or thrust is to demystify the Jew, that is, to explain the seemingly mysterious and obscure characteristics of the European image. This coincides with a period when immigrants were no longer arriving by droves on America's shores; the Jew in the United States was becoming a recognizable American; the European Jew, by contrast, was still strange (Doneson 11).
Over the period in question, Doneson says, the image of the Jew changed from a highly stereotyped figure to that of the Jew as a symbol for mankind, ending with the Americanized Jew.
Doneson notes that two forces were of overwhelming importance to the American film in the 1930s: the Depression, an internal threat; and Hitler, an international threat. The question raised by Doneson was to what extent did Hollywood feel the Nazi threat to the Jews to be a major concern, and, in asking this question, she notes the difficulty involved in trying to answer such a question through hindsight. She notes that the first American film to deal directly with the problem of anti-Semitism is The House of Rothschild, and she says that the timing of this historical film on the rise of the Rothschild financial empire is suspect because it was in the middle of the Great Depression, at a time when unemployment in Europe and the United States was at a peak and when several Eur
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