CALL FOR ESSAY PROPOSALS: Jewish Film and New Media
“Visualizing ‘The Jewish Question’ 1933-Present:
Anti-Nazi Resistance, the Holocaust, Collaboration, Ambivalence”
We invite proposals for essay contributions to a special issue of the journal Jewish Film and New Media that will offer a range of critical responses to an urgent yet complicated issue: What political, cultural, and social roles do film and other graphic arts play in representing the rise of Nazism, its consolidation of power, persecution of the Jews, and resistance? What role do visual media play in the global resurgence of white supremacist and antisemitic rhetoric and violence today and its resistance? How do we recognize and analyze representations of resistance that embed ambivalence and collaboration towards ‘The Jewish Question’? To address these questions, we ask: How do contemporaneous political, ideological, cultural, and social contexts intertwine with the techniques and styles as well as the rhetorical and narrative strategies of producing Anti-Nazi visual art?
We encourage discussions of film and other graphic arts that have been produced across a wide international spectrum since 1933. In addition to comparative studies, we invite essays focusing on individual films and artists, directors, actors, and artworks. Among the visual genres and media we will consider are documentary and feature films, TV films and series, comics, cartoons (print as well as cinematic), mural art and caricature, painting, drawing, photography, museum exhibits, and memorials.
Underlying this special issue is the conviction that in a variety of styles and artistic movements, from 1933 onwards, the visual arts have responded to the many forms and national embraces of Fascism, especially in the case of Nazi Germany and its ideologies and practices. This is true today with regard to neo-fascist white supremacist and other far right groups. The extended time frame of the special issue would include contemporaneous and subsequent responses to the rise and consolidation of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, as well as the long aftermath that includes intergenerational memory, national memorialization, and denial. For example, retrospective and revisionary views of Nazism are replete in the burst of Cold War spy films from the 1960s onwards, shedding critical light on earlier films. More particularly, as with other visual media and genres and as this special issue will demonstrate, their expressive and narrative forms represent the presence and absence, questioning and questionable depictions of Jewish personae, Jewish culture, Jewish realities, and Jewish myths. In addition to the proliferation of graphic memoirs and fictions, some contemporary examples are the TV series “A French Village” (France 2009-2017) and “Generation War” (Germany 2013), the Israeli docudrama “The Flat (Israel and Germany 2011), the Polish feature film “Aftermath” (2012), and the internet meme Pepe the Frog (2006).
A 350-word proposal, a short academic bio or CV, and contact information should be emailed to:J
Phyllis Lassner (phyllisl@northwestern.edu) and Alexis Pogorelskin (apogorel@d.umn.edu) by November 1, 2022.