Chai Noon
Jews and the Cinematic Wild West
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Book Presentation:
Only a few Westerns contain explicitly Jewish stories or themes, and very rarely do Old West tales involve identifiably Jewish characters. Yet Jewish contributors have shaped the Western—once Hollywood’s most popular genre—ever since the silent era, both onscreen and offscreen, and some filmmakers have sought to infuse the genre with a distinctly Jewish sensibility. In Chai Noon, Jonathan L. Friedmann applies some of the central questions of Jewish film studies to the Western: What makes a movie “Jewish”? What counts as a “Jewish image” on screen? What types of Jewish representation are appropriate? How much of a film’s “Jewishness” owes to the filmmakers and how much to the viewer’s interpretation?
This volume joins other reconsiderations of outsider and minority representations in Westerns to offer a more nuanced view of the genre. Friedmann engages with larger themes of Jewish identity in popular film, including depictions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. He also identifies similar concerns within the invention and creation of the imaginary West writ large in American culture. The juxtapositions prove to be both unexpected and intuitively understandable.
About the Author:
Jonathan L. Friedmann is a scholar of Jewish music history and the president of the Western States Jewish History Association. He serves as vice president, academic dean, and director of programs at Ezzree Institute; admissions director and associate professor at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism; director of the Jewish Museum of the American West; and cohost of Amusing Jews, an interview show celebrating Jewish contributors and contributions to American popular culture. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles, most recently Jewish Historical Societies: Navigating the Professional-Amateur Divide, coedited with Joel Gereboff.
Press Reviews:
"Prodigiously researched and written with verve, Chai Noon casts a long-overdue Jewish lens on the Western. Contrary to the conventional notion that Jews and Westerns are like oil and water, the book shows how Jewish characters, themes, and filmmakers played a prominent role in the origins and development of this most American of genres." -- Vincent Brook, author of Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir
"This imaginative and often witty book illustrates the centrality of Jews and Jewish themes in the Western. . . . A well-researched, engagingly written history of American popular culture, told from an unexpectedly revealing angle." ― Kirkus Reviews
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