(Jewish Group) Hollywood: Where Jews Don't Get To Play Jews
(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 Wouks 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 doesnt 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 Hepburns Japanese-American landlord, in the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffanys. 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 didnt know was that during Hollywoods golden age roughly from 1925 to 1965 Jews rarely played Jews in the movies. Call it Hollywoods Jewish Paradox. You cant have a Jew playing a Jew, it wouldnt 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 wouldnt 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.