When I was 12 or 13, I found a copy of Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus in my synagogue’s library. I stood amid the shelves, surreptitiously reading a sex scene (did the book just fall open right to it, the way every copy of Judy Blume’s Forever did at Chapter 12?) in which the passionate, long-legged, redheaded Jordana Ben Canaan makes love to her cerebral military strategist boyfriend, David Ben Ami, in the ruins of a Crusader castle on Mount Tabor in 1947 Palestine. As they canoodle, they recite King Solomon’s Song of Songs to each other. Uris uses ellipses ecstatically. (“And he kissed her breast … ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies …’ And he kissed her lips … ‘And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly’ …”) I was scandalized.

I took the book home and devoured it, much the way David devoured Jordana. 

Exodus not only titillated me but also filled me with youthful pride. It’s difficult to overstate what a phenomenon the novel — a sweeping story about the founding of the modern state of Israel — was, even in the early ’80s, when it was already more than two decades old. It was over 600 pages long, structured in “five books” (you know, like the Hebrew Bible), touching on the exile of Jews from the Holy Land, the terrors of life in the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Eastern Europe, and the horrors of the Holocaust. Mostly, though, it focused on a handful of Jewish characters, plus one foxy blond Presbyterian American nurse, in 1947 and 1948. 

If you walked into a Jewish living room when I was a kid (or today, if you have a grandparent of a certain age), you’d spot it on a shelf. The hardcover edition dominated bestseller lists for months; it was translated into over 50 languages. When the paperback came out in September 1959, it had the largest advance purchase order — a million and a half copies — of any novel in publishing history. It presaged a glut of massive, sweeping national epics by the likes of James Michener, John Jakes, and James Clavell. And in 1960, it became a blockbuster movie starring Paul Newman as hottie Jewish freedom fighter Ari Ben Canaan. 

From the start, Exodus hugely influenced the world’s perception of Israel. “It’s been said that the only other book that had as great an impact on American foreign policy was Pearl Buck’s novel about China,” said Riv-Ellen Prell, professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota and author of Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of Assimilation. “The book wasn’t just a driver of Jewish identity. People in the notoriously antisemitic state department read it at every level.” 

In Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story, Israeli college professor and historian M.M. Silver notes that the book was a gift to Israel’s tourist industry. “More tourists fly into Tel Aviv with Exodus than with the Bible,” said the director of the Israeli government’s tourist office in 1959. David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, reportedly proclaimed, “I don’t usually read novels. But I read that one. As a literary work, it isn’t much. But as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.” Production images from the Otto Preminger film, featuring a shirtless Paul Newman wearing a Star of David necklace, only increased the story’s allure. 

The book seemed to fit right in with the vision of Israel my parents provided for me. I grew up listening to Israeli folk records and hearing about the kibbutz movement, in which no one owned property and everyone tilled the land together and worked to make the desert bloom. I was taken to the Sinai desert, where my family camped with Bedouins and looked at the stars; I saw the mountain in the Galilee that would later feature in my bat mitzvah haftarah, where the prophet Deborah led the Israelites into battle against the Canaanites. Israel seemed like the happy almost-ending to the story of Jewish history. There’s a joke that the meaning of every Jewish holiday is “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” Jaffa oranges and creamy feta seemed like our delicious due for surviving the Holocaust.

When my parents were growing up, Jewish American identity was in transition. The Holocaust was a shattering collective experience, not only because of the deaths of 6 million Jews but also because it reminded American Jews that they were only guests in their own country. They knew about the draconian immigration quotas in America and elsewhere. No one wanted refugee Jews. Then, suddenly, the newly established state of Israel provided what seemed like a true haven. 

The postwar period was also when American Jews were starting to join the middle class in greater numbers, leaving tight urban enclaves and beginning a big collective move to the suburbs. It was a weird time. As Silver writes, “By the end of the 1950s, suburban Jews developed a new, vicarious form of affiliation; because Jewishness seemed inauthentic in suburban space, they sought membership in a far-off land whose moral credibility was rooted in a sacred Jewish past.”

