Neo-Kabbalah and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Film

Abstract This chapter examines the ways in which the esoteric Jewish speculative traditions known as Kabbalah and Hasidism have been represented in fictional film in the first decade of the twenty-first century. From Darren Aronofsky’s Pi of 1998 as the first successful feature film to cast Jewish mysticism in a neo-kabbalistic light to the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man of 2009 as the last major film to deal with neo-Kabbalah at any length, this period uncoincidentally dovetails with the height of the Hollywood popularization of Kabbalah as spurred by Sandra Bernhard and Madonna. The chapter considers the connections and their implications for both Jewish spirituality and its representations on the big screen. It analyzes some of the textual and conceptual traditions behind important cinematic representations within films of the period, including Pi (1998), Ushpizin (2004), Bee Season (2005), Ha-Sodot (2007), and A Serious Man (2009). It considers how film both stands in continuity with those kabbalistic and hasidic traditions and modifies them in the New Age vein of what is known as neo-Kabbalah and neo-Hasidism. In showing how it is that the Jewish speculative traditions of Kabbalah and Hasidism have been able to affect mass-consumed cinematic portrayals of ultimate Truth, it seeks to shed light on the New Age, pop-cultural dialectic of the particular within the universal and of the universal within the particular. In doing so, this chapter recognizes new media as contemporary extensions of past textual traditions that at once transform those traditions and bring them into the New Age.