I beg your pardon if it wasn't this obvious

[sovay]

I have been enjoying David Cairns' film criticism for at least a decade, but I was catching up on his latest installment on Chaplin's A King in New York (1957) and the record scratch of his sign-off stopped me cold:

Also, it never occurred to me before, but looking at Sid's frizzy hair, I wonder if he was mixed race. Though his broad nose is probably the result of his failed boxing career rather than genetics.

My dude, Sid James was born Solomon Joel Cohen. Have you never seen a Jewfro in your life? I'm not saying there's not precedent for confusion—Mezz Mezzrow in Really the Blues (1946) credited his own "nappy" Ashkenazi hair for getting him successfully transferred to the Black side of Riker's after his arrest for possession of a stupendous number of joints at the 1940 New York World's Fair—I am most definitely not saying that Black and mixed-race Jews don't exist, but I am saying that in this case no passing narrative is needed to explain the frizz unless you count the name change, which I doubt anybody does. (Please hold for my household's inevitable quotation of Sesame Street: "I am the Count. They call me the Count because I love to count things!" – "Wonderful! I'm Guy Smiley. They call me Guy Smiley because I changed my name from Bernie Liederkrantz!") It's just such a weird thing to speculate on when the information is out there. I don't have that hair, but I sure know people who do.

Comments

[sovay]

extremely curly hair without knowing to link it to Ashkenazi heritage. And I'd probably be far from alone among Brits in that.

That is really interesting to me. I am used to a lot of aspects of Jewishness being out-group opaque, but frankly for reasons of antisemitism alone I would have expected hair textures to be more widely tagged.

(I don't think it's a specifically Ashkenazi as opposed to generally Jewish thing, Mezz Mezzrow was just Ashkenazi.)

[davidgillon]

I think it's unfamiliarity, Jewish Brits are only 0.46% of the population and they're geographically concentrated, with more than half living in London. I'm not aware of meeting anyone Jewish until I had a Jewish colleague at work, and I'd have been c30 by the time I met him. Of course I may have met Jewish people where religion simply didn't come up, but I'm struggling to think of anyone Jewish I'd met outside of him and getting to know a bunch of people via my DW circle. One encounter on a train is about it.

It's entirely likely that the various forms of anti-semite out there are more aware of things like this, but British anti-semitism has always puzzled me because a huge chunk have probably had little or no contact with actual Jews. (Of course trying to apply logic to antisemitism is probably stupid).

[sovay]

I think it's unfamiliarity, Jewish Brits are only 0.46% of the population and they're geographically concentrated, with more than half living in London.

I knew we were a tiny fraction of the global population, but I actually hadn't realized we were so scarce in the UK. I suppose my perceptions were skewed by familiarity with British Jewish writers, artists etc.

but British anti-semitism has always puzzled me because a huge chunk have probably had little or no contact with actual Jews. (Of course trying to apply logic to antisemitism is probably stupid).

I am sure it's easier if you have no inconvenient realities to disrupt your image of The Jew, anyway.

[rmc28]

I didn't realise one of my friends from uni was Jewish for 10-15 years, it just literally did not come up in conversation for that length of time.