Overview
- Considers interwar Jewish life through the previously unutilised optic of film-going
- Contributes fresh material on the history of migrant life in Britain, detailing how a distinct migrant community inhabited and remade the modern city
- Examines a wholly new aspect of film reception and exhibition in the UK
- Reveals new experiences of the rituals and routines of the everyday of this community
- Features innovative methodologically utilising a range of empirical data including oral history interviews and a plethora of archival sources
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book investigates a Jewish orientation to film culture in interwar Britain. It explores how pleasure, politics and communal solidarity intermingled in the cinemas of Jewish neighbourhoods, and how film was seen as a vessel through which Jewish communal concerns might be carried to a wider public. Addressing an array of related topics, this volume examines the lived expressive cultures of cinemas in Jewish areas and the ethnically specific films consumed within these sites; the reception of film stars as representations of a Jewish social body; and how an antisemitic canard that understood the cinema as a Jewish monopoly complicated its use as a base for anti-fascist activity. In shedding light on an unexplored aspect of British film reception and exhibition, Toffell provides a unique insight into the making of the modern city by migrant communities. The title will be of use to anyone interested in Britain’s interwar leisure landscape, the Jewish presence in modernity, anda cinema studies sensitised to the everyday experience of audiences.
Reviews
“His book will indeed be of use to ‘anyone interested in the interwar leisure landscape, the Jewish presence in modernity, and a cinema studies sensitised to the everyday experience of audiences’ (blurb).” (European Journal of Communication, Vol. 34 (1), 2019)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Gil Toffell is an academic researcher currently working on the Oxford Leverhulme Diasporas Programme. He was previously Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Jews, Cinema and Public Life in Interwar Britain
Authors: Gil Toffell
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56931-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-56930-1Published: 14 November 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-56931-8Published: 03 November 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 227
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations
Topics: Film History, Jewish Cultural Studies, British Culture, History of World War II and the Holocaust