The Jew in American Cinema is a historical survey and analysis of over 800 feature films with Jewish characters and themes. The book covers films released both by Hollywood studios and independent producers, from the primitive years of the movie industry to the present. Patricia Erens charts the rise and fall of an extensive list of specific types, genres, and themes and analyzes their persistence, modification, or disappearance from decade to decade under the pressure of artistic and sociohistoric events. The genres she discusses include melodramas, dramas, comedies, domestic comedies, biblical epics, biographies, ghetto films, pogrom films, gangster films, Jewish-Irish films, war films, and social document- dramas. Erens identifies a surprising number of persistent Jewish film stereotypes: the Yiddisher Cowboy, the Neurotic Son, the Shlemiel, the Prodigal Son, the Benevolent Physician, the Jewish Soldier, the Hebrew Warrior, the Jewish Gangster, the Scheming Merchant, the Jewish Villain, the Jewish Peddler, the Comic Jew, the Jewish Agitator, the Stern Patriarch, the Diminished Father, the Holocaust Survivor, the Jewish Producer, the Jewish Ugly Duckling, the Manipulating Mother, the Long- Suffering Mother, the Virginal Jewess, the Sabra Heroine, the Rose of the Ghetto, and the Jewish American Princess, among others. Important individual films, producers, writers, actors, and actresses are discussed by decade, with particular emphasis on how the experiences and attitudes of the American people in general and the American Jewish Community in particular were reflected on the screen.
Patricia Erens has written the most extensive and thorough survey of Jewish stereotyping and characterization in Americancinema to date. It will, in the words of Harry Geduld, "be widely accepted as the basic history of the image of the Jew in American cinema...anyone seriously interested in the topic will want (this) book."