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October 30, 2009
Jewish body as propaganda
Imagery contributed to society's acceptance of mass murder.
KELLEY KORBIN
It's a phrase many Jews have heard one time or another, but what is the subtext to the statement, "You don't look Jewish"?
Last Thursday, Prof. Sander Gilman discussed various physical characteristics attributed to Jews over the centuries in a lecture entitled,Jews and Sport: Bodies that Matter.
Gilman's talk was presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) in conjunction with its 15th anniversary and the recently opened exhibit, Framing Bodies, Sports and Spectacle in Nazi Germany, a companion to the exhibit More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics. Framing Bodies examines the relationship between politics, propaganda and sport during the Games of the XI Olympiad.
Gilman's lecture was preceded by a talk by Birga Meyer, who discussed the Nazi physical ideal – blond, tall, lean and muscular – and how that ideal was used to perpetuate the militaristic and xenophobic goals of the Third Reich.
In marketing campaigns promoting the 1936 Games, German athletes were featured as models to the rest of the population. The male German athlete was described in metaphors of war and conflict; female athletes were represented as graceful and feminine and featured in depictions of them partaking in sports like figure skating.
Meyer, a doctoral candidate from the University of British Columbia, posited that these representations were designed to prepare the nation for war. The men were to become the strong, sacrificing soldiers, while the women were to become the ultimate mother figures, keeping the home fires burning while the country was at war.
On the other hand, those who didn't meet the physical ideal were excluded and targeted for discrimination, paving the way for societal acceptance of mass sterilizations, torture and murder. Of course, there were no greater victims of this propaganda campaign than the Jews. According to Gilman, the stereotypical image of the Jew was as a pathetic, inherently sickly weakling with, "Eyes that reduce everything to a commercial value.... Flat feet that preclude him from being a citizen and serving in the army.... Skin marked by the 'Jewish itch.'" This image had been perpetuated since the late 1800s, as evidenced by a composite drawing from London that portrayed a Jack the Ripper suspect with a stereotype of Jewish features.
However, this wasn't the only image of Jews available. Gilman, in his book The Jew's Body – one of more than 80 he has written – presents a history of various perceptions of the Jewish physique throughout the last few centuries, beginning with the famous self-identified Jewish athlete of the 1700s, Daniel Mendoza (otherwise known as "Mendoza the Jew"). Mendoza was the most important boxer of his day and became that era's model of a healthy Jewish body. The early Zionists also imagined a strong Jewish body, with Jews as farmers and laborers as opposed to scholars and rabbis.
Of these two opposing images – the weak and powerless Jew and the strong athletic Jew – Hitler perpetuated the former. Under Hitler, said Gilman, "The negative Jewish image becomes stronger again, as part of the visual imagery of anti-Semitism. Nazi children's books even capitalized on this image."
With few exceptions, Jews were not allowed to compete for Germany in the 1936 Olympics, the subtext being that Jews were not athletes and especially not team players.
However, Jews were able to dispel this image in the United States by integrating themselves into the mix of America through its favorite and defining pastime – baseball. By virtue of their talent on the diamond, the likes of Sandy Koufax helped the negative Jewish physical stereotypes recede until, Gilman said, by the racially charged 1960s, "Jews became invisible" because they had finally been assimilated and become, by many standards, white.
Gilman pointed out that the history of stereotypes of the Jewish body is not linear and that stereotypes seem to never completely recede. There is no success or failure in these portrayals, more a commentary on the social context in which they are made. His catalogue of images of the Jewish body over the decades indicate a correlation of physical stereotyping with political environment, whether it is for Jews, those of African descent or for any other ethnic minority.
So, it seems, whether you "look Jewish" or not can have very different meanings depending on when you live and who is doing the asking.
Kelley Korbin is a freelance writer and the Canadian Olympic Committee freestyle skiing media attaché for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.
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