade. British Movietone News, for instance, provided regular pieces including items on the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Riechstag fire show trials and the Nuremburg rallies. Particularly notable was a report on the boycott of Jewish businesses staged during the first months of National Socialist administration in 1933. Eager to pick up on the story an article in the Jewish Chronicle pointed out the reel was a “special edition”, and detailed scenes from the piece. In addition to remarking on shots of “Nazi Storm Troops” displaying “offensive notices” and painting “inciting symbols on shop windows”, the newspaper highlighted imagery of “lorry loads of gangsters in Nazi uniforms careering through the streets shouting anti-Semitic calls and lampoons in raucously repugnant tones” (“News Pictures of German Boycott”, April 14, 1933: 31). For the Jewish press the appeal of the newsreels was located not only in their potential to galvanise some sort of action on the behalf of the Jews of Germany, but also in their capacity to promote the fight against antisemitic feeling within Britain. Reviewing British Movietone News’ reel depicting the boycott of Jewish shops, the Jewish Chronicle noted how the “vivid scenes” were offensive to “the English mind with its instinctive belief in fair play”. Responding to these images, the London audience (at the Rialto News Theatre in Coventry Street) was described as “evidently deeply moved by the picture” and provoked into shouting “cries of ‘Shame!’” (ibid.). Such a response was naturally encouraging to the Jewish Chronicle, not least because the medium responsible for instigating such a reaction, the newsreel, was profoundly implicated in constructing the national consciousness. Receiving especially favourable commentary in Jewish newspapers were those editions of the American March of Time films that contained some denunciation of Hitler and the malignant influence of Nazism. Although adhering to many of the same criteria as the established British newsreels—producing a story of topical relevance to a regular and predictable schedule—the March of Time films differed in format insomuch as episodes would appear monthly rather than weekly. In contrast to British Movietone News and the other UK produced reels, the March of Time was regarded as being less objective in analysis as well as more willing to confront controversial issues. Of the various March of Time

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releases to examine the plight of the Jews under the Nazis, the editions Inside Nazi Germany: 1938 (1938) and The Refugee—Today and Tomorrow (1938) have come to be seen as the most historically significant (Fielding 1978). Certainly it is the case that these two episodes generated the largest quantity of discourse in the British-Jewish press. Reflecting the significance of the subject matter Inside Nazi Germany: 1938 was the first March of Time production to explore a single topic during its fifteen-minute duration rather than cover multiple events. Framed as a revelatory expose of the Nazi regime’s expansionist ambitions and totalitarian policies the film includes scenes explicitly examining the treatment of Germany’s Jews, using footage of public signage and racially designated park benches enforcing the special segregation of Jews and non-Jews in German towns. Premiering in London in May 1938 the film was warmly received by the Jewish Times where it was reported that “about one hundred members” of the Jewish Board of Deputies had been asked “by special invitation of the proprietors of the Cameo News Theatre, Charing Cross Road” (“An Anti-Nazi Film”, May 19, 1938: 4) to a screening. Listing the most prominent of the attendees (“…Barnett Janner, ex-MP; …Lady Spielman; John Diamond, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee…”) it was noted that “the visitors were greatly impressed with the film”. Significantly, this article was placed in the privileged position of publication’s “English Section”. Clearly it was desirable that news of “anti-Nazi” publicity that “should be good propaganda” be spread to as diverse an audience as possible and not just to Yiddish speakers. Indeed, it was asserted “it is a film everyone should see” and that “nothing but good can come as a result of its widest possible showing” (ibid.). Distributed in Britain in early 1939 the narrative of The Refugee— Today and Tomorrow begins in China and then shifts to Spain with armed conflict identified as driving the mass displacement of peoples, before a “new” category of refugee, specific to Northern Europe, is examined. Seeking to escape the repressive policies of the Nazi regime a host of marginalised social groups are shown searching for asylum beyond Germany’s borders, with Jews particularly prominent. For the Jewish Chronicle The Refugee—Today and Tomorrow was regarded a more successful, unsparing depiction of the suffering being wrought on European Jewry than Inside Nazi Germany: 1938, and two extended articles reviewing this later film were published in its pages. Unsurprisingly it was those sequences of Jewish privation that were singled out for extended

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comment, with references made to “shots of ordinary decent people being driven from their homes by Nazi bullies” (“The Refugee – Today and Tomorrow”, January 13, 1939: 55). It was also noted the title had “been shown recently in the United states, where it…[had]…created a profound impression” (“The Refugees”, January 6, 1939: 44). Such an impression, it was hoped, might effect action in the “hard publics” of legislative bodies, and these films were touted as being able to “powerfully assist in arousing the conscience of the democratic world on behalf of those most wretched and pitiable human beings – the refugees” (“The Refugee – Today and Tomorrow”, January 13, 1939: 55). Amid this enthusiasm for a visibility of anti-Nazi discourse in the public sphere, occasional reservations were voiced about the covering of National Socialist policy in news films. A topic of regular consternation for the left in Britain during the interwar years was the newsreels’ unswerving presentation of national narratives within the terms of consensus. A purging of controversy in news stories was, in fact, deliberate policy for all the reels. As Nicholas Pronay (2002) points out, “the five newsreel editors met regularly to decide on their policies concerning ‘touchy’ subjects” (148). Inevitably they resolved to emphasise order and deliver only what they regarded as the objective facts of an event. It should be remembered that self-censorship by the newsreels was a response to the widespread notion during the 1930s of the power of cinematic technologies to influence behaviour. The British Board of Film Censors operated in a manner that would now be perceived as hysterical, imposing bans for numerous minor transgressions. As a news source the reels were not officially subject to the same standards of censorship as fictional releases. However, the reality of this apparently charmed status was the screech of a “shrill chorus demanding censorship” every time an item took a “small step away from the principle of ‘nothing which the average man will not like’” (ibid.: 151). For the Jewish Chronicle one area of dissatisfaction with the newsreels’ coverage of events in Europe was the possibility the politically naïve might not comprehend the full implication of the on-screen events. While the “innate” sense of “fair play” of the “English mind” had, for the paper, been productive of catcalls when the thuggish actions of uniformed Sturmabteilung were presented in British Movietone’s 1933 reel, the non-Jewish audience apparently “hardly grasped the real significance of Nazi brutality” (“News Pictures of German Boycott”, April 14, 1933: 31). The German regime required a more severe indictment than the

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news film—with its inclination towards objectivity—could offer. Further, in contrast to the Jewish Times’ admiration of Inside Nazi Germany: 1938, the Jewish Chronicle was less convinced of its capacities to convey the malevolence of fascist politics. Although it was acknowledged the title’s spoken commentary was censorious of German policy, “the actual film” was felt to cast “a haze of glorification over the present regime with its labour camps…(and)…regimentation” (“Nazi Germany, 1938”, May 13, 1938: 60). Paradoxically, then, while the newsreels’ reputation for neutrality enabled an effective circulation of “Jewish” concerns in a generalised public sphere, this same lack of bias foreclosed the possibility of a truly forceful attack.

The Eternal Wanderer The only film during the interwar period that clearly identified the centrality of antisemitism to National Socialism and could claim an enhanced objectivity through the use of actuality imagery was the Yiddish language The Eternal Wanderer. Produced in America in 1933 this explicit denunciation of Germany under Hitler tells the story of Arthur Levi, a Jewish artist and professor at the Berlin Academy of Art. In commemoration of the institution’s fiftieth anniversary Levi has produced a painting of a Jewish patriarch, modelled after his deceased father, entitled “The Wandering Jew”. This references both the legend of the “Wandering Jew” and the then current status of the Jews as a people without homeland. However, although a loyal German with a distinguished war record the artist receives a rapid political education when, successively, his work is rejected by the Academy, he witnesses an antisemitic street rally, and his gentile fiancée abandons him. Levi’s disillusionment with the new regime complete he resolves to destroy his picture. At the moment of plunging a knife into the canvas, though, the painting’s subject is animated by the spirit of Levi’s father who steps from the picture before going on to offer a panoramic history of the persecution of the Jews that takes in the Babylonian seizure of Jerusalem, mediaeval Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and Tsarist pogroms. Concluding that in moments of strife a saviour comes to the aid of the Jews, Theodore Herzl is compared to Moses and the film ends with the development of a Jewish state offered as a resolution to their plight. A curious piece The Eternal Wanderer features an assortment of already extant visual material, as well as a series of digressive episodes. When

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Arthur Levi’s father recounts persecutions suffered in Jewish history the on-screen imagery is culled from a variety of silent epics and travelogues. Also shown is early footage of nation building in Palestine. Further, towards the end of the film an unusual fantasy sequence unfolds. This sees the protagonist dressed in “biblical” garb as optical effects and matte work situate him in a strange omnitopic landscape. Despite this disjointed and otherworldly quality the film held an ace card: documentary footage of Nazi rallies and rituals of racial purging had been made available to the filmmakers from a private source. Integrating this material into the film’s narrative proved a powerful technique. In contrast to bogus interior sets and awkward camera movement, the scenes depicting public burnings of “Jewish” literature at mass rallies stand out as starkly visually compelling.2 Some of the film’s oddness may, perhaps, be attributed to its rapid production schedule. Desiring to create an immediate response to fast-developing events across the Atlantic producer Herman Ross formed the production company Jewish American Film Arts in July of 1933. Gathering together a crew of creative staff and technicians their debut project would be The Eternal Wanderer. With experience in recycling old silent films as Yiddish talkies George Roland was hired as director. Jacob Mestel provided the screenplay and the one-time star of Maurice Schwartz’s Art Theatre, Jacob Ben-Ami, would perform the lead as Arthur Levi. Filming soon took place at the Atlas studio on Long Island and the picture was screening in New York by late October. The film’s release was not without problems, however. While the New York State Motion Picture Board granted the film a licence for exhibition some jitters were felt over the use of English subtitles. Potentially opening the film up to consumption by non-Jewish audiences the Board feared the film “might create a good deal of friction and trouble, and possibly violence” (quoted in Hoberman 1991: 197). As such, the film could only be shown on the proviso that any disturbance provoked by its screening might result in a withdrawal of the titled print. In England the distribution of the film provoked similar anxieties. In contrast to the US institutional response, however, this resulted in an outright ban. First submitted to the British Board of Film Censors 2 On May 10, 1933 nationalist students at universities across Germany engaged in a coordinated series of public burnings of “un-German” literature. The largest of these gatherings took place in Berlin, attracting approximately 40,000 people.