Exodus, the novel, arrived when Jews were searching for a new self-image. Uris was committed to a vision of muscular, heroic Jews, not ghetto weaklings or “golden riders of the psychoanalytic couch” (Silver’s term for Jewish American intellectual novelists like Philip Roth, who Uris loathed — and the feeling was evidently mutual). As Prell put it, “Exodus was a work of popular fiction that established a deep sense of Jewish identity, [instead of one] that had been far more complicated, fragmented, filled with shame. This book made the case that that’s not who you are as a Jew.”

As I got older, though, my youthful love of the book started to feel like an embarrassing crush on an teen idol. When I thought about Exodus at all, I recalled it as wildly sexist and reductive. More importantly, I wanted to forge my own sense of Jewish American selfhood that didn’t rely on endless stories of Israeli heroism and Holocaust horror, the twin narratives that seemed to direct so much of Jewish education and identity formation. Later, the Israeli government moved increasingly rightward and Jewish settlements expanded incrementally in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, and I turned away from Israel as a source of Jewish identity entirely. 

I instead focused my attention on Jewish art, Jewish folklore and mythology, Jewish food, home-based rituals like lighting Shabbat candles and building a sukkah and hosting Passover seders. I chose to ponder Jewish values and history through culture, through learning about Jewish leadership in American labor and feminist movements. When I had kids, I addressed Israel the way many Gen X and older millennial parents have: by avoiding it. By sighing when the subject came up, saying “It’s complicated,” and passing the latkes. 

I no longer have the luxury of noping out. I need to address my ambivalence and confront the gaps in my education if I’m to talk responsibly about Israel and Palestine, including the current siege of Gaza, with my own kids, who’ve grown up in silence. (I choose the word advisedly: Breaking the Silence is an Israeli NGO established by Israel Defense Forces veterans to talk about their experiences in the Occupied Territories since 2000.) My failure to discuss Israel with my children, even if I don’t have answers, is my fault. The first time I publicly wrestled with the subject of talking to kids about Israel when you’re dismayed by Israel, I got an email from a reader who wrote, “Jews like you are how my family ended up in the ovens.” Now I think if you’re not being accused of being a self-hating Jew by some folks and a Zionist stooge by others, you’re doing something wrong. 

As part of my self-education, I decided to reread Exodus and watch the movie, which I’d never seen. (Spoiler alert: This is one of those rare cases in which the movie is better than the book. Which is damning with faint praise.) 

Exodus is a novel, but the foreword begins, “Most of the events in Exodus are a matter of history and public record.” The rest of the book’s 608 (!) pages are filled with a litany of historical names and real places. There’s no afterword offering clarification; I had to keep looking up what was factual and what Uris had invented. The Jewish characters are wholly noble, though their politics differ, with some swearing by diplomacy and others by violent freedom-fighting. The Arabs — both Christian and Muslim — are evil cartoons. Uris luxuriates in phrases like “so illiterate and so backward,” “blood orgy,” “slithering along the ground with knives between their teeth,” “nearly insane with rage,” and “the dregs of humanity.” He makes sweeping generalizations like “There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. It was a constant struggle to survive. In this atmosphere, cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became a way of life.”

The book proffers only two good Arabs. One is Kammal, the village leader who says, “The Jews are the only salvation for the Arab people. The Jews are the only ones in a thousand years who have brought light to this part of the world.” (When Kammal’s weak-willed son Taha takes over as mukhtar, he spends his time obsessing over having forbidden sex with Jordana and preparing to betray her brother Ari.) The other good Arab is Mussa, the Druze who saves Ari’s life when he’s shot by British soldiers after breaking his uncle out of jail. Mussa is essentially faceless, but has a “carriage of dignity” and a village that’s “sparkling white and clean in comparison to the filth and decay of most Arab villages.” How nice. 

Exodus’s Jews just want to live in peace. The only time they do something bad, it’s “a strange and inexplicable sequence of events” — a mysterious accident! In a short passage based on the real-life 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, in which Zionist paramilitary groups attacked a village of mostly women and children, Uris says, “a panic broke out among Maccabee troops and they opened up a wild and unnecessary firing.” Strange! Inexplicable! His problem with the massacre isn’t the dead innocents; it’s that it “fixed a stigma on the young nation that it would take decades to erase.” 

