(Jewish Group) Hollywood: Where Jews Don't Get To Play Jews

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

I was 4 or 5 when the hot topic at dinner was the movie version of “Marjorie Morningstar.” Too young to understand why Mom was unhappy about it, I understood enough to get that Natalie Wood, a goy, had been cast in the title role in the screen adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel. But why was it a shande? Now I see that Mom believed there must have been a “Semitic” actress who could have played the comeliest Jewess in literature since Rebecca in “Ivanhoe.” (I wonder if Mom remembered that six years earlier, before she converted to Judaism, Elizabeth Taylor had been cast as Rebecca when MGM released its version of “Ivanhoe.”) Did the studio chiefs equate “comely” with “gentile”? Did they not know that casting non-Jews in “our” stories made us feel unworthy?

My immigrant parents learned how to become Americans at the movies. And they worried about what Americans might learn at the movies about Jews. Of course, casting gentiles as Jews doesn’t have the racial (and racist) implications it did when Ava Gardner played Julie, a biracial woman passing for white in “Showboat,” or when Mickey Rooney played Mr. Yunioshi, Audrey Hepburn’s Japanese-American landlord, in the 1961 film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Still, whenever I saw a non-Jew playing a Jew, often with exaggerated hand gestures and singsong diction, I felt a sting. To alleviate it, Dad made up a game: He designated gentiles who played Jews as “honorary landsmen.” The first was Charlton Heston as “Ben-Hur” (1959).

What Mom and Dad didn’t know was that during Hollywood’s golden age — roughly from 1925 to 1965 — Jews rarely played Jews in the movies. Call it Hollywood’s Jewish Paradox. “You can’t have a Jew playing a Jew, it wouldn’t work on screen,” producer Samuel Goldwyn argued, explaining that he wanted Frank Sinatra rather than Sam Levene — who had originated the role — to play the part of Nathan Detroit in “Guys and Dolls.” While Goldwyn never explained why Levene wouldn’t work, obviously Sinatra was a household name and Levene was not.


Equally paradoxical: Even though the men who built Hollywood were largely Jews, they rarely produced movies about Jews. When they hired Jews, they rechristened them with gentile names — Marion Levy became Paulette Goddard, Jacob Garfinkle was renamed John Garfield, and so on. (In the silent film era, Douglas Ullman renamed himself Douglas Fairbanks, keeping under wraps the fact that his father was Jewish). In the infrequent case that there was a Jewish narrative, more often than not gentiles were cast as Jews; for instance, George Arliss in the title role in “Disraeli” (1929) and in the double role of Mayer and Nathan Rothschild in “The House of Rothschild” (1934).

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A rather interesting article. Certainly not a normal topic of conversation.