Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture Online

The name of Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) long stood for a single book: a history of German film of the Weimar period, which appeared in 1947 with the enigmatic title From Caligari to Hitler. Kracauer is now considered one of the great figures of the history of theory in the 20th century, while his view of the image as the bearer of consciousness and world-interpretation continues to be understood as his most original contribution. The delayed reception can probably be understood by the fact that this border-crosser eludes an…

A cycle of crime films in expressionist style, shot in the United States from the 1930s to the 1950s. The large number of Jewish émigrés among the directors of film noir is striking. Their affinity to gloomy, social-critical material goes back to Weimar cinema (Metropolis), and was further intensified by National Socialism and its consequences. With its expressionist aesthetics and high artistic ambition, film noir represented a counterpart to commercial Hollywood productions.Film noir – French for “black film” (in the sense of dark, somber) is derived from the American r oman noi…

Fishke is the eponymous hero of Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh’s Yiddish novel  Fishke der krumer (first published 1869, “Fishke the Lame,” 1996) about the life of an itinerant Jewish beggar in Ukraine in the middle of the 19th century. Written in the 19th century tradition of European novels about the poor and downtrodden (Victor Hugo’s  Les Misérables, Dostoyevsky’s  Poor Folk and  Humiliated and Insulted) as well as underworld romanticism (Dickens’s  Oliver Twist, Eugène Sues’s  The Mysteries of Paris), the novel gave voice to the author’s critique of East European Jew…