In the middle of the movie their is a flashback of a wedding for the Hellen Mirren character and while a traditional Jewish dance is seen, no men are wearing yarmulkes, which seems odd -- but I don't know about Austrian Jewish traditions.
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The film's budget was small.
shareYou just didn't notice! There were several men donning their kippas and women wearing tiaras (which would technically be like a headband - if you don't know what I'm referring to, I don't have time to explain). It was the after party as someone else explained and Maria did day that half of Vienna attended, so one would expect that not all the guests would be Jewish. It was also obvious that her family, like so many Austrian Jews, were not Orthodox Jews, instead they were fully integrated into secular Austrian society. Practicing Conservative Jews many, sure, others maybe even secular non-practicing Jews. People who never believed they'd be treated like they were as they were citizens, they were Austrians, they were just like everybody else. They were scapegoated. And please, if anyone is tempted to hurl anti-Semetic rants at me after this posts, don't bother, I'll report you, block you and you'll be yelling at only yourself.
shareI think the point is that they were very secular, very assimilated Jews. They were not very traditional or observant.
what is with the rant at the end? are you encouraging people to capital shout abuse at you on the internet because you pointed out something?
my friend commented on the same thing after we left the cinema. i can only guess that kippas were used for the religious ceremony and discarded after as austrian jews tended not to be very religious. not that it explains it to be honest
I love the movie. I am Jewish, and I didn't find this particularly problematic. Liberal Judaism had it's origins in Germany over 200 years ago. Liberal Jews not wearing Yarmulkes would not be unusual. The family were obviously not Orthodox.
As an addendum, the original Classical Reform movement was so far away from Orthodox Judaism that many Reform synagogues actually banned the wearing of kippot and tallitot as old-fashioned and backward. It's only been in recent decades that the Reform movement has gone back to embracing some of the older traditions.
I'd like to be a pessimist, but this is a luxury I cannot afford.—Joseph of Cordoba
People shouldn't assume there's just one version of Judaism--any more than there's just one version of Christianity.
For example, Reform Judaism got going in the 19th Century--many decades before the action of this film--and it flourishes in the U.S. today. No doubt many Austrian Jews of the 1930s practiced something similar, just as some other Austrian Jews (for whatever reasons) persisted in the Orthodox version.
And it probably figures that the family of the film wouldn't be Orthodox Jews, since many Orthodox are not known as fans of portrait or other figurative art--apparently part of their beliefs about not "worshipping" graven images, etc.
I wondered at the dancing--would such an assimilated family have had this as part of a wedding? If you read memoirs like Stefan Zweig's it seems as though that kind of "Klezmer" celebrating would not have been part of such a family's way of life.
shareYou are quite right; this Klezmer-style-dance was the most embarrasing part of the movie. Of course this style of music did not fit to the Bloch-Bauers; probably the author who wrote this scene has seen "Fiddler on the Roof" too often ...
shareand while a traditional Jewish dance is seen,What makes you think this was a "traditional Jewish dance"? I in fact saw it as another sign of how secular and nonreligious they were--very orthodox Jews would never have men and women dancing together the way they did. share
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