The Long History of Jewface

Leonard Bernstein had a big nose. It wasn’t distractingly big—not Cyrano-big, not Mr. Burns-big, not an Alpine astonishment like Mount Durante. It was, rather, a fine, substantial nose, the kind that confers dignity, especially when situated beneath soulful eyes on a handsome face like the late conductor and composer’s.

The dimensions of Bernstein’s nose would seem to be a minor concern in this year of fire and flood. But every day the Internet brings wonders. On August 15th, Netflix released the teaser trailer for “Maestro,” a Bernstein bio-pic, directed by and starring Bradley Cooper. The trailer itself is unremarkable, revealing what looks to be an upper-middlebrow melodrama, with decorous touches—Mahler’s Fifth swelling over black-and-white cinematography—engineered for awards season.

What caught viewers’ attention was Cooper’s nose. It appeared to have greater presence—lots more going on, in terms of length, breadth, and over-all affect—than the noses with which admirers of both Cooper and Bernstein are familiar. The news spread that Cooper had worn a prosthesis, and soon nostrils were flaring worldwide, with critics on social media and in the press decrying “Maestro” for propagating an antisemitic trope. In a viral post on X, formerly known as Twitter, a Jewish-studies Ph.D. candidate wrote, “This isn’t about making a non-Jewish actor look more like Leonard Bernstein; it’s about making a non-Jewish actor look more like a Jewish stereotype.” Headlines across the globe framed the controversy as an example of the movie industry’s insensitivity to Jews. It was, according to USA Today, the latest manifestation of “Hollywood’s ‘Jewface’ Problem.”

That term, Jewface, has gained currency in recent years, amid increasingly heated debates about representation, appropriation, and who has the right to depict whom on film, television, and the stage. In the U.S. and the U.K., the casting of non-Jews in Jewish roles has been met with outcry—claims that, in an age of show-business reckoning with historical wrongs, injuries to Jews are ignored. In 2019, twenty-two Jewish actors and playwrights published an open letter lamenting the “erasure” of Jews in the London theatre and the absence of “protests about Jewface” when non-Jews perform Jewish parts. The argument was more aggressively advanced by the British comedian David Baddiel, the author of a best-selling polemic, “Jews Don’t Count” (2022), which he followed up with a TV documentary. Jews, Baddiel has written, are “assumed, anti-semitically, to be successful and privileged and powerful, and therefore not in need of the protections that identity politics affords other minorities. In the case of casting, that falls down as: ‘Well, Jews are everywhere in showbiz, so Jewish actors don’t need that leg-up.’ ”

Baddiel’s American counterpart is the comedian Sarah Silverman, who has emerged as a forceful critic of Hollywood’s casting choices and portrayal of Jewish characters. Silverman has expressed dismay about “a long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews,” citing such recent examples as the casting of Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Kathryn Hahn as Joan Rivers. “One could argue . . . that a Gentile playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called Jewface,” Silverman said on an episode of her podcast, in September, 2021. Jewface, she said, “is defined as when a non-Jew portrays a Jew, with the Jewishness front and center—often with makeup, or changing of features, big fake nose, all the New York-y or Yiddish-y inflection.”

There are notorious examples of Jewish caricatures in cinema. In “Oliver Twist” (1948), Alec Guinness’s Fagin is a hunched vampire straight out of a Der Stürmer cartoon; Spike Lee’s “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990) features John and Nicholas Turturro laying it on thick as the grasping, kvetching jazz-club owners Moe and Josh Flatbush. But the grotesquerie of these performances has little in common with, say, Rachel Brosnahan’s lead turn in Amazon Prime’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” or Cillian Murphy in “Oppenheimer,” both often cited in discussions of Jewface. The Jewface discourse is fuzzy, unclear about where lines must be drawn, what exactly is verboten, and how to distinguish, as Silverman would have it, “front and center” Jewishness from other, presumably subtler, varieties of Jewishness and Jew-ish-ness. For Silverman, the Jewface problem evidently does not extend to Bradley Cooper and his big fake nose: she appears in “Maestro” as Leonard Bernstein’s sister Shirley.

Attempts to police these boundaries can veer into absurdity. In a Guardian opinion piece, Baddiel complains that the Netflix animated series “BoJack Horseman” hired the non-Jewish actor J. K. Simmons to voice the character Lenny Turteltaub—“a turtle,” Baddiel writes, “but a very Jewish one.” Another question is whether the standards must be upheld in the other direction. If we insist that Gentiles not play Jews, shouldn’t Jewish actors be barred from impersonating the goyim? That’s a development that would put a lot of Jews out of work. It would also impoverish culture. Where would we be, as a human race, without Lauren Bacall’s Vivian Rutledge, in “The Big Sleep,” or Jason Alexander’s (nominally Italian American) George Costanza?

What we have here, in other words, is a case study in culture-war overreach, in which the precepts of identity politics are clumsily invoked and the realities of structural power misconstrued. To put it less politely: the Jewface imbroglio feels like a dubious effort to elbow in on the long-standing grievances of Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian actors and filmmakers. Baddiel is right that “Jews are everywhere in showbiz” has long been an antisemitic talking point. Nevertheless: there are lots of Jews in show biz. A century after émigrés from the Pale of Settlement and the Lower East Side schlepped West to found Hollywood’s major movie studios, Jews remain heavily represented among the industry’s power players and gatekeepers. It is specious to imply equivalence between the standing of Jews in Hollywood and that of people of color, who, until recently, were locked out of nearly all positions of influence in the industry and were made to enact racist stereotypes onscreen—on the occasions, that is, when those roles weren’t performed by white actors, wearing the hideous minstrel stage masks of blackface, redface, brownface, and yellowface.

Blackface, in particular, is germane to this conversation. It’s no secret that, from around 1885 on, Jews were prime movers in the blackface industrial complex, benefitting materially (and, as has often been argued, psychosocially) from the wild popularity of racist burlesque on the stage and screen. Jewish variety-theatre impresarios reaped fortunes by featuring blackface acts; the Jewish songwriters and song-publishing moguls of Tin Pan Alley churned out cakewalks, “coon songs,” ragtime ditties, plantation-nostalgia anthems, and other blackface numbers; and Jewish vaudevillians, including some of the biggest stars of the early twentieth century—Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Stella Mayhew, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, and, preëminently, Al Jolson—cut their teeth in blackface, and were among the genre’s most beloved performers. The primordial place of blackface in both motion-picture history and the drama of Jewish American self-actualization is captured in the first feature-length talkie, “The Jazz Singer” (1927), an assimilationist parable in which Jakie Rabinowitz (Jolson) blacks up, belts out “My Mammy” at the Winter Garden, and graduates from immigrant cantor’s son to Yankee Doodle pop star.