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(BBFC) by one Mr. J. Pearson on March 9, 1934, it was assessed by the organisation’s president—Edward Shortt—who issued it with a total rejection certificate on March 16. A letter from the BBFC to the London County Council (LCC) dated November 14, 1934, reveals that “exception was taken to the film on the ground that its propagandist nature rendered it unsuitable for exhibition in this country” (GLC/ DG/EL/01/250, LMA). Also in the letter was the information that the submitting party—Mr. Pearson—“had been associated with the American film trade for about six years and had come to the country with the express purpose of exploiting the film referred to”. For some reason it was added that Mr. Pearson was “found…[to be] a Parsee” (ibid.). Accepting defeat Pearson seems to have sold or passed on the distribution rights to the Marble Arch-based Dan Fish, a man the Jewish Chronicle referred to as a “well known person in the film distributing business in London” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, February 22, 1935: 43). Believing the film to be something other than a hopeless cause Fish appealed to the London County Council for a review of the ban in a letter dated October 29, 1934, arguing that the “picture possesses exhibition value only to the limited cinemas that cater for Jewish audiences” (GLC/ DG/EL/01/250). After some confusion locating the original documentation pertaining to the film’s rejection by the BBFC arrangements were finalised between Fish and the viewing committee at the LCC to see the film at a private theatre of the Western Electrical Company in Bush House, Aldwych on November 23, 1934. The viewing committee seem to have gone about their task with some seriousness, communicating with Fish that no press were to be invited to the showing and that only those issued with special passes would be admitted. In an LCC memo dated November 21 the procedure for assessing the film was outlined. In addition to LCC members attending the screening there would also be representatives from the neighbouring regional municipal authorities of Middlesex County Council and Surrey County Council. During the screening no member was to intimate whether they felt disposed to uphold the censor’s wishes, and after the film was exhibited a “general discussion” (GLC/DG/ EL/01/250) was to take place between the different groups. Each council would then return to their respective district and deliberate on whether a recommendation for certification be granted. Duly, the screening did go ahead, with the film being passed by the Chairman of the screening committee Hubert L Foden-Pattison. In the official report dated November 23, 1934, he commented:

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“the film is a dignified and passionate protest against the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany”, and the committee was “of the opinion that the film, which will appeal primarily to Jewish audiences, is not likely, although admittedly “propaganda”, to be injurious to morality or to be offensive to public feeling in England”. (GLC/DG/EL/01/250)

This allowed for the film to be shown in any cinema in the twenty-nine boroughs of the County of London area. However, voices in favour of upholding the ban were raised. Specific boroughs covered by Surrey County Council continued to refuse permission to exhibit the film. And opinion within the LCC could not have been said to have been homogenous. In a letter written on the day of the screening, J. A. Gillison, a Labour Party member of the Council, wrote to the committee stating he felt it “wise to refuse sanction”. An assortment of reasons were given including a belief that “the film gives expression to our innate sadism (love of maltreating others) and equally to our masochism (love of being maltreated and humiliated)” (GLC/DG/EL/01/250). Apparently the senior committee members were not enthusiastic readers of KrafftEbing, and the film was showing in central London at the Forum Cinema on March 17, 1935. Situated beneath Charing Cross Railway Station the Forum was well known for offering cinematic curiosities, and The Eternal Wanderer exhibited both in venues associated with the distribution of foreign films and in cinemas catering explicitly to Jewish audiences. Following a two-week premiere in the city centre the film transferred to the East End, appearing for one week at the Mile End Empire. In addition to the main attraction of the film the performer Leo Fuld appeared on the stage “singing Jewish melodies” (see Advertisement, JC, March 29, 1935: 5) as part of the program. From London the print travelled north to Manchester, where it screened at the city centre GaietyTheatre during the week beginning Monday 8 April. Returning briefly to the capital the film’s final 1935 screening in London appears to have taken place on Sunday 14 April at Woburn House in Bloomsbury (then home to various Jewish communal organisations including the Board of Deputies of British Jews). Part of a special event organised by the Federation of Synagogues and the Jewish National Fund it was shown alongside a Zionist propaganda film with the title Eretz Israel.

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There is some suggestion the film may also have been screened in Leeds around this time. Certainly it is the case that the Leeds Chief Constables Office contacted the LCC in a letter dated March 2, 1935, requesting information on any conditions that been placed on the exhibition of the film in London (GLC/DG/EL/01/25); and Leeds Watch Committee minutes do reveal an unnamed uncertificated film passed for exhibition soon after this date (LLC 5/1/24/). The Yorkshire Evening News also reports witnessing a private view of the film in early March of the same year (“In Yiddish”, March 2, 1935: 3), but it is unclear whether a release was achieved at this time since none of the regional newspapers carry an advertisement for the title during this period. By the mid-summer, however, the film was showing in Scotland, screening first at the La Scala Cinema in central Glasgow, and then at the La Scala Cinema in Edinburgh’s Old Town, the Jewish Chronicle reporting it being scheduled to appear at the venue during the week beginning August 5, 1935 (“General Releases”, August 2, 1935: 30). In 1938, with conditions for German Jews worsening further, The Eternal Wanderer received a second release exhibiting around the country in a series of one-night fundraising presentations. With the permission of Leeds Watch Committee the Forum Cinema in the Chapeltown neighbourhood gave the film a late night performance on Saturday 23 July. A day later in London the Phoenix Cinema in Charing Cross Road hosted a “special showing” (see Advertisement, JC, July 22, 1938: 56) of two screenings. The final prewar screening in the UK seems to have been in Liverpool. Shown at the Central Hall in Renshaw Street on Thursday September 15, the event was organised as a charity performance by the Zionist Society, with receipts going to the Women’s Welfare Fund (“Forthcoming Events”, JC, September 9, 1938: 12). Further screenings of the film were attempted, but even this late into the decade the film was considered controversial and municipal authorities refused exhibition requests. Quoting the trade publication the Daily Film Renter, the Jewish Chronicle noted that the Smethwick Watch Committee had recently branded The Eternal Wanderer “racial propaganda” (“The Eternal Wanderer Banned”, JC, September 30, 1938: 42) and would not permit its exhibition. In the same article the newspaper reminded readers that Smethwick was the fascist leader Oswald Mosley’s constituency in the days when he represented Labour in the House of Commons.

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Film as a Political Statement In part, it seems highly likely The Eternal Wanderer’s failure to imprint itself on the collective memory of film history is a result of the piece’s low production values. Many of the performances are stilted, sets look artificial and camera movements are awkward. The technical shortcomings of the film were not lost on contemporary reviewers, and some stern criticism came from both the mainstream and British-Jewish press. The Manchester Guardian—which covered the film in three articles— considered “the cutting and sequences…technically poor” and felt the piece as a whole “uneven” (“Nazi-Jew Film”, April 9, 1935: 13). The film reviewer of the Jewish Chronicle responded in even harsher tones, stating “the direction is poor, the cutting definitely bad, as is some of the photography” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, February 22, 1935: 43). Yet despite such reservations no reviewer perceived the film as valueless, often readily asserting its virtues as transcending aesthetics. Indeed, for the Jewish Chronicle it was a “really remarkable all-Jewish film” (ibid.). In part this was due to the performance of Jacob Ben-Ami in the lead as Arthur Levi. Applauded in reviews that accompanied both 1935 and 1938 releases the Jewish Chronicle announced “one cannot praise too highly the acting of Jacob Ben-Ami”, and claimed he brought an “extraordinary grace and a superb presence without any trace of effeminacy” (ibid.) to the role. Given the prominence of the figure of the feminised Jewish male in antisemitic discourse, this satisfaction in Ben- Ami’s sensitive yet masculine quality seems oriented to an imagined gentile consumption. In no way could it be anticipated that Levi’s embodied self might risk alienating non-Jewish audience members by presenting as damagingly Other. In addition to his acting skill the same paper regarded Ben- Ami’s facial features worthy of comment, noting him “strangely like Paul Muni in appearance” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, July 29, 1938: 44), and remarking the two men had learnt their trade in the same company (Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theatre) (“The Eternal Wanderer”, July 22, 1938: 36). This comparison was also a feature of a review in the non-Jewish Yorkshire Evening News, where it was suggested “something of the certainty and understanding of that fine actor” (“In Yiddish”, March 2, 1935: 3) was apparent in Ben-Ami, and hinted that his career might go on to follow the path of his illustrious doppelganger. Most central to the film’s significance, though, was its potential to function as a public pronouncement, alerting the world to the disastrous

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situation in Germany. The Jewish Times asserted it had “provoked a powerful protest against the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Germany” (“Today the Yiddish Talkie Film”, July 24, 1938: 3), while the Jewish Chronicle understood the piece to be in some dialogic relation to an imagined interlocutor, casting it as “Jewry’s answer not only to Hitler, but to all the myriad persecutors who have tried to destroy a spirit that has always proved greater and stronger than its enemies” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, February 22, 1935: 43). This political pedigree was affirmed by the original proscription imposed on the picture by the BBFC. Wearing the ban as a badge of honour publicity material referred to “the sensational Jewish film forbidden by the censor” that could only be shown “with the permission of the LCC” (see JC, March 25, 1935: 3). Conservative forces had recognised The Eternal Wanderer’s incendiary potential and had attempted to suppress it, but good sense would ensure the truth would out. Crucial to the film’s status as a political object was the use of documentary footage in a scene depicting the ritualistic burning of “Jewish” books in May of 1933 in Berlin. Structured around a shot-reverse-shot editing pattern the spectator witnesses the horror of the event through the protagonist’s eyes. Following an evening with his fiancée, Gertrude, Levi is preparing to bid her goodnight on the doorstep of her home. Upon noticing some nearby disturbance the sequence begins with an image of Levi’s disbelieving face as he catches sight of the spectacle taking place on the Berlin streets. There is then a reverse to his point of view: a long shot. On the right of shot a huge fire is blazing, on the left figures can be seen throwing books into it. With flames reflected in his face Levi moves closer to obtain a better look. Again a reverse to his point of view: a medium-long shot. Now individuals can be seen dumping armfuls of books onto the fire. Cut back to Levi and then to a series of shots of the event. Numerous bonfires are visible, in one shot the vastness of the crowd can be seen, in another flaming torches are carried around in a procession, a further shot sees books cascade from all angles on the blaze. Stunned, Levi returns to his apartment prophetically declaiming “German youths feeding their souls to the flames – what darkness will result?”. For the Jewish Chronicle this was a remarkable sequence, and reviews included explicit commentary on the provenance of the documentary footage present in the film. It is interesting to note, however, that this information differed with the releases of the film in 1935 and 1938. When the film was

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distributed in 1935 shots of the book burning were said to have been “smuggled out of Germany, having been originally intended for a Nazi “epic” of the revolution which was never completed” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, February 22, 1935: 43). When the film was screened later in the decade, though, it was reported “These photographs, which were taken by a member of the Vanderbilt family, were smuggled out of Germany by him when he was ordered by the authorities to leave” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, JC, July 22 1938: 56). While there is no reason to think substantially different cuts were released in 1935 and 1938 the reception of this footage can be understood as historically contingent. Audience knowledge of what they were witnessing was subject to the explanatory discourse of the press—during the earlier release imagery produced by Nazis in the service of the regime was on the screen, a little later one was looking at the results of a daring and covert evidence gathering operation. Since the film contains a large variety of actuality imagery determining the provenance of each shot is not straightforward. It is the case that following a trip to Europe in 1933 the journalist and newspaper publisher Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. produced an anti-Nazi propaganda film entitled Hitler’s Reign of Terror (Mindlin 1934) that utilised a range of newsreel and documentary material (including footage of books hurled onto large fires). According to a contemporary Time magazine review at least some of the actuality images were “pictures his cameramen took in Germany and Austria” (“Cinema: The New Pictures”, May 7, 1934: 19). That said, many of the images of The Eternal Wanderer’s book burning sequence can also be seen in The Nazi Plan (Stevens 1945). This was a documentary compiled by the US military for use as evidence at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg on December 11, 1945. For this the makers strictly used only German source material, suggesting the earlier 1935 account offered by the Jewish Chronicle is the more accurate narrative with specific reference to imagery depicting the public destruction of books. It is also interesting to note that book burning footage had previously been shown on British cinema screens two years earlier in 1933 editions of British Paramount News and British Movietone News newsreels. Significantly, however, the British Paramount sequence was titled “Kultur Cleans Up” (issue number 231) and the event was not presented as raucous or explicitly antisemitic, while British Movietone News’ December review of 1933 (issue number 238A) included merely

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a few seconds of material sandwiched between Everton Football Club’s triumph in the F. A. Cup and footage of the champion race horse Hyperion (see Hollern Szczetnikowicz 2006). Given, then, that Hitler’s Reign of Terror was not distributed in Britain and received no discussion in the major Anglo-Jewish news media, and that the newsreels framed the event in political rather than racial terms these images were first encountered by British-Jewish audiences as a specifically antisemitic act in The Eternal Wanderer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, although this sequence was referenced in the mainstream British press—both the Manchester Guardian and Daily Herald noted its presence as significant—it was in the British-Jewish press that it was most enthusiastically seized upon. According to the Jewish Times “The scenes of the books by Jewish and radical writers being burnt…[made]…a tremendous impact on all the viewers” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, March 25, 1935: 4). For the Jewish Chronicle it was the film’s “highlight…an astounding piece of cinematography, completely real and yet completely ‘of the cinema’” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, February 22, 1935: 43). Alighting for a moment on this construction offered by the Jewish Chronicle, the designation of the book burning material as simultaneously authentic yet wholly cinematic is highly significant. As we saw in the previous chapter the notion that the film industry was in the command of Jews was in wide circulation during the period. Across the political spectrum commentators described cinema as marked by ethnicity in excess of the nature of its textual content. Paradoxically, then, what was referred to, in the idiom of the era, as “pro-Jewish screen propaganda” could only be successful in soliciting a sympathetic gentile audience if a Jewish agency was demonstrably absent from the production process. For individualistic liberalism a precondition for the legitimacy of public discourse is that it be universalist in orientation: credibility of argument resides in disinterest. It is in such a context that the value of documentary material should be understood. To make the ontological claim of the footage of book burning as “completely real” was to assert the neutrality of the sequence. It was the record of an objective eye, a machinic process incapable of partisan agitation. By simply being for itself the imagery removed a specifically Jewish agency behind the scene—no one could reject actuality footage of burning books as a tendentious contrivance deployed to further particularised interests. In addition to lauding the scene as “completely real” the Jewish Chronicle also praised its visual drama, considering it “completely of

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the cinema” (ibid.). This too might be understood in reference to the film’s effective circulation beyond an enclaved Jewish audience. Historically, notes Nancy Fraser (1992), dominant public spheres “privilege the expressive norms of one cultural group over others and thereby make discursive assimilation a condition for participation in public debate” (126). Speaking with those in hegemonic ascendancy thus requires an adoption of their communicative forms. To affirm the book burning material “completely of the cinema” was to declare its status as idiomatically identical to an established standard of film aesthetics. For Miriam Hansen (1991) the shooting and editing methods of narrative film developed as a technique to solicit a universal spectator within a new mass market. Key to the institution becoming a “democratic” art was its ability to appeal to individuals irrespective of their class profile. As such, for material to be “completely of the cinema” was to point out that the film was speaking in a language understandable by all. It was a mode of communication of unlimited accessibility.

