Is this anti-semitism?

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

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

I've never seen it myself but I remember a friend of mine saying how impressed he was that Kingsley's character smoked cigarettes the way Pakistani men in his neighbourhood did.

Mark Harris:

I am not in sympathy with a view of acting that centers an actor’s identity rather than a character, or with the blanket disqualification of certain kinds of transformational artistry that is inherent in that approach, and I’m troubled when Jewishness is enlisted to support it. To start with, Jewishness is neither a characteristic nor a word that can support any assumption about experience or internal feeling. I’m Jewish, and was raised culturally Jewish, but because I had a Jewish father and a Catholic mother and am therefore not a matrilineal Jew, I grew up hearing from various schmucks and nudniks that I was “not really Jewish,” “not technically Jewish,” and “not Jewish enough.” I bring this up only to note one area in which the comparison to blackface is useful, which is that, just like any ethnic minority, Jews are an astonishingly heterogeneous people, physically, intellectually, politically, culturally, religiously, and experientially. Our upbringings and backgrounds vary vastly, the intensity of our faith runs along an immense spectrum, and what we believe and what we have lived is absolutely uncategorizable by any single generality. There’s a reason for the old joke that if you want to start a fight, all you have to do is “put two Jews in a room.” No two of us are alike.

So when I hear “Only Jews should play Jews,” what rings in my ears is overanxiety from some members of my religious cohort and ignorance from outside it. I won’t belabor the anxiety here. (But hey, put me in a room with a Jew who’s upset about Maestro and I’ll make that joke come true!) I’ll just say that I don’t think any argument about the systematic denial of opportunity to Jews in [checks notes] the Hollywood entertainment business is going to stand up very well to scrutiny. 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. It’s the righteous certainty that I find cringe-inducing, containing as it does 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.

https://slate.com/culture/2023/08/leonard-bernstein-bradley-cooper-maestro-movie-nose-jewface.html

One can fret or not about this stuff, but Harris is being disingenuous with that glib quip about Jews in Hollywood. There are plenty of Jews in Hollywood, but imo not a lot of Jewish representation beyond broad depictions. That's why when I see it, in, like, A Serious Man, or Shiva Baby, or Fleischman is in Trouble, it sticks out to me as noteworthy, or at least as noteworthy as Seinfeld going out of its way *not* to portray its characters as Jewish.

Does it matter? I don't know.

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

― Monthly Python (Tom D)

imagine if Ben Kingsley was cast as the Blue Raja today

With a title like ‘Maestro’ you know it’s going to be bad.

Very recently, Oppenheimer was played by an irish and no one batted an eyelash, so I think it’s fair to say that without the prosthetic nose no one would care, and everybody would be better for it.

There are plenty of Jews in Hollywood, but imo not a lot of Jewish representation beyond broad depictions.

just rattling some shows that depict judaism (secular or religious) in a realistic, not broad manner: transparent, uncut gems, the goldbergs, difficult people, mrs. maisel. go back a little further and you get curb, the nanny, fuck, even the o.c.

a list of shows that do the same for islam or hinduism or even, like, mormonism is likely much shorter

uncut gems is not a tv show, but you get my drift

Mormoxploitation needs to happen.

I forgot about Uncut Gems, that was another big one. Though Maisel and Transparent were/are, iirc, part of the Jewface debate, right? I've never seen The Nanny, but here's a perspective I just found about that:

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-nanny-unshakeable-jewish-legacy

As a Jewish girl growing up in the ‘90s, I didn’t get to see a lot of representation of Jewish women on television. Jewish television characters have historically been outliers. And though there were some memorable male Jewish TV characters before the ’90s—Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bernie Steinberg (David Birney) on Bridget Loves Bernie, Mr. Harold Hooper (Will Lee) on Sesame Street, Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) on Seinfeld, and Krusty the Clown (Dan Castellaneta) on The Simpsons—Jewish women were even rarer. In an unscientific Facebook poll, I asked about the most memorable Jewish female TV characters; this yielded a pretty narrow range of responses. My Jewish and non-Jewish friends alike replied either with characters from the past 10 years—characters such as Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Miriam Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Ilana Wexler (Ilana Glazer) and Abbi Abrams (Abbi Jacobson) on Broad City—or with only a handful of Jewish female characters from before 2000.

These pre-2000 characters included Molly Goldberg (Gertrude Berg) on The Goldbergs (1949-1956), Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper) on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda,, and Grace Adler (Debra Messing) on Will and Grace. But the character most often cited by people who responded to my query was Fran Fine. And indeed, on my binge-rewatch of The Nanny, I found that she’s even more Jewish than I remembered. The Nanny follows Fran, a working-class Jewish woman from Queens, as she serendipitously lands a gig nannying the three children of Maxwell Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy), a British widower and Broadway producer. The Sheffields are rich, WASP-y, and, as both Fran and I put it, fancy-shmancy. As in many sitcoms, The Nanny’s comedy is derived from the clash of cultures, and Fran’s Jewishness and gefilte-fish-out-of-water (oy, forgive me) role in the Sheffield household is at its center. Drescher and her then-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, created, wrote, and produced the show; and their shared background as Jewish high-school sweethearts in Queens gave the show a verisimilitude that can only be born from lived experience.

broad city and crazy ex-girlfriend, those are good ones too

yeah most of the cast in transparent was not jewish (kathryn hahn and gaby hoffmann are somehow not jewish), but the showruunner/writer is.

Sopranos kind of criticized antisemitism by indulging in it.

Again, though, I think the argument is not that Jews are somehow more deserving than many of the other minorities that are often even more underrepresented, but that Jews aren't even considered by many a minority class in the same way, often for at best disingenuous reasons ("but the Jews run Hollywood!") but also on a more malicious basis ("Jews run the world," etc.).

