Minority representation in the streaming era: An analysis of Jewish identity in competing subscription video on-demand platforms

This article considers how three competing subscription video on-demand services (SVODs) – Jewzy, ChaiFlicks, and IZZY – attract American Jewish subscribers via content selection, platform design, and marketing rhetoric. Although these three SVODs offer similar catalogs, they nonetheless foreground...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:International journal of cultural studies 2023-03, Vol.26 (2), p.145-163
Main Authors: Sienkiewicz, Matt, L. Wayne, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cultural identity
Jewish Americans
Marketing
Minority groups
Representation
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Summary:This article considers how three competing subscription video on-demand services (SVODs) – Jewzy, ChaiFlicks, and IZZY – attract American Jewish subscribers via content selection, platform design, and marketing rhetoric. Although these three SVODs offer similar catalogs, they nonetheless foreground distinct elements of Jewish life, history, and practice. This process of commercial framing, the paper argues, creates unique brand identities for the three services that align with three different approaches to the construction of American Jewish identity. The article goes on to show that these SVODs offer an opportunity to revisit core assumptions embedded within Jewish screen studies and minority screen representation studies more broadly. Minority identity on screen is most often studied through the interpretation of key instances of minority representation. These SVODs instead emphasize the dynamics of interpellation, as they hail viewers by appealing to limited, pre-constructed concepts of cultural identity while offering entire platforms worth of representations.
ISSN:1367-8779
1460-356X
DOI:10.1177/13678779231155507