I was recently reading The Whole Truth and Nothing But, a 1963 memoir by the legendary gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and I came across an interesting passage in which the producer Samuel Goldwyn (né Szmuel Gelbfisz) tells Hopper flatly, “You can’t have a Jew playing a Jew. It wouldn’t work on the screen.”
She then goes on to report, using once-famous names you will need to Google to track down, that “in Hollywood only Christians are allowed to portray Jews. Gertrude Berg was thrown out of A Majority of One to make room for Rosalind Russell. . . . Anne Frank emerged as milk-and-watery Millie Perkins.” She doesn’t even mention the actor best-known for playing Jews, a Mr. Charlton Heston from No Man’s Land, Illinois.
What was true in 1963 has remained mysteriously true half a century later; many of the most Jewish movies have often featured the least Jewish actors. In 1964, Rod Steiger (German-Scottish) was a Holocaust survivor in The Pawnbroker. In 1984, the very Italian Robert De Niro played the Jewish gangster David “Noodles” Aaronson in Once Upon a Time in America, with the very WASPy James Woods as his sidekick Max Berkovicz. In 1986, Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs was filmed with Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey—genetically suited to play members of the German American Bund—as immigrant Jewish sisters in the 1930s. In 1989, Jessica Tandy, Dan Aykroyd, and Patti LuPone constituted a Southern Jewish family in Driving Miss Daisy without there being a drop of Jewish blood among the three of them. In this century, Australia’s Eric Bana and James Bond’s Daniel Craig were Israeli assassins in Munich; Craig was also a Jewish partisan in Defiance. And on it goes.
Why is it that moviemakers seem to revel in having non-Jews play Jews when there are so many Jewish actors and actresses who could fit the bill? The old answer was that Jewish producers wanted to universalize their people, to end the idea that a Jew constituted a recognizable “type.” When Goldwyn said a Jew couldn’t play a Jew, he really meant “shouldn’t.” It’s a harder question in the decades since, when America has come to accept Jews almost completely.
The latest example of a non-Jew playing an ur-Jew is Richard Gere, who stars as the title character in a film called Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. It is the first movie made in English by a celebrated Israeli writer-director named Joseph Cedar. Norman is loosely based on the scandal involving former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who was driven from office and eventually jailed for taking illicit gifts from an American businessman named Morris Talansky. Gere plays the Talansky character, an odd and desperate New York figure named Norman Oppenheimer.
Norman calls himself a consultant, but he seems to have no clients of his own. It is perpetual winter in Norman’s New York, and he has no office, wandering instead around the public spaces of midtown and making calls in the office-furniture section of Staples. He risks and receives nearly constant humiliation at the hands of rich men with whom he is trying to curry favor, and about whom he lies constantly.
He does succeed in making one connection, to a second-tier Israeli politician named Micha Eshel, when he finds himself buying Eshel a pair of wildly expensive shoes he can so ill afford that he must sneak into the kitchen of his synagogue later that night and make a dinner out of pieces of herring and Ritz crackers. It turns out to be the best investment of his life, because three years later Eshel is the prime minister of Israel and suddenly Norman becomes known as a back-channel conduit to the leader of the Jewish state.
Norman is a brilliant piece of work, as sophisticated and knowing a satire of contemporary politics as I’ve seen. It is particularly impressive in its stunning final 20 minutes, in which Cedar takes every bit of plot we’ve seen, ties it all together, and reverses every expectation we’ve developed over the previous 90 minutes.
But there’s something about Norman that doesn’t work, and that something is Richard Gere. He tries. He tries very hard. He does his best to look Jewish and to sound Jewish and to act Jewish. But—and this is the tricky part—Norman is a complicated and devious character, and it is likely Gere did not feel comfortable making Norman as unattractive as he needs to be at certain points in the film. Cedar is open to playing on Jewish stereotypes throughout Norman, in part to undermine them. It’s a very tricky business Cedar is up to in this picture, and there’s just no way Gere could truly be in on it.
Joseph Cedar surely didn’t cast Richard Gere because he wanted this nice Buddhist matinee idol to deracinate his movie’s central character and distract from Norman’s Jewishness. That Jewishness is central to Norman’s character and to the movie itself. Cedar probably just thought he was getting a relatively big star for his relatively low-budget movie. But the effect is the same, and it robs the film of some of its power. For Norman to have been the movie it should have been, only a Jew could have played this Jew.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