Very recently, Oppenheimer was played by an irish and no one batted an eyelash, so I think it’s fair to say that without the prosthetic nose no one would care, and everybody would be better for it.

An Irish played a Jewish and now he's up for an Oscar.

Mormoxploitation needs to happen.

Big Love has been memory-holed. I don't even know if it's streaming anymore.

go back a little further and you get curb, the nanny, fuck, even the o.c.

don't forget Seinfeld

Seinfeld is the one I cited as a show that went out of its way to de-Jewish its characters. Brandon Tartikoff (Jewish) famously dismissed the pilot as "too Jewish." As this thing I found put it:

Seinfeld manages to have it both ways. While Jerry is explicitly Jewish and the show is rooted in New York City culture in a way that, say, Friends is not, the interpretation of the other characters as Jewish relies on decoding clues such as who plays them, how they look, how they talk and so on. They are crypto-Jews, deliberately, playfully and thinly disguised.

Take Jerry and George’s parents. While Jerry is explicitly identified as Jewish, his parents are played by two non-Jewish actors: Barney Martin and Liz Sheridan. By contrast, George, whose last name suggests he is Italian and is nowhere explicitly identified as Jewish, is played by Jewish actor Jason Alexander and his parents were played by Jewish actors Estelle Harris and Jerry Stiller.

"Kramer" had other names before the series aired, including "Kessler" and "Hoffman."

Makes me think of Everbody Loves Raymond, where Ray is Italian, his mother is Jewish, his father is Irish and this children are Nazis.

... I forgot his Jewish brother and WASP wife.

No one loved Raymond.

When that show was being created, they originally thought it was "too ethnic," too, and wanted it moved out of New York. And this was *despite* the success of "Seinfeld."

it sticks out to me as noteworthy, or at least as noteworthy as Seinfeld going out of its way *not* to portray its characters as Jewish.

Does it matter? I don't know.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 17, 2023 2:17 PM bookmarkflaglink

I was thinking about that too, Josh. And how they had many story lines about the absurdity or mistakes about wrong assumptions about identity.

"Seinfeld" is such an interesting case. Everyone just *assumes* the characters are all Jewish, despite their not traditionally Jewish sounding names (in a world where Scarlett Johansson is Jewish), because of how they are coded, but it's really never foregrounded. Jerry is the only one identified as Jewish, but iirc (and it's been a long while) that's typically expressed indirectly by, say, *lack* of Christmas decorations, rather than the presence of Hanukkah accoutrements; there's a running tradition in TV of either referencing Hanukkah either as a kind of self-effacing joke alternative to Christmas or as a perfunctory learning experience ("character C teaches character B about Hanukkah"). (Never mind that Hanukkah is not an important holiday, it's just the Jewish holiday non-Jews know the most, and even then, probably due to its relative proximity to Christmas.) Anyway, the fact that the Jewishness of the "Seinfeld" characters is mostly conveyed through mannerisms and affect (themselves kind of interchangeable with "New York") has lead some people to conclude that the entire cast is Jewish, too (Julia Louis-Dreyfus is not).

Friday Night Dinner streams free on the Roku Channel in the US. I'd be interested in your take.

Charlotte in Sex and the City/And Just Like That hasn't been mentioned.

And with Beverly Katz on HannibalnI feel very seen.

Apart from Paul Ritter, the horrible aggressive guy the grandmother is dating is probably the funniest character - and he is Jewish!

That's so funny. I watched the entire series kind of wondering if people were ok with Martin being portrayed by a non-Jewish actor.

Shows how little I know!

And with Beverly Katz, I've since read people that found her character's treatment ... not good. I hadn't really clocked that. Just thought it was cool to have a Korean American character who is also Jewish and it wasn't a big (or any) deal in the story.

(xp) Not Martin, Lou Morris, the obnoxious boyfriend of the grandmother.

horrible man lol

Anyway, the fact that the Jewishness of the "Seinfeld" characters is mostly conveyed through mannerisms and affect (themselves kind of interchangeable with "New York") has lead some people to conclude that the entire cast is Jewish, too (Julia Louis-Dreyfus is not).

I remember as a kid that I'd thought all the main characters in Seinfeld were supposed to be Jewish, until the 'shiksappeal' episode, which hinges on Elaine not being Jewish (same episode as 'serenity now', which I'd forgotten). There are a few other episodes where Jewishness is explicit - the bris episode, the one where Jerry's dentist converts to Judaism, I think they're mostly a bit later on in the run of the series, maybe they felt more able to do that when the show was an established success?

Um, Michael Anthony Richards is also not Jewish

Sometimes it does feel like the whole outer-boro Jewish-Italian thing merged into a new ethnicity, and I've met people from other ethnicities that kind of code this way too, e.g. an Indian-descent Queens born and raised neighbor of mine who was raised in Queens and reminded me so much of Jewish relatives.

JLD is, distantly, related to the Alfred Dreyfus of the Dreyfus Affair.

yeah, I remember finding out Elaine was supposedly not Jewish. Come on, man.

Though JLD has always identified as Christian.

Michael Anthony Richards is also not Jewish

lol, kinda my point exactly!

I interviewed Ray Romano years ago, and he said this:

What’s funny is that you have George’s parents Italian, and they couldn’t be more Jewish. My parents are Italian, and they could *easily* be Jewish. Which, by the way, is the same thing. Italian … Jewish … the same neurotic mother. It doesn’t matter.

yeah, I remember finding out Elaine was supposedly not Jewish. Come on, man.

― hardcore technician gimmicks are also another popular choice f (President Keyes), Friday, August 18, 2023 8:00 AM bookmarkflaglink

Sorry, I don't understand. What does this mean?