Friedman, Lester D. "The Edge of Knowledge: Jews as Monsters/Jews as Victims." MELUS 11.3 (1984): pp. 49-62.

Friedman argues that many of our deepest feelings about minorities are formed and cultivated by visual media, such as film or television. He borrows film critic Robin Wood’s simple formula for horror films: “normality is threatened by the monster.” (49) This postulate is then applied to the representation of Jews in film. Friedman argues that usually films tend to avoid including any sort of allusions to specifically ethnic characters as to make the film as universally appealing as possible. He argues that once a character is identified with a specific ethnicity or race, then that character takes on a wealth of political, social, and sexual connotations that increase the complexity of the film. However, these connotations also run the risk of offending certain audiences. He examines the role of the Jewish “monster” in Paul Wegener’s The Golem, a German Expressionist film from 1920.

This idea of the Jew as the “monster” is one that is repeated in several of the texts that I have selected for this project. Here, it is applied not to Jud Suss, but to The Golem, a German film created twenty years prior to the creation of Jud Suss. However, many of the stereotypes of Jews that are used in The Golem are seen again in Jud Suss, as well as other anti-Semitic films created in Germany. It is interesting to note how Jewish stereotypes are treated even before the rise of the Weimar Republic and to draw comparisons between the representations of Jews in The Golem and those in Nazi films.

Additionally, Friedman discusses a question similar to my thesis: “What demonic power could match Hitler’s feat of turning members of the most humane professions into murders and supporters of a totally immoral regime?” (56). According to the article, the answer lies in propaganda’s ability to depict the world as “vast and terrifying horror movie” where the lines between good and evil are very clear. German audiences internalized the depictions of good and evil that were fed to them through various cultural texts, one of which was the Jewish “monster.”