Pride and Prejudice

There have always been attempts to create this image—in art history, in Hollywood, and more recently on social media platforms like TikTok.

Filmmaker Nico Beyer has also undertaken this endeavor. His short films, shown here, are portraits—miniatures of contemporary Jewish life in Europe—that, as sketchy glimpses, make no claim to a comprehensive representation. Nevertheless, they aim to show the pride, the doubt, and the sense of normality with which their Jewish protagonists present themselves on camera.

The films’ credo: many images, rather than a single image, of Jewish people.

But even these many images are contested. They must hold their own against the outside gaze—the attributions of a non-Jewish majority—as well as in the internal Jewish struggle over claims to representation.

So who is portraying whom here, and how? These battles over representation become audible in the audio installation that surrounds Nico Beyer’s films. There, one finds all the difficulties inherent in today’s view of Jewish people and their (self-)representation in images: distorting stereotypes, hateful comments on social media, AI-generated fakes, anti-Israeli visual propaganda in the wake of the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, and the fundamental question of whether, regardless of this flood of anti-Semitic imagery, there can be a self-determined, truthful image of Jews.