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Protection, I'm giving you up—correction, I'm saying that I'm right enough
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.
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.
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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.)
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DDD:
OH, OPERA.
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My experiences of good rather than whatthehell opera have been fortunately in the majority, but the whatthehell I have encountered in my life has gone for broke. Like the Boston Lyric Opera's 2008 Les contes d'Hoffmann, which had too many puppets.
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then I would have included a UTU link except UTU is not working. SIGH.
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I don't know if it was the same production, but it sounds like the same problem. It's fine to have puppets in the first act with Olympia. It's thematic. Rather a lot of puppets in this case, but I reconciled myself to it by remembering it's in the tradition of Powell and Pressburger to have all the guests besides Hoffmann be automata anyway. It is not fine to have Antonia's mother in the (sometimes third, here) second act represented by a giant puppet straight out of "Tevye's Dream." I mean like the kind that chases you across a stage. I kept expecting it to bust out in "MAZEL TOV, MAZEL TOV!" instead of "Mon enfant! Ma fille!" It was a shame because some of the production's other conceits were quite good, but there was no coming back from Giant Puppet Antonia's Mom. The Giulietta act had unfortunate seahorses.
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fansparasols, my badhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk41BaSDXak
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OHHHHH MY GOD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwfGFgWRfd4
NATALIE DESSAY
(Everyone in the comments: "Holy shit, Natalie Dessay!....HOLY SHIT THOSE DOLLS D:")
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Yeah, that's memorable.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdZ0D7uaFJ8
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I think she needs a better agent.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dlGDNoliH0
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Oh . . . dear. That sounds like an experience all right.
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I just feel there must be a story there, like Halévy got tired of saying, "No, Eugène, we don't . . . no, Eugène, nobody says . . . no, Eugène, that's . . . YOU KNOW WHAT EUGÈNE I DON'T EVEN CARE ANYMORE," but I have no idea if that's true or how I would even find out if so.
Oh . . . dear. That sounds like an experience all right.
In its dubious favor, I've never forgotten it!