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.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.