Protection, I'm giving you up—correction, I'm saying that I'm right enough

[sovay]

Carrie Rickey's "Hollywood: Where Jews Don't Get to Play Jews" is a very good article about exactly the phenomenon the title describes: the venerable Hollywood tradition of casting non-Jews to play Jewish characters, of which the flipside is all the Jewish actors you wouldn't know from their changed names. She calls it "Hollywood's Jewish Paradox" and ties it to anti-Semitism and the Production Code, Henry Ford and Joseph Breen, the Jewish studio moguls' fears of the perception of undue Jewish influence. It's part of the reason The Ten Commandments (1956) is such a surreal experience and Out of the Fog (1941) stings so badly and I remain grateful and amazed that a movie like The Heart of New York (1932) even exists. I recommend reading. There's just one point I wish she had articulated a little more:

It may seem counterintuitive, but Darryl F. Zanuck, the one Gentile studio chief, was committed to making films about Jews.

I have noted the issue before and I am hardly the first to feel it: that part of being accepted as a Jew in a majority non-Jewish society is not talking about anti-Semitism. Agree it's a problem when disinterested goyische parties point it out. Otherwise it's that special pleading that Breen complained about with Crossfire (1947), it's playing the Holocaust card, it's stealing attention from really marginalized people. So it's not counterintuitive at all. It was safe for Zanuck to make movies about Jews because he wasn't one of them. He wouldn't be accused of tribalism, of exploiting his control of Hollywood to advance his people's agenda. He could rock the boat without being ascribed ulterior motives. Rickey alludes to these forces earlier in her article: "Given this charged atmosphere, no Jewish mogul wanted to make his studio, his movies or his religion a target for attacks. Jewish producers worried that movies about Jews would incite anti-Semitism. Thus Jews as Jews on screen were almost invisible, and Jews played by non-Jews scarcely less so." I just wish she'd drawn the link to the latitude afforded Zanuck—and non-Jewish actors, playing ideas of Jewishness with no danger of being reduced to the real thing—a little more strongly. I mean I still want to have seen Defiance (2008) with Jason Isaacs. The next person who tells me that Call Me by Your Name (2017) wasn't groundbreaking had better have a list of big, sweeping, non-Holocaust, non-Orthodox, non-tragic queer Jewish romances to back it up.

Comments

[asakiyume]

part of being accepted as a Jew in a majority non-Jewish society is not talking about anti-Semitism.

Yes: the majority (as an abstract whole, obviously there are always some #notall cases) never likes to be criticized and never likes to acknowledge its wrongs.

The majority demands certain terms of engagement, and those terms, unsurprisingly, tend to maintain the status quo and neutralize anything even remotely threatening.

[sovay]

The majority demands certain terms of engagement, and those terms, unsurprisingly, tend to maintain the status quo and neutralize anything even remotely threatening.

I woke up and saw this ruling. This is not even maintaining the status quo. This is going backward. Increasingly I feel the message of this administration to anyone who is not its chosen splinter of self-identification—who behave simultaneously like an embattled minority and the coast-to-coast default mainstream—is be grateful we allow you to escape with your lives. And sometimes not even then.

[asakiyume]

I only just saw that ruling now. Profoundly depressing.

[sovay]

I only just saw that ruling now. Profoundly depressing.

Kara Hurvitz who does the weekly national news roundups has just posted, "To be clear, since I'm wrapping up analysis on the opinion now, the actual results of this case are not as bad as commonly feared, and the precedent created by it is pretty legally useless for a variety of reasons," which is nice to hear. But she also acknowledges that people are anxious and upset and have reasons to be.

I blew right past your comment as related to the original point of this post. Once again I wonder what the majority would have been able to demand of Hollywood without the Production Code. It told America what normal looked like for so long that some of us still believe it. Normal was an absence of a lot of things.

[niqaeli]

I wonder a lot what we might have had without the Code, but I find I'm never sure how right those in Hollywood who thought that if they didn't self-censor they were going to be dealing with an unmanageable nightmare of 50 different state censorship boards all with different standards (they were already dealing with something like 11 at the time), and perhaps a federal censorship board to boot, were.

And -- even if they were right, would that really have been worse? How much worse? I mean, we're never going to know, because they did what they did and then handed over the gatekeys to fucking Joseph Breen. But I have a hard time even imagining what film-making would have looked like in this country if they'd never implemented it so effectively.

My feelings on Joseph Breen are, as I suspect you sympathise, unprintable; not because I would censor myself, but because I can't actually articulate my rage into words.

