How could I be Jewish, my friend wondered out loud, when I didn’t have the… She paused as she mimed a big old nose, coming far out from the face in a grotesque outward bulge. I was shocked. My friend was a sophisticated Cambridge graduate, yet still she had imbibed the anti-Semitic cartoons that have caricatured and justified violence against Jews for time immemorial.
That was in 2004, long before most people knew what critical race theory and BAME groupings were. It was also a time in which one of the most popular shows on TV, Little Britain, featured actors in blackface: characters played by Matt Lucas and David Walliams included an obese Caribbean woman called Desiree DeVere, portrayed in blackface, and a portly Thai bride called Ting Tong. Lucas and Walliams have since said sorry for those performances:
Jewface will continue to be fine, and all other ‘face’ not
‘David and I have both spoken publicly in recent years of our regret that we played characters of other races. Once again we want to make it clear that it was wrong and we are very sorry,’ Lucas tweeted following the outrage over the killing of George Floyd in 2020.
But the Jewish exception has continued in matters of ‘face’. Nobody in their right mind in Hollywood or TV or theatre land would dare for one moment to use a non-black actor then daub them in dark paint to make them seem black. Not in any context, at all, ever.
Fake Jewish noses on non-Jewish actors, however, are fair game and even, perhaps, worthy of an Oscar. This week, the pretend schnozz-tastic films Golda, starring Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, and Maestro, starring Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein, were nominated for Best Hair and Makeup. Neither Mirren nor Cooper are remotely Jewish, and neither have particularly big noses.
Both Golda Meir and Bernstein, however, happened to. And so quite an impressive set of prosthetic technologies were deployed to make both gentile actors look like the big-nosed Jews they were bringing to life.
I should be outraged at this Oscars for Jewface, given how brazenly it shows the double standard. And secretly I am a bit annoyed that these two titans of Jewish history happened to have large noses (again, giving false grist to the anti-Semite caricaturist mill). But, actually, I am not that bothered. The reality is this: two extremely brilliant actors have done an excellent, serious job playing Meir and Bernstein.
Mirren, cast by the director Guy Nattiv, immersed herself in Israel’s history and pulled off a blinder as one of the least traditionally sexy-looking, but most impressive women of the 20th century. Cooper did such a good job that Bernstein’s family defended his casting, ‘Jewface’ included, given that, they said, he did Bernstein real justice. The result? Thanks to these prosthetics, audiences were brought that bit closer to the history of what they were watching.
None of this means the double standard is acceptable. If, as I and many other Jews believe, Jewface is merited by a serious treatment in the name of art or history, then the anti-Semitism only lies in the refusal to apply the same standards to all other minorities.
In blunt terms: so long as Jewface is OK, as the Oscars committee has confirmed it is, then blackface and Indian face and trans-face must also presumably be OK. If the best actor for a black role is white, or east Asian, then the judges of the Oscars would, in a saner world, be OK with their appearance being tweaked in a similar way to that of Mirren and Cooper. Mirren, after all, ended up looking like Golda, shnozz and all, and Cooper’s new big nose made him that much more like Bernstein. So the same rules should be applied to others.
Of course, given that the double standard shows no sign of abating – Jewface will continue to be fine, and all other ‘face’ not – we should call it out for what it is: anti-Semitism. Or maybe it’s just the excessive worship of the sensitivities of everyone else that is the problem. Either way, the double standard, bad as it is, means that art is working as it should in at least one tiny domain. In casting the very best people instead of those who share a real-life ethnic background, the permissibleness of Jewface shows how it should be done, and should lead the way for everyone else – and would, in a world less unhinged than ours.
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