Should non-Jews play Jewish roles?
JVL Introduction
Bradley Cooper is facing criticism from British actor Tracy-Ann Obermann and others for performing in “Jewface” after the release of the trailer for his biopic of Leonard Bernstein, which revealed the facial prosthetics he employed for the role.
Mark Harris in Slate is having none of it:
“We are not so direly mistreated by movies and television that we need a category of role reserved for us, and as for having the right to tell our own stories, we tell them (and many others, as everyone should have the opportunity to do) all the time…
I find cringe-inducing… the assumption that all Jews share some deep, ineffable, biographical commonality, some ooky-spooky cross-generational muscle memory or psychic bond that hyper-qualifies us for certain acting assignments and should at least move us to the front of the line.”
RK
This article was originally published by Slate on Thu 17 Aug 2023. Read the original here.
The Bradley Cooper “Jewface” Controversy Isn’t Really About That Nose
There’s nothing wrong with the actor’s decision to wear a prosthetic to play Leonard Bernstein, nor is that really what’s at stake.
Loading article text…
Reverse the question:
Should Jews play non Jew roles?
Oberman, along with Rachel Riley, Louise Ellman, and many others in the UK have long weaponised antisemitism both for political purposes and profile. Ignore.
I find it strange that this objection has come up only over Bernstein and his nose (incidentally is his man-izing going to feature in this biopic about him and his wife?) — but not to my knowledge about ‘Oppenheimer’. Surely it is very strange that the Manhattan Project was largely staffed by Jews yet in the film there is not a single Jewish actor as far as I know?
Soon I hope to see ‘Dr Semmelweis’ in the theatre, though with some doubts as acted by Mark Rylance it apparently attributes Semmelweis’s struggle to get his lifesaving hygiene measures adopted by the medical establishment to his Aspergers rather than their open antisemitism .
I did experience a problem when for instance the play ‘Ghetto’ was played at the National Theatre with very few Jewish actors some years ago. It made the whole thing feel like rather a cardboard cutout. The film of ‘David Copperfield’ was the most extreme example I’ve yet seen of casting seen almost as a job creation scheme for diverse actors, and it came over to me as just too theatrical and hammy.
There are many ways of making sense of Dickens or Shakespeare or other parts of the historical repertoire that once were acted only by white people. The Afro-Futurist ‘Much Ado’ at Stratford was pretty terrific, I thought. I cried at Glenda Jackson’s Lear, and was impressed by the all-female Henry lV acted as in a women’s prison. Last night at Camden Fringe I saw a cross-dressing play about Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia played by a cast of theys/shes/hims which was intriguing and mind-expanding.
What I don’t like is careless mashups. It will be many generations, I suspect, before a white man plays Othello and a good thing too. Loath as I am to agree with D Baddiel about ANYTHING, I think he has a point about Jewface.
This is not to say that no performer can ever play anything except their own ethnicity, sexual orientation etc, but I do believe there’s a depth when performers can also act out of lived experience. You could call it the ring of truth.
Thank you for this wonderful post! Made not just my day, but, I fear, my year!!!! Perhaps we should start a Bradley-Cooper-for-President petition.
Much of the anger around ‘Jewface’ (the term coined by Sarah Silverman) is growing frustration over Hollywood’s long-standing refusal to cast Jewish actors in parts depicting Jews as positive role models.
It is a shame JVL has chosen to use the offensive and culturally appropriated term ‘Jewface’ here. It also surprising given that JVL had previously republished my article
‘Jewface and other David Baddiel Racisms’ (originally published Arena magazine).
You’d think they’d be some sort of embarrassment given that Sarah Silverman argued
“let’s not use the word ‘Jewface’… the fact that (Al) Jolson, a Jew, made a career in blackface, indicates another major reason why we shouldn’t use the term ‘Jewface.’ White Jews have benefited from this racist mode of performance.”
It is also worth noting that Jewish-Americans and Mediterranean-Americans were frequently chosen to don greasepaint to play Native Americans. Anne Bancroft (Walk the Proud land), Tony Curtis (The Outsider) being among the numerous examples.
Aside from the racially offensive side of this term and argument, is it in an utterly self-defeating move, being suggested, that Jewish performers restrict themselves to Jewish roles? Should they or their estates refund the money gained from playing Catholics, Protestants, Atheists etc?
Sidney Tafler played an Italian-English Catholic hitman and Harry Landis a cockney Catholic gangster. Jewish parts have not been the majority of Maureen Lipman’s career. The same is true of Kirk Douglas’s career. Incidentally, Douglas was not a genuine Thracian (Spartacus), a genuine Viking (The Vikings), or genuine Frenchmen (Paths of Glory).
Fascists used to justify their anti-Semitism claiming that Jews were not real white westerners. The logical outcome of those repeating David Baddiel’s ill-informed self-important gibberish is to replicate this Fascist position.
We only ‘chose’ to use the word because that was what the controversy was about. It’s an important issue to address and impossible to discuss without the use of the word in the centre of it.
I observe self interest. And, after all, this is about dramatisation, which is often not accurate, usually being an impression of events. I love Throne of Blood, the 1950s film which I originally thought to be a perfect recreation of Old Japan. I now realise that it is actually an impressionist Kabuki version of Shakespeare. I love it all the more. Laurence Olivier played Richard 3rd with a false nose, without any suggestion that the plotting and heroic last King of England to die fighting in battle was Jewish.
As my Jewish partner, who is a performer said, if non-Jews are not allowed to play Jews than can Jews play non-Jews?
