Ambivalence and Identity in Russian Jewish Cinema

‘The Jew is ambivalence incarnate.’ zygmunt bauman Historically, the representation of Jews in Soviet national cinema (when and where it has been allowed) has been a litmus test for the Jewish position in Rus-sian culture. Jews have been variously, and paradoxically, stereotyped: they could simultaneously symbolize backwardness (as ignorant shtetl dwellers) or progres-siveness (as the learned ‘people of the book’); they could stand for emasculated weakness (as victims of pogroms and genocide) or virile leadership (as rabbis or commissars); they could be seen, in short, as heroes or anti-heroes (Bartov 2005). For scholars of contemporary Jewish cultures, film therefore provides eloquent material for research on identities and their construction and reconstruction. According to Stuart Hall (1990), cinema is a potent medium in which identities are produced. Rather than being a ‘second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists’, it is ‘a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak’ (1990: 236–7). Moreover, because of their profound influence on society and cul-ture, films constitute a source of the visual memory transmitted to future genera-tions (Portuges 2005). Taking these formulations as a starting point, I will approach the subject of Russian Jewish identity by studying representations o