For my inaugural column on all things Jewish, I thought I’d write about the most important Jewish cultural artefact of the late 20th century: Jennifer Grey’s nose.
Grey, as surely all JC readers know, is an actress who appeared in two of the greatest films ever made: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as Ferris’ furious younger sister Jeanie, and, most iconically, Dirty Dancing, in which she starred alongside Patrick Swayze. Now Dirty Dancing is an inexhaustible subject to discuss, of course, but the relevant issue here is that it is a very Jewish movie, focusing on the Jewish family, the Housemans (of course the father is a doctor) and, in particular, the younger daughter, Baby, played by Grey. Grey is herself Jewish, the daughter of the Oscar-winning actor Joel Grey, and the actress Jo Wilder.
Until I read Grey’s newly published memoir, I’d never considered Joel Grey’s Jewishness one way or another, which is, presumably, how he preferred it, given that — I learned from his daughter’s memoir — he had a nose job early on in his career, as his wife, mother and aunt did, too.
“Thinking about it now, I can’t help but notice that the roles my dad was being cast in were decidedly NOT Jewish. The part he became most identified with, the Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, was most likely a Nazi, or Nazi adjacent,” Grey writes. Which brings me to Grey’s own nose. Grey did not avoid playing Jews. In Ferris Bueller, she played a not very convincing suburban WASP, but, as I said, in Dirty Dancing her character was emphatically and gloriously Jewish, her mid-century, upper-middle-class Jewishness playing off against Swayze’s character’s working-class Catholicism. Dirty Dancing was written by Eleanor Bergstein (no prizes for guessing her background) and Baby Houseman remains one of the very few Jewish female characters who gets the hot (and non-Jewish) man in a Hollywood movie. This is just one of the many reasons why Dirty Dancing is one of the greatest movies ever made.
Grey could have overturned the Hollywood trope that Jewish men are irresistible (Woody Allen, Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, etc) and Jewish women are shrill nags. But she needed more Eleanor Bergsteins. She writes in her memoir that she struggled to find work after Dirty Dancing, despite that movie’s monster success. Eventually, at the urging of her mother — “It’s much harder to photograph you than a Michelle Pfeiffer. You want a career, make it easier for them” — she went to a plastic surgeon.
Jennifer Grey
Jennifer Grey pre nose job
What happened next became one of the world’s great cautionary tales. The surgeon ended up altering Grey’s profile so drastically that she no longer resembled herself. Her fans felt betrayed, everyone else snickered, and Grey’s career pretty much died there. The saga of Grey’s nose could be a metaphor for Jewish assimilation: how much to change, how much to cling onto our most identifiably Jewish qualities, and which will ultimately lead to greater success? But no matter how much Jews assimilate — how much they try to straighten their noses — they will still be seen, first and foremost, as Jews. This isn’t necessarily a problem in some industries, but for women it is, if their job is to be desired, and that is as true today as it was in Grey’s time.
Only Jewish women who don’t have classic Jewish features are seen as desirable — Natalie Portman, say, or Scarlett Johansson. Barbra Streisand is a rule unto herself, and I love her for casting herself opposite an array of blond men, from Robert Redford to Nick Nolte. But she didn’t change things for Jewish women. She just changed things for Streisand.
For Jewish girls like me in the 1980s, it felt like Grey was going to change things for us. But we didn’t understand it wasn’t just up to her, and, ultimately, it just got too hard. And who can blame her? For all the still tenacious jokes about how Jews run Hollywood, how many obviously Jewish women do you see on screen today, 40 years later, being held up as beauty icons? The answer, dear readers, is a fat, Yiddish nul.
