Should only Jews be cast to portray Jews onscreen?

• Published date: 28 September 2021
• Author: HANNAH BROWN

Seltzer was moved to write this piece because Kathryn Hahn, an actress who, for the record, I always thought was Jewish, was cast in the role of Jewish comedian Joan Rivers for an upcoming series. The well-written, well-reasoned article did not question Hahn's acting ability, but Seltzer wondered why so often non-Jews are cast as Jews on screen, particularly when it comes to actresses, notably Rachel Brosnahan as the lead in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex and Rachel McAdams as an Orthodox wife in Disobedience. Is there some kind of antisemitism at work, are Jewish actors, particularly Jewish women, considered somehow too Jewish to play Jews, she asks.

Of course, Seltzer is not saying that Jewish actresses (and actors) are underrepresented in Hollywood. Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot are box office queens.

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And there is certainly such a thing as inauthentic casting. If you were looking for two actresses to play a Jewish mother and daughter spending the summer in the Catskills, you likely would not call the agents for Diane Lane and Anna Paquin, but that's just what the producers of A Walk on the Moon did. While not all Jews fit the Ashkenazi stereotype of being pale, dark-haired and having a big nose and not all actors playing Jews need to look like that, sometimes a certain casting decision just doesn't feel right. When Michelle Pfeiffer, as Ruth Madoff, says, "I just feel like such a total putz," in The Wizard of Lies, it's hard not to laugh.

But pushing identity politics into casting decisions is a slippery slope and one that can have unintended consequences. If I understand the identity-politics groupthink, it is fine for those from a minority group, in this case, Jews, to portray those from a larger group, Christians, but not vice versa.

By this logic, it is okay for Shira Haas, who is Jewish, to play the young Golda Meir in the upcoming biopic by Guy Nattiv, but not for Oscar-winning Helen Mirren, one of the greatest actresses currently working, to play Meir as an adult.

But if there came a day when Christians felt that Jews could not authentically portray Christian experiences on screen and a Christian writer criticized the casting, say of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter or Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Kennedy, most Jews would not be happy. But if we...