Is this anti-semitism?

This is why:

When he was not composing and conducting, Bernstein enjoyed skiing, playing tennis, and engaging in all manner of word games, especially cutthroat anagrams.

there are already movies about leonid brezhnev, lenny bruce, and lester bangs

To clear up any lingering confusion between him and Elmer Bernstein, in my mind at any rate

the nose is bad, but i saw some people saying that only a jewish actor should play a jewish character. i think this is a very strange position.

Only a Libra should play a Libra

Very upset when right handed actors play left handed characters

i saw some people saying that only a jewish actor should play a jewish character

I'm Jewish and that is absurd. As is the fake nose controversy. There's plenty of anti-semitism in 2023 but this does not qualify.

Only Al Pacino should play Jewish characters

the italian-jewish alliance, sometimes embodied

I'm a retired investor living on a pension

the movie looks like a horrible piece of shit for vacuous film school dorks, nose the least of the problems but obviously horrible if not exactly antisemitism

only Al Pacino should play gay men who visit the Mineshaft.

Talk about versatile

the nose is bad, but i saw some people saying that only a jewish actor should play a jewish character. i think this is a very strange position.

Wait till they hear about Norman Jewison.

I'm torn, because the Jewface issue is legit, imo, but I'm not sure where the line should be drawn (or if) on actors altering their appearance or affect to appear a different race or ethnicity or anything, let alone use an accent as well. There was another minor kerfuffle a week or so ago of Hugh Grant getting shrunk to play an Oompa Loompa in the new Willy Wonka, with little actors complaining it was an insult that further limits their work, but of course this stuff happens all the time, to varying degrees. Brendan Fraser for playing obese. Zoe Saldana getting criticized for playing Nina Simone. Straight actors getting criticized for playing gay characters, etc. The crux of the Jewface debate, per Sarah Silverman at least, was that Jewish actors often get typecast as much as any minority actor, so seeing non-Jewish actors get roles as Jews by embracing or playing up stereotypes is a bit of an insult, but because Jews are typically considered white, they don't get the same sympathy that's extended to other minorities. And that Jews, perhaps used to decades of discrimination and micro-aggressions, don't often stand up for themselves.

Brendan Fraser got shit not for playing obese -- he got shit for playing obese, gay, lonely, and sentimental in a lachrymose shit show of a movie.

I wish people protested movies for being bad.

I'm not saying anything prescriptive (nor revelatory tbh) with this, but as a society we have way over-invested in media representation

and "relatibility"

My sense (as a, you know, Jew) is that non-Jewish actors, expecially in comedies, can often overplay "Jewishness" (whatever that means) in a way that - while it doesn't offend me - is nonetheless excerable to watch, and it makes me feel pissy that non-Jewish audiences probably can't sense the difference. Likewise I'd feel weird about about a non-Jewish actor going large with Jewishness - like, Jery Stiller-level large. Brannagh in Celebrity, already a bad movie, seems like a good example of ythis, although as a result at least we get the comedy of the same actor playing Woody Allen and Reinhard Heydrich.

There was a sitcom in the UK, full of actors who weren't Jewish but "looked" Jewish that felt very Jewfacey to me, although other people in family loved it.

Not bothered about BC's nose except that it looks nothing like Bernstein's nose.

(was called Friday Night Dinner)

Branagh has found a booming career in his autumnal years playing members of ethnic groups cluelessly.

Yeah, ultimately I don't really care about the Bradley Cooper thing, but it's still really touchy to tie in appearance with Judaism, especially that particular stereotypical trait.

Iirc Sarah Silverman complained that while casting an actor to play her mom in an autobiographical play, actors kept using a stereotypical New Yawk Jewish mom affectation, and Silverman's, like, I grew up in Connecticut, my mom is nothing like that. But then, as she concedes, in the end she ended up casting a non-Jew as her mom.

FND was produced and written by a British Jewish guy and most of the characters are played by Jewish people - Tamsin Grieg isn’t Jewish but nobody complained about her casting when it originally aired!

Just out of interest, who in Friday Night Dinner do you think looked Jewish but wasn't?

xpost I don't think that's right, iirc I think the controversy stemmed from the fact that *none* of the cast (except someone that played an aunt) was Jewish.

Simon Bird and Tasmin Grieg, obviously - so not really "most"

When you say "nobody complained", that doesn't square with my memory amongst Jewish peers, even back in the early 2000s when people tended not worry about this sort thing

For me it's less about the actors than it is about the untruthful-seeming perforances. Bird is just being Bird, he's fine. Grieg's performance is... not cool IMO

We’re both wrong - Tamsin Grieg has Jewish ancestry/roots but is Christian; Tracy-Ann Oberman is Jewish and played the aunt, as noted above, and had no complaints around the casting back then. There’s been a shift in recent years. I tend towards being OK with casting whoever is available that works best, and if the decision is made by producers/casting people/other interested parties who are themselves Jewish, I’m not gonna complaint n about that.

Nose prosthetics, though? No fucking way is that ever OK.

Right, I didn't realise she was one of those Christian Jews.

I'd never thought about it before but it is indeed true that most of the cast isn't Jewish. I assume the casting director saw Tom Rosenthal's name and thought he sounds Jewish we'll have him.

