"Movie-Made Jews focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation, as well as through the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. By selectively revisiting canonical pre-1990 films and amply representing films of the new millennium, Movie-Made Jews illuminates an American Jewish film tradition that includes jazz singers, pawnbrokers, and serious men. It also features those who tremble before G-d, who commit crimes and misdemeanors, who declare Hineini, Here I Am, who do whatever works, who leave and then return to Delancey Street and Liberty Heights. In these pages, those who might be identified as "just Jews" reside alongside those who are traditionally-and sometimes untraditionally-observant. Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, play a DVD, watch streaming videos, Jewishness becomes part of the multicultural mosaic rather than collapsing into a generic whiteness or being represented as a life apart. This engagingly-written book demonstrates that a Jewish movie is neither just a movie nor for Jews only. With incisive analysis of what appears onscreen as well as what happens behind the scenes during production and how audiences respond to what they view, Movie-Made Jews challenges the assumption that American Jewish cinema is a cinema of impoverishment and assimilation. While it's a truism that Jews make movies, this book brings into focus the diverse ways movies make Jews"--

Identity Papers argues that contemporary Jewish American literature revises our understanding of Jewishness and Jewish difference. Moving beyond the reductive labeling of texts and authors as “too Jewish” or “not Jewish enough,” and focusing instead on narratives that portray Jewish regeneration through feminist Orthodoxy, queerness, off-whiteness, and intermarriage, Helene Meyers resists a lachrymose view of contemporary Jewish American life. She argues that such gendered, sexed, and raced debates about Jewish identity become opportunities rather than crises, signs of creative potential rather than symptoms of assimilation and deracination. Thus, feminist debates within Orthodoxy are allied to Jewish continuity by Rebecca Goldstein, Allegra Goodman, and Tova Mirvis; the geography of Jewish identity is racialized by Alfred Uhry, Tony Kushner, and Philip Roth; and the works of Jyl Lynn Felman, Judith Katz, Lev Raphael, and Michael Lowenthal queer the Jewish family as they reveal homophobia to be an abomination. Even as Identity Papers expands Jewish literary horizons and offers much-needed alternatives to the culture wars between liberal and traditional Jews, it argues that Jewish difference productively troubles dominant narratives of feminist, queer, and whiteness studies. Meyers demonstrates that the evolving Jewish American literary renaissance is anything but provincial; rather, it is engaged with categories of difference central to contemporary academic discourses and our national life.