The 1948 narrative I and so many others grew up with, the one depicted in Exodus, maintains that Arab leaders, both in Palestine and in the wider world, told residents to flee while Jews begged them to stay. We now know this isn’t true. Left-leaning Israeli media have reported on the Israeli government’s ever-increasing efforts to suppress scholarship on 1948-era Palestine and its history, including the fact that Zionists attacked Arab residents and seized their land. Palestinians are more than justified in calling their own Exodus the Nakba — the Catastrophe. 

The argument that Uris and the modern Jewish right share, that non-Jewish Palestinians chose to leave, isn’t correct. The insistence that Israel is inherently virtuous because, after the Nakba, it did what America refused to do and accepted Jewish refugees (this time, the ones expelled from or threatened with murder in the Arab countries in which they were residing in 1948) isn’t relevant. Absorbing all those refugees meant less land — or the impossibility of return — for the Palestinians. Jews deserve a homeland, but so do Palestinians. As I sighed to my kids: It’s complicated. But I also need them to know that there are Jews working for the rights of Palestinians. Organizations like T’ruah, the New Israel Fund, and B’Tselem have long focused on peace and human rights throughout Israel and the Jewish world.

When I sat down to watch Exodus, the movie, with my home-from-college kid (who quickly fled, noting, “This is boring”), I was surprised to find it more nuanced than the book. Director Otto Preminger explicitly rejected Uris’s rabid anti-Arab prejudice. “I don’t believe that there are any real villains,” he later said. Preminger hired Uris, who had written a successful screenplay, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, to adapt his novel into a movie but quickly wound up firing him. Preminger claimed he tried to work with Uris’s script but gave up a third of the way through; Uris claimed he never wrote a word and was fired for his beliefs. Uris said, “Otto was a terrorist — he’s Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein.” Preminger replaced him with the then-blacklisted non-Jewish screenwriter Dalton Trumbo; it was Trumbo’s first script credit since his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.

“I think my picture is closer to the truth, and to the historic facts, than is the book,” said Preminger. In a strangely prescient snippet of dialogue not in the book, Ari objects to his uncle Akiva’s attacks on unsanctioned targets: “I think these bombings and these killings hurt us with the United Nations,” he says. “A year ago, we had the respect of the whole world. Now, when they read about us, it’s nothing but terror and violence.”

Preminger’s claim that his film “avoids propaganda” is debatable, though. It still features a rousing speech from a Jerusalem balcony, in which Ari’s father Barak, a diplomatic Jewish leader played by Lee J. Cobb, tells a vast cheering crowd that the United Nations has voted to partition the land into two states and urges, “To the Arab population of Jewish Palestine, we make the following appeal: The Grand Mufti has asked you either to annihilate the Jewish population or to abandon your homes and your lands and to seek the weary path of exile. We implore you, remain in your homes and in your shops! And we shall work together as equals in the free state of Israel!” In reality, not so much. 

My kid is right: The movie isn’t great. It is three and a half hours long. (Comedian Mort Sahl supposedly stood up three hours into a screening and yelled, “Otto! Let my people go!”) Paul Newman is wooden. Preminger’s wife Hope Bryce told the director’s biographer that Newman and Preminger got off on the wrong foot when the actor arrived with five pages of notes and suggestions about his character and Preminger immediately informed him he wasn’t changing a word of Trumbo’s script. When filming began and Newman asked what Ari should be thinking in a certain scene while eavesdropping on two other characters, Preminger barked, “Oh for God’s sake, just stand there.” 

But as Ari Ben Canaan, Newman is at his most ravishing. Who cares about wooden acting when a human looks like that? Seeing this huge movie star (half-Jewish, as both Adam Sandler and my mother note) wearing a Star of David on his wet, bare, heaving chest — in his first scene, he’s just swum to shore in a heroic and strenuous reconnaissance mission, obviously — at a time when Jews were mostly depicted onscreen in sword-and-sandal epics and generally played by the goyish and unpleasant Charlton Heston is surreal. Newman embodies exactly what Uris wanted from his Ari: an icy blue-eyed action hero, not a cringing shtetl weakling.

