CHAI NOON

Shalom, partner.

Westerns are a staple of the Hollywood tradition. They represent ideals of American individuality, communal governance, and a reverence for the land. They also raise questions about the treatment of Native Americans, the inherent racism and inequality of American institutions, and the pervasive violence that governs our relationships. Jewish men and women were, from the outset, at the heart of Hollywood. Jewish producers, writers, and actors shaped our sense of heritage and landscape. This imaginative and often witty book illustrates the centrality of Jews and Jewish themes in the Western. Friedmann, the director of the Jewish Museum of the American West, explores a range of “recurring Jewish tropes and motifs” in film and television Westerns: masculine identity, personality types, occupational niches, survival strategies, intermarriage, racism, and marginalization. His book presents a series of close readings of the Western canon—Cimmaron, Shane, The Searchers, High Noon, Deadwood—to see how Jewish figures (explicit and implicit) serve as foils for American male identity. Best is the treatment of the Jewish merchant, from Levy in Cimmaron to Sol Star in Deadwood. Most provocative is its celebration of Mel Brooks as the anarchic critic of American ideals in Blazing Saddles. The book also examines how Jewish émigré composers created the Hollywood film sound and how the arching, aching strains of Max Steiner, Aaron Copland, and Dimitri Tiomkin gave voice to a longing to fit in. For Steven Spielberg, the Western shaped the heroic and artistic ambitions of the outsider, as in the animated adventure An American Tail (with its mouse, Fievel Mousekewitz). In the end, the Western offers tales of “personal tragedies papered over by the American dream mythology”—a statement that says much about the lives of all of us, regardless of religion or descent.

A well-researched, engagingly written history of American popular culture, told from an unexpectedly revealing angle.