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and John Travolta rose to prominence, while directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Michael Cimino were also highly successful. While such success might possibly signal an erasure of Italian ethnicity into a general sense of whiteness, this was not the case. Recall that during the 1960s, dominant American culture was coming under severe criticism from various sectors of the counterculture. As part of those critiques, whiteness was being taken off its pedestal and racial and ethnic identities were being celebrated as more authentic and meaningful. White suburban lifestyles (on display, for example, in comedies such as Please Don’t Eat the Daisies [1960] or The Thrill Of It All [1963]) were increasingly seen as bland and mind‐numbing. As a consequence, ethnicity was suddenly “in,” and starched symbols of whiteness (such as Doris Day and John Wayne) were supplanted by actors who did not hide their ethnic heritage.

Still frame displaying the wedding scene of the 1972 film The Godfather.

      The Godfather, copyright © 1972, Paramount.

      Many of these types of images of Italian Americans remain in contemporary Hollywood film. While characters of Irish descent often appear without any mention of their heritage, Italian American characters are still frequently depicted as earthy, working‐class types (as in Moonstruck [1988]), or mobsters (as in The Untouchables [1988] or the cable TV series The Sopranos [1999‐2007]). While across culture‐at‐large Italian Americans have become for the most part regarded as white, many Italian Americans still choose to maintain a pronounced ethnicity, actively celebrating the culture and traditions of their heritage. Consequently, representing Italian Americans as a distinct ethnicity remains a common practice in American film. The recent four‐part PBS documentary The Italian Americans (2015) offers a good introduction to many of the issues faced by Italian immigrants as they became part of the fabric of American culture throughout the twentieth century.

      Jews in America and in American cinema have faced (and still do face) a different set of circumstances than either Irish Americans or Italian Americans in their negotiation of whiteness. For example, the Jewish religion is not considered a Christian religion, unlike the Catholicism of many Irish and Italian Americans. Also, Jewish immigrants came to America from a wide variety of countries and thus claim a wide range of national heritages. And unlike most Irish and Italian people, who left their native lands for America as a matter of choice, many Jews were forced out of European nations via state‐sanctioned acts of murder and terrorism (such as the pogroms of Tsarist Russia or the Nazi‐induced Holocaust). Furthermore, while most of the US population now regards citizens of European Jewish background to be white, a small but highly vocal group of white supremacist Americans still regard Jews as a “race” that are out to destroy white Aryan purity through intermarriage. (Their use of the term “race,” rather than “ethnicity,” is further meant to exclude Jews from their definition of whiteness.) The roots of such anti‐Semitism, or hatred of Jews, are complex and can be traced back thousands of years. Even in contemporary America, people of Jewish heritage are still regularly targeted by hate crimes and hate speech. Conversely, most European immigrants from Christian belief systems have been more readily assimilated into the ideals of American whiteness.

      Intriguingly, many of the most popular Jewish stage entertainers of the period used blackface in complex ways. While attempting to differentiate (white) Jews from (black) African Americans, Jewish entertainers also used blackface to indicate shared oppression and outsider status. For example, under the guise of blackface, Jewish entertainers sometimes felt safe to tell jokes critical of the white power structure. Jewish entertainers also blurred boundaries between racial and ethnic categories – they may have been performing in blackface, but they sprinkled their dialog with Yiddish slang. Such tomfoolery, practiced by major stars such as Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, tended to expose the artificiality of racial and ethnic categories by jumbling them all together. When Eddie Cantor made a film version of his hit stage musical Whoopee! (1930), he bounced from one racial/ethnic type to another: Jewish in one scene, then in blackface, and then Native American. The film’s story revolves around Cantor’s friends, who are forbidden to marry because the man is Native American and the woman is white. This conflict is resolved when it is discovered that the male was only raised by Native Americans and is “actually” white. The resolution of the plot, as well as Cantor’s parody of racial stereotypes, demonstrate the highly subjective and constantly fluctuating nature of racial and ethnic identities.

      By the time that Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor moved from stage to film, circumstances for Jews in the American film industry had changed immensely. During the 1920s, Jews came to dominate Hollywood. Initially, a number of Jewish immigrants had opened and run nickelodeons in the urban ghettoes of large Eastern cities. From those beginnings, these same men built film production companies, moved to the West Coast, and wrested control of the industry

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