Public or Private? While the Jewish press undoubtedly desired The Eternal Wanderer to be viewed by as wide an audience as possible, gauging its actual penetration into a gentile public consciousness is a challenging and uncertain business. In the discourse surrounding the British exhibition of the film a tension in its status as a public artefact is discernible. On the one hand both the official censor in the guise of the BBFC and the Jewish press made much of the film’s potential to effect the realm of the social in some way. On the other, the film’s distributor, and the majority view within the municipal body of the LCC understood the appeal of the picture as strictly limited in its reach, and thus public in a manner wholly different to that imagined by those agents who believed the title contained a capacity to stir controversy. This contradictory frame—between propaganda and invisibility, accessibility and bafflement, publicness and non-publicness—is not straightforwardly resolvable. To evaluate the binary we must examine how both sets of claims were articulated. It is clear The Eternal Wanderer did achieve some mainstream visibility, with the widely read Yorkshire Evening News, Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald all covering the film’s initial release. Of these established British newspapers the Manchester Guardian offered the

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most coverage discussing the film in three separate articles; though P. L. Mannock’s short piece in the Daily Herald was, perhaps, the most politicised, noting the Censor’s ban but asserting “I am glad this trenchant picture is soon available” (“Despite the Censor”, March 18, 1935: 14). Additionally, the film was exhibited in city centre picture houses in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Spatially associated with the accessibility of mass consumption these cosmopolitan sites marketed cinematic events to an audience undifferentiated by ethnicity. Even when the film was exhibited at a cinema situated in a Jewish neighbourhood an awareness of its message was not necessarily restricted to the boundaries of a Jewish cultural realm. Coinciding with his charity fundraising trip to Leeds actor Eddie Cantor was reported advising people see the film at its upcoming screening at the Forum Cinema in the Chapeltown district— then the epicentre of Jewish settlement in the city (see “The Eternal Wanderer”, JC, July 29, 1938: 44). The essential condition for participation in a public is attention. If an individual engages with the discourse of a public they are included in that public. How one responds to the discourse is a different matter, but, argues Michael Warner (2002), “by coming into range you fulfil the only entry condition demanded by a public” (61). While the goal of censorship is to render a proscribed object invisible it frequently produces the opposite effect. With each attempt to restrict The Eternal Wanderer’s exhibition more attention was drawn to it. Prior to the title exhibiting in Britain, the story of censors at the BBFC and LCC finding themselves at loggerheads was making its way around the country. In the Lincolnshire Echo an article addressing the saga recounted not only the deliberations of the municipal actors, but expanded upon the production’s narrative and explained that while the spoken dialogue was in Yiddish subtitles were in place for English speakers (see “Censors Agree to Differ”, December 22, 1934: 5). Later, when the title was rereleased in 1938 the continued refusal of the Smethwick Watch Committee to grant an exhibition licence was picked up by Daily Film Renter, ensuring less specialist publications such as the Era would later report on it. As an object of censorship the film acquired news interest; indisputably its “range” was extended. It can also be contended that to only accept discourse as legitimately public if it is generated within a singular dominant public sphere is to ignore a broader definition of what constitutes public behaviour. In Chapter 1 we considered the potential for exhibition sites oriented to

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Jewish audiences to function as part of a Jewish counter-public sphere. For Nancy Fraser, public discourse has always been marked by competition between multiple publics. From the emergence of the modern public sphere in the seventeenth century “counter publics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behaviour and alternative norms of public speech” (1992: 116). In articles and advertisements in the Jewish press The Eternal Wanderer was presented as a site of collective Jewish expressivity. For the Jewish Times the appearance of the film at the Phoenix Theatre in 1938 offered the opportunity for Jews to engage in a politicised attack against their antagonists, and its readership was encouraged to “come, everyone,…to show your protest against the Nazi atrocities” (“Today the Yiddish Talkie Film”, July 24, 1938: 3). Sadly, no record remains of the lived experience of cinema auditoria during the two British release cycles of The Eternal Wanderer, though some scraps of information relating to specific screenings do survive. The Jewish Chronicle reports the title playing to a packed house when it exhibited during July 1938 at the Forum Cinema in Leeds (“The Eternal Wanderer”, July 29, 1938: 44). Billed to begin at 10:45 on a Saturday evening, and with all profits going to a charitable fund for the relief of Austrian Jewish children the event took place outside of the rhythms of the venue’s established programming, as well as in contravention of the logic of profit generation for commercial cinema. With every seat taken and reportedly hundreds turned away at the doors, this midnight matinee clearly exceeded any mundane and anonymous experience of a trip to the pictures at the end of a working week. We might also want to consider how the 1935 exhibition of The Eternal Wanderer at the Mile End Empire—with its specific ethnic framing in the Jewish press and the accompanying live rendition of “Jewish Melodies” by a Jewish performer—could be something other than an inward-looking culturally enclaved entertainment. Rather than isolated screenings of a commercial spectacle to be passively consumed by individual spectators, the exhibition of The Eternal Wanderer at sites associated with Jewish film-going might instead be understood as events connected to an already existing assemblage of associative bodies—political, charitable, and cultural—that oriented British Jews to the social world. Indeed, the film even appeared at Woburn House, the symbolic home of institutionalised Jewish interests. In a plurality of material and discursive spaces the collective interests of

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Jews coalesced into common themes through deliberation and debate. Additionally such spaces provided Jews with a self-image as a communal unit organised in a shared endeavour. While the political landscape inhabited by British Jews could be a notoriously fractious environment, an overwhelming majority could see the utility of broad-based campaigns against the mounting Nazi threat. Even if The Eternal Wanderer failed to achieve widespread visibility its circulation may still have rendered it a public object. It was a site—amongst others—where consciousness could be raised, knowledge produced, and where a Jewish collective could be witnessed and experienced. Without the development of these processes it would not be possible to issue any kind of demand for recognition in the “hard public” of parliamentary government. Within a subaltern counter-public communicative and expressive forms emerge specific to that scene of interaction. Subordinated groups define their needs and identities through the innovative creative work of producing discourses sufficient to capture their lived experience, as well as enacting novel modes of resistance to structural marginalisation. These might include, but are not limited to, the development of ideas, slang, discursive aesthetics, self-presentation and bodily hexis. The ethnic particularity of The Eternal Wanderer’s formal aspects (i.e. spoken Yiddish, Yiddish theatrical stagecraft) was a part of a cultural style immediately intelligible within the Jewish public sphere. However, it is the expressive specificity of counter-publics that can see their political claims regarded as outside the boundaries of public relevance. The bourgeois public, in Habermas’s terms, functioned through a coming together of persons on neutral ground. Social status was to be bracketed and participants were required to utilise a rhetorical style regarded as universally comprehensible. While The Eternal Wanderer may have demonstrably circulated within a Jewish counter-public, the clear desire of commentators in the Jewish press was that it should be made available to a generalised British public and consumed widely. That the film’s distribution and social impact was significantly limited was not simply a result of an effective censorship regime. As Eley (1992) points out, the normative culture of the emergent bourgeois public sphere coincided with the historical development of modes of subjectivity that defined what it was to inhabit the place of the white bourgeois male. The habitus of this class, unevenly distributed across European society, came to be the medium through which an individual could address the arena of public opinion as a disinterested party

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seeking to enhance the common good. Those that were unable to assimilate the protocols of speech and decorum appropriate for entry into public life found themselves viewed as representative of private interests. Styles of self-presentation change over time, but the principle that the mark of the particular compromised the universal relevance of public statements remained into the era in which The Eternal Wanderer could be found appearing on British cinema screens. With Yiddish as a basic unit of communication The Eternal Wanderer’s alterity radiated from the screen. So pronounced was this difference even some sources sympathetic to the plight of Germany’s Jews could not help but view the narrative as guided by a partisan mentality. As a leading voice of the liberal-left the Manchester Guardian was both stridently critical of fascist racial policy and had long maintained support for the rights of world Jewry. Commentary on the film was provided on three occasions, and although a largely warm response was offered in its main review an earlier preview article listed one of the title’s failures as being “top-heavy with propaganda” (“A Yiddish Film”, March 8, 1935: 2). In spite of the Jewish press’s insistence on the unmediated veracity of the book burning sequence in The Eternal Wanderer, the film could still be undermined by perceptions of a tendentious appeal to special interests. Exemplary of such a discourse was the dissenting voice of London County Council member J. A. Gillison. Anxious at what he saw at the Council’s closed screening, he set out his misgivings in a letter to the viewing committee. For him, “revenge, plus a superb self-sufficiency”, was the inspiration for a narrative “untrue in its lack of proportion and bias” (GLC/DG/EL/01/250). A General Practitioner at the QuakerSocialist Dr Alfred Salter’s pioneering clinic in south-east London, John Allan Gillison was elected in 1934 to join the LCC as a Labour member for Rotherhithe. At one time an impassioned evangelical Christian, his energies had become directed to an ardent socialism by the time he entered public office. Later in the decade Gillison is reported to have shown much concern for the plight of refugees from Nazi oppression (see F. T. in BMJ, 1975: 770), but he did not, in the mid-1930s, at least, believe The Eternal Wanderer should be permitted to circulate as part of a campaign to solicit sympathy for any such cause. For Gillison, the key issue was The Eternal Wanderer’s failure to depict the “primary right of the Jews to equity and humane consideration because they are brethren in the human family”. Instead, he claimed, the title was informed by a spirit of “raucous racialism” that asserted “the

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superiority of the Jews qua Jews” (GLC/DG/EL/01/250). Jews, he claimed, were uniformly portrayed as victims, while gentiles were inevitably seen as the agents of intolerance. At no point was this grievance actually substantiated with details of performances, scenes or lines of dialogue, nor was it explained how Jews might be understood as anything other than persecuted in representations of mediaeval massacres, the Spanish Inquisition or the opening months of Nazi rule. In fact, Levi’s gentile romantic interest, Gertrude, is portrayed sympathetically, displaying horror at the unfolding events. Her ultimate abandonment of her fiancé plays out less a suggestion of the impossibility of affection between Jews and non-Jews, instead signalling the painful inability of the individual to exist beyond the most rigorously enforced boundaries of social taboo. Moreover, insomuch as the narrative espouses political Zionism as formulated by Hertzl, the film can be read as an endorsement of normalised relations between Jews and other nations. While subsequently eventuating in its own oppressions this was an ideology that explicitly articulated universalist aims, asserting that the common good of humanity would be enhanced by the recuperation of world Jewry from its diminished status in diaspora. Given Gillison’s failure to present any clear data to support the charge of unjustifiable bias, and his emphatic suggestion, again unsubstantiated, that some form of Jewish supremacy marked the text, it appears the factor determining the failure of the film to effectively argue from the position of universality was simply its inability to abstract itself from the voice of ethnic specificity. Adopting an unmarked discourse was not, apparently, a difficulty for Gillison, and much effort was made on his part to speak as the universal subject. In addition to the disclaimer “I have a great respect for a number of Jews and am not conscious of any antagonism towards them”, the “scientific” abstraction of a then voguish psychoanalytic discourse was mobilised with categories of “sadism”, “masochism” and “inferiority” drawn on to unpick the irrational neuroses and pathological drives apparently conjured into being by the film. Indeed, so keen was he to transcend private interest that the possibility “all my strictures on the film may rise from an inferiority in me” (ibid.) was suggested. Singularly misunderstanding the centrality of antisemitism to National Socialism, Gillison saw the film as permeated by particularised point scoring, arguing that the Nazis too were “suffering from humiliation” and needed “their wounds healed” (ibid.). Such ideas were in wide

