Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and the Ambivalence of French–Jewish Identity
MIAMI UNIVERSITY
From the 1995 release of La Haine, critics have questioned whether Jewish-French film director Mathieu Kassovitz is ‘authentic enough’ to speak for the ethnic banlieue. Yet La Haine is preoccupied with this very anxiety. This article examines how the film self-reflexively explores the place of Jewishness in the social crisis it dramatizes. La Haine achieves this ‘Jewish’ self-reflexivity primarily through the relationship its arguably most fully realized character, Vinz (a working-class Ashkenazi Jew), entertains to his more visibly ethnic friends Saïd (an Arab) and Hubert (a black African). As Vinz navigates the complicated terrain of adolescent relationships striving to become ‘real’, in other words, ethnic, masculine, authentic, the film also searches for a place for Jewish identity a generation after the ambivalent Jewish encounter with May 1968 and beyond. Vinz's ambivalent locus between, on the one hand, other minority figures with whom he wishes problematically to identify and, on the other, the privilege of whiteness vis-à-vis which he occupies a position of complex and uneasy proximity exemplifies a wider crisis of French Jews on the Left. The article concludes with a discussion of this crisis and how La Haine situates itself in the history of post-war Left Jewish politics in France.