James Jordan

Assimilated, integrated, other: an introduction to Jews and British television, 1946-1955

Through the use of production files, correspondence and press cuttings held at the BBCs Written Archives Centre, this article provides an overview to the variety of Jews and Jewish life seen on British television from 1946 to 1955, including examples of televisions first engagement with the Nazi persecution of the Jews of Europe. In so doing it demonstrates not only the diversity of representations, and thereby the multiple Jewish identities on display in post-war Britain, but also the richness of television and the BBCs archives for scholars of British Jewish studies.

‘And The Trouble Is Where to Begin to Spring Surprises on You. Perhaps a Place You Might Least Like to Remember/ This Is Your Life and the BBC’s Images of the Holocaust in the Twenty Years Before Holocaust

In his contribution to this volume, Tim Cole explores a number of different responses to the BBC’s screening of the NBC miniseries Holocaust in September 1978. Building on the work of Emiliano Perra, he argues that ‘the response to Holocaust in Britain’ had more in common with ‘the muted and ephemeral reception seen in Italy’ than ‘the more extensive and far-reaching response seen in West Germany or the United States’.1 As he summarises, ‘far from Holocaust stimulating deep engagement with the wartime past, both British audiences and the press responded more to Holocaust as TV drama’. Moreover, Holocaust was, for some critics, not necessary in Britain, where ‘over the past 20 years there has been much including Thames TV’s “World at War” series, which has seriously documented not only the genocide directed against the Jews but the historical context of this and other agonising events’.2

Jewish Migration and the Archive: Introduction

In July 1999, Potsdam University hosted an international conference, supported by the European Council of Jewish Communities, the Jewish Partnership for Europe, the European Commission (Direction Générale X), the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and the Moses Mendelssohn Centre. ‘Preserving Jewish Archives as part of the European Cultural Heritage’ was not just a conference title, but the starting point of an ambitious programme: to identify Jewish archives (within Jewish communities and related organizations) as well as public archives (state, regional, municipal) containing material relating to Jewish history and culture; to encourage and support exchange and cooperation between those archives; ‘to present the state of the art in the field of Jewish archives in Europe, to set the foundations for a future directory of Jewish archives, and to create a debate between the main actors of the field, including our American and Israeli colleagues’. In his opening lecture Feliks Tych, then Director of the Zydowski Instytut Hystoryczny (ZIH) in Warsaw, argued that the course of events since 1933 – the destruction of Jewish communities and related organizations all over Europe, the confiscation of archives and libraries by the Nazi government in Germany and its institutions all over occupied Europe, the deportations of Jewish people to the concentration and extermination camps, the damage caused by warfare and military action, as well the post-war emigration of many of the Jews who survived the Holocaust – have turned historians into archaeologists who try to decipher tombstones, search through the ruins of destroyed synagogue buildings and, literally, dig out lost or hidden materials in cities or forests. Documents which may have been kept in secure places, in well-organized archives, in genizot, or even in private property, for hundreds of years, have been destroyed or, in many cases and in many different ways, displaced: from Berlin to Moscow, from Vilna (Vilnius) to New York, from Odessa to Jerusalem. Most archivists agree today that these displacements have to be accepted as a matter of fact, and that instead of trying to ‘return’ documents to their places of origin, efforts should be made to ‘reconstruct’ archival collections only in a virtual way, through cataloguing, digitization, publication, and other forms of collaboration between archives all over the world. Already in 1999 those present at Potsdam, after having heard reports from Kiev, Prague, Sofia, Berlin, Milan, Girona, and so many other places, had the impression that there was another dimension, another meaning maybe, to be realized and understood. Historians must begin to integrate their knowledge of

The Prisoner (1952) and the perpetrator in early post-war British television

Since its post-war resumption in 1946, British television has presented a remarkable range of factual and fictional Holocaust perpetrators. This essay considers some of the earliest of those images, moving backwards from the early 1960s to the 1950s. It focuses on the output of the BBC and the content and impact of the 1952 drama The Prisoner. Set in contemporary Israel, this play provoked outrage among British Jewry for its depiction of an Israeli government minister who was also a Nazi sympathiser and Jewish perpetrator. This controversy is explored using production files, newspaper reports and the surviving script of the play.

Another man’s faith? The image of Judaism in the BBC television series Men Seeking God

The 1954 BBC television series Men Seeking God saw Labour MP Christopher Mayhew interview devout believers of the world’s great living religions. The present article uses press coverage, Mayhew’s and the BBC’s archives, and the surviving 15 minutes of footage to reconstruct and discuss episode three on Judaism, arguing that it conflates Judaism, Jewishness, Anglo-Jewish and Israeli identity.

Haunted Images: film, ethics, testimony and the Holocaust

myth of ‘The Few’, glorifying their heroism against the odds. The series Piece of Cake, screened 20 years later, is viewed as an attempt to overturn this myth with a revisionist approach to the Battle which portrayed ‘The Few’ as ordinary and flawed men; But the mixed critical reception it received, as well as the more traditional approach of A Perfect Hero, screened not long after, is used to demonstrate that the myth of ‘The Few’ was resilient in the public mind. The Battle of Britain is thorough in its examination of these case studies, employing a wide range of primary sources. These include both the obvious documents such as Admiralty and Air Ministry papers, Ministry of Information files and national newspapers, and some less widely utilised sources such as scripts, pressbooks, fanzines and taped interviews. MacKenzie’s use of this latter category of sources is especially welcome as it sheds new light on some of the better documented films, even where the discussion predominately reinforces existing interpretations as in the case study of The Lion Has Wings. Similarly, the overarching central thesis that a myth evolves in relation to changing socio-cultural contexts is an idea that already underpins much scholarship on collective memory and history (for example in the three publications cited above), but what is more distinctive is MacKenzie’s specific focus upon myths of ‘The Few’ and the Battle of Britain, the length of time over which he traces these myths, and his engaging discussion of how these myths evolved. A tame thesis and interpretations that reinforce existing scholarship should not detract from the value of this rigorous, well written and frequently thoughtprovoking monograph.

‘What we have gained is infinitely more than that small loss’: Rudolph Cartier and The Dybbuk

This essay recounts the Jewish journey of producer and director Rudolph Cartier, an Austrian refugee from Nazism who forged a new life in Britain from 1935 onwards, playing a pivotal role in the moulding of BBC televisions post-war drama output. It also explores the journey of Jewish cultural texts and traditions as it discusses the production and reception of Carders 1952 English—language adaptation for the small screen of Anskys classic play The Dybbuk. The challenges Cartier perceived in completing this production and the responses of both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences reveal much about the limits of assimilation in an increasingly multicultural Britain.