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circulation during the period, and as the situation worsened for Jews with rising persecution in Nazi Germany the possibility that cinema would have little effect on public opinion began to be voiced. Although the Jewish Times continued to promote The Eternal Wanderer as a site of protest in 1938, reviews in the Jewish Chronicle took on a different tone with the later release. While the paper considered the film “as topical now as it was then [1935]” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, July 22, 1938: 36) and “extraordinarily moving” (“The Eternal Wanderer”, July 29, 1938: 44) it was also “deeply depressing” (ibid.). Intersecting with concerns over Jewish life in Germany were anxieties about events in Mandatory Palestine. As the reviewer stated: Whereas in 1935, the year of its first showing, shots of a new Palestine cast a ray of hope over the German scene, today, even the sight of Chalutzim working happily in the fields with not a ghaffir3 in sight - can only recall the present terrible situation of affairs. “A leader will surely arise and save the Jews; it has ever been so” is the message of the film. Meanwhile – patience. (ibid.)

For the largely Zionist Jewish Chronicle the slow pace of bringing Jewish statehood into being was affecting Jews over one thousand miles away in Germany. A few months later this more pessimistic assessment of the utility of film was reiterated. In an end of the (Jewish) year review of 1938’s films the newspaper referenced The Eternal Wanderer alongside a handful of productions dubbed “Special Jewish Interest” (“Special Jewish Interest”, September 23, 1938: 92). None of these films, it was asserted “could be said to have made any contribution to the better understanding of the Jew and his problems”. This is not to argue that with The Eternal Wanderer’s 1938 release came a truer or more realistic appraisal of its merits. Rather, for the Jewish press its life as a public object could be understood around two opposing poles that expressed its visibility (or lack of it), and thus utility, as a political act. It was a fact that the content of the film—as the BBFC feared it might—breached the boundaries of a Jewish cultural realm. At the same time it should be noted that some reviews accompanying the 3 Member of the Jewish Settlement Police. Their role included providing protection for Jewish villages and Kibbutzim during the Arab revolt of 1936–1939 in Mandatory Palestine.

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later screenings took on a tone of weary impotence, and no evidence could be brought to suggest the film contributed to any challenge to the British government’s policy of appeasement. There was thus no easy category in which to place the film—it was both a public statement and an enclaved piece of minority entertainment. At a given historical moment it may have been possible to understand the piece as closer to one pole than the other. However, both readings were available at any given screening. The Eternal Wanderer was not the final narrative fiction film endorsed by the Jewish press as revelatory of Nazi malevolence. Both Warner Brother’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Litvak 1939) and the Russian Professor Mamlock (Rappaport and Minkin 1938) received a British release during the summer of 1939, the latter, in common with The Eternal Wanderer, following an overturning of a BBFC ban by the LCC (Hicks 2012). Even on the cusp of war the Jewish Chronicle considered it worthwhile to inform its readership of the potential influence these titles might wield in the battle to sway public opinion. As a Hollywood production featuring a major star (Edward G. Robinson) Confessions of a Nazi Spy was subject to particular interest. American audiences, it was reported, were irate that a hostile foreign power might be actively involved in subversion on US soil, and it was noted that police were in attendance to ensure public order when the film screened at the Strand Theatre, New York (see “Hollywood Takes the Heil Out of Hitler”, May 26, 1939: 48). Moreover, the title was viewed as a sign that a host of anti-Nazi productions were now in the pipeline following the drying up of revenue to Hollywood studios from fascist states (see “Will the Government Control the Cinema?”, May 12, 1939: 50). So long as cinema-going remained a culturally central activity commentators in the Jewish press continued to believe film could play some role informing a generalised public of the dire situation of European Jewry, and the threat posed to all by Hitler. The trials of distributing The Eternal Wanderer had, however, provided a corrective lesson in what could be said publically, and who could say it. The most vociferous, even if well aimed, attacks on Nazi racial policy were liable for proscription by the censor. And if a given production was marked as speaking from a position of Jewish subjectivity, then it risked being perceived as advocating for particular and private interests rather than the general good. News films were seen to provide some critical commentary that would be regarded as universalist in orientation, but their commitment to an ethos

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of neutrality could effectively erase the asymmetries of power between the German state and its Jewish minority. As such, to the extent that a singular dominant public sphere was a constituent of the social imaginary, a practical exclusion of Jewish interests from the social structure was enacted, at least if carried by the medium of film. This is not to argue that the counter-public activities associated with The Eternal Wanderer lacked utility. As an arena in which hegemonic discourses could be contested, knowledge produced, and collective solidarity fostered the “scene” of film exhibition and press reflection may well have proved valuable. Within 1930s Britain, radical assimilation was understood to be the most legitimate and desirable cultural and political practice for immigrants, and affirmations of group identity within this context should not be dismissed. However, as the decade progressed and Europe drew closer to war it became ever more evident that Jewish life was entering a moment of existential threat. Amongst those works that went into the bonfires during the ritualised book burnings of 1933 were the writings of Germano-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Famously his early play Almansor contained the admonition, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen”: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people”. In the face of such a premonition becoming a reality it should have been more viable for those at the greatest peril to employ whatever tools were to hand in amplifying shared concerns.

Bibliography British Movietone News. 1933. “Movietone Reviews 1933.” Issue number 238A. 28 December 1933. British Paramount News. 1933. “Kultur Cleans Up.” Issue number 231. 18 May 1933. Eley, Geoff. 1992. “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fielding, Raymond. 1978. The March of Time, 1935–1951. New York: Oxford University Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Habermas and the Public Sphere, edited by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press. F. T. 1975. “Obituary Notices.” British Medical Journal (BMJ). 27 September 1975.

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Hansen, Miriam. 1991. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hicks, Jeremy. 2012. First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hoberman, J. 1991. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film Between Two Worlds. New York: Museum of Modern Art, Schocken Books. Hollern Szczetnikowicz, Susan. 2006. British Newsreels and the Plight of European Jews. PhD thesis, Univeristy of Hertfordshire. https://core.ac.uk/ download/pdf/29842580.pdf. Kushner, Tony. 1994. The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Litvak, Anatole, dir. 1939. Confessions of a Nazi Spy. USA: Warner Bros. 35MM. Mendes, Lothar, dir. 1934. Jews Suss. UK: Gaumont British Picture Corporation. 35MM. Accessed via BFI National Archive YouTube Channel. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=dMTHwuQnIKA. Mindlin, Michael, dir. 1934. Hitler’s Reign of Terror. USA. Pronay, Nicholas. 2002. “British Newsreels in the 1930s: Their Policies and Impact.” In Yesterday’s News: The British Cinema Newsreel Reader, edited by Luke McKernan. London: BUFVC. Rappaport, Herbert and Adolf Minkin, dirs. 1938. Professor Mamlock. Soviet Union: Lenfilm Studio. 35MM. Roland, George, dir. 1933. The Eternal Wanderer. Brandeis University, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, 1999. VHS. Stevens, George, dir. 1945. The Nazi Plan. USA: U.S. Council for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality for the Nuremberg Trials. The March of Time. 1938a. InsideNazi Germany: 1938. Volume 4, Episode 6. USA. The March of Time. 1938b. The Refugee—Today and Tomorrow. Volume 5, Episode 5. USA. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Werker, Alfred L., dir. 1934, The House of Rothschild. Los Angeles: United Artists. 35MM.

Archive Letter from BBFC to LCC Dated November 14, 1934. Catalogue Reference: GLC/DG/EL/01/250. London Metropolitan Archive (LMA). Letter from Dan Fish to LCC Dated October 29, 1934. Catalogue Reference: GLC/DG/EL/01/250. London Metropolitan Archive. LCC Memo Dated November 21, 1934. Catalogue Reference: GLC/DG/ EL/01/250. London Metropolitan Archive.

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LCC Official Report Dated November 23, 1934. Catalogue Reference: GLC/ DG/EL/01/250. London Metropolitan Archive. Letter from J. A. Gillison Dated November 23, 1934. Catalogue Reference: GLC/DG/EL/01/250. London Metropolitan Archive. Letter From Leeds Chief Constables Office to LCC March 2, 1935. Catalogue Reference: GLC/DG/EL/01/250. London Metropolitan Archive. Leeds Watch Committee Minutes. Catalogue Reference: LLC 5/1/24/, p. 25. West Yorkshire Archives, Leeds.

CHAPTER 7

Epilogue: The Decline of a Jewish Cinema Culture

At the beginning of this volume we were introduced to a young Jewish man overseen engaged in a few mindless moments of activity in the bedroom of a Whitechapel tenement. Although utterly anonymous his experience of social class was wrought large in the shabbiness of his cramped surroundings, and this short vignette was used as a device to encapsulate the social world of thousands of Jews then clustered in poor districts across urban Britain. Subject to the same forms of discrimination and economic exploitation, and sharing a cultural horizon the everyday life, a generation was marked with common experience. With the outbreak of World War II came a cleavage, in many ways permanent, from the social dynamics that had come to characterise Jewish life over the previous two decades. Since the cinema was interwoven into these structures, it too would cease to occupy the same prominence. At the height of the London blitz, on the night of October 22, 1940, the East End’s Rivoli Cinema took a direct hit from a Luftwaffe bomb. A site that had once been at the centre of the lived materiality of London’s Jewish cinema culture was instantly reduced to flames and rubble. No longer would Yiddish or Zionist film be presented to those Jews who refused to jettison culturally particular tastes in leisure activities, nor would the likes of performers such as Sophie Tucker bring a dash of Jewish glamour to this most unglamorous, if not uncharismatic, corner of Jewish life. The war years would also see a Jewish reception discourse lose its resonance for Jewish audiences. As film receded from cultural centrality, and the Jewish experience took on an introverted quality in © The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8_7

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the confusion of the post-holocaust moment, a communal desire to enter collective life through the universal public sphere diminished. The Jewish experience of the interwar era was branded with a distinct singularity. During this time Jewish migration from Eastern Europe and Russia had slowed to a trickle, and a second generation—typically lacking any meaningful experience of life outside the UK—had come of age. Since the USA had enhanced its own regime of border control few now conceived the East End, the Leylands or Cheetham Hill as a temporary stop on a longer journey to the American metropolis. In the cities of London, Leeds and Manchester areas of Jewish settlement may have been the locus of ongoing communal flux, but they were also now established neighbourhoods. With these districts marked by advanced commercial and communal infrastructures catering to Jewish religious, culinary and leisure requirements, the urban landscape became remade. Within these communities local inhabitants may have perceived their immediate geographies as subject to pronounced, if informal, boundaries but they were far from isolated from the wider social and economic transformations of the time, and this included changing leisure trends. Indeed, Jews played a central role in the development of Britain’s consumer and leisure economy, whether that was in the manufacture and sale of both hard and soft goods, or in emergent sections of the hospitality and entertainment industries. In this coincidence of topography and new cultural activity the possibility of a Jewish cinema scene was born. With significant numbers of Jewish individuals concentrated in defined urban centres it was only a matter of time before local film exhibitors recognised that Jewish consumers possessed both as much enthusiasm for cinema-going as audiences from other sections of society, as well as specific tastes grounded in Jewish self-identity and cultural traditions.