Rosenthal wrote something interesting about this on twitter back when David Baddiel published his article complaining about non-Jews playing Jews, but it looks like he deletes his older tweets and it's not there anymore. iirc he has Jewish heritage on his father's side but says he wasn't raised with any sense of Jewish identity, he felt that people saw him as too Jewish to play gentiles but not Jewish enough to play Jews

Here's a 2011 quote from that guy that's on wiki: "I get called a Jewish comedian and I'm totally fine with that, but I can't really inform either of the performances I've done this year with a Jewish background. But I have learnt a lot about the culture and it has given me great pride to do so."

So, so not Jewish that he found playing a Jew to be a learning experience. Later he is quoted (in the context, coincidence or no, of being anti-circumcision), "The last proper Jew in our family was four generations back."

I was a little surprised by how little pushback there was on Mrs. Maisel, where none of the actors in Midge's immediate family are Jewish. (I know there was some discourse about it, but not even as much in 5 seasons as there already has been about Cooper's nose.)

Interesting discussion.

It might be good to keep in mind that not all Jewish people are white or Caucasian or make assumptions about what any of that entails. I am a (very secular) Jewish person and also an ethnic minority (Korean - mom converted to marry my dad). I also have African-American family members. Our family is really diverse. When people online (always white people) hear one fact about me (my Jewishness) and seem to automatically assume I live in a white bubble and that I need to be educated on Missing White Woman Syndrome etc. I find that offensive.

I respect that Jewish people might be sensitive about Friday Night Dinner. This seems especially so in the UK where the discussion of antisemitism seems to have become completely toxic. Personally, I find Friday Night Dinner hilarious. I didn't feel it leaned into "Jewface," though I feared some of what I considered inside jokes about being Jewish might land that way with other Jewish people. But that was the writing, not the performance imo.

I have enjoyed Tamsin Grieg and Tom Rosenthal in other things. This discussion reminds me of the thing that some people say about supposedly 1/2 and 1/4 Jewish people - it was good enough for Hitler. That's a different issue but I think it has some weight.

A huge number of actors have Jewish ancestry - Hallie Berry, Scarlett Johansen, Timothee Chalamet, Robert DeNiro, Lauren Bacall. A good reality of social progress I think is that as society evolves it's not necessary to put people in rigid boxes and it's best to let the individuals self-identify rather than debate other people being Jewish or whether Jewish people are passing for non- Jewish or vice versa. But I also wouldn't weigh in on a similar issue concerning another race or ethnicity that wasn't mine. That would be changing the context and perspective, and such calls are simply not mine to make.

I would hope the conversation about what is stereotypically "Jewish" or "Jewface" will recede in time. I cannot imagine having a discussion about whether Jewish actors can play "gentile" characters.

Hey, Lauren Bacall was totally both-parents-Jewish Jewish. Bacall apparently went by Betty to her friends, and always (at least privately) identified as Jewish. This was trenchant/interesting:

A model before she was an actress, Bacall once revealed to other models that she was Jewish, and despaired that the response “Oh — but you don’t look Jewish at all!” was meant as a compliment.

“I resented the discussion — and I resented being Jewish, being singled out because I was, and being some sort of freak because I didn’t look it,” Bacall wrote in her autobiography.

And ScarJo had a Jewish mom and was raised Jewish. But Lil' Timmy C. has a Jewish mom, yes.

DeNiro and Berry ... first I've heard that.

you're not truly a jewish actor or actress until adam sandler includes you in "the chanukah song." sorry, i don't make the rules.

on a serious note, great post, felicity

Yes, thanks Felicity!

I find it hard to get worked up about this stuff because the Jewish experience is generally well-represented in American movies and TV over the last 50-60 years, and there is no shortage of roles for Jewish actors. There are much worse histories of discrimination and lack of representation in media, and there are much more serious instances of anti-semitism going on these days.

That said, I did watch the terrible This Is Where I Leave You on a plane a few years ago, featuring Jason Bateman Tina Fey and Adam Driver as Jewish siblings who return home to sit shiva, say brachas, smoke weed in shul, and have stereotypically loud family arguments, and I got how offensive unconvincing depictions of Jewish family dynamics could be.

Felicity very OTM

Only a Libra should play a Libra

― Andy the Grasshopper

only a ninja can defeat a ninja

imagine if Ben Kingsley was cast as Gandhi today

Except his father was Indian and his real name is Krishna Pandit Bhanji.

I agree but am kind of averse to the "everyone else has it worse, stop complaining" line, which I also hear a lot

But Lil' Timmy C. has a Jewish mom, yes.

DeNiro and Berry ... first I've heard that.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 17, 2023

I might have misunderstood Barry but at some level who cares

the ben kingsley thing is odd because no one seemed to point out the obvious fact that he is half Indian back when people started throwing this up as controversial (which, to my mind, was only about 10 years ago; I don't recall any controversy about his casting in the 80's or 90's...I could be wrong). I only found out he was half Indian last year due to wikipedia.

He played a Pakistani taxi driver in Mike Leigh's first film for the BBC.

From memory, it was mentioned loads when the film was being made and when it was released.

Yep