“This is Your Bar Mitzvah, Goldberg!: Jewish Losers, White Gentile Male Saviors, and ‘Unthreatening’ Egalitarianism in The Mighty Ducks Trilogy.”

• In Event: Children’s Culture and Ideological Formation

Abstract

Jewishness plays a central but unrecognized ideological role in the blockbuster Disney children’s hockey film trilogy, The Mighty Ducks (1992-1996). This trilogy, which remains nearly unstudied in the literatures on children’s films, sports films, and Jewish film representation, specifically deploys tropes of comedic Jewish emasculation to underpin its wider fantasies about taming feminist and multicultural progress. In particular, I reveal how this ideological labor falls on the team’s fat and klutzy Jewish goalie, who is always addressed by the conspicuously Jewish mononym, “Goldberg.” I argue that as a sidekick and foil to the team’s white gentile male captain, Goldberg vitally enables the trilogy to articulate a new moral order of “proper” relations between white gentile men and minoritized people: an order that repackages white gentile male dominance in benevolent-looking new forms, rather than disrupting that dominance. Even when Goldberg is not onscreen and seems marginal to the plot, his role as a Jewish foil always delineates the film’s core fantasy of sustaining a “sweeter” white gentile male patriarchy over people who are women, people of color, and/or Jews. To construct this narrative and visual analysis, I link prior scholarship on Jewish emasculation (by Daniel Boyarin, Ann Pellegrini, and Sander Gilman) with scholarship on race, gender, and sexuality within children’s films and sports films (such as work by Aaron Baker, Julia Lee, Ian Wojcik-Andrews, Ron Briley, Seán Crosson, and Emma Poulton). These new dialogues extend Jewish studies, gender studies, critical race studies, and media studies to clarify how antisemitic subtext can pervasively underpin the ideological apparatus of children’s sports films--including films that seem earnestly liberatory.

Author

• Jonathan Branfman, Stanford university