A New National Consciousness Although, from the perspective of the lived everyday, modes of life may seem to endure as a foreseeable recurrence, change is inevitable in social relations. Following Britain’s declaration of war on Germany anxiety was immediately registered over the possibility civilian populations might become targeted with poison gas or high explosives in strategic bombing. Inner-city districts with high population densities were judged especially vulnerable and many Jewish children, as well as some adults, moved away from urban centres to provincial or rural locations deemed less likely to suffer attack. Simultaneous to this development conscription

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into the British armed forces began for young men in late 1939, and by 1942 all males between the age of 18 and 51 years (with certain exceptions for health or occupation) had become liable for compulsory military service. Over the space of a few years large numbers of Jewish men thus found themselves undergoing combat training or on active service. Additionally, key areas of industry deemed essential for the war effort required an influx of workers, and labour—including both men and significant quantities of young women—was diverted to crucial war work. Often this could take place far away from the towns and districts enlisted individuals had previously spent the entirety of their lives. The combination of widespread civilian evacuation and military conscription affected the perceptions of Jews and non-Jews alike. Functioning as a form of social condenser war conditions presented Jewish troops, workers and evacuees with the opportunity for extended social interaction beyond the confines of often insular Jewish neighbourhoods. Similarly, many non-Jews had little primary experience of ethnic difference, and for the first time the ordinariness of British Jews could be encountered. As might be expected these interactions could become a site of conflict, and many evacuees and soldiers experienced antisemitism, but friendships or even romance between Jews and non-Jews also developed—increasingly so as the war went on (Kushner 1989). Following the ending of hostilities significant bomb damage to housing stock in inner-urban areas (particularly the East End) complicated the prospect of returning to prewar sites of habitation. Prior to the conflict Jewish migratory trends away from primary areas of settlement had already begun, but with some diminution of perceptions of Jewish difference these patterns of movement accelerated. As well as destroying the material fabric of the old neighbourhoods, then, the war reduced Jewish anxieties about conditions of life outside those spaces. To the extent that a localised Jewish cinema culture was underpinned by the viability of geographic enclaves, the events of World War II thus proved significant in its decline. Relatedly, as a national emergency the hostilities with Germany engendered an intensified national consciousness. At the instigation of the state poster campaigns and public information films sought to instil a commitment to collective endeavour, encouraging citizens to make household economies or, if not conscripted into the military, sign up for civil defence responsibilities. Privately owned communications media was quick to assist in the war effort, and both the fourth estate and the newsreels proved adept at fostering patriotic sentiment. Deploying staff to accompany the British Expeditionary Force the newsreel

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companies understood themselves as having a new national significance, and a majority of newsreel items soon focussed on the conflict. In a Mass Observation report from 1940 it was stated that 71% of recent items contained imagery of soldiers, and non-war related stories had shifted from 62% of subject matter prior to the start of war to just 15% once the fighting was underway (England 2002). Like any other social group, interwar Jewish self-identity was neither fixed nor homogenous. Depending on context and circumstance an individual might reflect upon herself as variously Jewish, British, occupying some regional identity, or comprised of some assemblage of constituent parts. Examining some of the reception discourse surrounding the release of wartime newsreel and public information films it is possible to understand these titles as a potential site of imaginative entry into national life for British Jews. Throughout the war the Jewish Chronicle ran regular reports on the latest films featuring actuality footage covering the armed campaign or life on the home front. These articles were published at least once a month, and there could be as many as three individual news-cinema items reviewed in the same issue. Typical was an item on the documentary short The Second Battle of London (Knight 1945) in which British gunners defending London were described as “our A. A. defences” (“The Flying-Bomb Battle”, December 8, 1944: 16). Likewise, the reviewer of Listen to Britain (Jennings and McAllister 1942), a short film produced by the Crown Film Unit, assumed an essentially British spectator. In this title “characteristic” sounds of “Britain at war” (“War-Time Documentaries”, February 27, 1942: 20) were presented including “bird songs mingled with the roar of planes over a wheat-field…barracks, homes and Civil Defence posts”. Mobilised here were some of the key motifs of a British cultural nationalism of the period—the natural world and a timeless rural landscape—set in harmony with the life of a people unified in struggle. On the odd occasion the paper did address its readership as Jews in relation to some war news film, this was to note a Jewish contribution to the national cause. In a review of the Army Film Unit’s Seige of Tobruk (1942), covering events in the North Africa Campaign, it was reported that the piece contained “an illuminating shot that will show all people that Jews have taken their place with their comrades in the danger line”. “Every Jew who sees this film”, it was added, “will feel very proud indeed” (“The Epic of Tobruk”, June 5, 1942: 19).

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In these pieces the reader was addressed as straightforwardly British. Taking a patriotic tone, it was assumed that imagery located in the specific cultural tradition of an English picturesque would be evenly consumed by spectators irrespective of ethnicity. To the extent that Jews remained conceived as a discrete entity visibly distinct before the gaze of a generalised public, less emphasis was now placed on their status as a marginalised group. Hitherto, the cinema had been advanced as a mechanism to amplify concerns over social injustice and gain political recognition. In contrast, the Jewish Chronicle’s discussion of wartime actuality film tended to minimise differences in Jewish and non-Jewish experience, usefully demonstrating Jewish participation in the shared perils of military service. And in as much as this entry into the national family was regarded a beneficial display for gentile consumption, it was also presented as a source of satisfaction for Jewish viewers. However, although the reception of news and documentary imagery in the Jewish press could provide a conceptual framework for the Jewish spectatorship of this material, it does not follow that real-world audiences were inevitably interpellated fully as British subjects. In spite of a new national consciousness, Jews remained in a social position at variance with that of their fellow citizens. Beginning in 1939 individuals resident in the British Isles but classed as alien nationals from states at war with Britain could find themselves subject to a new regime of national security. With significant numbers of non-naturalised Jews of German or Austrian heritage now living in the country, they, along with non-Jewish Germans, Austrians and Italians—as well as known fascist sympathisers— could face an assortment of restrictions, including confinement in internment camps. An even more profound dissonance between the experience of British Jews and non-Jews was knowledge of, and a sense of proximity to, the destruction of European Jewry. Even once the war was underway Jewish newspapers were amongst the few information sources prepared to give extensive and prominent coverage to reports of the genocide unfolding in the ghettos and extermination camps of Eastern Europe (see Scott 1994). In January 1940 the murder of 1900 Jews near the Polish town of Chelm was reported in the Jewish Chronicle (“Massacre at Chelm”, January 26, 1940: 1), and as early as June 1943 the same paper was stating that “in the Treblinka camp special gas chambers for murdering Jews have been set up” (“Jewish Victims Vivisected”, June 25, 1943: 1). Continuous figures of mass killings emerged: 70,000 in

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Kiev (“The Horror of Kiev”, December 10, 1943: 1), 80,000 in Vilna (“The Massacres in Vilna”, August 4, 1944: 1). With the Russian offensive pushing through the east came more detailed stories on the worst of the camps. First Majdanek—an image of charred skeletal remains in the camp crematoria accompanying the piece (“The Martyrs of Lublin”, August 18, 1944: 7)—and later Auschwitz (“Oswiecim Revelations”, February 9, 1945: 1). Throughout this period the disaster was barely registered cinematically. A handful of fictional films released during the War, such as Pastor Hall (Boulting 1940), made reference to the brutality of Nazi repression, but these did not come close to portraying the reality on the ground. In late April of 1945, however, this situation changed drastically. As the war in Europe reached its final phase advancing British and American forces discovered still operational concentration camps within Germany, and footage of the liberation of sites such as Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen was publically exhibited in newsreels. Of the actuality imagery produced since the invention of the motion picture camera this material ranked amongst the most distressing ever recorded and audiences were stunned. Presented in the films was evidence of cruelty and sadism that even experienced combat personnel found hard to bear. Perhaps for the final time during the era that cinema was culturally central in Britain, film entered the heart of Jewish experience.

Understanding Bergen-Belsen On April 15, 1945 the British 11th Armoured Division entered BergenBelsen under truce conditions. Initially, Bergen-Belsen joined the concentration camp system as a holding facility for influential Jews who might have some “exchange value” for captured Germans, and conditions were somewhat less harsh than in other camps. From the beginning of 1944, however, the population in the camp leapt as prisoners previously destined for Auschwitz were rerouted due to the Red Army’s advance. A number of sick slave workers were also brought to the camp to recover from illness. A further development occurred when Josef Kramer, previously stationed at Auschwitz, was given the role of commandant and decided to establish a harsher regime. The scene that greeted the British liberators was thus one of unimaginable misery and squalor. The overcrowded camp housing sixty thousand prisoners was in the grip of a typhus epidemic and the afflicted lay dying everywhere.

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Prisoners were appallingly emaciated and dressed in rags. Drinking water came from a pool contaminated by rotting corpses (Shephard 2006). From mid-April British newspapers started running stories on the liberation of the German camps. On April 19, the BBC reporter David Dimbleby broadcast a radio report on what he had witnessed in Bergen-Belsen. Although alarming, many of these early accounts shied away from detailing specifics. Following a visit and subsequent report on Buchenwald by a party of two peers and eight British Members of Parliament, however, the exact situation was made clear. Initiated by Eisenhower—who was anxious to get as many reliable witnesses to see the camps as possible—Churchill pressed for a delegation to be organised with haste. Visiting Buchenwald (the first camp to be liberated by America) on April 21, they returned to London the following day and produced a White Paper, extensive portions of which were then reprinted in the national press. The report scrupulously documented what the group had seen and whom they talked to, noting the ethnic make-up of prisoners and details such as the workings of the crematoria. The evidence in the White Paper was considered irrefutable. What was not provided in abundance was visual material. Photographs were available for publication but so horrible were they most newspapers chose to print only a limited few. Individual pictorial publications such as the Picture Post did put out special issues in which more distressing photographs were shown, but these did not place pictures of the camps in the public gaze in a truly substantial way (Caven 2001). The first newsreels to cover the story came out on Monday, April 30, 1945. All five of the major newsreel companies were allocated extra film for their release, and the same programme was reissued later in the week. The only story featured was the liberation of the camps. The footage used derived from essentially two sources: a small amount came from cameramen employed by individual newsreels, but most came from material that had been shot by the Army Film and Photographic Unit. Cameramen with the AFPU had been at Bergen-Belsen from the moment British troops entered. Despite the psychological strain of working in such an environment they resolved to see the job through and went about documenting all aspects of the camp. Remaining at Bergen-Belsen until it was razed several weeks after the liberation, many of the most recognisable motion picture images of the episode were the results of their efforts. The viewing of the films of Bergen-Belsen’s liberation became both a national event and civic duty in Britain, and demand for cinema seats

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was extremely high (see ibid.). Spectatorship was understood as a form of witnessing, and prior to the release of the newsreels newspapers cautioned readers to prepare themselves for screenings. In an article in the Evening Standard the headline read, “Steel Yourself to See this Film” (Kirwan, April 23, 1945: 6). Further down the column the advice continued, “it is your duty not to spare your feelings, but to see them” (ibid.). In spite of the warnings numerous accounts of responses to the imagery suggest audiences found it overwhelmingly affecting. Mass Observation conducted research on the exhibition of the films and recorded individuals losing sleep or suffering ill health following screenings (see Kushner 1994; Caven 2001). One woman, interviewed leaving a cinema, informed researchers she “kept turning away- it was so horrible, I just couldn’t go on looking” (quoted in Caven 2001: 245). Irrespective of audience ethnicity the encounter with visual material of Nazi atrocities could be highly traumatic. For British Jews, however, the experience might be personalised in ways that were simply not shared by non-Jewish citizens. As has been documented, Jewish newspapers provided detailed commentary on the escalating persecution of Jews to an extent rarely matched by other areas of the press, and significant numbers of Jewish spectators carried an enhanced knowledge of events into the cinema. For those with family members who had become trapped in continental Europe with the outbreak of war this was a time of particular distress. In diary accounts from the war years Jews expressed deep anxiety about close relatives with whom they could not communicate (see Kushner 1994). With detailed visual evidence of the fate of much of European Jewry now in the public realm, the exhibition of the liberation films provided a clarification of a long and painful period of expectation. During oral history interviews that I undertook with Jewish elders it was occasionally possible to broach the topic of newsreel footage of the liberation of concentration camps. One respondent, “Sarah”, was a young woman at the end of the war and her memories conveyed the grief of this moment. Talking of her response to imagery of the camps she stated “Oh it was terrible, you sat down and cried didn’t you”. Asked to expand, she emphasised the specificity of Jewish experience, noting, “especially when you had your own father’s family [living in continental Europe]”. With significant numbers of relatives residing in Holland her family’s personal loss was considerable and she explained: “My father lost 125 of his family. Yes my father lost 125 of his cousins, his aunts, his great aunts, great cousins, great nieces – counted up”.

