Some of us look like Einstein, others like Barbie. Go figure - The Jewish Chronicle

All right — let’s take this Goyjew, Barbenheimer hilarity to its logical conclusion. If, as many maintain, Oppenheimer should have been played by a Jew, then so should Barbie.

Shul for shul there might not be much to choose between them, but Barbie’s origins were more avowedly Jewish, or at least less awkwardly non-Jewish, than Oppenheimer’s.

Put it this way: though pre-war America forced a degree of ethnic scene-shifting on all Jews, Barbie’s progenitors would seem to have taken fewer pains to nudge her Jewishness out of sight than did the Oppenheimers who sent their son to an Ethical Culture Society School whose motto was “Deed before Creed”. For whatever reasons, Barbie’s creator, Barbara Handler, chose not to send her bubbule there.

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Margot Robbie in Barbie (Photo: Warner Bros)

Should the idea that Barbie was more antecedently Jewish than Oppenheimer strike you as preposterous, that can only be because a) you’re an intellectual snob, and expect every Jew to have gone to Harvard, or b) you’re an antisemite and can’t accept that a Jewish woman might be blonde, blue-eyed, sweet-tempered, narrow-hipped and double-jointed.

If you don’t think the part was tailor-made for Miriam Margolyes, what’s your objection to Tracy-Ann Oberman or Sarah Silverman in a sheitel? And should your taste run to a more ironic and rebarbative Barbie, then Maureen Lipman would be the natural choice. I’d pay double to see that movie.

As for Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose — I don’t see the need for it myself. As long as Bradley Cooper’s circumcised he’s Jew enough for me.
Enough with the tomfoolery.

Much as I decry the parochialism of Jewish humour — rubbing the magic lamp someone gave us for our bar mitzvah and falling about laughing when the genie turns out to be Shlomo Finkleburger from Borehamwood in a yarmulka — I am as guilty of it as anyone.

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Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer (Photo: Universal Studios)

It’s a family thing. A love of close connection, a shared delight in the poetry of our names, a hugger-mugger joy when a word like “bagel” or “bris” opens the secret locker of our faith. But there is another side to this innocent kvelling.

The excessive pleasure it gives us to hear someone outside the family saying something nice about us.

All right, there are places where support is welcome. Let a band none of us have heard of tell Roger Waters and his BDA cronies to jump in the lake and agree to perform for half-an-hour in the Negev and it’s as though we’ve been chosen all over again.

Take away the realpolitik, however, and there is less reason to be excited just because someone not born Jewish turns out to have a great-great-great uncle called Shlomo Finkleburger, or once read a Psalm that moved them, or respects our rabbinic teaching on hand washing.

Twenty years ago it was fashionable for the likes of Madonna (call her Esther) to get themselves a Jewish teacher, wear a red bracelet and study Kabbalah. “I decided I needed to have a spiritual life,” she said.

Hard to imagine what “deciding” to have a spiritual life must be like. Similar to deciding to cut out carbs, I imagine. But at least she didn’t go looking to the Ethical Cultural Society, if it still exists, to fill the spiritual void in her.

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Madonna (Photo: Getty Images)

Spiritual voids are as subject to fashion as saggy pants for boys who’ve never been to prison. They’re in, they’re out.

They’re up, they’re down. Much has been made in the past few weeks of the late Sinead O’Connor’s quest for meaning — a journey, as recounted in her book Rememberings, that took her from the Irish Catholicism into which she was born; rebellion against Rome (as exemplified by her tearing up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live); intuiting Judaism by forming a close musical bond with Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand; and being ordained as a “renegade” Catholic priest, until finding what she had all along been after in Islam.

One should begrudge no one the urgency of their quest nor the peace in which they might ultimately come to rest, but there are spiritual tyre-kickers — as car salesmen call people who look with no intention of buying — who are so indiscriminate that no faith should feel itself honoured to have been kicked.

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Sinead O'Connor (Photo: Getty Images)

All well and good if Judaism provides nourishment to the hungry traveller. But it signifies little to be one staging post among so many, or to be picked up only to be dropped again.

Thank you for trying us, is the most we can say. But such thanks should run no deeper than their attempt to find meaning in our teaching did. You dipped your toe in the waters of Judaism, we dip ours in the waters of gratitude. Thanks for thinking we might have been able to help.
Any further expression of indebtedness demeans us.

So let’s stop collecting passing friends of the faith. We are not so hungry ourselves that we must feed on every scrap of interest or praise. Judaism is not a tourist destination.

We do not need good reviews from visitors. No one will learn what Jewishness is, anyway, except by living it, perhaps as an intense experience of mind and soul over a lifetime, perhaps as a lonely immersion in study, perhaps as a patchwork of perfectly mundane obligations and pleasures, conscientiously honoured, full-heartedly enjoyed.

No one Jew — not the Psalmist, not the most learned of rabbis, not the most soulful of singers — can teach a prospective Jew what they’re missing.

Is that a reason for insisting only an echt Jew should play a Jew? No. Go in that direction and only an echt Jew should write about us. And to say there is such a thing as an echt Jew is to consent to a demeaning stereotype.

We are copy proof and tourist proof because we’re various. Some of us look like Einstein after a heavy meal. Some of us look like Barbie when we’ve eaten nothing. Got zu danken — as Madonna would say.

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Oppenheimer

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