Sal Mineo — who also has a shirtless scene — gives an excellent performance as an angry young Holocaust survivor and Nazi rape victim. (Again, this is not in the book. Only Jewish women get raped in the book.) Mineo is naturalistic and emotional, and his chemistry with every other actor is magnetic. The movie’s action scenes are thrilling; there are flashes of humor the book lacks; the fact that the film was shot on location lends immediacy and verisimilitude. But it’s still cheesy, and it reminds me of how far away modern-day Israel is from the naïve, glorious promise of my childhood. I wonder how many other Jews my age and older have considered the ways in which Exodus warped our perception of the country and made us slow to demand better of it. 

I’d argue that it’s worthwhile for everyone to revisit books and movies they loved as kids. You too may be shocked to learn how you missed or even internalized some pretty problematic ideas. Real life is knotty and multistranded, and reductive storytelling harms us all. “Uris was a vivid and suspenseful writer,” said Prell — who, by the way, also read Exodus when she was 12 — “and a simple enough writer to tell a simple story about one of the most complicated places on earth.”

The movie changes the book’s ending, making it bleaker. Ari stands over an open grave containing two corpses wrapped in linen. A double funeral, for an Arab and a Jew. Ari says, in Trumbo’s words, “I look at these two people and I want to howl like a dog. I want to shout ‘Murder!’ so that the whole world will hear it and never forget. It’s right that these two people should lie side by side in this grave, because they will share it in peace. But the dead always share the earth in peace. And that’s not enough. … I swear, on the bodies of these two people, that the day will come when Arab and Jew will share a peaceful life in this land that they have always shared in death.” But in the final shot of the film, a line of jeeps come, and the men and women with rifles hop in, and we know there will be more killing.

When the first images of Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic schnoz — the honking appendage he wears to play conductor Leonard Bernstein in Maestro — made their internet debut a few months ago, hot takes abounded: The Nose was antisemitic! The Nose was not antisemitic! Anyone saying The Nose was not antisemitic was antisemitic! Leonard Bernstein’s children responded: Their father “had a nice, big nose” and all criticism was merely “disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch”! The Onion chimed in: “Leonard Bernstein’s Children Release Statement Confirming Father Wore Big Prosthetic Nose In Real Life”!

Whew. As noted large-nosed Jew Sigmund Freud might have put it, sometimes a nose is just a nose. But sometimes it’s a symbol of something (even) bigger. The question of how some people were absolutely sure the nose was problematic and others were 100 percent convinced it wasn’t raises fascinating, nuanced questions about what it means to be an American Jew. What, exactly, is “Jewish representation?” As Henry Bial, theater professor at the University of Kansas and author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen, notes, “Generally speaking, we tend to be upset by non-Jews playing Jews to the degree that we feel Jews are accepted in the mainstream.” 

People who see Jews as basically just white people, as immigrants who’ve made it, tend to roll their eyes at those who see Jews as a minority needing protection … and at those who care about some self-important actor’s oversized proboscis. People who feel threatened by the stratospheric rise in antisemitism in the last few years take The Nose — and the fact that Jews onscreen tend to be played by non-Jews — as a marker of something more sinister.

It’s important to note that not all Jews are white. And because Jews, after their expulsion from Judea by the Romans in 70 CE, have lived all over the world, there are all kinds of Jews: Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Jews of all hues. But it’s the stories of Ashkenazi Jews like Bernstein that tend to get told, when Jewish stories are told at all. That’s probably because American Jewry is predominantly Ashkenazi, and Hollywood is an American invention. 

As we gear up for Maestro’s theatrical release, perhaps it’s time to discuss the idea that this disagreement shows the peculiar place Jews hold in the world. We’re seen as both consummate insiders and perpetual outsiders. We’re considered hungry usurpers, foreigners, sneaks; we’re also told we’re influential decision-makers, whispering in the ears of the most powerful people in the world. This is why antisemitism itself is such a weird, singular hatred, one that isn’t so comparable to other kinds of -isms. It comes from both the left and the right. And it hangs on a contradiction. Are we in or are we out? Is it possible to be both? 

