In Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, Nathan Abrams seeks to demonstrate that the famed director fully merits the book’s subtitle. Frederic Raphael, who wrote the screenplay for Kubrick’s 1999 Eyes Wide Shut, is unconvinced:
Abrams affects to unlock what Stanley was “really” dealing with, in all his movies, never mind their apparent diversity. It is declared to be, yes, Yiddishkeit, and in particular, the Holocaust. This ground has been tilled before by Geoffrey Cocks, when he argued that the room numbers in the empty Overlook Hotel in The Shining encrypted references to the Final Solution. Abrams would have it that even [Kubrick’s 1975 film] Barry Lyndon is really all about the outsider seeking, and failing, to make his awkward way in (Gentile) society. On this reading, [the film’s protagonist] is seen as Hannah Arendt’s Jewish “pariah” in 18th-century drag. The movie’s other characters are all engaged in the enjoyment of “goyim-nakhes” [sic], an expression—like mentshlikhkayt—he repeats ad nauseam, lest we fail to get the stretched point. . . .
Abrams seeks to enroll [Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of] Lolita in his obsessive Jewish-intellectual scheme by referring to Peter Arno, a New Yorker cartoonist whom Kubrick photographed in 1949. The caption attached to Kubrick’s photograph in Look [magazine] asserted that Arno liked to date “fresh, unspoiled girls,” and Abrams says this “hint[s] at Humbert Humbert in Lolita.” Ah, but [Vladimir Nabokov’s novel] Lolita was published, in Paris, in 1955, six years later. And how likely is it, in any case, that Kubrick wrote the caption?
The film of Lolita is unusual for its garrulity. Abrams’s insistence on the sinister Semitic aspect of both [its predatory villains], Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert, supposedly drawing Kubrick like moth to flame is a ridiculous camouflage of the commercial opportunism that led Stanley to seek to film the most notorious novel of the day while fudging its scandalous eroticism.
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