Photos were released last week from the set of the new Bradley Cooper-helmed biopic Maestro where, having failed to bag his Oscar with either A Star Is Born or as Rocket Racoon in Guardians Of The Galaxy, Cooper will portray classical music’s most charismatic conductor, Leonard Bernstein.
Lennie was Jewish. Very Jewish. So Jewish that he wrote musicals for Broadway, championed the music of Gustav Mahler (a converso Jew who nevertheless filled his symphonies with Jewish angst and klezmer tunes) and threw himself into musical causes in Israel. Extremely Jewish.
Bradley Cooper, who also directs and co-wrote the Bernstein biopic, is not.
In a now-familiar refrain, my social media feeds lit up with Jewish friends saying it was “not OK” and throwing around the comedian Sarah Silverman’s now-notorious term, “Jewface”.
As it happens, Silverman is in this film, so presumably she hasn’t got so much of a problem with her leading man’s ethnicity. Or maybe she’s decided that having at least some of the Jewish characters played by Jews is better than none. To Silverman, “Jewface”, the casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles, is the Jewish equivalent of blackface. When white actors “black up” to play black characters, society now considers it wrong. When non-Jewish actors, er, “Jew up” to play a Jew — the pictures reveal Cooper wearing a prosthetic nose — it should be similarly unacceptable. I disagree, in principle, with both.
What is this about? Respect, being seen, and equality. So if Jewish actors were not being given equal casting opportunities in general, you could argue that they should to be given priority for roles like Shylock and Bernstein and Amazon Prime’s Mrs Maisel (who was played by non-Jewish Rachel Brosnahan).
But is that the case? Today? I don’t think so. Not when Oscar-winning Natalie Portman has a lead in the new Thor film, Paul Rudd is Ant Man and Gal Gadot is about to be Cleopatra.
Seen Top Gun: Maverick yet? Jennifer Connolly’s mum went to a yeshiva school.
It’s hard to argue that Jewish actors don’t get a fair shake (I also believe that black actors in the UK — where non-whites have been playing Shakespeare’s kings and lovers for at least 20 years — enjoy greater equality than in the US).
So we come to the question of respect. Is Cooper’s performance going to be disrespectful of Jews? I highly doubt it. That prosthetic nose looks fine, and does help make him look stunningly similar to Bernstein. So where’s the offence?
Laurence Olivier, son of a Christian priest, filmed Shylock in 1973 — directed by Jewish Jonathan Miller — and it’s superb. Today, Olivier might not be cast, but that’s only because theatre companies would fear the outrage.
Now we’re getting to what this is really about. It’s not that Jewish actors have been missing out on opportunities. It’s that when everyone is shouting about minority rights on stage and screen, Jews are not counted as a minority.
Despite the fact that our numbers are tiny, comprising just 0.2 per cent of the world’s population (0.3 per cent of the UK, 1.8 per cent of the US) — and that we have been murdered and persecuted in our millions over the centuries — we are not allowed to feel like a minority.
So, while everyone was tweeting furiously (often rightly) about seemingly every other ethnic group, Jews were simply not admitted to that discussion. And we responded by feeling unvalued and ignored. So we started our own tweet-storm.
You cannot argue that Jews have been “locked out”, but we have been left out of the debate on representation of minorities in showbiz. Maybe this has started to have an effect at some levels on Jewish actors’ ability to get work.
When non-Jews get cast as Bernstein or Mrs Maisel, the answer should not be screaming. After all, actors, you know, act. Not playing who or what you are in real life is literally what acting is (Cooper is not only not Jewish, he is also not a raccoon, yet his Rocket is terrific).
The answer is deceptively simple: equality of opportunity for all actors.
