Searching for sensitivity

Steve Barnes

Phil Kaplan, one of Arkansas’ premier civil rights attorneys, died earlier this year, robbing yours truly of his best sounding board on matters Jewish. He was my go-to guy when I was uncertain whether something I was about to publish might inadvertently be ethnically insensitive or, Heaven forfend, be judged anti-Semitic. As in the case of a long-ago Pine Bluff high school girlfriend who everyone seemed to know was Jewish and who too many seemed to regard as an inappropriate date for a gentile. Choosing to write about it decades later, the goy guy asked Kaplan if the column was kosher.

“You worry too much,” he replied.

It would seem that a great many people worry too much, including some who insist we can never worry enough. Race and religion — in the broad scope of our species they may be artificial constructs, but six million years after homo sapiens debuted, pigment and ethnicity and theology are still the stuff of conflict unto war. Eternal vigilance is the price not only of liberty but sanity, too. So if a columnist can write something he didn’t intend to write, others can sometimes see things that simply aren’t there. From either can controversy erupt.

For instance, Arkansans appreciative of the classical canon, and especially patrons and benefactors of the state’s several symphony orchestras were alarmed at word of a possible delay in releasing a motion picture about Leonard Bernstein, late the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. Perhaps others were more concerned with the film’s casting. Bernstein, a Jew of Russian descent, is portrayed in the movie by Bradley Cooper, he of Irish lineage and a practicing Catholic. That alone was sufficient to tingle the antennae of anyone determined to identify insult to the faithful, be they Orthodox, Reform or Reconstructionist. But the real trouble started in the movie’s makeup room.

In a quest for the closest possible physical resemblance to Bernstein, Cooper is outfitted with prosthetic nose. No matter that Bernstein had a prominent nose; photographs of Cooper as the conductor brought immediate denunciations of the transformation as simply another puerile example of anti-Semitic stereotyping — “Jewface,” the more strident critics declared it.

Enter Bernstein’s three adult children, pronouncing themselves “perfectly fine” with Cooper’s prosthetic proboscis and expressing gratitude for the production’s commitment to an accurate, empathetic portrayal of their father. That was sufficient to bring on encomiums from major Jewish organizations including the Anti-Defamation League. Cooper’s artificial nose, a League spokesman attested, was not an anti-Semitic trope. As a member of the faith put it, Bernstein “didn’t have a Jewish nose, he had a big nose.”

As to the effectiveness of the device, judge for yourself: Still photographs and the movie’s trailer are available on the internet. Cooper, an enthusiastic admirer of Bernstein, could pass for his clone. Bernstein’s glamorous wife, born to a Costa Rican mother and reared in Chile as a cradle Catholic before converting to Judaism, is portrayed in the film by a British actress of Irish and Welsh descent.

But there’s this also, even better: Currently playing in a theater near you is Golda, in which Dame Helen Mirren, an atheist born in Britain, becomes Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel in the early 1970s. The former in no way resembles the latter, not in real life (Meir died in 1978.) But — Hollywood makeup magic! It took almost three hours every morning for the artists to make Meir of Mirren, but they did it. They used, yes, all manner of prostheses — applied to the nose and the forehead and the cheeks, and a body suit to add poundage to the torso and the legs. Wigs and eyebrows and eyelashes, too.

Mirren cautioned the movie’s director that there might be resistance to a non-Jew playing Israel’s fourth prime minister. The director, a Jew, insisted he had found in her his Golda. Any complaints since the film’s release have involved not Mirren’s makeup or characterization but the script’s historical accuracy.

The episode offers additional opportunity for a consideration of the matters that divide us as they involve the things that are intended to inform or entertain us. Will the rebellion against blackface mimicry extend to Shakespeare’s Moors? Should his Shylock be retired? Should a non-Jew be cast as a Jewish character? A Catholic as a Baptist preacher, or a Muslim as a priest? A Latino as an imam? Should a White man record “Old Man River”? Should a straight woman portray Gertrude Stein?

There’s more involved here than the silver screen and Broadway. I wish Phil Kaplan could get in on this.