Quintessential Strangers: The Representation of Romanies and Jews in Some Holocaust Films

Whereas the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust has been acknowledged on screen, the Romani Porrajmos (the Romani word for the Holocaust) in which more than 250.000 Romanies found their death from Nazi terror, has never been a major topic of any feature film to this day. This article explores the way in which blinding ethnocentrism is at work even among ethnic minorities with a history of persecution. Not all minorities and not all victims have easy access to the media and consequently to global consciousness and conscience. For the Romani the author argues that this reflects the marginality assigned to them everywhere in the world and in Europe in particular and highlights the notion that for many people nothing has really happened until it has happened on screen

The Post-Holocaust Jew in the Age of “The War on Terror”: Steven Spielberg’s Munich

As a film about “terror” spilling over from its local context (the struggle over Palestine) into the global arena, Munich transcends the specificity of the so-called “Palestinian question” to become a contemporary allegory of the Western construct of “the war on terror.” The essay explores the boundaries and contradictions of the “moral universe” constructed and mediated by the film, interpreted by some as a dovish critique of Israeli (and post-9/11 U.S.) policy. Along the way, the author probes whether this “Hollywood Eastern” continues the long Zionist tradition seen in popular films from Exodus onwards, or signals a rupture (or even latent subversion) of it

Buffy the vampire slayer: what being Jewish has to do with it

This article examines the whiteness in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The author argues that the show’s overwhelming whiteness is a product of a generalized white anxiety about the numerical loss of white dominance across the United States and, in particular, in California. The article goes on to think through the role that Jewishness plays in the program, discussing the relationship between the apparently Anglo-American Buffy, played by a Jewish actor, and her sidekick, Willow, who is characterized as Jewish but is played by a non-Jewish actor. The evil master in the first series is given Nazi characteristics and the destruction that he wants to inflict carries connotations of the Holocaust. Structurally, Buffy is produced as the Jew who saves the United States from this demonic destruction. In this traumatic renarrativising, the Holocaust comes to stand for the white-experienced crisis of the loss of white supremacy in the United States. With this reading we can begin to understand the show’s popularity among early adult, predominantly white Americans