Concerning\u00a0 Leonard Bernstein, Woody Allen, and Mel Brooks, Saul Bellow and Bob Dylan
I cannot, unlike Portnoy, Philip Roth\u2019s creation, make a complaint
that any of them chose to hide their Jewish identity, as do movies that prevent like Penicillin
exposure to this identity, ensuring its restraint,
not only\u00a0in the movie about the Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Robert Allen Zimmerman \u2013 Bob \u2013
but ones regarding Robert Oppenheimer and Neil Diamond which make a void of this unvaunted property.<\/p>\n
For this offence,\u00a0theft\u00a0of it is not a correct accusation. Although evasive film directors seem to rob
these Jews of their identity, that it\u2019s lost property is more due to the losers\u2019 negligence than robberty.<\/p>\n
In \u201cAvalon,\u201d a 1990 movie directed by Barry Levinson, \u201cAvalon,\u201d chronicling a Polish-Jewish immigrant family\u2019s assimilation into American life in Baltimore from the 1910s to the 1960s, the word \u201cJew\u201d\u00a0seems not to be \u00a0mentioned a single time, and the only ritual celebrated by its Jewish characters, besides a funeral,\u00a0is a completely secular Thanksgiving dinner. The movie concludes with a fire of a large discount appliance store, caused by children playing with fire. I regarded the fire as a symbolic transformation of a secular auto da fe.<\/p>\n
The fire caused temporary guilt, a supposed Jewish trait, but turned out to be\u00a0in fact banal and accidental, like the assimilation of Jews in the mid-20th Century.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In \u201cThere\u2019s Something Missing in Films About Jewish Cultural Figures: Why do films relating to Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan and Robert Oppenheimer barely mention their Jewishness?,\u201d \u00a0NYT, 12\/31\/25, Mireille Silcoff writes:<\/p>\n
The stories are about us, but we\u2019re not in them.
But in the movie, one type of American is not visible, unless you count a split-second image of the Fran Drescher sitcom \u201cThe Nanny\u201d playing on a TV set in the background. There\u2019s no reference to Diamond\u2019s heritage, not even a sidelong hint; no Jews seem to be present. This absence might not be on the level of, say, a movie about white musicians trying to become the world\u2019s best James Brown cover act without ever acknowledging race. But of course a movie like that would at least address the topic \u2014 as in 1991\u2019s \u201cThe Commitments,\u201d about a Dublin soul band.<\/p>\n
Lately this feels like a pattern with Jewish stories. I got an odd feeling watching 2023\u2019s \u201cOppenheimer,\u201d a film that seems uninterested in the fact that its protagonist \u2014 leading the Manhattan Project in 1942, at the height of Nazi control of Europe \u2014 came from a Jewish German family. I got the same feeling watching Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet as Bob Dylan in 2024\u2019s \u201cA Complete Unknown,\u201d a film that skirts not just Dylan\u2019s origins but also the Jewishness of the Greenwich Village folk scene. I got it while watching Bradley Cooper play the muscularly Jewish Leonard Bernstein in 2023\u2019s \u201cMaestro,\u201d with an absurd prosthetic nose substituting for Jewish interiority. I definitely got it watching Helen Mirren as the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, with yet more nose prosthetics, in the film \u201cGolda,\u201d which turns the Yom Kippur War into an almost ethnically neutral war-room flick. In each movie, some bid for universality trumps the representation of Jewish experience, leaving behind a peculiar Jew-shaped hole: The stories are about us, but we\u2019re not in them.<\/p>\n
I would hate to think that this is because we have, in recent years, been deemed too problematic, too difficult to relate to or hard to like, for mainstream consumption. You could, of course, make a case that what we\u2019re seeing is precisely the opposite \u2014 that this erasure actually represents some triumph of assimilation and acceptance. What followed that midcentury efflorescence of Jewish visibility, after all, was a period during which parts of the Jewish experience were absorbed into the mainstream, until millions of Americans could watch TV shows steeped in Jewish humor and sensibilities, like \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d and think of them only as New Yorkers Being Very New York. Somewhere along the path from \u201cGoodbye, Columbus\u201d and \u201cThe Odd Couple\u201d to Judy Blume and \u201cAn American Tail,\u201d from \u201cDirty Dancing\u201d to Jon Stewart\u2019s \u201cThe Daily Show\u201d to \u201cThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,\u201d the Jewish experience became capable of blending, sometimes invisibly, into the broader American one.<\/p>\n
Gershon Hepner<\/strong> is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored \u201cLegal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.\u201d He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Concerning\u00a0 Leonard Bernstein, Woody Allen, and Mel Brooks, Saul Bellow and Bob DylanI cannot, unlike Portnoy, Philip Roth\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":502694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,224,5337,225454],"class_list":{"0":"post-502693","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-los-angeles","12":"tag-losangeles","13":"tag-poetry2021"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115862691357368502","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}