Abstract
This article studies how two popular 1960s Anglophone children’s films projected antisemitic ideas onto genocidal villains. Focusing on Cruella de Vil of Walt Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and the Child Catcher of Ken Hughes’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), it analyzes the appearance of ethnically stereotyped, Jewish-suggestive figures presented as enactors of genocidal violence, rather than as victims or survivors of it. Subliminally reversing the resonance of the Holocaust’s Jewish victimization by non-Jewish Europeans, these films both touch upon themes of genocidal atrocity that were belatedly emerging in broader Western popular culture of the 1960s, as well as maintain an antisemitic ethnic hierarchy in which implicitly “Jewish,” non-white, and queer bodies appear unworthy or dangerous. In these films, villains marked by Jewish, racialized, and queer stereotypes, as well as by antisemitic paradigms, categorically oppose the existence of an entire demographic or seek to confine and/or annihilate that demographic for their own perceived wellbeing. Contextualizing and analyzing this phenomenon, I consider its potential meanings for 1960s American audiences in relation to their shifting social and political realities, including the waning of public antisemitism, as well as the emergence of Second-Wave Feminism and the Gay Liberation movement.
Recommended Citation
Moskowitz, Golan
(2023)
"“Jewish” Genocidal Villains for Children? Emergent Holocaust Consciousness and Postwar Antisemitism in One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,"
Jewish Film & New Media: Vol. 11:
Iss.
1, Article 2.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/jewishfilm/vol11/iss1/2