Abstract
This chapter discusses the myth of Jewish passivity and its cinematic renderings in relation to female resisters. Firstly, it provides a critical overview of three films depicting heroic women in protagonist roles, namely The Last Stage (1948), Kapò (1960) and Aimee and Jaguar (1999). Secondly, this chapter brings to the fore the hyper-sexualisation of Jewish women involved in the resistance, exemplified by the recent blockbuster Black Book (2006), which is a sign both of national Israeli discomfort with regard to female Holocaust survivors and of an enduring dismissive attitude to female heroism. Overall, the chapter explains the neutralising strategies employed by filmmakers, which result in minimising and downplaying the contribution of Jewish women to the resistance movement.
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Lewis, I. (2017). Patriarchal Perspectives on Jewish Female Heroism. In: Women in European Holocaust Films. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65061-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65061-6_13
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