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Navigating Neqama: Jewish Americans in Mass Media
Abstract
This paper examines three recent mass mediations of Cold War Jewish American revenge fantasies: Inglorious Basterds (2009), Hunters (2020), and The Plot Against America (2020). First, I read these three films/shows across anthropological and literary studies of the racialization of Jews in Euro-American modernity [Brodkin (1997), Boyarin (1997), Boyarin and Boyarin (2002) Schreier (2015)]. Accordingly, I argue for a productively unstable positioning of Ashkenazi Jews as colonized people, model minorities, and agents of white supremacy. Subsequently, I link these films/shows to the eras they depict and contextualize their storylines within the ascendance of Jabotinskyist and Kahanist Jewish nationalism expressed primarily in the Middle East. In the process, I ask whether these films/shows advance nuanced understandings of Jewish identity and politics; or whether they essentialize and fetishize Jewish identity – that is whether they partake in Orientalist discourses of a noble savage. Finally I ask whether or not these revenge fantasies obscure from view historical and ongoing acts of violence committed by groups of Jewish nationalists who employ neqama (revenge) in the articulation of their political violence.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Israel
North America
Palestine
Sub Area
None