April 2, 2010

A Jewish philanthropist brandishing a large menorah as a weapon was not the image I was expecting to see when I screened “Leaves of Grass,” which opens today. I knew of Tim Blake Nelson as the intelligent and thoughtful filmmaker who in 2001 brought us “The Gray Zone,” a powerful and incisive look at sondercommandos in the concentration camps. But the image on the screen was not one that I remember seeing for decades, certainly not since the late 1980s when Jewish-themed films were often self-deprecating and sometimes offensive. That was a time in America when the screen was filled with an ostentatious presentation of the Jew as having made it in America, with images as far afield as Hollywood movie moguls throwing bagels at each other (“Hearts of the West”) to chopped liver wedding-table sculptures (“Goodbye, Columbus”). Jews had reached a new comfort zone and Jewish filmmakers were busy happily poking fun at themselves. The images we have been seeing this last decade are more even depictions, with spiritual soul-searching (“Keeping Up with the Steins” and “A Serious Man”), Jewish pride (“Defiance”), and total comfort (“Knocked Up” and “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan”). We even get Quentin Tarantino creating a Jewish hit squad (“Inglourious Basterds”) that terrorizes Nazis.