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She also elaborated on the fate of the grandfather of a close friend. Returning to Holland from Britain to live with a brother shortly before the German invasion proved a decisive mistake, and it clearly still affected her that “him and the brother was put in the Belsen camp”. Whether rooted in personal experience or culturally specific knowledge the collective reception of the footage of the camps for Britain’s Jews was marked by identification with camp inmates. Yet despite abundant reliable data on the ethnicity of surviving prisoners relatively few public references were made explicitly recognising the centrality of antisemitism to the camp system. In Bergen-Belsen the inmate population was dominated by Jewish prisoners; of the 60,000 individuals held in the camp at the time of liberation around 40,000 were estimated to be Jews. However, when the story was reconstructed in the communications media (including newsreels) the ethnic particularity of survivors was often elided. One explanation for this omission is that during the period there was widespread concern that any emphasis on Jewish suffering risked invoking public scepticism about the veracity of reports (see Kushner 1989, 1994; Caven 2001). It has also been argued (see Kushner 1989, 1994) that an ideology of liberal universalism exerted a powerful influence over state and media considerations of ethnic difference, and that, consequentially, the Nazis’ crimes tended to be understood as directed against a broad humanity. Relatedly, surviving prisoners were regarded as individual citizens of separate national polities rather than as members of a religious or ethnic collective. British state policy thus took the position that displaced Jews should return to countries of origin, and not attempt to resettle en masse in Britain or Palestine. Unlike the mainstream press the Jewish press was keen to dwell on the Jewish experience of the camps. This included reports on survivors singing the Hatikvah, the need for kosher rations at Bergen-Belsen, and the obstacles to resettling displaced persons in Palestine. In May 1945 Patrick Gordon Walker of the BBC broadcast a short radio documentary containing recordings of both liberators and inmates of Bergen-Belsen. Unusually, the programme explicitly referenced the presence of Jewish survivors, a fact the Jewish Chronicle was keen to highlight. Thus, it was stated the programme included “the voices of Jewish prisoners…worshipping together for the first time in years” (“The Voice of Belsen”, May 25, 1945: 5). Emphasising the need for such material to circulate publicly, the paper noted how the participants were “in tears. They knew they were being recorded and they wanted the world to hear their voices” (ibid.).

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Notably, it is an interesting detail that the Jewish press offered virtually no coverage of the exhibition of the newsreels depicting the camps. Taking the two major Jewish newspapers of the day, not a single story remarked upon them in the Jewish Chronicle, while the Jewish Times merely ran one brief article. This was a rather deadpan report on municipally organised screenings in France and Belgium of the “The Buchenwald Horror Film”, which was being distributed to work as “a medicine against antisemitic agitation” (May 3, 1945: 2). Interpreting a silence is not an easy task. Historically the major organs of the Jewish press understood the Jewish experience of oppression as a collective and communal matter irrespective of where it occurred, and legitimately of public relevance. As such, the rationale for an absence of commentary on the liberation footage in the Jewish press clearly differed from the mainstream refusal to name Jewish victimhood. While any analysis must remain speculative, it is striking that an overtly nationalist discourse was mobilised to give some narrative shape to the liberation of BergenBelsen, and that this dominated commentary on the matter. While the films of the camps may purport to present Nazi atrocity what is actually shown is its aftermath. The newsreels cover the process of liberation, not extermination (see Losson 1999). It was at this moment, when the allied powers finally entered the “event” of the camp system, that some narrative order could make sense of an apparently ineffable barbarism with the resolution of rescue. From the time of its liberation the Bergen-Belsen camp occupied a quite distinct place in British discussions of the defeat of the Third Reich. As Kushner has noted, “through the intimate connection brought about by both the military and the medical liberation of Bergen-Belsen, it became “our”, that is, Britain’s camp” (Kushner 1997: 191). In the British press a repetition of binary contrasts between a Nazi savagery embodied by preliberation Bergen-Belsen, and a British moral purpose expressed through the liberation of the camp, offered a structure to contain an otherwise overpowering experience. Along with the print media, the British newsreels contributed to the construction of a narrative of British rescue. Pathe produced two episodes dealing with events at Bergen-Belsen, and both emphasise British involvement. In the initial film, entitled German Atrocities (1945), the presence of British troops at the scene is repeatedly underlined. Over shots of uniformed British infantrymen riding into the camp on armoured vehicles, the commentary points to the role of

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“our men” in the liberation. Referring to specifically British rather than allied soldiers, this use of the possessive is contrasted with the category “American”, which is differentiated by citing the US military’s similar, but separate, experiences liberating Buchenwald. A second film about Bergen-Belsen—An End to Murder (1945), released in late May of 1945—focuses on the medical recovery of prisoners and the final destruction of the camp. In this latter story the agency of the British forces is made apparent in shots of camp infrastructure being razed. Crowds watch as British troops shoot huge jets of flame onto blazing outbuildings with equipment referred to in the narration as “British flame-throwers”. It is both a cliché and a truism to characterise the Holocaust as an unknowable entity. Most commonly such statements refer to the unrepresentability of mass extermination, but other areas of experience related to this moment fall into silence. During the final weeks of hostilities a narrative about the place of Bergen-Belsen in the national life of Britain was created, and this left little space for the particularity of Jewish experience. Only the Jewish press offered a significant quantity of (counter)-public discourse identifying the centrality of antisemitism to Nazi ideology and its implementation. In regard to the Jewish experience of confronting the spectacle of genocide, however, this encounter was never afforded any form of public recognition. While an instruction to bear witness to Nazi inhumanity, and an interpretative narrative of Bergen-Belsen as “Britain’s camp” would offer some structure for a non-Jewish spectatorship of the newsreels, Jewish audiences were offered no reception discourse to provide a framework for thinking through the experience of witnessing the suffering of co-religionists. For Jewish news publications any discussion of the footage of BergenBelsen’s liberation would necessarily require an emphasis on the specific oppression of Jews. Given the newsreels’ stark omission of information identifying the ethnic particularity of surviving prisoners, such a move would involve a transfer of attention away from the narratorial assertion of Britain’s central role in the triumph over barbarism. This manoeuvre, if not wholly in contradiction to the patriotic address of the films, would at least diminish its prominence. Rarely did the Jewish press—particularly the Jewish Chronicle—seek to bring Jewish and British identities into conflict. On the contrary, the capacity for Jewish religious difference to endure as an element internal to British life was a key preoccupation of the Jewish establishment: as an ideal Jewishness and Britishness would

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increasingly coalesce. Liberal pluralism was, at most, a marginal discourse in British-Jewish political thinking, and unable to reconcile these two identities in relation to the newsreels it may have proved a less problematic editorial position to decline to comment on their content. When discussing the exhibition of the newsreels with Jewish elders there was some suggestion that the contemporary interpretive framework imposed on the representation of Bergen-Belsen’s liberation continued to affect the perceptions of those that recalled the original context of the films’ release. Personal memory is notoriously fallible and any discussion on the matter must remain highly tentative, but the discourse of several individuals was marked by difficulties in talking about the footage as revelatory of a specifically Jewish experience. Despite claims that the material was “unforgettable” and that the newsreels were a significant topic of conversation within Jewish communities, memories were often fragmentary and my interlocutors sometimes struggled to provide little beyond momentary flashes of detail, or descriptions of imagery since replayed hundreds of times on television documentaries and news bulletins. Initially somewhat vague about the experience of watching the newsreels, the key to unlocking “Sarah’s” memories was the term “Belsen”, and she became animated only once the camp was referred to by name. Yet even when her recollections sharpened, her discourse rapidly shifted to the realm of personal biography, expanding on an aunt’s role in bringing Jewish children to England after the war. Other respondents similarly reached out to sources external to the films. Although the newsreels contained no documentation of industrialised extermination “Sidney” made reference to Jews on transport trains and gas chambers; imagery that entered the popular imagination at a much later date with the transmission of the 1974 Genocide episode of Thames Television’s The World at War documentary series and film dramas such Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg 1993). For “Laurence”, a volume from his personal library, The Scourge of the Swastika, offered a reliable reference point for discussing the films. Published in 1954 by the British military jurist Lord Russell of Liverpool, this explicitly positioned Nazi war crimes within the context of a doctrine of racial supremacy. A key feature of a British-Jewish cinema culture during the interwar years was a distinct mode of critical reception. Established in the Jewish press was a reception discourse that identified specific productions as novel in their relevance to Jewish audiences, or appraised their worth as a vessel to transport communal Jewish interests and concerns into the

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visual field of a gentile public. Unable to acknowledge the centrality of Jews to the logic of Bergen-Belsen in reviews, the films of the camps could not be absorbed into this model. Over the previous two decades film had become the era’s essential form of mass communication. Regrettably, at the moment when the technology of cinema converged with the defining event affecting the Jewish people in modernity, the recuperation of those representations into the news media of a Jewish counter-public would be extremely limited.

The Post-War Shift Significantly, it was not only the newsreels of concentration camps that failed to be integrated into the conventions of a Jewish reception discourse. Coincident with this episode was a more general diminution in emphasis on film’s potential to penetrate every corner of British society and further an understanding of Jewish life. In contrast to the assorted celebratory and jingoistic war movies that were produced in the decade following Germany’s defeat, a small number of films gave some recognition to Jewish suffering under the Nazis. Screening in Britain in 1946 one of these was the Swiss produced The Last Chance (Lindtberg 1945). The title’s narrative involves the escape from Italy of three allied soldiers (an American NCO and two British officers) who stumble into leading a multinational group of refugees through the Alps to safety in neutral Switzerland. Although rigorously universalist in outlook—the fugitives are variously French, German, Austrian, Dutch, Polish and Yugoslav— two of the refugees are Jewish (an old tailor named Hillel and his niece, Channele), and the Jewish Chronicle was keen to stress this fact. Reviewed in an extended article the piece was warmly received, being judged in a subheading “An Intensely Moving Film” (“Tragedy of the Refugees”, February 1, 1946: 19). Whereas the Jewish Chronicle’s review pages had hitherto adopted a boosterish tone when discussing the possibility of positive representations of Jews circulating before a non-Jewish audience, the language used to assess The Last Chance took on an insular quality. Focussing on the struggles of the film’s Jewish characters it was stated “In these two… the world will see one aspect of what it is pleased to call ‘The Jewish problem’” (ibid.). While the public sphere remained a prominent category in the Jewish Chronicle’s reception discourse, some ambivalence was expressed about the value of this space to Jews. For sure, it was

