The title of the Egyptian film "Hassan and Marcus" (Rami Imam, 2008) nods to the title of an older Egyptian film, "Hassan, Marcus and Cohen" (Fu'ad al-Gazairli, 1954). This older film features three partners - Muslim, Coptic and Jewish – who run a pharmacy together, and is based on the play "Hassan, Marcus and Cohen" that came on the stage of the theater in the early 1940s. In the newer film Cohen's name is conspicuously absent, marking the absence of the Jew from the Egyptian social landscape The absence of the Jew in the film is not only expressed through the deletion of his name, but rather through his presence. In one of the most emotional scenes, when the Muslim family and the Christian one sit together in the living room and watch TV, Hassan and Marcus are nostalgically reminded of Egypt's "good old days" when nobody was stopped and asked about their religion. In a moment of metatextuality the film that airs on television is an old Egyptian movie "Flirting of the Girls" (Anwar Wagdi, 1949), starring Naguib al-Rihani, the comedian who put on the show "Hassan, Marcus and Cohen", and the Jewish singer and actress Laila Mourad. As the camera faces the TV screen, Laila Mourad rises from the darkness and sings her famous song "I Have No Hope in this World". Although there are fewer than ten Jews living in Egypt today, it seems that in recent years Jewish figures are increasingly making appearance in Egyptian television and film. Jewish figure is largely cast as an Egyptian patriot who demonstrates his fidelity to the homeland. The return of the Jew to the Egyptian screen is reflected in the film "Heliopolis" (Ahmad Abdullah, 2009), the TV drama series "Ana Qalbi Dalili" (Mohammad Zahir Ragab, 2009) and "Harat al-Yehud" (Mohammad Gamal al-'Adl, 2015), in documentary films such as "Salta Baladi" (Nadia Kamel, 2007) and "Jews of Egypt" (Amir Ramses, 2012). Drawing on Svetlana Boym's distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia, my paper examines the nostalgic dimension of these visual works. I argue that while the Jew in these works becomes a signifier of another era, a lost paradise, this signifying gesture is not an attempt to restore the past in order to return to it, but rather a means of critically assessing the present with a restorative eye toward the future.