In
early June (2017), there has been some discussion
on the web on how the Israeli actress Gal Gadot gives us a Diana in Wonder Woman
who is princess of the Amazons, and Jewish. Aside from some weird issues here
about race — issues that could be disposed of by just saying, "Yeah, at
root we Jews are Semites, not Aryans" — what's at stake in this minor
debate isn't that Ms. Gadot is Jewish but Israeli. So the film has gotten
involved in the standard agit-prop
over the existence of Israel/the Zionist entity and the 50th
anniversary of Israeli occupation of lands generally recognized as Palestinian.
Well, Israel was the deep topic, plus informing people who don't know the
history of comics the dark secret that the major comic book superheroes were
created by Jews.
The
horror! But do keep the Yiddishkeit
of the many of the creators of comics in mind if you ever study the attack on
comic books in the 1950s and their role in the Seduction of
the Innocent.
But
since "everybody is talking
about" Wonder Woman — an
excellent movie, by the way — I want to follow my usual custom and talk about
something else, taking my "Jagged Orbit" off on a tangent.
So:
Consider the movie Norman
(2016), subtitled "The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York
Fixer," and definitely a New York Jewish fixer — who gets involved in
Israeli politics and saving the synagog of a definitely New York Jewish
congregation.
Norman
Oppenheimer in the film is mostly a small-time fixer, "mirrored" by
Srul Katz, an even smaller-time fixer, played by Hank Azaria in a very small
role.
Hank
Azaria is Sephardic Jewish, and the Israeli characters are played by actors at
least generally Jewish, a safe inference with the major character, Micha Eshel,
played by an actor named Lior
Ashkenazi. Norman is played by Richard Gere, who is neither Jewish nor New
Yorker (b. Philadelphia). The relevant rabbi, Rabbi Blumenthal, is played by
Steve Buscemi, who was born in Brooklyn but raised Roman Catholic, and not
Jewish. Ditto for not New York, not Jewish — there's a website where one can look up such
things — for the English and Welsh actors who played the other major New York
Jewish roles.
Matters are similar for that fine movie on Jewish and other partisan resistance to the
Nazis, Defiance (2008), where one
of the three heroic Bielski brothers is the emphatically Jewish Liev Schreiber,
but the other two are the English actors Daniel Craig, who is not Jewish, and
Jamie Bell, who is probably also not Jewish.
The
point with Norman and Defiance is that if there are people out
there who give a rat's ass about the ethnicities of the actors playing Norman
or the Bielski brothers, they've been quiet about it, or, anyway, any
complaints have failed to gain traction on the web and other media.
No
accusations of cultural appropriation; no complaints about the impossibility of
these gentiles to embody the Jewish experience, the
"inappropriateness" of their trying.
And,
the point of this little essay: that's a damn good thing.
It
might not continue given the Furies that can be released by a failed — or
all-too-successful — Presidency of Donald J. Trump, but at least into 2016 of
the Christian Era, Jews in the West were in a strong enough position that we
could be happy that competent and popular actors were portraying us on film in
positive or neutral or at least nuanced roles.
The
ideal for every minority group is a world free of ethnic hatreds and contempt.
On the road to utopia, though, a decent mile-marker is where you can save your
anger for blatant attacks and can take cultural borrowing as a compliment and
not have to worry about such relative trivia as who gets cast to play whom in
movies.
It's
good to see a nice Jewish girl kicking Aryan ass in Wonder Woman, but it's not a big deal. And Richard Gere made
a most excellent Norman, and Steve Buscemi was well-cast as a nervous rabbi.
And, for
that matter, I prefer Irish-American Owen Wilson's Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris (2011) to pretty much
any of Woody Allen's Woody Allen.
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