If you watch one Hanukah film this festive season may I suggest you watch the 2003 film, The Hebrew Hammer. I am particularly partial to this film, it featured heavily in my book, The New Jew in Film, for its self-conscious reversal of cinematic stereotypes of Jews.
Starring Adam Goldberg (fresh from Saving Private Ryan), Andy Dick and Judy Greer, The Hebrew Hammer features an orthodox crime-fighting Jewish hero, Mordechai Jefferson Carver, who saves Hanukah from the clutches of Santa Claus’s evil son, who wants to make everyone celebrate Christmas.
The Hebrew Hammer has been voted among the top holiday movies by the New York Times and Vanity Fair. Moment Magazine listed it among its “Top 100 Most Influential Films in the History of Jewish Cinema” alongside such great films as The Graduate, Schindler’s List and Annie Hall.
The Hebrew Hammer bills itself as the first “Jewsploitation” film since it’s self-consciously based on the Blaxploitation subgenre of American film. A portmanteau of the words “black” and “exploitation”, the genre emerged in the 1970s and was characterised by its controversial portrayal of Blackness, graphic violence and frequent female nudity.
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Speaking to the Hebrew Hammer’s director Jonathan Kesselman about how he crafted the film, he mentioned that he rented all the blaxploitation movies he could get his hands on to get a sense of the genre and how it works. So inspired by this movie marathon, he wrote the Hebrew Hammer in a month and there are clear influences to be spotted throughout.
The eponymous Brooklyn-based Haredi crime fighter is not so much a Jewish James Bond as a semitic Shaft (a classic of blaxsploitation from 1971) – “the kike who won’t cop out when Gentiles are all about” as the theme tune tells us. He is a tough Yiddish-speaking action hero modelled on the Black Panthers. As “the baddest Heeb this side of Tel Aviv”, he is also tattooed and muscled – what in Yiddish would be called a shtarker.
Then there is his whole look. Carver is dressed as a cross between the fictional private investigator Shaft and a Haredi Jew. He wears a black trench coat and cowboy boots but with Star of David-shaped spurs and belt buckle, two exaggeratedly large gold chai (Hebrew for 18 or life) neck chains and a tallit (a traditional prayer shawl) as a scarf. He drives a white Cadillac with Star of David ornamentation and two furry dreidels (spinning tops used during the festival of Purim) hanging from his rear-view mirror. His registration plate also reads L’chaim (Hebrew for “to life” or “cheers”).
Undermining stereotypes
Blaxsploitation films have a complicated legacy with some celebrating them as a revolution in representations of black empowerment and by others as pandering to longstanding and harmful racial stereotypes. For those who celebrate these films, however, they are seen as countering and mocking stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. The Hebrew Hammer can be seen as doing very much the same for Jewish stereotypes.
Carver is recruited by the Jewish Justice League (JJL), which is housed in a building modelled on the Pentagon but in a Star of David shape. The JJL is an umbrella organisation for such groups as “The Anti-Denigration League”, “The Worldwide Jewish Media Conspiracy” and “the Coalition of Jewish Athletes” (whose delegate is, in another dig at anti-Jewish stereotypes, predictably absent).
Carver’s mother is overbearing, his girlfriend is a Jewish American Princess – a spoiled and entitled whiny woman – and her father resembles the Israeli general Moshe Dayan. Carver also manifests every Jewish neurosis: he is allergic to dust, has a taste for Manischewitz wine (Black Label) and cannot handle too much pressure or expectation. When his enemies seek to distract him they do so by throwing money on the ground.
Jonathan Kessleman
Like in blaxsploitation, these are all harmful stereotypes of Jewish people. However, in The Hebrew Hammer it’s not about bolstering them but mocking and therefore undermining them in a self conscious way.
As well as hyperbolic representations of stereotypes, The Hebrew Hammer reverses the antisemitic trope that Jews are physically weak and cowardly. “We’re often depicted as intellectual, but weak and uncool,” Kessleman said. “It’s important to take back these stereotypes and own them.”
“When I made it, I didn’t think I was making a holiday movie,” Kesselman told me but noted that, “it survives because it’s a holiday movie.”
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