Make no mistake, the fact that Jews in film and TV are overwhelmingly played by non-Jews is real. Off the top of my head: Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Rachel Brosnahan as Mrs. Maisel. (Bonus points for Tony Shalhoub as her father and Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce.) Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug. Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan. Rachel McAdams as an Orthodox Jew in Disobedience. Renée Zellweger as an Orthodox Jew in A Price Above Rubies. Óscar Isaac as a formerly Orthodox Jew in Scenes From a Marriage. Kathryn Hahn as a rabbi in Transparent. Al Pacino as a wince-inducingly over-the-top Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Alec Guinness as a wince-inducingly over-the-top Fagin in Oliver Twist. Charlton Heston as, y’know, Moses. Millie Perkins as Anne Frank. Jared Leto as Israeli WeWork founder Adam Neumann. (The fact that no one had criticism of Jared Leto’s prosthetic nose is perhaps an indication of just how annoying Jared Leto is. The nose is a drop in the bucket.) Steve Carell as a Jewish therapist in The Patient. Adam Driver as a Jewish cop in Black KkKlansman. Daniel Craig as Jewish World War II resistance fighter Tuvia Bielski in Defiance. Wendi McLendon-Covey as a clinging, neurotic 1980s Jewish mother in The Goldbergs. Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano as Steven Spielberg’s Jewish parents in The Fabelmans. Rachel Sennott in, well, everything. Gary Oldman as Jewish screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (cast despite his 2014 rant that “in a town that’s run by Jews,” Mel Gibson “got drunk and said a few things, but we’ve all said those things,” and now Gibson is “an outcast, a leper”; sure, Gary).

With all the attention to Bradley Cooper’s nose, barely anyone has noticed that Carey Mulligan plays Bernstein’s wife Felicia Montealegre, the daughter of an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Costa Rican mother. And honestly, when it comes to Helen Mirren’s Golda Meir, the prosthetic nose feels like the least of that movie’s problems. (On the upside, Melanie Hutsell did recently discuss her apology to Mayim Bialik for wearing a big ol’ fake nose as Blossom on SNL, back when Bialik was a teenager. Yay?)

Does casting matter? Does casting matter when a lot, though not all, of those Jewish roles played by non-Jews were written by Jews? A common antisemitic belief is that “Jews own the media.” For the record, we do not. But we’ve been integral to the creation of it and have always participated in it. Jews — Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Harry Warner, Marcus Loew — founded early movie studios because they could.

Unlike more prestigious, longstanding fields, moviemaking had no old boys’ network, no status, no one shuddering delicately at these men’s déclassé religious heritage and deliberately keeping them out. When TV was established, it too was viewed by the titans of industry as niche, tacky, beneath notice. It took off fast, though (in 1950, only 9 percent of American homes had a TV; a decade later, 90 percent did), and all at once there was ravenous demand for content, a term no one yet knew. Suddenly, Jewish men had a huge platform.

Jewish history and entertainment history, entwined

Even when those Jewish men were at the helm, they hesitated to depict Jewish characters and Jewish stories. A common phrase at the time — one still, by some accounts, used today — was “write Yiddish, cast British.”

One of the first Oscar-bait depictions of (non-Biblical) Jewishness was Gentleman’s Agreement, the 1947 movie in which Gregory Peck plays a journalist for a prestige magazine who goes undercover as a Jew. He discovers that many hotels are closed to Jews, that some landlords won’t rent to Jews, some neighborhoods won’t let Jews buy homes, and some doctors won’t see Jewish patients. He discovers that Jewish kids get bullied and that many genteel, classy people have prejudices they’re unaware of. It’s vital to note that the first movie about antisemitism had to star a beloved, menschy non-Jewish actor and ask the audience to identify with his courageous discovery that antisemitism exists and it is bad. 

In general, though, Jewish creators sought to tell “American” stories. The last thing American Jews wanted to do was point out their otherness. They were probably right to make that call. Eddy Portnoy, senior researcher at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, told me, “The basic racism of American society, especially in the 1950s, was that in a popular TV show you could have Jewish people clowning like Sid Caesar and Milton Berle, but if you wanted to have a popular TV show with an office and a family, it had to reflect the dominant society. It couldn’t be Jewish.”

