Apologies for the title; I couldn’t resist. The “Marxian” perspective I refer to is the one from Vaudeville and Hollywood, not Germany or the British Museum. Historians of American film and American Judaism have often argued that the Jewish performers and movie-makers who flocked to Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s brought no unique perspective, and particularly no uniquely Jewish perspective to their film. The Marx Brothers, for example, born in New York City to Jewish immigrants, did not play Jewish characters on screen, and their films are said to contain no content originating from their Jewish background or their Read more