Why Harry met Sally: coupling narratives and the Christian-Jewish love story

This dissertation is a broad historical, cross-disciplinary examination of how Christian-Jewish coupling narratives have served as sites of ideological, political, and cultural contestation in numerous American and European contexts. Through a broad sampling of texts from cinema, literature, television, theater, and radio from the 1850s through the 2000s, this project argues that the emancipatory solution for the crisis of modernity transmuted into the erotic realm in the form of “the coupling narrative.” The transformations brought about by the global media landscape produced both emancipatory and reactionary configurations of the “Christian” and the “Jew” as representations of ideological contestation. In the early twentieth century, American mass media responded to European fascism and eugenics theory by producing Christian-Jewish couplings as a progression narrative in the emerging, and then dominant, Hollywood film industry. ❧ Through detailed cross-disciplinary textual readings and an engagement with a broad spectrum of critical analysis, this project argues that the “coupling narrative” has used representations of gender, sexuality, class, race, and eroticism to thematize the legacies of historical trauma. Chapter one traces the roots of this configuration to European politics in the late nineteenth century. Political figures such as Benjamin Disraeli and Alfred Dreyfus, informed Jewish representations in literature by Proust, Kafka, and Joyce, and the cinema of Méliès. In the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, the three periods of American film and television focused on in this dissertation, Christian-Jewish coupling narratives became important cultural sites of political arbitration. In politically liberal climates, Christian-Jewish couplings formed emancipatory tales of multiculturalism. This was seen in films such as The Jazz Singer (1927), The House of Rothschild (1934), The Graduate (1967), and Dirty Dancing (1987). In conservative and nativist climates, such as the 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, Jewish alterity, along with a more general ethnic visibility was denied through absence. This structure is defined as “Christonormativity.” ❧ In tandem with the historical nature of this research, this dissertation also theorizes the role of Jewish and Christian bodies as competing archetypes. Jewish bodies functioned in numerous historical eras as destabilizing and disruptive forces. This can be read through coupling narrative iconography. Chapters three, four, and five trace how Jewish identity and Christian normativity developed as a relational erotic expression of youth culture and avant-garde resistance in the postwar era. These chapters argue that the Christian-Jewish coupling was a privileged mode of resistance to ethnic, gender, sexual and racial classifications that had emerged in the wake of World War Two and the HUAC investigations of the 1950s. The political and cultural upheavals of the late 1960s produced a second wave of Christian-Jewish couplings in which the “Jew” became an emancipatory signifier of both the counterculture and the sexual revolution. Chapter six concludes with an examination of the function of Christian-Jewish erotic unions in both Holocaust dramas of the 1980s and 1990s and the American romantic comedy of the 1990s and 2000s.