On the Joy of Not Having to Care: Ethnic Casting, Jewish Subdivision

         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 50^th 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.

Crusades: A Quick non-Latin-Orthodox-Catholic-Christian View (8 March 2014)

Trudy Rubin of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote an excellent column on Sec. of State John Kerry’s February 2014 efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the column included an unfortunate phrase picked up in its headline by my local newspaper and elsewhere: "Kerry’s crusade just what the Mideast needs."

            "Crusade"? Really? Like George W. Bush didn't screw that one up enough for editors to remember?

            Working on my own writing, I had out Matthew White’s The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (2012) and could do some quick checking undone at several respectable news sources.

            The literal Crusades of 1095-1291 make #30 on White’s list of mass killing, with a body count of approximately three million. A significant and — trust me on this — highly restrained paragraph in White's entry describes the climax of the First Crusade: "Finally, Jerusalem was besieged and captured in July 1099. The crusaders looted the city and killed 70,000 people in the streets — Muslims mostly, but also anyone who looked Muslim. Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue were burned inside. The chroniclers wrote of crusaders wading through blood as deep as their horses’ bridles — an exaggeration obviously, but we can certainly imagine them splashing through sticky puddles of blood leaking from bodies in the streets" (p. 101).


            Please do picture crusaders splashing through "puddles of blood" and those bodies in the streets in Jerusalem — and at other times in Constantinople (killing Greek Orthodox Christians) and Acre and a number of cities on the crusaders’ routes; and then never again wish on the Mideast or any place else another crusade. Especially not on the Middle East.

"Squeamishness," "Manliness" ... Brutality (13 Aug. 2014)

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“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." 

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. 

It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. 

But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) 

in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars 

and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. 

Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like 

 the bureaucracy of a police state or the office 

of a thoroughly nasty business concern. —

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface

 

I'm still stewing over the line in an editorial in The Ventura County Star (our local paper in "south-central-coastal California") on President Obama's "squeamishness about the use of force" in Iraq, a sequeamishness he's partly overcome as I write in early middle-ish August of 2014.

Let's go back to a war ambiguous enough to keep a conference of ethicists at work for a few years, but relatively straight-forward as wars go and certainly compared with most wars currently and lately: "The Big One," "WWII," "The Last Good War" (on the side of the Allies).

The people of Dresden and Hamburg were, generally and undoubtedly, "Good Germans," supporting their duly elected Leader. Did they — or the people of Tokyo — deserve to be blown apart or burned to death or asphyxiated as the firestorms destroyed their bombed cities? Did they deserve to have their children killed — or their children to die, often horribly?

To ask such questions is to answer them, and it is rare for politicians or others to justify carpet-bombing cities in terms of deserve. The questions either aren't asked, or justifications are presented in terms of "speed the end of the war."

Air-power advocates had a theory: "strategic bombing," as it was called, would remove the means of making war at their sources by destroying factories, communication networks, and stores of war materiel; would break the morale of the Enemy by terrorizing the civilian population and killing family members of fighters; and (usually spoken very quietly, if at all), kill off many in a rising generation of potential opponents.  Or, as Winston Churchill is said to have put it back in the days before accurate bombing — deny housing to Enemy workers, since if the bombers could get their bombs onto a city, they'd be sure at least to destroy a bunch of houses.

Back when I was studying such things, the war wonks were still arguing whether or not strategic bombing worked, and my Army teachers were dubious. For sure, however, we can say that warfare from the beginning has involved killing civilians and killing them in large numbers: intentionally as part of a terror campaign and/or "business as usual," or, more recently, as "collateral damage," where noncombants are not killed (wounded, maimed, rendered homeless) as a primary objective but as a more or less unfortunate unintended —  but inevitable — consequence.

Similarly for weapons of mass destruction other than strategic bombers, e.g., massed artilley a fleet showing up in  your harbor with large numbers of naval guns and/or, nowadays, missiles.
I don't know whether President Obama was right or wrong in ordering air attacks in Iraq, and right about now I'm too disgusted with both the Israelis and Palestinians to take sides (although I'm Jewish and old enough to know what "Good Germans" of many nations could do to Jews rendered stateless — and the survival of Israel is important to me). What I can do now is repeat yet again a couple ideas drawn from George Orwell on language, Kurt Vonnegut on warfare, and C. S. Lewis (see above) on the nature of modern evil.

There are always men in the world  — mostly men —who have set up "ends," goals they are convinced will justify "any means necessary" to achieve. These people, generally, are fanatics, often fanatics operating from religious assumptions that involve values of infinite worth: saving souls, e.g., establishing The Kingdom of God, as they see it, doing what "God wills" (Deus vult!). There are other men — mostly men — less lofty in their worldviews for whom "War is a mere continuation of policy by other means," or who pursue the Mafia idea of "Business is business," just on vaster and bloodier scales than Mafia dons and soldiers.

 Such folk can do a lot of damage, as can decent people resisting evil or frightened people who will do unto others before those others do unto us — or people understandably out for revenge.
And many such people are armed and dangerous, and sometimes heavily armed.

This has been the way of humankind and in less sophisticated forms (quite likely) the way of many of the ancestors of humankind. So be it. Let us at least, however, face honestly what it is we do.

Contemplating the destruction of Dresden by US and UK aerial bombing during World War II, Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.”

I can't be quite that much of a pacifist, so my advice to the hawks calling for US "assertiveness" and "use of force" is (1) to put in specific, concrete terms just what they are calling for, (2) think about Vonnegut's actually rather extreme position — as the world goes — and (3) apply the more limited rule, "Only kill when you really, really have to," and, if we're talking about killing people, maybe not even then.

And, while we're engaging in such relatively idealistic behavior, perhaps we can reduce the "massacre machinery" in its nuclear varieties to levels where our willingness to kill one another doesn't get so out of hand that we take down our civilization, if not our species (and maybe vertebrate life and complex plants).

 That may be unmanly talk, but, then, I'm endorsing some varieties of squeamishness.