Hi folks,

I will be providing you with a prompt each week to guide your thinking about the films and readings for the week.  My questions are designed to facilitate your engagement with the texts but if you have another compelling question or concern that you would like to raise, please feel free to write about it instead, provided you consider it relevant to the course material.

For this week, I would like to you think about Ellis Island (1981), Hester Street (1975) and The Jazz Singer (1928) in terms of questions of identity.  What conflicts of identity–and specifically racial and religious identity–do each of the films raise?  How does each film resolve these issues, if at all?  You might choose a scene from either film that you think makes the film’s strategy for depicting and resolving racial and religious conflict clear. Do you agree with Rogin’s reading of the function of whiteness and blackness in The Jazz Singer?  And what might Michael Rogin have to say about Hester Street or Ellis Island?  Finally, how might we relate the history of immigration that Foner describes to these films which engage with the same historical period in a more lyrical fashion than Foner’s text?  What is present in the films that is absent in Foner’s work–and vice versa?

Again you don’t need to answer all of these questions but please do engage with those that strike your interest.  Your answer should at least 300 words or roughly a page in length but may be as long as 3 pages.