The row over the ‘Hershel Fink’ character in a new play at the Royal Court inevitably collides with the idea of ‘Jewface’ — when non-Jewish actors are criticised for portraying Jews
November 18, 2021 15:44
Hershel Fink and Jewface: now there’s a pair of broiguses. Old Aaron has learned much (and forgotten slightly less) in his time, and a lot of it in the last week has been about Jews and the theatre. I’m not sure what you call a character that would have been fictional but never actually appeared.
But Hershel Fink is one of those. He was to have been the unsympathetic centre of a new satirical play at the Royal Court Theatre in London called Rare Earth Mettle. The character, now renamed Henry Finn (an Irish name, I believe), is a manipulative multi-billionaire of Elon Musklike dimensions.
The text does not stipulate or demand that he is Jewish, but let’s just say that to most of our minds he might just as well have been called Ygael Gluckstein.
I’m not going to second guess the playwright Al Smith, who may not be that interested in the origin of names. With his name, who could blame him? Spokespersons for the Royal Court have said that there was no intention to make the character Jewish, and I’m happy to accept that. It happens.
The problem that was pointed out in objection to the Fink name was, of course, that the evil, manipulative moneybags Jew is a problematic kind of villain. He is an antisemitic trope. If you make that kind of villain a Jew, you reinforce stereotypes that are routinely deployed by folk who do not wish Jews well.
The Royal Court backed down, leaving behind a number of unsettled questions — one of which is this: if that’s the kind of villain a fictional Jew can’t be, what kind of villain can she be? This is a problem.
A Jew can’t be a banker (Rothschild), a financier (Shylock), an organiser of pickpockets (Fagin) or a dubious entrepreneur (Melmotte). It goes wider. The forged/plagiarised Protocols of the Elders of Zion famously put Jews in charge of everything, from trades unions to newspapers via pornography and (of course) banking. So almost anything associated with power, money and secret manipulation is out.
If, for example, Logan Roy in the TV series Succession had been Donny Lowenstein and the terrible family had gathered every Friday night, I don’t think we would all have been laughing quite so much. An expat Scot Logan could be, because no such trope exists.
Infernal slyness and mendacity are no good either. Jewish “shapeshifting” is also a stereotype. Nor would an anti-patriotic, anti-national, cosmopolitan Jew be unworrying. Blofeld has to be German, no? Imagine Bond breaking into that underground cavern and coming across a cat-stroker in a kippah.
This means that the only acceptable Jewish villain is the one whose characteristics are counter-trope. Jewish gangsters are good here, being brave, bad and straightforward. If only someone would dramatise Isaac Babel’s Odessa Tales and the adventures of Benya Krik.
I think it’s one reason I love Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America — that the gangster anti-heroes are Jews. And chief among them is David Aaronson, aka “Noodles”. If you’re not Al Smith, you’ll be able to see why my younger self might identify with a David Aaronson.
Played, in the film, by that legendary Jew, Robert DeNiro. And here we move effortlessly from broigus one to broigus two. In this time when people are angry when Latino characters are played by white folk, Arabs by Latinos, the matter has arisen recently of who gets to play Jews.
The casus belli in this instance appears to be a TV series starring Will Ferrell and Paul Rudd, depicting a Jewish psychoanalyst and a Jewish patient (it’s a true story, so such appalling stereotypes are permitted). Will Ferrell is not Jewish, although his character is SO Jewish — with a semi-Jewfro — that this has been dubbed “Jewface”.
Allowing for such matters as under-representation of minorities and the lack of opportunities for some of them in a majority white culture, my rule is pretty simple. Actors act. They play other people. That’s their job and their genius.
I don’t therefore buy the idea that you can always or even usually better act something if you’ve direct experience of being that thing. Indeed, I think it’s a good idea for actors to try and inhabit other bodies if they can. My non-Jewish sister-in-law had a role in the stage version of Fania Fenelon’s Playing For Time, about the Auschwitz orchestra. She was very good and she learned things.
Looking at the young cast for Paula Vogel’s Indecent at the Menier Chocolate Factory in Southwark, many of them non-Jews, I got a sense of how much was being gained by this process. To be fair, maybe a New York Jewish psychoanalyst not so much.
Which of course, brings us to the culminating question. If Hershel Fink had made it to the stage, would we have demanded that he was played by a Jew? Discuss.
This has been edited. In the original version Paul Rudd was described as non-Jewish.
