As the 95th Academy Award Nominations were revealed, Steven Spielberg received his first ever nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Though it might sound unbelievable, this is because Spielberg has historically been a champion and discoverer of stellar writing talent, and despite his heavy involvement in the process, he usually leaves credit to others.
Lawrence Kasdan was one month into his career at screenwriting when Spielberg recruited him to pin down George Lucas’ ideas for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg also gave David Koepp his first big blockbuster writing opportunity for Jurassic Park, and ever since the 2005 political thriller Munich, he has collaborated in various occasions with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Kushner (Lincoln, West Side Story). In his newest collaboration with Kushner, The Fabelmans, Spielberg took on writing duties, as the story is inspired by his upbringing, making it his most personal work to date. In this particular film, Spielberg touches on his Jewish identity in a way he had never done before, grounding themes he had explored previously in a more human and delicate way.
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Judaism has been present for the director ever since Jaws; in some films his exploration of it has been subtler, and in others such as Schindler’s List, way more explicit. Through it all, his faith and life have been anchors to one of the most robust and iconic bodies of work in cinematic history.
Spielberg’s Personal Life as Inspiration
Biography Channel
Though The Fabelmans is not strictly an autobiography, a lot of what’s present in the plot did happen in Spielberg’s youth. His parents were usually raised in mostly Christian neighborhoods, and so was he, where he experienced antisemitic bullying constantly. Having spent his formative years moving throughout America, due to his father changing jobs, he went from Cincinnati to New Jersey, Arizona, and Northern California, and in all these places, he always felt like an outsider. This is why many of the protagonists of his films are outcasts or individuals attempting to go against the flow.
In his earliest productions, his life and identity as a Jew did not show up so vehemently. The bullying in his childhood certainly did affect him, and for a lot of years, Spielberg has confessed he felt ashamed of who he was. Some critics have hinted that in Jaws, the shark is a metaphor to antisemitic perceptions in society, as an outsider that is not wanted and is seen as someone who will destroy everyone. Spielberg recalls that, upon reading the source material, he identified with the shark; a Freudian may say that the very title itself hints at Jewish themes.
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, his first sole screenwriting credit, the ending seems to hint at Judeo-Christian notions of the afterlife, as Richard Dreyfuss’ character joins the departing aliens. These allusions and details would start to become part of his filmography, eventually becoming a central theme to his work.
Spielberg’s Judaism from Shame to Empathy
Universal Pictures
Having witnessed and lived in his own skin what it’s like to be perceived as a lesser member of society, Spielberg understood the struggles of others. In the 1980s, two of his films, The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, display his acute sense of empathy. The former was a turning point in his career, when he began to not only be perceived as a director of summer blockbusters, but as a serious auteur with a great capacity for portraying complicated stories of human strain.
The Color Purple depicts the hardships of Black women in the early 20th century, bringing to the world the breakthrough performance of Whoopi Goldberg, as well as earning Spielberg his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The latter, featuring a 14-year-old Christian Bale, is about a young British boy who goes from living with his wealthy family in Shanghai, to a prison camp in World War II.
These two productions not only marked a shift in his life, but also are influenced by his understanding of suffering. This factor is precisely what makes them both some of his most complex and overlooked films, in which empathy stemming from his upbringing and identity bleed through every frame. This same empathetic approach toward otherness would help define his 1997 film Amistad, as well as The Terminal, Lincoln, and of course Schindler’s List.
Judaism as a Historical Axiom
In a lot of his films, Judaism has been present as part of the formation of modern history. Critics and scholars have deemed Raiders of the Lost Ark as a revenge movie against Nazism. The Ark is a Jewish artifact (supposedly containing the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God), and though the Nazis prosecute them, they need them in order to gain a superior power. The Ark’s rejection (and subsequent face-melting) can be seen as God denying Nazis a pass to heaven.
Two films in particular explicitly tackle Jewish identity in history. The obvious first, Schindler’s List, tells the real life story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who uses his close ties with the Nazi Party to save the lives of Jews by employing them as workers in his factories. The other film would be Munich, the fictionalized account of an undercover Mossad operation to assassinate members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September for killing 11 athletes of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Olympiad in Munich.
Schindler’s List and Munich as Personal Spielberg Movies
In Schindler’s List, Spielberg gives a heartwarming tribute to those who stand against dividing forces in the world and disregard their own status to save lives. Here, Jewish existence is set in a moment of extreme struggle, and disregard for their lives. Though the story is told from the eyes of a non-Jewish person, it’s a humanistic take on empathy, one that Spielberg himself felt for others through his life. The second is a bleak account of death.
Munich is about how retaliation and violence will only bring more of it, and how at the core of historical conflicts, the constant is human suffering and the people that are stuck with having to deal with the constructed hate of the past. Savagely critiqued by Zionist movements across the world for seemingly portraying the Israeli agents as terrorists themselves, Spielberg said that the source of the film did have second thoughts about his killings, and that the survivors of the operation would probably never find peace for what they did.
These two films work as representation of Jewish identity trough history, and how nothing is truly black and white. For Spielberg then, the notion of identity is both personal and collective; it’s not only set on personal experiences, but built through context, circumstances and historical events that affect a lifetime. His filmography is a place where these two ideas collide and find common ground, though not always at the forefront of the narrative. With his newest film being praised as his most personal, the themes surrounding his formation as a filmmaker are now making a full circle between life and art.
