It's still the early days of 2019 so apologies for starting off the new year with some shocking - and posisbly life-altering - news. Cher Horowitz, the protagonist, heroine and fashion icon of the 90s classic film Clueless, is not Jewish.
The film's creator Amy Heckerling revealed in an interview with JTA that, despite her very Jewish-sounding name, her very Jewish-seeming dad and her subsequent position in the canon of great Jewish films, Cher was never meant to be Jewish.
“I wasn’t thinking in terms of this being a Jewish story,” Heckerling said in the interview. “I was taking the plot of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ and translating it into that world.
“In my mind, you’re always writing versions of people you know, and to me it felt like I was writing about the daughters of people in show business in L.A."
