Jewish Studies Commons^™

Judy Holliday's Urban Working Girl Characters In 1950s Hollywood Film, Judith E. Smith

American Studies Faculty Publication Series

A Jewish-created urban and cosmopolitan working girl feminism persisted in the 1950s as a cultural alternative to the suburban, domestic consumerism critiqued so eloquently by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. The film persona of Jewish, Academy Award-winning actress Judy Holliday embodied this working girl feminism. Audiences viewed her portrayals of popular front working girl heroines in three films written by the Jewish writer and director Garson Kanin, sometimes in association with his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, and directed by the Jewish director George Cukor in the early 1950s: Born Yesterday (1950), The Marrying Kind (1952), and It …

But Where Will They Build Their Nest? Liberalism And Communitarian Resistance In American Cinematic Portrayals Of Jewish-Gentile Romances, Holly A. Pearse

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation analyzes approximately fifty American films that feature predominantly heterosexual interfaith/intercultural romantic, sexual or marital relations between Jewish and Gentile protagonists. It asks what political or social ideals can be illustrated by these portrayals, and how these films can be taken cumulatively to explore trends in modern life. The author places liberalism at the heart of the mainstream Hollywood discourse on intermarriage, and shows how films that run counter to the expectations of liberal romances may reflect communitarian critiques of liberal tenets.

The issue of intermarriage is contextualized with a discussion of the endogamous tradition in Judaism, and by …