Not really white - again: performing Jewish difference in Hollywood films since the 1980s

Joke-Work: The Construction of Jewish Postmodern Identity in Contemporary Theory and American Film

“…Nevertheless, their participation in the multiculture also entails producing Jewish difference via doubling and performance. 4 In a recent essay, Homi Bhabha in fact analyzes the tendentious, self-critical joke as "a mode of [Jewish] minority utterance" 5 precisely because of the doubling or ambivalence that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy find problematic. And he adds that this focus on the joke-work shifts the definition of difference from visible or visual marks to "verbal or rhetorical locutions."…”

The new ‘Porn Wars’: representing gay male sexuality in the Middle East

“…It is important we remember that the Jewish body, Arab body as well as the Muslim body have a history of being represented, discussed and constructed as sick, perverse, diseased, frail and weak (Abrams, 2009;Lehamn & Susan, 2007;Puar, 2007;Stratton, 2001;Yosef, 2004). Challenging a history of the nerdy, desexualised, diasporic Jew and the frail 'Holocaust' Jewish body, Lucas presents us with the new gay Israeli, a variation of the 'new Jew' (Yosef, 2004).…”

Homo Mimeticus

“…For a productive recuperation of both Caillois and Huizinga in the context of "Homo ludens 2.0" that resonates with homo mimeticus in its diagonal attention to aesthetics, games, and politics and the mimetization qua "ludification of contemporary culture it entails, " see Frissen et al 2015, 15. Chapter 6: The Human Chameleon As critics pointed out, this formal device led initial viewers to believe in the historical existence of Zelig. See Stam andShoat 1987, 192 n. 7, andNas 1992, 99. On Zelig as a "metaphor for ethnic assimilation, " see Johnston 2007; on Zelig as a "metaphor for intertextuality" predicated on "postructuralist mimesis, " which reproduces other cinematic texts, see Nas 1992, 95; on Zelig as representative of the performative dimension of Jewish identity in the 1980s, see Stratton, 2001, 152-154. See Golomb and Wistrich 2002.…”