Bradley Cooper is not anti-Semitic. If he was, he’d surely have let it slip by now; as Mel Gibson proved (‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!’), it can be hard to hold such things in. And Cooper certainly wouldn’t be portraying a Jewish composer sensitively and affectionately on screen if he was.
No, his decision to use a rubber nose when playing the role of Leonard Bernstein – to nose up, if you will – was likely not animated by the anti-Semitism of Hitler or Gibson. But it was animated by something and it is useful to consider what it was.
Why was it necessary to nose up? Did Cooper fear that we’d miss Bernstein’s ethnicity without it?
Yesterday, Bernstein’s children rushed to the actor’s defence. ‘It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose,’ wrote Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein in a statement. ‘Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that.
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