Page - 129 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

cinema in the late 1960s. Generally speaking, two rhetorical trends emerged from the second wave. The first trend took on the absence of Jews during the 1930s and 1950s and tackled the association of Jews with Communism. The Front (Martin Ritt, US 1976), starring Woody Allen, is an excellent example of a second-wave film on 1950s blacklisting and is an example Moss wields well. The second trend of this New Hollywood was a “new Jewish visibility [that] signified the rhetorical entrance of explicit sexuality” (151). Moss marshals a lit- any of filmic Jewish/non-Jewish couplings to show the sexual experimentations of the youthful counterculture. Also in Part Two, he tracks the rare television cross-couplings of the second wave and the pornographic cinema of the 1970s. Despite some holdovers, the second wave of clear cinematic cross-couplings largely declined in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Reagan-style conservatism took hold in American culture and politics. (The Holocaust in popular culture was an exception.) If the second wave was defined by cinema, the third wave, discussed in Part Three, “The Third Wave: Global Fockers at the Millennium (1993–2007)”, began heavily invested in television. To highlight just a few ex- amples of his sweeping survey in Part Three, we can note that the radical female Jew returned in popular culture in the form of Roseanne Connor (Roseanne Barr) in Roseanne (ABC, US 1988–1997) and Moss’s most potent analysis is cen- tered on The Nanny (CBS, US 1993–1999). This period is particularly defined by the adaptation of Christian-Jewish couplings for global, transnational audienc- es. American television companies were expanding their markets overseas and thus required the “familiar, translatable material” that they found in the “nos- talgic tone of the couplings of the third wave” (234). Moss moves beyond TV sit- coms to highlight Broadway musicals and the gross-out comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, such as American Pie (Paul Weitz / Chris Weitz, US 1999). Part Three includes a variety of examples of which full account cannot be given here. By the late 2000s, the third wave was coming to a close as “scripted entertainment began to look elsewhere for visualizing societal fracture” (260). Moss’s book is particularly intriguing when he connects media formats in popular culture, especially when he joins newspaper accounts, stand-up come- dians and novels to experimental Jewish/non-Jewish couplings in cinema and television. His command of media formats, major theorists and secondary lit- erature is impressive and expansive. However, the book seeks to account for too much, and as a result Moss sometimes misses the opportunity to make his analysis all the more persuasive. For example, Moss’s analysis of the comedy revolution – stand-up comedians in the 1950s and 1960s – is fascinating, but a more detailed engagement with this revolution might have offered other con- vincing examples beyond Jerry Stiller and Lenny Bruce. Similarly, aspects of the theoretical material on the comedy revolution needed to be worked out more to be persuasive. It is unclear to this reviewer, for instance, that “the anti-hu- Book Review: Why Harry Met Sally | 129www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1