Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema

The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish “outsiders” to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

“The ‘Film Europa: German Cinema in an International Context’ series is increasingly indispensable for those interested in film history or media studies. This collection appears in that series, and Hales and Weinstein provide a masterful introduction that places the historical bookmark where it belongs: everything starts with Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler: Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen (1952)… Highly Recommended.”  • Choice “An important contribution to an understanding of filmmaking in Germany during the Weimar Republic. This volume offers a multi-faceted, in-depth investigation into the Jewish presence in Weimar cinema both on screen, in various genres, and off screen through biographical sketches and film reviews.” • Barbara Kosta, University of Arizona “Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Film makes a significant and welcome contribution to the study of Weimar film, to German film studies in general, and to German Jewish studies. It presents detailed research and analysis of important Weimar films, artists, and critics; most of them have not been examined in much detail by other scholars, and when they have been, they have rarely been analyzed in relation to Jewishness, a concept that this volume explores in a very nuanced manner.” • Rick McCormick, University of Minnesota

Barbara Hales is a Professor of History and Humanities at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Her publications focus on film history of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. She is the author of Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany (Peter Lang, 2021). Along with Mihaela Petrescu and Valerie Weinstein, she also co-edited a volume entitled Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928-1936 (Camden House, 2016). Dr. Hales is President of the Center for Medicine After the Holocaust.