[gwynnega]

I will probably spend the rest of my life discovering that various Hollywood actors who changed their names were Jewish. (Only last week did I learn Hedy Lamarr was Jewish.) Oddly enough, when my mom used to do phone work in the seventies, she called herself "Garfield" just like John Garfield did!

[sovay]

I will probably spend the rest of my life discovering that various Hollywood actors who changed their names were Jewish.

Same! I knew about Hedy Lamarr, but I learned last week about Winona Ryder. There's a sense in which I am no longer surprised and a sense in which it feels like a discovery each time. It is also weird to me that it still happens, but I agree that it happens less programmatically now. It does change things.

Oddly enough, when my mom used to do phone work in the seventies, she called herself "Garfield" just like John Garfield did!

I kind of love that. It feels like the correspondence between a Hebrew name and a secular name. A lineage of use-names.

(swan_tower posted recently about language as magic and the power of true names and that was one of the places my brain immediately went.)

[kore]

Paulette Goddard was one that surprised me (also what a life!).

[lauradi7dw]

Goddard was married to Charlie Chaplin for eight years, including the time in which "The Great Dictator" was made. The movie "Chaplin," with Robert Downey Jr. as the title character, had a scene in which PG was thanking CC for making the film. As I recall, he called her Miss Levy during the discussion - an acknowledgement that both of them were aware of what Hitler was up to, and why it was important to let people know, or that's what I took it to mean.

[muccamukk]

Zanuck also had a habit of wandering around acting like he was the first person on Earth to have considered that anti-Semitism was a thing, in conversation with his Jewish co-workers, which I'm surprised didn't get him murdered in his bed (I'm not actually surprised, but STILL...)

Everyone mostly seems busy freaking out about how CMbYN is paedophilia somehow. I need to get around to seeing it.

[sovay]

Zanuck also had a habit of wandering around acting like he was the first person on Earth to have considered that anti-Semitism was a thing, in conversation with his Jewish co-workers, which I'm surprised didn't get him murdered in his bed

I had not realized that scene between Phil and his secretary in Gentleman's Agreement was roman à clef. Oh, man. I share your surprise.

Everyone mostly seems busy freaking out about how CMbYN is paedophilia somehow. I need to get around to seeing it.

I recommend it! I saw it in March with rushthatspeaks and barely wrote about it and loved it. The age difference concern feels mostly like trolling to me, especially since it's addressed directly and not lampshadingly in the script.

[muccamukk]

I know that the boardroom scene was almost word for word. I'm less sure about the secretary, but I would not be surprised. He must have been fun to work with!

I need to see it. There are so few gay movies at all, let alone period ones with happy endings. Haven't been watching much lately.

[sovay]

Haven't been watching much lately.

I hope you get a chance to catch up soon. How's your ankle?

[kore]

When the U.S. entered World War II at the end of 1941, he was commissioned as a colonel in the Army Signal Corps, but was frustrated to find himself posted to the Astoria studios in Queens, Long Island, and even worse, serving alongside the spoiled son of Universal's founder, Carl Laemmle Jr., who was chauffeured by limousine to Long Island each morning from a luxury Manhattan hotel.
Appalled by such privileged cosseting, Zanuck stormed down to Washington, DC, and into the War Department, demanding a riskier assignment from Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall. Since American forces were not yet fighting anywhere, Marshall had Zanuck posted to London as chief U.S. liaison officer to the British Army film unit, where at least he would be studying army training films while under Nazi bombardment by Hitler's Luftwaffe in the still-ongoing Blitz.[6] Zanuck cheerfully endured the bombs, refusing to leave his room at Claridge's for its air-raid shelter during nightly raids and instead hosting "blitz parties" because he had such a splendid view of antiaircraft fire from his hotel room, not to mention coveted PX food and drink long missing from Britain's highly rationed shelves. He even persuaded Lord Mountbatten to allow him along on a secret coastal raid across the Channel to occupied France. The daring nighttime attack on a German radar site was a success. Zanuck, ever the showman, sent his wife in Santa Monica a package of "Nazi-occupied sand", writing her "I've just been swimming on an enemy beach" – not allowed, of course, to tell her where he'd been, let alone that they'd been under Nazi gunfire and helped the wounded back to the ship.

OMG. (From Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Last Tycoon/Wiki)

[sovay]

Zanuck, ever the showman, sent his wife in Santa Monica a package of "Nazi-occupied sand", writing her "I've just been swimming on an enemy beach" – not allowed, of course, to tell her where he'd been, let alone that they'd been under Nazi gunfire and helped the wounded back to the ship.

I'm not saying he didn't have an impressive war, I'm just saying I'm not surprised he pissed his Jewish colleagues off when he got back from it!

