Page - 128 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

and performance of “Anglo-Christian-Jewish entanglement” spoke to the con- ditions and tensions of the modern age and provided Disraeli with access to political power (33). Moss then examines Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army famously convicted of treason in 1894 on false charges. French newspapers and the French cinema used Dreyfus’s Jewish wife, Lucie, as the face of the Dreyfus Affair, and images of her proliferated. Though both Drey- fus and his wife were Jewish, the mass media, French intellectuals, and Lucie herself drew heavily on Christian imagery of martyrdom and crucifixion to pub- lically frame the Affair. This was a kind of baptizing, as Moss calls it, of Alfred and Lucie in response to antisemitic, Christianized rhetoric. Still, akin to Alfred’s public image, Lucie’s Jewishness as threat came back into the conversation, ex- emplifying the failure of this mass media baptism: “she found herself tarred by the same suspicions of dual loyalty that stuck to her husband” (39). According to Moss, the Dreyfus Affair raises a key question in relation to coupling, à la Disraeli, one that has no clear answer in light of different European contexts: would the Affair and its mediation have been different if Alfred married a Chris- tian? While there is no simple answer, Moss uses Dreyfus and Disraeli as exam- ples of “the link among marriage, coupling, Jewishness, and modern identity at the beginning of the screen media age” (40). Connected to press and screen, the trial and its fallout influenced a number of European intellectuals as they wrestled with the potential limits and paradoxes of Jewishness, coupling and social acceptance in a rapidly changing modern Europe. Novelists noticed “the potency of Christian-Jewish intersubjectivity” (50) for transgressive experimen- tation; Moss effectively connects writers such as Kafka, Proust and Joyce to Disraeli and Dreyfus. American cinema had a more utopian vision of Jewish/non-Jewish couplings than that which emerged in Europe. Moss’s best analysis of this vision centers on prominent films in the late 1920s, such as The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, US 1927) and Abie’s Irish Rose (Victor Fleming, US 1928), which “featured a variation of either intermarriage or a thematic Anglo-Christian-Jewish coupling” as “the marker of final ascension into American life” (71). On screen cross-cou- plings like these could be a fairly safe form of transgression and experimenta- tion. Regardless of their usefulness and popularity, first-wave films had their critics and decline. Moss robustly accounts for the dwindling representations of the first wave as anti-Semitism and discrimination grew in the United States. The primary dates associated with Part Two, “The Second Wave: Erotic Schle- miels of the Counterculture”, are 1967–1980, but Moss starts with interesting background for this second wave. Key writers, most notably Philip Roth, and boundary-pushing comedians like Lenny Bruce critiqued 1950s’ conservatism and the de-ethnicization of the immediate post-war period. They ultimately had an impact on the sexualized coupling themes of American New Hollywood 128 | Matthew H. Brittingham www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1