The canonical example is The Dick Van Dyke Show, which aired from 1961-66. It was a de-Jewified version of its creator Carl Reiner’s own story as a writer on Your Show of Shows, with extremely not-Jewish Mary Tyler Moore as his stunning wife. By the 1980s, we started to see more Jewish men playing Jewish men on TV, perhaps as overt antisemitism abated, Jewish university quotas ended, memories of the Holocaust became less immediate. “But it became a common phenomenon to have a Jewish man with a gentile woman,” Portnoy pointed out. “I don’t know if that was part of the male Jewish writer’s shiksa-goddess fantasy.” (Hint: Yes. And I’d argue that today, positive Jewish representation is still more of a problem for Jewish women than Jewish men.)

In general, Jews and non-Jews alike seem uncomfortable talking about the Jewish history of show business. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences opened the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in 2021, controversy erupted: There was almost no mention of the industry’s pioneers being Jewish. As a Brandeis professor of American Studies and Hollywood historian observed, “It’s sort of like building a museum dedicated to Renaissance painting, and ignoring the Italians.” The museum responded with a promise to launch a special exhibit called “Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” which focuses on the early studio system and will open in May 2024. Is that good enough?

Jewface and its malcontents 

Jews are in this weird liminal space, both inside and outside the general entertainment discourse. Meanwhile, all of us are now in an era of reckoning in which people are looking at the media they consume and realizing that, historically, certain stories haven’t been told. Or if they have been told, it’s been through white savior narratives, like Gentleman’s Agreement, or a gazillion movies about heroic white rescuers of Jews, Black people, and so many other marginalized communities. We’re starting to contend with exclusionary, horrifying casting decisions. Mickey Rooney’s squinty-eyed, buck-toothed portrayal of Audrey Hepburn’s Asian neighbor, for just one example, has rendered Breakfast at Tiffany’s unwatchable for many. Where do Jews fit into this paradigm?

“In the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s, you had this self-policing, in which Jewish producers and directors worried that if they cast a Jew in a Jewish role, people wouldn’t watch,” Bial told me. “It’s different when it’s a non-Jewish actor playing Jewish to show what a good actor they are, because being Jewish is so inherently weird and hard. A parallel might be straight actors playing gay and getting awards, or actors who aren’t disabled playing disabled.” And don’t forget cisgender people playing trans folks and, in a colorist world, perhaps even light-skinned Black actors portraying dark-skinned historical figures. 

Actors often want to play people who are nothing like them because that’s how you win Oscars. And sometimes this casting comes from what Bial called a “naively optimistic” place: “A non-Jewish actor can be eager to play a Jewish role to show they don’t see Jews as different,” he explained. “Not in an oppressive, colonizing way, but in a ‘we’re all just people’ way.” It’s a method acting thing: You needn’t have the same experience as a character as long as you can tap into parallel emotional experiences in your own life. 

But does this mean you’re taking roles away from those who should be inhabiting them? Sarah Silverman and others have complained about “Jewface,” by which they mean the casting of non-Jews as Jews. In 2021, after Kathryn Hahn was cast as Joan Rivers in a now-shelved project, Silverman said on her podcast, “There’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews, and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish, but people whose Jewishness is their whole being.” Jewface, to her, means “changing of features, big fake nose, all the New York-y or Yiddish-y inflection.” Silverman asked, “In a time when the importance of representation is seen as so essential and so front and center, why does ours constantly get breached even today, in the thick of it?” (Due to the publicity blackout of the SAG-AFTRA strike, Silverman has thus far been saved from having to comment on her role in Maestro as Bernstein’s sister Shirley.)

Silverman’s is a valid question. But as the critic Jody Rosen has long pointed out, “Jewface” has a specific meaning that’s different from the way Silverman uses it. Back in the day, vaudeville featured all kinds of ethnic mockery: of Irish people, Jewish people, Black people. One reason I’m personally uncomfortable using the term Jewface about casting decisions is that it plays on the term blackface, some of the most noted stars of which were Jews. The plot of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first talkie and the rare early film that starred a Jew playing a Jew, is about the son of a synagogue cantor who prefers to sing onstage — sometimes in blackface — rather than in the pulpit. 