I think the line about swimming must have been a popular soldier's understatement; it shows up in Thieves' Highway (1949), where Richard Conte's veteran tells an Italian girl that he once went "swimming in Italy . . . A place called Anzio."

[ethelmay]

Huh. I'd have thought a lot of people would just have assumed Zanuck was Jewish anyway. At least it's not a name that screams "Gentile" to me, but that may just be my ignorance.

[sovay]

At least it's not a name that screams "Gentile" to me, but that may just be my ignorance.

No, I see why you say that; it's a Germanic-looking name, which often means Ashkenazi. I think his reputation as the sole non-Jewish studio head may have preceded the sound of his name.

[kore]

It looks like his dad was Swiss (Wiki says Swiss/Dutch, WTF).

[batdina]

I'm fascinated. I have a lot of movies to watch.

As an aside here, I once upon a time taught an elective at a Jewish high school on Jews on television. Starting in the 90s, give or take, Jews did start playing Jews. Numbers is a great example in that all three Jews in the central family were played by Jews. Homicide, and then Law and Order (same roll, same actor) is another.

On the other hand, I've had a variation on the drinking game called "Judaism: Good or Ill. I take a whatever every time there's a "Jewish" story-line, and they get it completely wrong.

I get hammered fairly often.

Again, lots of movies to watch.

[sovay]

I'm fascinated. I have a lot of movies to watch.

I am happy to have increased your watchlist!

As an aside here, I once upon a time taught an elective at a Jewish high school on Jews on television.

That's really cool.

Numbers is a great example in that all three Jews in the central family were played by Jews.

Yes! I enjoyed that. I have not seen much of Homicide beyond the crossovers with Law & Order, but I watched an enormous amount of Law & Order and I remember when I recognized that Lennie's ethnoreligious background matched Jerry Orbach's own. What other shows were you looking at?

I get hammered fairly often.

It sounds hazardous. If you include opera, I warn you in advance about the Passover scene in Halévy's La Juive. Nobody in the history of Judaism has ever held a Seder that sounds like that.

[zdenka]

Yeah, I was disappointed in La Juive. I was hoping for it to feel more like actual Judaism, and it didn't. (Like, I expect the Judaism in Nabucco to be pasted on yay, and that one wraps around to me finding it slightly hilarious, but I was hoping for better from a Jewish composer.)

[sovay]

(Like, I expect the Judaism in Nabucco to be pasted on yay, and that one wraps around to me finding it slightly hilarious, but I was hoping for better from a Jewish composer.)

To my knowledge, the author of the libretto was not Jewish. Which is not much of an excuse for it reading like he never met a Jew in his life, since he was working with Halévy, but I've always assumed that was the explanation. That opera is such a fascinating combination of legitimately famous music and WAIT NO STOP GO BACK.

(I saw a Met production with two friends in 2003. It was an experience. It was not Neil Shicoff's fault that he had bronchitis and dropped out right before "Rachel, quand du seigneur," and it was not the understudy's fault that he was short and round where Shicoff was tall and thin, but the substitution was still about as awkwardly accomplished as possible. The set design was absolutely somebody's fault and I hope they still feel bad. It was black and white and so steeply raked that we genuinely worried about the singers slipping off and landing in the orchestra. The conceit of placing the Gentiles above and the Jews below produced the impression that Eléazar's family was living in the Emperor Sigismund's basement. The costuming jettisoned fifteenth-century Konstanz entirely in favor of Nazi Germany complete with yellow stars but also for some reason eighteenth-century Austrian guardsman everywhere. And we could find no other way to interpret the finale except that the eponymous Jewish maiden was killed by Klansmen in a pot of stoplights. At least it gave us something to talk about on the train back to New Haven.)

[kore]

I watched SO MUCH L&O and Orbach's role in it was so so underrated. The show didn't survive that long without him.

[moon_custafer]

Apparently Orbach used to write his wife a love poem every morning before leaving for the L&O set.

[lauradi7dw]

Rob Morrow (of Numbers) spent five years playing fish-out-of water New Yorker Dr Joel Fleischman in a small town in Alaska in "Northern Exposure." His Jewish identity was the main plot of several episodes (why he couldn't bring himself to accept the gift of a Christmas tree, what to do about saying Kaddish when his uncle died, a small discussion about circumcision being a religious, not medical choice).
At the same time (and even mentioned, in a very meta way, in an episode of NE) CBS had a show about a Jewish family in Brooklyn in the mid-1950s
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101055/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

You mentioned Baltimore already, but film-wise, there is "Liberty Heights," in which some of the Jews are played by Jews (Adrien Brody, David Krumholtz (another Numbers connection)).