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recognised that gentile polities would determine the fate of European Jewry, but the terminological formulations used by both press and state to think through events were perceived as insultingly reductive. Collapsed into a singular “problem” were the multiple complexities of Jewish statelessness in the post-holocaust context, and the film’s reviewer bristled at the ethical and intellectual inadequacy of such a conceptualisation. An experiential divide between Jewish and non-Jewish cinema spectatorship seems to have been sharply felt at this moment, at least in relation to representations of Jewish victimhood. As the review moved on to examine a critical scene featuring Hillel and Channele, it was explained that towards the close of the drama the young girl witnesses her uncle shot dead by Nazi troops just as the party are approaching the Swiss border. With Hillel seen praying in Hebrew and Channele uncontrollably distraught at the loss of her only relative the performances were regarded utterly compelling, and a moment when “the child runs about wildly and hysterically over the body” was singled out as “insupportably affecting” (ibid.). The distribution of affect amongst the film’s audience was, however, imagined as strikingly asymmetric. Assuming an ethnic particularism to spectatorship, it was stated such imagery was “for Jews, at any rate…heartrending in its poignancy” (ibid.). Suggesting both that Jews would bring a distinct set of knowledge to the text, and that gentile viewers may not empathise with the distress of explicitly Jewish characters, the limited potential for imagery of Jewish suffering to advocate for Jewish interests was again underscored. Several months after The Last Chance first appeared on British cinema screens, Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) received its London premiere. A film noir concerning a United Nations investigator hunting down a fugitive Nazi war criminal, Franz Kindler, to a Connecticut town, the film was the first fiction production to incorporate documentary footage of concentration camps within its narrative. The newsreels of the camps had powerfully affected Welles (Barker 2012), and in The Stranger they are used as a device to force Kindler’s dutiful wife to confront his true depravity. In its review of the title the Jewish Chronicle recommended the film to its readership, but also expressed some satisfaction in its consumption by gentile audiences. Explaining the “film maintains that underneath the servile whining of the Germans…the old idea of world conquest still persists” (“Films of the Week”, August 23, 1946: 19), the extensive distribution of this Hollywood product was seen to ensure the threat of a National Socialist resurgence would achieve popular recognition. Again, then, the cinema was presented as an arena in which Jewish

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collective interests would be amplified. As with The Last Chance, however, this capacity of film no longer figured as a significant preoccupation. Little beyond a few lines were devoted to discussing the context of exhibition, with more comment passed on Welles’ authorial status and the aesthetic merits of the piece. For Kahn-Harris and Gidley (2010) Britain’s Jewish communal leadership remained committed to a “strategy of security” (13) for over a century. From the Victorian period until the 1970s organisations such as the Board of Deputies sought to make certain the legitimate belonging of Jews to the national community through Jewish cultural assimilation and demonstrations of fidelity to the values of British society. That a Jewish reception discourse was preoccupied with the appearance of representations of Jews before a gentile British cinema audience was an echo of this orientation to social relations. Any recognition of Jewish concerns could be understood to reveal, and to further, the secure position of Jews in Britain. While this discourse would endure into the post-war period, however, historic events immediate to the mid-1940s rendered it inadequate to address the paradoxical position Jews found themselves placed on the social landscape. Having served in all areas of the British armed forces and participated in a highly patriotic national culture over the duration of hostilities, now more than ever the mass of ordinary Jews might identify as British citizens of a different faith. Yet a significant experiential gap between Jews and non-Jews persisted. Rooted in the events of the holocaust, and reinforced by the ongoing presence of antisemitism in Britain (including anti-Jewish riots in British cities following the 1947 killing of two British Army NCOs by the Irgun group in Mandatory Palestine) “an increasingly inward-looking and insecure world view” (Kushner 1994: 223) has also been seen as marking BritishJewish life at this time. Although the critical reception of Jewish interest film continued to retain discursive parameters established in the interwar years, its address became anachronistic to a lived experience of Jews subject to social forces both encouraging and forestalling identification with the nation. Further, a drift away from concern with film’s potential as a vessel for Jewish interests to enter the public sphere coincided with the beginning of a downward trend in cinema-going. Cinema attendance in Britain reached its all time peak in 1946, with over 1640 million tickets sold during that year (see Jancovich et al. 2003). Yet rather than signalling the business of film exhibition remained in rude health, the following decade saw the industry enter a major decline. Rising ticket prices and new forms

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of leisure associated with economic recovery conspired to make the cinema a less attractive option for consumers, and by the second half of the 1950s significant numbers of picture houses were being forced into closure. Overdetermined by unrelated events, the diminution of a Jewish reception discourse came into effect simultaneously to the decentring of cinema as a leisure activity. To a significant extent cinema’s decline in popularity was contingent upon cultural change associated with post-war suburbanisation. With increased house sizes, and private gardens attached to dwellings the domestic setting became an important site of leisure activity for an expanding lower middle class. As aspirant for lower population densities and leafier environs as their gentile neighbours, British Jews sought to move away from inner-urban districts in ever-greater numbers. Often following radial routes organised around existing transport infrastructure (underground rail lines, arterial roads), these flows out of the city had been established prior to the war. In the immediately post-war period London saw a fresh wave of Jews leave the East End and other working class districts to join emergent Jewish communities in the fast-developing outer suburbs of Enfield, Ilford and Gants Hill. That their co-religionists in Leeds and Manchester were similarly migrating to the urban fringe was a clear signal that by the second half of the 1950s notable quantities of Jews were benefitting from a revitalised national economy. Although film-going was declining in prominence in everyday cultural life, it is possible to identify a post-war continuity to a material Jewish cinema culture, even in suburban settings. By the late 1950s the congregation at Ilford Synagogue had grown to such an extent that in 1959 High Holy Days’ services began to be held at the Odeon Ilford. Located at a major intersection opposite Gants Hill Underground Station, and with seating for 1000 patrons, the Odeon Ilford was suitably equipped to meet the demand for additional communal space. Referred to by worshipers as the “Cinemagogue” (Fenton 2017), this novel utilisation of a picture house recalled the similar occasional use of the Rivoli and Mile End Empire cinemas in the East End during the interwar period. An arrangement that remained in place for over twenty years, the Odeon Ilford served as an important communal hub throughout the time this stretch of the London suburbs expanded became home to the largest concentration of Jews in Europe. Of course, plenty of Jews lacked the desire or capital to move away from inner-urban areas, and meaningful numbers thus remained situated

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in neighbourhoods such as Whitechapel, Cheetham Hill or Chapeltown in the years following the war. Political consensus on the need for urban reconstruction led to substantial quantities of public housing being made available from the early 1950s, and Jews who secured a tenancy on one of the new estates often saw little reason to uproot once they had acquired a spacious modern dwelling. Clearly the communal centre of gravity was now shifting away from primary sites of Jewish settlement, with many religious and other communal institutions either closing or moving to new foci of Jewish life, but some significant organisations and businesses did elect to continue attending to established Jewish populations well into the mid-century. This included film exhibitors who recognised the ongoing potential to generate profits by presenting occasional programmes explicitly oriented to Jewish audiences. Prager (1990), for instance, records a series of Yiddish films (including titles featuring Molly Picon) screening at the Vogue Continental Cinema in Stoke Newington during May of 1954. Discussing the post-war fate of the Mayfair Cinema in Brick Lane, one oral history interviewee—Janet—remembered childhood visits to the site with her sister during the 1950s as a throwback to an earlier incarnation of the East End. The audience, she recalled, were almost entirely Jewish, many were advancing in years, and—to her mind—they revelled in the anarchic atmosphere of the venue. Refusing to acknowledge the “fourth wall” patrons were given to calling out to on-screen characters, shouting, in Yiddish, “khoorva!” (whore!) at a femme fatale, or in English, “he’s behind you!” as a murderer approached his victim. Some of her strongest memories were of the circulating aromas of traditional Jewish foodstuffs that the audience brought into the auditorium, such as the acrid tang of pickled vegetables. Indeed, it was for this reason, along with the increasing disrepair of the site, that eventually motivated the sisters to travel further afield in their search for cinematic entertainment. In common with a Jewish reception discourse, then, modes of film-going established in Jewish communities during the interwar period survived into the mid-century. However, what remained after the war was less a coherent scene of Jewish cinema culture, instead comprising a patchwork of social practices, some anachronistic, some an improvisatory adaptation to a new context of Jewish life. Unwilling to give up on longstanding leisure habits, the ageing film-goers of the Mayfair Cinema ensured the space retained its prewar character as a zone of Jewish expressivity, even to the detriment of alienating a younger generation of

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Jewish East Enders. In Ilford, in contrast, the appeal of an ethnically distinct leisure culture had significantly lessened for a more youthful Jewish population, but the absence of communal infrastructure in this rapidly expanding suburb necessitated the presence of a film exhibition space in the collective life of suburban Jewry. The utilisation of a local cinema for high-holiday services simply represented a practical solution to an immediate communal problem, and the site reverted to an ethnically unmarked space for film screenings.

Multicultural Imaginaries Coterminous to film’s move away from a position of cultural centrality in British life, and the fragmentation of Jewish cinema culture, mass migrations of Commonwealth citizens from South Asia and the Caribbean saw skin colour become the vital marker of alterity in Britain. Jewish self-perceptions of difference to an imagined “native” British population were subsequently less keenly felt, and as Jewish young people took advantage of an increasingly accessible Higher Education sector and a buoyant jobs market, those fantasies of mass assimilation conjured in the minds of a Jewish elite of a previous generation achieved something like a lived reality by the 1960s. For some British gentiles Jews would never lose their Otherness, and a Haredi population would remain highly self-segregated, but a majority of British Jews no longer experienced the economic and social exclusion common to many during the interwar years, and the alternative public spheres of that era fell into abeyance. Contrasting sharply with the interwar years film and cinema-going cease, at this point, to provide a useful optic through which to view Jewish communal life. While the cinema remained imagined a component of a universal public sphere television, particularly in its news and current affairs formats, now occupied a far more prominent place in discussions of the formation of public opinion. In primary areas of Jewish settlement, such as the East End, Jewish cultural life was irrevocably denuded by the early 1970s, though it is notable that a number of film exhibition sites that had once been Jewish social hubs did not simply orient programming to an ethnically non-specific audience. Throughout the 1960s a significant Indian and Pakistani population had migrated to east London, and what was once The Mayfair Cinema in Brick Lane had converted to The Naz, a venue specialising in South Asian film. Owned during the mid-1970s by an enterprising Bengali businessman the site also presented live entertainments such as South Asian musicians or Pakistani

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wrestlers (often pitched against white opponents). Three other venues in the area became viable businesses offering similar fare. It is often a misplaced cliché to call for historical events to serve as a pedagogic guide to current life. Social formations are temporally specific, and the solutions of the past are not necessarily applicable to the problems of the present. Nevertheless, in an era when multiculture has come under sustained attack, particularly, in the aftermath of the events of September 11, it may be worth turning our attention to Jewish life in interwar Britain when considering what is at stake in the retraction of an offer of liberal pluralism. A particularly indolent form of thinking in the popular debates over mass migration is the notion of the Jews as a “model minority”. An ethos of social assimilation was not a seed carried from Eastern Europe and then nurtured into life by an immigrant generation. Many Jews experienced communal and state pressure to “Anglicise” as a coercive act, and the linguistic and cultural alienation felt between first and second generations must, in part, be assessed as a consequence of institutions inaugurated to iron out the “ghetto bend” in immigrant youth. Upward economic mobility was similarly not a defining experience of British Jewry until the years after World War II. Financial hardship, or even impoverishment, was common, and a majority laboured in trades that offered little beyond the means to live modestly. As a cultural form sufficiently malleable to accommodate social difference the cinema emerged as significant leisure institution of interwar Jewry. Its utilisation as a social hub was a material response to a lived marginality. For the mass of working class Jews life conditions changed only with a wider social transformation, as this occurred so the cinema lost its relevance. As an imagined a point of Jewish entry into the wider social collective, film and cinema proved an uncertain route. Too often bodies marked by difference were regarded as agitating for particularised interests. It is important to acknowledge that boundaries defining what might be understood as universally relevant, and thus legitimately public are not fixed. Whereas domestic violence was once perceived to belong to the private domestic sphere the feminist movement has worked to redefine it as a matter of public health. It remains the case that access to representation in the most prestigious and trusted areas of a universal public sphere is not symmetric, and marginal voices struggle to be heard. When producing or consuming our media we would do well to recall the significance of recognition, and the consequence of exclusion. Modern multi-ethnic multi-faith democracies are complex, and sometimes

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confusing, societies where commonality across populations can be difficult to discern. The social imaginary is, by definition, a shared space. Fashioning a public sphere that accounts for and incorporates difference should be understood as both an ethical imperative as well as the ground upon which a fuller collective life might take root.

