The fantastic Hasid fashioning Jewishness on-screen /

This dissertation explores the representational power of Hasidic Jews in film, the natural site for the construction of a shared and heavily stereotyped visual vocabulary. Hasidic Jews onscreen indicate Jewishness-in-general, even when the vast majority of Jews do not look Hasidic at all. Their costumes---beards, hats, caftans, and peyos, combined with exaggerated speech patterns and gestures---are instantly recognizable. Exploring films that feature Hasidic imagery, I examine what is at stake when Jewish identity is emblematized by a specific religious iconography. Emptying the real Hasidic Jews who wear the garb of any individual or historical substance, Hasidic attire becomes a site onto which Jews and non-Jews can displace and project their anxieties about what it means to be Jewish.Focusing on American films from the late twentieth century, I demonstrate how Hasidic imagery responds to the multiculturalist demands of the period. Finding a place within the multiculture through this limiting and ambivalent imagery enabled Jews to participate in a new form of nationalism, by establishing Jewishness---in its Hasidic iteration---as a desirable variety of white ethnic difference. The Hasidic fantasy thus signifies Jewish racial difference and whiteness, Jewish particularism and Americanness, Jewish authenticity and Jewish performativity.While I argue that these contradictory meanings coexist onscreen, filmmakers and viewers foreground different implications depending on context. I introduce a counterexample to the American films by discussing the popular French film Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob. While this film makes comparable use of Jewish imagery, France's historic resistance to multiculturalism provides an alternative context for the Hasidic figure even as the consequences of the imagery transcend national boundaries.This dissertation participates in the ongoing conversation about the meanings of coded Jewish performances, but expands on previous scholarship by illustrating that even the most transparent depictions of Jews generate complex, often contradictory codes. The Hasidic figure onscreen, ostensibly easy to decipher, poses questions about Jewishness, gender, and national identity. The image presumes transparency while communicating a set of opaque signifiers. Conversely, representations of Jewish women lack such signifying immediacy. By redirecting the lens toward gender, new options for thinking about Jewishness emerge.Ph.D. -- Graduate Theological Union, 2013.School code: 008