Jewish Studies Unscrolled: American Horror and Sidney Lumet’s film The Pawnbroker (1964), with Jeremy Dauber

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Religion & Spirituality, Judaism, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 December 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Today on Jewish Studies Unscrolled, we delve into a rare cultural intersection: Jewish life and the genre of horror. While Jewish contributions to American culture often focus on comedy, literature, or music, horror remains largely unexplored, even by prominent Jewish filmmakers. We’re joined by Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University professor and author of American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond. Together, we examine Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film The Pawnbroker as a rare exception, highlighting its haunting depiction of Holocaust survivor Sol Nazerman’s trauma, particularly through the “thin place” of the subway—a space where the present collides with the horrors of the past. You can watch the subway scene we discuss here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello podcast fans. It's producer Josh Cross here. If your email inbox right now is anything like mine, you're being inundated with the end of year giving asks. Well, I'm coming at you with one more. Here at Tablet, we are proud, thrilled really, to be able to offer you Jewish content, on podcasts, on our site, in newsletters, and even on Zoom. We've been bringing you old favorites, new shows and miniseries you've liked, and we've even got some new ones coming soon that you're going to love. But we can't do it without a little help from our friends, which is where you come in.
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1:09.9	Welcome to Jewish Studies Unscrolled, the podcast where we bring on an expert guest to take a close read of one Jewish text.
1:11.5	I'm Elisa Quint.
1:19.3	When we think about Jewish contributions to American culture, we usually think about music,
1:25.6	literature, or comedy especially. What we don't really think about is horror.
1:28.6	Even the Jewish film directors that make horror movies, like Ari Aster or Eli Roth, or even
1:36.8	Steven Spielberg, don't depict horror in American Jewish life.
1:42.5	Why? Well, for one thing, recent chapters of Jewish history are already filled with enough horror.
1:51.0	A second reason?
1:53.1	As a collective, Jews have understood America to be a refuge, a place of optimism and opportunity.
2:00.8	Sydney Lumet's 1964 film, The Pondbroker,
2:04.5	is an exception of a kind. It's not exactly a horror movie, but it is a movie about Jewish life
2:10.5	that complies with one of the genre's most important rules. The movie's protagonist is Saul
2:16.6	Nazerman, a German immigrant to New York. Before World
2:20.2	War II, he had been a professor in Germany and lived a wonderful life with his wife and children.
2:25.5	He is the only one of his family to escape the Holocaust, and he has left a shell of his former self.
2:32.0	After the war, he splits his time between his sister-in-law's home on Long Island,
2:37.1	the pawn shop he runs in Manhattan, and his car commuting between the two. The horror of this
2:43.9	film comes when he leaves these three places and enters a fourth, the subway, where he experiences
	...

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