Institute of European Studies and Center for Holocaust Studies

GUEST LECTURE

‘“Almost the same, but not quite”: Jewishness in Contemporary UK Cinema’

Nathan Abrams

Bangor University

FRIDAY, May, 13 – 4.00 p.m.

Przegorzały, ul. Jodłowa 13, Room 1.11

All welcome

What does being Jewish today mean in the United Kingdom today? I will seek to explore this question by taking British cinema as my case study. In doing so, I will utilize Homi K. Bhabha’s analysis of the colonial subject, which is useful in considering the position of the British Jew, especially his concept of ‘almost the same, but not quite’ (1994: 123). Using Bhabha's notion of mimicry, I will explore how these ideas are played out in British cinema, in particular how the Jew/ess bears the brunt of ‘the difference between being English and being Anglicized’, with specific reference how it seeks to disguise itself or perhaps to make it more interesting to the mainstream by miming ‘the forms of authority’.

Dr. Nathan Abrams is currently a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Bangor University. He has written widely on Jewish film, history, politics and popular culture in the United States and UK, including The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (London: IB Tauris, 2010); Struggling for Empire: Norman Podhoretz and the Rise and Fall of the Neo-Cons (New York and London: Continuum, 2010); Jews & Sex (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2008);Commentary Magazine 1945-1959: ‘A journal of significant thought and opinion’ (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); Studying Film (co-authored with Ian Bell and Jan Udris; London: Arnold, 2001) and Containing America: Production and Consumption in Fifties America (co-edited with Julie Hughes; Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2000).