Chai Noon: Jews and the Cinematic Wild West

by Jonathan L. Friedmann

Overview

Only a few Westerns contain explicitly Jewish stories or themes, and very rarely do Old West tales involve identifiably Jewish characters. Yet Jewish contributors have shaped the Western—once Hollywood’s most popular genre—ever since the silent era, both onscreen and offscreen, and some filmmakers have sought to infuse the genre with a distinctly Jewish sensibility. In Chai Noon, Jonathan L. Friedmann applies some of the central questions of Jewish film studies to the Western: What makes a movie “Jewish”? What counts as a “Jewish image” onscreen? What types of Jewish representation are appropriate? How much of a film’s “Jewishness” is owed to the filmmakers and how much to the viewer’s interpretation?

This volume joins other reconsiderations of outsider and minority representations in Westerns to offer a more nuanced view of the genre. Friedmann engages with larger themes of Jewish identity in popular film, including depictions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. He also identifies similar concerns within the invention and creation of the imaginary West writ large in American culture. The juxtapositions prove to be both unexpected and intuitively understandable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299352103
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Series:	Wisconsin Film Studies
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jonathan L. Friedmann is the president of the Western States Jewish History Association; vice president, academic dean, and director of programs at Ezzree Institute; admissions director and associate professor at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism; and director of the Jewish Museum of the American West. He is the author or editor of numerous books, most recently Jewish Historical Societies: Navigating the Professional-Amateur Divide, coedited with Joel Gereboff.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 How the West Was Made
2 Pre-Code Westerns
3 Code-Era Westerns
4 Television Westerns
5 Post-Code Westerns
6 Comedic Sensibility
7 Revisionist Sensibility
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Prodigiously researched and written with verve, Chai Noon casts a long-overdue Jewish lens on the Western. Contrary to the conventional notion that Jews and Westerns are like oil and water, the book shows how Jewish characters, themes, and filmmakers played a prominent role in the origins and development of this most American of genres.

Vincent Brook

For those who see the Western as a genre inhospitable to Jewish characters and content, Friedmann offers a comprehensive and engaging record on the full range of Jewish characters, themes, and artistic expressions in this genre. Most compelling is his chapter on Jewish revisionist Westerns such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Little Big Man, and High Noon—the latter furnishing the basis of the book's ‘punny’ title.

Wendy Zierler

Original, seminal, and groundbreaking. . . . Impressively well written, detailed, organized, and presented.

Midwest book Review

This imaginative and often witty book illustrates the centrality of Jews and Jewish themes in the Western. . . . A well-researched, engagingly written history of American popular culture, told from an unexpectedly revealing angle.

Kirkus Reviews

Offers a wide-ranging history. . . . Chai Noon uses the Western as a window to explore bigger questions.

Jewish Chicago: The JUF Magazine

Original and insightful. . . . Provides insight into a topic previously understudied and underappreciated in American Jewish film studies and, in doing so, suggests that, perhaps, the mythical American West is big enough for all of us.

Jewish Book Council

2025-03-08
Shalom, partner.

Westerns are a staple of the Hollywood tradition. They represent ideals of American individuality, communal governance, and a reverence for the land. They also raise questions about the treatment of Native Americans, the inherent racism and inequality of American institutions, and the pervasive violence that governs our relationships. Jewish men and women were, from the outset, at the heart of Hollywood. Jewish producers, writers, and actors shaped our sense of heritage and landscape. This imaginative and often witty book illustrates the centrality of Jews and Jewish themes in the Western. Friedmann, the director of the Jewish Museum of the American West, explores a range of “recurring Jewish tropes and motifs” in film and television Westerns: masculine identity, personality types, occupational niches, survival strategies, intermarriage, racism, and marginalization. His book presents a series of close readings of the Western canon—Cimmaron,Shane,The Searchers,High Noon,Deadwood—to see how Jewish figures (explicit and implicit) serve as foils for American male identity. Best is the treatment of the Jewish merchant, from Levy inCimmaron to Sol Star inDeadwood. Most provocative is its celebration of Mel Brooks as the anarchic critic of American ideals inBlazing Saddles. The book also examines how Jewish émigré composers created the Hollywood film sound and how the arching, aching strains of Max Steiner, Aaron Copland, and Dimitri Tiomkin gave voice to a longing to fit in. For Steven Spielberg, the Western shaped the heroic and artistic ambitions of the outsider, as in the animated adventureAn American Tail (with its mouse, Fievel Mousekewitz). In the end, the Western offers tales of “personal tragedies papered over by the American dream mythology”—a statement that says much about the lives of all of us, regardless of religion or descent.

A well-researched, engagingly written history of American popular culture, told from an unexpectedly revealing angle.

Kirkus Reviews