Bibliography Army Film, and Photographic Unit. 1942. Seige of Tobruk. UK: Ministry of Information. Barker, Jennifer L. 2012. “Documenting the Holocaust in Orson Welles’s the Stranger.” In Film and Genocide, edited by Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás F. Crowder-Taraborrelli, 55–58. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Boulting, Roy, dir. 1940. Pastor Hall. UK: Charter Film Productions. 35MM. Caven, Hannah. 2001. “Horror in Our Time: Images of the Concentration Camps in the British Media, 1945.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21 (3): 205–53. England, Len. 2002. “Mass Observation File Report No. 16, 7 January 1940.” In Yesterday’s News: The British Cinema Newsreel Reader, edited by Luke McKernan. London: BUFVC. Fenton, Rosaleen. 2017. “The Religious History of the Gants Hill Odeon Explored in New Exhibition”. Ilford Recorder, 29 January. http://www. ilfordrecorder.co.uk/news/the-religious-history-of-the-gants-hill-odeon-explored-in-new-exhibition-1-4866466. Jancovich, Mark with Lucy Faire, and Sarah Stubbings. 2003. The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption. London: BFI. Jennings, Humphrey, and Stewart McAllister, dirs. 1942. Listen to Britain. UK: Crown Film Unit. Kahn-Harris, Keith, and Ben Gidley. 2010. Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today. London: Continuum International. Knight, Castleton, dir. 1945. The Second Battle of London. UK: Gaumont-British Screen Services. Kushner, Tony. 1989. The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society During the Second World War. New York: Manchester University Press. Kushner, Tony. 1994. The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kushner, Tony. 1997. “The Memory of Belsen.” In Belsen in History and Memory, edited by T. Kushner, J. Reilly, D. Cesarani, and C. Richmond. London: Frank Cass. Lindtberg, Leopold, dir. 1945. The Last Chance. Switzerland: Praesens-Film. 35MM.

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Losson, Nicolas. 1999. “Notes on the Images of the Camps”. October 90 (Autumn): 25–35. Pathe News. German Atrocities. Issue 31, April 1945. UK. Pathe News. An End to Murder. Issue 31, May 1945. UK. Prager, Leonard. 1990. Yiddish Culture in Britain: A Guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Scott, Julian Duncan. 1994. The British Press and the Holocaust 1942–1943. PhD thesis, University of Leicester. Shephard, Ben. 2006. After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945. London: Pimlico. Spielberg, Steven, dir. 1993. Schindler’s List. USA: Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment. Thames Television. The World at War (Genocide). TX: 1974. UK. Welles, Orson, dir. 1946. The Stranger. USA: United Artists Studios. 35MM.

Index

A Academy Cinema, 54, 89, 93, 106, 126, 133, 134 A Daughter of Israel (1925), 55, 67, 77 Alexandra Picture Palace, 85, 88 alternative public sphere, 3, 15, 22, 45–48, 55, 132, 142, 192, 193, 198, 218 Americanism, 91, 92, 151 Ancient Law, The (1923), 40, 65, 103 Apollo Picture House, 33, 78, 79 archival methodology, 12 Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU), 207 audience behaviour, 22, 30, 37, 38, 40–42, 217 B Balcon, Michael, 152 Battle of Cable Street, 175 Ben-Ami, Jacob, 182, 186 Ben-Dov, Ya’acov, 97, 99, 100 Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), 69

Bergen-Belsen, 16, 206, 207, 209–213 Betjeman, John, 160, 172 Bial, Henry, 164 Bijou Picture Theatre, 44, 45, 96 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), 4, 106, 154, 160, 180, 182, 183, 187, 190, 191, 196, 197 C Cantor, Eddie, 107, 119–123, 142, 191 Cesarani, David, 8 Chapeltown, 11, 48, 91, 217 Chaplin, Charlie, 86, 115, 116, 119 charity fundraising, 50–52 Cheetham Hill, 10, 44, 48, 49, 71, 75, 85, 87, 93, 96, 101, 202, 217 Chosen People, The (1925), 85, 86 cinema hoardings, 31, 33–35, 78, 164 Cinema House, 90 cine-variety, 42–44, 50 Cohen, Elsie, 54

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 G. Toffell, Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8

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224  Index Cohens and the Kellys, The (1926), 80, 81 Coles, George, 42, 148 culture of modernity, 22, 35 D de Certeau, Michel, 46 Deutsch, Oscar, 5, 101, 150, 152 Dimbleby, David, 207 E East End cinemas in, 2, 25, 26, 30, 34, 42, 43, 50, 56, 61, 62, 147, 201 communal institutions, 21 jewish habitation of, 6–9, 73, 75, 218 relationship to West End, 53 Egocrat, 139, 140 Eternal Wanderer, The (1933), 16, 44, 90, 105, 176, 181, 182, 184– 186, 188–194, 196–198 F film exhibition in domestic setting, 102 film exhibitors, 30, 49, 147, 149, 151, 202, 217 Film Studies, 5, 12 Flanagan, Bud, 5, 89, 90 Forum Cinema, Chapeltown, 91, 93, 126, 150, 185, 191, 192 Forum Cinema, Villiers Street, 54, 90, 104, 184 Fraser, Nancy, 47, 132, 135, 190, 192 Fuld, Leo, 44, 90, 184

G Galsworthy, John, 104, 154, 155 Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, 35, 36, 82, 101, 148, 152, 154, 160, 163, 168, 173 ghetto, 73–76, 80, 82 Ghetto Film, 72, 74–77, 80–83, 89, 92 Golders Green, 9, 48 Golem, The (Der Golem 1920), 53, 64, 65, 68, 104 Golem, The (Le Golem 1936), 104 Goldin, Sidney M., 86, 88, 89, 129 Goldman, Willy, 37 Gordin, Jacob, 83 Gramsci, Antonio, 92, 151 Green, Joseph, 49, 84, 92, 93, 124, 128, 135 Greenberg, Lazarus, 25–27, 29 Greenberg, Leopold, 12, 169 H H&G Kinemas, 148 Habermas, Jurgen, 3, 47, 193 Hackney Pavilion, 73 Hansen, Miriam, 15, 22, 23, 46, 91, 190 Harlan, Veit, 166 Harrison, Tom, 1 Hartland, George, 170, 171 Hebdige, Dick, 170 Henriques, Rose, 27, 29 Henriques, Sir Basil, 27 His People (1925), 55, 74–77, 80–82, 86, 118 history of Jewish presence in the Britain, 6 House of Rothschild, The (1934), 49, 104, 154, 157–159, 165, 168, 169, 176

Index

Humoresque (1920), 72–74, 77 Hurst, Fannie, 72, 81 Hyams, Phil, 147 I Inside Nazi Germany: 1938, 179, 181 J Jazz Singer, The (1927), 61, 65, 77–79, 81, 82, 114, 122 Jewish Chronicle, The, 12 Jewish middle class, 9, 10, 48–50, 102 Jewish Studies, 5 Jewish syncretic identity, 10, 11 Jewish Times, The, 13 Jewish World, The, 13 Jew Süss (1934), 104, 154, 160–169, 171, 172, 176 Jolson, Al, 78, 79, 114, 122 K Kaddish (1924), 55, 65, 66, 68, 85 Kipling, Rudyard, 170 Kracauer, Siegfried, 151 Kuhn, Annette, 14, 43, 150 L Land of Promise (Banim, Bonim 1924), 97–99 Land of Promise, The (L’Chayim Hadashim 1935), 100, 101, 103 Last Chance, The (1945), 213–215 LCC. See London County Council (LCC) Leeds, 10 cinemas in, 47, 55, 56 jewish habitation of, 10, 11 Lees, Arnold, 168

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Lejeune, C.A., 157, 168, 169, 171, 172 Lewis, Ted ‘Kid’, 35, 42 Leylands, 11, 48, 56, 85, 88, 202 London County Council (LCC), 106, 183–185, 187, 190, 191, 194, 197 London’s West End. See West End Low, Rachael, 5, 161 Lower East Side of New York, 22–25, 72–75, 77–82, 88 Loyalties (1933), 104, 154–156 M Maida Vale Picture House, 49, 67–69, 76, 79–82, 97 Manchester cinemas in, 56 jewish habitation of, 9 Marx Brothers, 113, 114 Mass Observation, 1, 2, 7, 41, 45, 52, 53, 204, 208 Mayfair Cinema, 34, 217, 218 Melody of Life (1932), 81, 82 melting pot, 75–77 middlebrow, 49, 169, 170 Mile End Empire, 34, 44, 66, 91, 184, 192, 216 military conscription, 202 Mizler, Harry, 33 Modern Times (1936), 116 Mosley, Oswald, 185 Muni, Paul, 114, 115, 119, 142, 145, 186 Myer, Morris, 13, 164 N national film culture, 5 Nettler, Fred, 102 New Scala Theatre, 53, 65, 86, 87 newsreel, 14, 16, 41, 42, 45, 176, 178, 180, 181, 188, 189, 203, 204

226  Index British Movietone News, 178, 180, 188 British Paramount News, 188 footage of concentration camps, 206–214 March of Time, 106, 178, 179; Inside Nazi Germany: 1938, 179, 181; The Refugee – Today and Tomorrow, 179 Pathe News, 210 O Old King’s Hall, 26–29 oral history, 12–14 Ostrer, Isidore, 5, 152 Ostrer, Mark, 101 P Palaseum Cinema, 25, 34, 63, 85 Pavilion Theatre, 31, 32, 34, 38–40, 45, 65, 66, 86, 87, 89, 117, 118 Picon, Molly, 15, 43, 49, 93, 107, 123, 125, 127–129, 131, 134, 136–138, 140, 142, 217 Picture Show Annual, 113 Pommer, Erich, 146 posters, 31, 32, 34, 35, 113 public space, 8, 22, 30, 140, 164 public sphere, 3, 4, 14–16, 22, 54–56, 134, 138, 140, 142, 153, 180, 181, 190–193, 198, 202, 213, 215, 218, 219 R Red Bank, 9 The Refugee – Today and Tomorrow (1938), 179

Rivoli Cinema, 31, 33–37, 39, 42, 43, 45, 48, 56, 62, 82, 89, 90, 93, 99, 123, 134, 201, 216 Roman Scandals (1933), 122 Rosenblatt, Josef “Yossele”, 78, 79 Roth, Cecil, 4 Rothman, Benny, 10 Rothschild, Nathan Mayer, 9 S Satz, Ludwig, 88, 118, 119, 128 Schildkraut, Joseph, 118 Schildkraut, Rudolph, 74 Schwartz, Maurice, 31, 33, 53, 77, 88, 125, 166, 182, 186 second generation of immigrant Jews, 8, 76 Sennett, Richard, 38 Shandler, Jeffrey, 117, 127–131 Shildkraut, Rudolf, 118 Sloman, Edward, 74 Soho, 52, 53, 168 Sommerfield, John, 7 Souls in Exile (1926), 33, 77, 78 Staiger, Janet, 13 Stamford Hill, 9, 48, 50, 51 suburbs, 9, 48, 49, 51, 56, 151, 216, 218 T Taylor, Charles, 3, 54 Temple Pictorium, 85, 87 Ten Commandments, The (1923), 70, 71 This is the Land (1935) Troxy, 34, 42, 43, 50, 52, 82, 125, 142, 148–152, 175 Tucker, Sophie, 43, 201

Index

U Uncle Moses (1932), 31, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92 urban landscape, 7, 31, 34, 202 V Vanderbilt, Cornelius Jr., 188 Voice of Israel, The (1931), 89, 118 W Warner, Michael, 138–140, 191 War-time evacuation, 203 Wedgwood, Josiah, 98 Weitzman, Chiam, 10 West End, 51–55, 88 Williams, Raymond, 126, 132, 172 Wise, Rabbi Stephen, 154, 177

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Y Yiddish film, 3, 39, 54, 62, 83–91, 93, 123–126, 128, 129, 134, 135, 181, 182, 194, 217 Yiddishland, 117, 123, 131 Yiddle with His Fiddle (1936), 49, 84, 92, 93, 123, 124, 126–128, 130–133, 135, 136, 140–142 Young Palestine: Eretz Israel in 1926 (1926), 97, 99 Z Zangwill, Israel, 73, 75, 115, 156 Zilberberg, Wolf, 126, 137 Zionism, 10, 27, 47, 89, 94–103, 120, 195 and visual culture, 94, 96 Zionist film, 15, 62, 94, 96–102, 184, 201