Stanley Kubrick is generally acknowledged as one of the world’s great directors. Yet few critics or scholars have considered how he emerged from a unique and vibrant cultural milieu: the New York Jewish intelligentsia.
 
Stanley Kubrick reexamines the director’s work in context of his ethnic and cultural origins. Focusing on several of Kubrick’s key themes—including masculinity, ethical responsibility, and the nature of evil—it demonstrates how his films were in conversation with contemporary New York Jewish intellectuals who grappled with the same concerns.  At the same time, it explores Kubrick’s fraught relationship with his Jewish identity and his reluctance to be pegged as an ethnic director, manifest in his removal of Jewish references and characters from stories he adapted.
 
As he digs deep into rare Kubrick archives to reveal insights about the director’s life and times, film scholar Nathan Abrams also provides a nuanced account of Kubrick’s cinematic artistry. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of one of Kubrick’s major films, including Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick thus presents an illuminating look at one of the twentieth century’s most renowned and yet misunderstood directors.  

NATHAN ABRAMS is a professor of film studies at Bangor University in Wales. He is the founding coeditor of Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal, and he is also the author of several books including The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (Rutgers University Press). 

"Abrams’s book is a towering achievement in the ever-burgeoning literature on Kubrick. It genuinely reveals new perspectives on Kubrick through its ability to read the autobiographical allusions present in all of his films, and it provides a vital argument as to the importance of the director’s Jewish ancestry on his art."

"Nathan Abrams’ recent and remarkably insightful book published by Rutgers University Press in 2018."

"Brilliantly documents and analyzes Kubrick's Jewish sensibility by locating him in the lifelong context of his Jewish cultural and intellectual milieu. Abrams breaks acres of new ground. Essential reading."

 "Abrams...[identifies] each and every Jewish allusion in Kubrick’s oeuvre that he can find."

"Stanley Kubrick is outstanding in its approach and the material it covers. As a pioneer work, anyone investigating Kubrick in the future would not be able to overlook Abrams' findings and arguments."

"Abrams dug through the archives to provide a detailed re-examination of Kubrick’s films through the context of his Jewish background. The book details themes and concepts such as masculinity and ethical responsibility. Abrams also explores Kubrick’s fraught relationship with his Jewish identity, and how his reluctance to be pegged as an 'ethnic' director manifested in the removal of Jewish references and characters from stories he adapted."

"Abrams offers fine-grained readings and interpretations of Kubrick’s career as a photographer and director, including insights into Kubrick’s process of development and production. Abrams is particularly attuned to the paradoxical pattern of Kubrick’s erasure of overt Jewish representation from source material while simultaneously interweaving Jewish themes, symbols, and cultural textures into his art."

"Abrams...makes a very convincing case that while Kubrick posed as an atheist technocrat filmmaker who wanted his films to appeal to worldwide audiences, among the many things he was burying in their subtexts were 'the concerns of Jewish intellectuals in the post-Holocaust world'....Ultimately though, are Abrams’ assumptions correct? Many of them ring true and likely are."

"Abrams asserts that if you look closely enough, the tension between being a cultural and religious Jew turns up frequently in Kubrick’s work." 

"With imagination and intellectual rigor, using archival research and close readings of the films, Nathan Abrams explores Stanley Kubrick’s relationship with his Jewishness in this exceptionally readable and convincing book."

"No stone is unturned, no link untraced. Fans will revisit Kubrick’s movies with increased appreciation of the depth and complexity that make them compelling, and new ideas to fuel speculations. Academics will find plenty to rekindle debates about matters such as authorship, genre, adaptation, context and audience address, making this a significant intervention beyond the sub-field of Kubrick studies."     

"Written by Nathan Abrams, a superstar of contemporary Kubrick studies, this wonderfully knowledgeable and scholarly account of the great director’s Jewishness is the most original film book I’ve read for many years."

"Abrams’s study—this is not the least of its virtues—encourages us to revisit the films with a refreshed, enlightened eye. This is what any serious and good work of film criticism should do."

"An impressive work of original scholarship, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual presents an exceptionally informative study of one of the twentieth century's most renowned and yet misunderstood film directors."

"Irresistible reading."

"The power of the book as a whole...will be riveting reading for anyone who loves Kubrick's film."

"Abrams combines close readings of the films with intensive, archival research into the source material— scripts, production documents, and Kubrick’s personal papers and artifacts—which collectively tell a Jewish story."

"[An] extraordinarily entertaining new book."

"No film or Jewish history holding should be without this different approach to Kubrick's film magic." 

"In Nathan Abrams’s Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, [an] exploration of the contradictions of Kubrick’s relation to Jewish identity, the film is seen through the lens of Biblical allusion and Kabbalistic interpretation."

"We’re still finding Jewish clues in Kubrick’s work 20 years after his last film," by Nathan Abrams
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/were-still-finding-jewish-clues-in-kubricks-work-20-years-after-his-last-film/

"No stone is unturned, no link untraced. Fans will revisit Kubrick’s movies with increased appreciation of the depth and complexity that make them compelling, and new ideas to fuel speculations. Academics will find plenty to rekindle debates about matters such as authorship, genre, adaptation, context, and audience address, making this a significant intervention beyond the subfield of Kubrick studies."

" [A] pathbreaking new book."

"Every scholar and devotee of Kubrick will want to read Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual."

"As he digs deep into rare Kubrick archives to reveal insights about the director’s life and times, film scholar Nathan Abrams also provides a nuanced account of Kubrick’s cinematic artistry. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of one of Kubrick’s major films, including Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick thus presents an illuminating look at one of the twentieth century’s most renowned and yet misunderstood directors."  

“A must-read for anyone interested in Kubrick, this original and provocative study combines wonderfully perceptive film analyses with extensive archival research and a dazzling display of cultural-historical and biographical knowledge.”