Nathan Abrams

What was HAL?: IBM, Jewishness, and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the spaceship Discovery is run by a supercomputer named ‘HAL 9000’. Kubrick seemed to be particularly concerned with HAL, spending more time, care, and attention lovingly crafting its character than that of the film’s humans. Much ink has been spilled on the origins of HAL’s name, particularly its proximity to the letters, and hence the company, IBM. In what will be argued is an example of his signature misdirection, Kubrick denied any connection, insisting that it simply stood for ‘Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer’. The odds of such a coincidence, however, were very high. As General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) put it in Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick), ‘we are ploughing through every possible three letter combination of the code […] there are seventeen thousand permutations’. Drawing upon research in the Stanley Kubrick Archive, coupled with a detailed knowledge of Kubrick’s oeuvre, this article will suggest alternative readings of the character of HAL to (re-)locate ‘him’ in the context of Kubrick’s New York Jewish background and, in particular, how Kubrick’s construction of the character showcased his sense of humour that so powerfully animated his previous two films, Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove.

A Jewish American Monster: Stanley Kubrick, Anti-Semitism and Lolita (1962)

This article presents a case study of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, considering how his films can be considered an emotional response to the Holocaust, the legacy of European anti-Semitism, and stereotypes of the Jewish American woman. It will argue that there are various clues in Kubricks films which produce Jewish moments; that is, where, through a complementary directing and acting strategy, in particular one of misdirection, the viewer is given the possibility of �reading Jewish,� albeit not with certainty, for Jewishness is �textually submerged.� Its focus is Kubricks 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita (1955), in particular the character of Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters, especially in light of Kubricks choice of casting for the role, and Winterss subsequent performance of it. It will conclude that Holocaust and anti-Semitic stereotypes/reverse stereotypes haunt Kubricks version of Lolita as an emotional, yet sub-epidermis, presence.

Muscles, Mimicry, Menschlikyat, and Madagascar: Jews, Sport, and Nature in US Cinema

Muscling in on New Worlds brings together a dynamic new collection of studies that approach sport as a window into Jewish identity formation in the Americas. Articles address football/soccer, yoga, boxing, and other sports as crucial points of Jewish interaction with other communities and as vehicles for reconciling the legacy of immigration and Jewish distinctiveness in new world national and regional contexts.

‘America is home’: Commentary Magazine and the Refocusing of the Community of Memory, 1945–60

This article examines one of Americas most celebrated periodicals, Commentary magazine, founded by the American Jewish Committee under the editorship of Elliot E. Cohen in 1945. The article describes the process by which young Jewish intellectuals, who had removed themselves from their communities, would edit and write for a magazine of the organised Jewish community. It examines Commentarys formative years during the 1940s and 1950s, in particular the nature of the relationship between the editors and its sponsors. In doing so, the article shows the effects of this literary and cultural effort in producing a new Jewish-American discourse of America as ‘home’.