ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on hits by interwar jazz singer Tibor Weygand to argue that the songs, and their position in the films in which they are heard, can tell us much about Hungarian attitudes to the period’s all-pervasive debate on Hungarianness and its potential to accommodate Jewishness. The essay situates the films and Weygand’s career in the context of the Hungarian film sector in the process of etatization to show that despite the claims of anti-Jewish commentators and activists, films made by the ‘Christian-national’ faction and those made by Jewish Hungarians shared an imaginary that framed Jewishness as cultural difference.