I wonder what the reaction would be if they’d cast a Jew with a big nose instead or indeed anyone with a sizeable one. Or if Cooper had played the part without a nose extension – would they have said he doesn’t look like Bernstein? The point is that this is nothing to do with Jewishness but playing a part.
I am so grateful, that you (very bravely) used your intriguing story, to touch on the (non) existence of an alleged specific Jewish phenotype. An alleged (but not existing) stereotypical phenotype and in its direct footstep, the evenly not-existing specific Jewish genotype. For contrary to the widely spread misconception (paradoxically held both by semites as by anti-semites alike), there “of course” is no such thing as a “Jewish gene”. You did rightly refer to your Jewishness, as a religious concept and as a mindset and not as a physical, let alone a genetical phenomenon.
However, you did not exactly refer to the direct geopolitical consequence of this notion – being, that modern Jews are NOT genetically connected to that ancient (partly mythical) Jewish People that is supposed to have been led by their supreme religious leader a few millennia ago, to “the promised land of Canaan” in the region of Mesopotamia.
The ultimate consequence which after all might very well be, that there is not such a thing as Alyah to, and/or a biblical Birthright of the land of Palestine for all those who do consider themselves a Jew.
That very notion should cast – at least for all those, who still do see themselves as deriving / stemming from the ancient “Jewish Tribes” that would have been living “in the Diaspora” for so long – a serious (and fundamental) doubt on the “divine” premise, that “The Jewish People” these days, is just reclaiming the land of its Jewish fore-fathers, instead of de facto conquering and colonializing other people’s territory.
Yes I know that this delicate theme has been brought up by many others before, but there still seems to be no willingness at all, to just realize one’s exact position in the world, and no willingness either, to stop the violent colonialization of Palestine and to stop the killing, mistreating and uprooting of the indigenous people of Palestine.
Having read my friend Amanda Sebestyen’s comment, I think I would like a second bite of the cherry.
I don’t recall seeing Ghetto at the National Theatre, but isn’t it possible it was just a poor production, badly performed?
This is about context and political environment as well as ideas about acting or about acting performance. I don’t recall David Baddiel ever worrying about an able-bodied actor starring in My Left Foot – but maybe I blinked and missed his expressions of concern. And he managed to do some ‘blackface’ himself in the 1990s, taking a quarter of a century to get around to apologising for it. But I do know he has been banging on about the huge dangers of actually existing as well as threatened antisemitism – including antisemitism on the left, which suggests to me that is where his priorities lie. So, I sense that getting exercised about actor Jews not being chosen for Jewish roles reflects this misplaced preoccupation with the uniquely special vulnerability of Jews to hostility and discrimination.
It’s also yet another example of trying to purloin the very real experience of lack of opportunity experienced by other groups. If Jewish actors miss out on some ‘Jewish’ roles, they easily make up for it elsewhere: Jews are hardly ‘under-represented on stage or screen or in film or production! The same cannot be said for black or Asian or other ethnic minority actors or those with disabilities. (Or for that matter, for women, whose opportunities for juicy roles are generally fewer – and then fewer and fewer as they age).
Finally, Bernstein’s kids were both gracious and witty about their father’s shnozz, and the choices that Bradley Cooper made . How come Baddiel or Tracy-Ann Oberman or absolutely anyone else has the right to say – we know better?
Finally, finally, what a knock-out piece of writing by Mark Harris – would that we could all conduct our cultural politics (indeed, our politics generally) with such a sharp satirical pen. Or would, at least, that I could!
Just speaking as an audience member, Naomi! And thanks to everyone here who reminded me of some great performances – as well as some embarrassing ones imo.
To Mike Cushman
Mike as the first posts in the comment section indicate it is possible to debate Jewish visual and narrative stereotypes in popular culture without the use of offensive culturally appropriated terms like ‘Jewface’.
In dealing with the issue of post-western racism JVL reposted a short memoir of mine entitled “Pressure: A Personal Reflection on British and Western Establishment Racism” see – reference below”.
However bad the post-war Black experience was I never attempted to suggest it was exactly the same being Muslim and having my mosque firebombed or being beaten for wearing a head-covering.
We can show solidarity with each other without racist cultural appropriation.
https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/article/racism-truly-the-personal-is-political/
Schnozzgate sounds like a Jimmy Durante routine
Jewish itself is not a racial category?
Secular Jews lucky to survive Hitler’s ovens plan for them would slate Harris.
As bad, his examples for Jews in other communities’ roles ignore recent progress.
Cue authenticity in actors picked to play disabled, LGBTQI+ and minority ethnic people.
Their cohorts equal Jewish heterogeneity, but retain distinctive cultural histories.
Murphy chosen as Oppenheimer, Mirren as Meir show directors shun this advance.
Hollywood bent on box office stars over verisimilitude puts takings before truth.
Can “lived experience” mean less fair representation than sex, drugs and dollars?
Next, Maureen Lipman as the Virgin Mary.
.
Let’s broaden the argument. People who have not murdered any-one should not be allowed to play murderers. Married people who have remained faithful to their spouses should not be allowed to play adulterers. People who have never stolen should not be allowed to play thieves or burglars. And actors who have at one time or another been punished for any sort of criminal offence should not be allowed to play anybody who is innocent of any crime.
Reductio at absurdum – except that the argument is absurd to begin with.
Incidentally, on a personal note, I am a Jew by ancestry, but I am also a musician who has spent his life performing the traditional music of the British Isles: should I throw it up and only perform Klezmer?