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

[mrissa]

I learned the word by, uh. Dating a guy who used to have one and self-described that way to me in conversation: "that was back when I was rocking a Jewfro." I had not been around for the height of that particular choice in personal styling, and it was quite a startling difference.

But the concept of that particular hair texture as ethnic signifier was not new, not at all new. Just the word.

[sovay]

But the concept of that particular hair texture as ethnic signifier was not new, not at all new. Just the word.

I expected Cairns to know the signifier if not the word and have now been multiply informed that culturally-demographically it's not unusual that he didn't. I am now having a secondary reation of "but you watch movies for a living, I've seen kinds of people in movies I've never met in my own life," but that's probably just picking on the guy.

[mrissa]

I think one of the weird things about how Hollywood has worked is that it's actually done kind of a lot to break down ethnic signifiers that are there in reality. And...I don't want to say "only people of Norwegian or at least Scandinavian ethnicity to play in movies made out of Ibsen plays" or anything like that, that would be horrible, I would much rather have a world where we can have Lauren Bacall playing a great many things and nobody saying, "only Jewish roles for you, madam." But at the same time I do feel like it has played a large role in people having no idea that I, for example, look suuuuuper ethnic, oh my goodness do I have a strong ethnic look. My fellow Americans in particular are surprised that people try to speak Swedish or Norwegian to me in Sweden and Norway but almost no one speaks Danish to me in Denmark, because the idea that there could not only be a strongly ethnic appearance but a distinction among those ethnicities is just...boggling to a lot of people, it's just not on their radar. But in Hollywood if you want to make someone "look Swedish" you plunk a blonde wig down on her head and Bob's your uncle, and I am not a blonde. (Neither is my auntie Ulla, who is Swedish-born of two Swedish-ethnic parents and has lived in Stockholm her whole life. But this is apparently beside the point.)

As I say above, I don't want Hollywood to make a particular effort toward general ethnotype casting. I don't even want them to make a particular effort to cast families from the same ethnotype. But I do think that "I watch a lot of movies" and "I don't correlate this thing with the ethnicity it's actually associated with" might actually go together more rather than less strongly.