Description: "Only a few Westerns contain explicitly Jewish stories or themes, and very rarely do Old West tales involve identifiably Jewish characters. Yet Jewish contributors have shaped the Western#20;once Hollywood's most popular genre ever since the silent era, both onscreen and offscreen, and some filmmakers have sought to infuse the genre with a distinctly Jewish sensibility. In Chai Noon, Jonathan L. Friedmann applies some of the central questions of Jewish film studies to the Western: What makes a movie "Jewish"? What counts as a " Jewish image" onscreen? What types of Jewish representation are appropriate? How much of a film's "Jewishness" is owed to the filmmakers and how much to the viewer's interpretation?"--
Brief description: Jonathan L. Friedmann is the president of the Western States Jewish History Association; vice president, academic dean, and director of programs at Ezzree Institute; admissions director and associate professor at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism; and director of the Jewish Museum of the American West. He is the author or editor of numerous books, most recently Jewish Historical Societies: Navigating the Professional-Amateur Divide, coedited with Joel Gereboff.
Review Quotes: "Prodigiously researched and written with verve, Chai Noon casts a long-overdue Jewish lens on the Western. Contrary to the conventional notion that Jews and Westerns are like oil and water, the book shows how Jewish characters, themes, and filmmakers played a prominent role in the origins and development of this most American of genres."--Vincent Brook, author of Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir