scholarly journals “Sometimes a Bee Can Move an Ox”: Biblical Epics and One Man's Quest to Promote Jewish Values in Blacklist-Era Hollywood

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Andrew Paul
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Biblical Epics

In the 1950s, the top American Jewish organizations chose a single man, John Stone, to represent their collective interests in Hollywood. Over the course of the decade, Stone's Motion Picture Project sought to prevent antisemitism on film and to inspire the creation of positive Jewish characters. Negotiating the cultural politics of the era, however, resulted in an increasing tendency to favor depictions of biblical Jews over contemporary American ones. In a strange twist, Stone endorsed no film with as much zeal asBen-Hur, a New Testament celebration of Jesus. By following Stone's tortuous attempts to navigate Cold War controversies, and by casting new light on the phenomenal success of biblical epics in the 1950s, this essay suggests that at the heart of postwar popular culture was a shift toward a particular discourse of liberal humanism.

Sexuality, Stoning, and Supersessionism in Biblical Epic Films of the Post–World War II Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 311-325
Author(s):  
Adele Reinhartz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
New Testament ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
King Vidor ◽  
Biblical Epics ◽  
Narrative Thread

Several biblical epics from the 1950s and 1960s with strong female heroes contain a narrative thread involving the stoning or threat of stoning of these protagonists. Notably, this motif is entirely absent from the biblical stories on which the films are based. This essay examines this feature in three films: David and Bathsheba (Henry King, 1950), Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959), and The Story of Ruth (Henry Koster, 1960). I argue that the motif of stoning is adopted from the New Testament story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), and that this use contributes both to the subtle denigration of traditional Judaism and the reinforcement of gender hierarchies that are evident in many Bible films from the post–World War II period.

The Asia Foundation’s Motion Picture Project

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The 1950S

This chapter investigates how and to what extent the Asia Foundation (TAF) and its field agents covertly acted to construct an alliance of anticommunist motion picture producers in Asia. It explores how US government–led Cold War cultural policies influenced the Asian regional film industry in the 1950s. It also scrutinizes the ways TAF agents responded to the various needs of local film executives and negotiated with the constantly changing political, social, and cultural environments in the region during the project's early activities. The chapter reviews the origin of TAF, the Committee for a Free Asia (CFA), which is intended to advance US foreign policy interests in Asia. It discusses the CFA's core activities, which include the broadcasting of Radio Free Asia.

“Dressed in an Angel's Nightshirt”: Jesus and the BBC

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Veldman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Radio Drama ◽  
Religious Broadcasting ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Popular Religiosity ◽  
Popular Television

AbstractThis article examines images of Jesus broadcast on the BBC from the 1930s through the 1950s. During these years, the BBC sought to use its cultural influence to replace popular religiosity with what the clerics who staffed its Religious Broadcasting Department (RBD) regarded as a more masculine, modern, and vigorous national religious faith. To achieve this aim, the RBD marshaled the might of British New Testament scholarship and its image of a warrior-like, apocalyptic historical Jesus. Yet the RBD's hopes of bridging the gap between popular religiosity and its own vision of Christianity went unrealized. Programs on Jesus that reached a genuinely national audience—The Man Born to be King, Dorothy L. Sayers's wartime radio drama, andJesus of Nazareth, a popular television series from the 1950s—instead featured Anglicized and ahistorical images deeply embedded within British popular culture. The story of Jesus on the BBC highlights both this popular culture's strength and Christian Britain's fragmentation.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

The Lattimore case

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Penrose
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Witch Hunt

Edith’s career and collaboration with Fritz Machlup at Johns Hopkins University flourished and she began work on the growth of the firm, and studied the Hercules Powder Company. As Cold War tensions increased during the 1950s she and Penrose became involved in the defence of their friend and colleague Owen Lattimore who was named as the top Soviet spy by Senator McCarthy. The chapter covers the persecution of Lattimore, his trials, the role of Judge Luther Youngdahl, and the operation of his defence fund. Other friends of E. F. Penrose became victims of the anti-communist ‘witch hunt’, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the USA, and determined he must leave. In 1953 Edith and Penrose testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. They were also investigated by the FBI. After five years the case against Lattimore was dropped. Edith’s father died and her brother Harvey was killed in an air accident.

Serbia and Croatia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filip Ejdus
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Small States ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
Defence Strategy ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
National Defence

During the cold war, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia was a middle-sized power pursuing a non-aligned foreign policy and a defence strategy based on massive armed forces, obligatory conscription, and a doctrine of ‘Total National Defence’. The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s resulted in the creation of several small states. Ever since, their defence policies and armed forces have been undergoing a thorough transformation. This chapter provides an analysis of the defence transformation of the two biggest post-Yugoslav states—Serbia and Croatia—since the end of the cold war. During the 1990s, defence transformation in both states was shaped by the undemocratic nature of their regimes and war. Ever since they started democratic transition in 2000, and in spite of their diverging foreign policies, both states have pivoted towards building modern, professional, interoperable, and democratically controlled armed forces capable of tackling both traditional and emerging threats.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

scholarly journals Saints on Stage: Popular Hagiography in Post-WWII Italy

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 216
Author(s):  
Daniela Cavallaro
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Young People ◽  
Educational Goal ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Lives Of The Saints

This article brings to light several examples of the hagiographic plays staged in Italy during the 1950s and early 1960s in parishes, schools, and oratories. The article begins with a brief introduction to the continued tradition of staging the lives of the saints for educational purposes, which focuses on the origins, aims, and main characteristics of theatre for young people of the Salesians, the order founded by Don Bosco in 1859. Next, it offers a brief panorama of the pervasive presence of the lives of the saints in post-WWII Italy. The main discussion of the article concerns the hagiographic plays created for the Salesian educational stages in the years between 1950 and 1965, especially those regarding the lives of young saints Agnes and Domenico Savio. The article concludes that the Salesian plays on the lives of the saints, far from constituting a mere exercise in hagiography, had a definite educational goal which applied to both performers and audiences in the specific times of Italy’s reconstruction and the cold war.

scholarly journals Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2020-012061
Author(s):  
Lara Choksey
Keyword(s):  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Environmental Racism ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Material Environment ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
Influence At Work ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Genetic Reductionism

This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend.

In the Service of World Revolution: Vietnamese Communists’ Radical Ambitions through the Three Indochina Wars

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-30
Author(s):  
Tuong Vu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
International System ◽  
The North ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
The 1950S

The terms “decolonization” and “Cold War” refer to specific processes and periods in the international system, but they do not capture the full agency of local actors such as Vietnamese Communists. Based on recently available archival materials from Hanoi, this article maps those terms onto Vietnamese Communist thinking through four specific cases. The declassified materials underscore the North Vietnamese leaders’ deep commitment to a radical worldview and their occasional willingness to challenge Moscow and Beijing for leadership of world revolution. The article illuminates the connections (or lack thereof) between global, regional, and local politics and offers a more nuanced picture of how decolonization in Southeast Asia in the 1950s–1980s sparked not only a Cold War confrontation but also a regional war.

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