While Irish organizations were successful in fighting demeaning vaudevillian portrayals of drunk Irishmen, Portnoy told me, Jews took a different tack: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em — and be better at it. Around 1909, the Central Conference of American Rabbis instigated an investigation into offensive portrayals of Jews in vaudeville because they felt it led to increased antisemitism: “But then they figured out that by that time, Jewish performers had taken over the field,” Portnoy said. Jews have always been quick to make fun of themselves. The rabbis backed off, deciding there was nothing to be done about Jewface when, in Portnoy’s words, “not only the performers, but the writers, the sheet music publishers, the theater owners, the managers, and the audiences were mostly Jewish.”

The great Irving Berlin had a song called “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars,” in which Old Man Rosenthal is on his deathbed but refuses to die until Cohen pays him. “A Jew wrote this!” Portnoy exclaimed. “This is in some ways problematic! But it was a writing gig!” Jewface performances quickly became so full of Yiddish that non-Jews wouldn’t understand them. They were aimed at the in-group, not the wider culture. Lots of marginalized artists — drag queens, Black standup comedians, Latino performance artists — have turned other folks’ mockery into points of pride through their work.

Jews’ insider/outsider status in American show business was predated by centuries of painful portrayals by non-Jews. Bial has written extensively about the ways in which medieval dramas, church drama stories, and Renaissance, and early modern theater used physical conventions to show that a character was Jewish. The character would have red hair, which was associated with the devil, or they’d have to sport special conical or Sorry-game-piece-shaped hats. For hundreds of years in physical media, Jews were portrayed with very specific physicality. Portnoy said, “Humor magazines like Puck and Judge had lots of cartoons with horrible caricatures of big-nosed, thick-lipped, curly-haired, droopy-eared, weird-bodied Jews. That was the nature of humor at the time.”

These images were printed on postcards, many of which are part of YIVO’s large postcard collection. “Clearly the images were so commonplace they weren’t even discussed,” Portnoy continued. “The postcards in the collection are all used, all written to someone, and they’re always, like, ‘We’re in Niagara Falls; we’d love to see you!’ They never even comment on the image.”

The long history of “this is what Jews look like” can make a prosthetic nose feel awfully weighted, particularly since Maestro’s nose seems way more prominent than Bernstein’s own. (In my humble opinion, that is. As the saying goes, though, two Jews, three opinions: A Jewish female screenwriter protested to me, “I’d kill to have a nose like that! If I had a nose job, that’s the nose I’d want!”) Portnoy notes that the term in vaudeville for the substance used to attach a fake snoot was “Jew clay.”  

Reasonable people disagree about where Jews belong in the diversity conversation. Bial puts it succinctly: “There’s a fundamental asymmetry in that progressives universally think of Jews as white and white supremacists universally think of Jews as not white, and this creates a problem. Because if you think Jews are white, there shouldn’t be a problem with any other white person playing them.” Of course, again, not all Jews are white, and even those who are can have their whiteness questioned. There are so many kinds of Jews whose traditions and stories are rarely shared, which informs questions around Jewish representation far bigger than The Nose.

And yet, The Nose pulls the focus. It might be more productive to ask questions like, “Do you have to have generational trauma baked into your bones to be able to play Anne Frank or Leonard Bernstein?” as Bial asks (rhetorically?). Is authenticity artistically vital because it makes someone a better actor, or is it politically vital because people who have been excluded in the past should now get to be centered? Are Jews who throw around the term “Jewface” demanding to be seen as oppressed when they shouldn’t be? 

Which brings us back to Bial’s point: “If we feel Jews are just another white American ethnicity, there’s no real power imbalance. But if we feel that Jews are othered or slandered in media, or that antisemitism is on the rise, we tend to get a lot more nervous about how we’re being represented and we’re less likely to trust someone who’s not a member of the tribe to do that representation.”

When I started this piece, I didn’t think The Nose was a big deal. By the time I finished, I felt that telling other people they’re silly or overreacting for being upset is perhaps more harmful than any prosthetic nose could ever be.

Maestro is playing on Netflix.