‘Sure,’ I responded, girding myself for something offensive or tone deaf. They looked up at me, trying to figure out how to phrase it. Finally, they let themself speak…

‘Can you explain to me where Jews come from?’ They stared at me expectantly as my mouth betrayed the barest hint of a smile. It’s a simple question, but one that belies a frighteningly common lack of basic understanding of Jewish history, identity, and culture.

Believe it or not, I am asked questions about my Jewishness far more often than I am asked questions about my transness. Perhaps it’s the circles I move in, as most of my friends are queer folks who are either trans themselves, or at least very trans-literate. I’m also a good person to ask. On top of, you know, being a Jew, I wrote my thesis paper, in part, on Jewish ethnogenesis and identity.

While I have of course experienced transphobia in my lifetime, including rather merciless bullying as a child as well as the expected slurs and verbal assaults, I have experienced more extreme and violent antisemitism in my life; bomb threats and suspected arson at local temples, swastika graffiti, being verbally accosted in a restaurant on Christmas, having strangers spot my Hamsa, or the Magen David that was passed down to me by my grandfather and take that as an opening to spew their hatred, and I could go on and on.

People tend to be quite surprised when I express this reality of my life. And I do recognize that I have privileges today that spare me from the worst of transphobic violence; I am often, though not always, white-assumed, and I am typically cis-assumed. These are realities of my life that protect me and cannot be ignored or unaddressed.

However, my larger point is that one of my identities is considered unequivocally marginalized, while many continue to brush over antisemitism as a non-issue despite its meteoric rise over the last decade in the U.S. As David Baddiel so clearly elucidated, it’s the ‘Jews don’t count’ of it all.

This point of view extends to the way we are portrayed in media.

Recently, it was announced that Kathryn Hahn would be playing Joan Rivers in an upcoming biographical series about her life. Quickly, Sarah Silverman waded into the argument over Hahn’s casting, rightly pointing out the clear double standard that in this era where there are greater and greater calls for authenticity, Jews don’t count. Soon after, it was announced that Claire Foy, another non-Jew best known for playing the Queen of England, would be playing Sheryl Sandberg in an upcoming film based on the book An Ugly Truth. 

Hahn and Foy join the ranks of Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, Michael Keaton as Ken Feinberg, Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn as Martha and Elizabeth Weiss, Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, and the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s almost become a rule that Jews are not played by Jewish actors, which compounds the misunderstanding of who we are.

In my work as a trans media consultant, we often talk about the small percentage of the U.S. population that is trans, and even more importantly, the percentages of cisgender people who personally know a trans person. The reason why these statistics are important to keep in mind is that when people don’t know a trans person personally, and then see inaccurate trans representation on screen, they have no real world baseline to compare it to. This exacerbates transphobia.

Approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population is Jewish. It’s ironic that oftentimes our population is vastly overestimated. I have my theories as to why. There is, of course, the reality of Jewish contribution to American culture. However, because of the adoption of Jewish texts in Christianity and the development of Islam being closely tied to the history of the Jewish diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula, Jews become narrative characters in two of the world’s largest universalist religions (as opposed to Judaism, a particularist spiritual movement that is only concerned with the Jewish people as an ethnic and national identity).

People are comfortable with Jews as a parable. I mean, a whole religion was developed on this foundation. Non-Jews enjoy when we are a mirror for society to hold itself up to, to understand and see its ills. Oftentimes, as Dara Horn pointed out in her book People Love Dead Jews, this functions best when we are dead; a relic. Because then we can be whoever the world wants us to be.

In fact, I see it all the time. Every Christmas season, I see a litany of posts saying ‘Jesus was…’ and nearly universally the words that complete this sentence are not, ‘a Jew’… the only ethnic identity that Jesus indisputably was. What I find interesting is that I often see it posted by the same people who are dead-set on the concept of universal Jewish whiteness. This in turn is often an argument only conveniently invoked by non-Jews when they want to argue that they don’t need to care about antisemitism. Ironically, it’s another role we get cast in to make non-Jews feel better about their own world-view: Jews as a mirror. And when the representation they see is Vanessa Kirby in a large manor house pretending to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, it’s no wonder people feel this way.

These are prime examples of this dynamic. And it creates a disconnection point in popular imagination between ‘the literary Jew,’ who teaches the world a lesson about themselves, and real live living Jews who are currently experiencing the highest levels of antisemitism in this country since the first half of the 20th century. And confronting this antisemitism in the here and now, which would need to start with a basic understanding of who we actually are, would upset the balance of whatever morality play we’ve been cast in by others. Then this silence helps perpetuate the hatred and allows it to flourish.

Add socially ingrained casual antisemitism into the mix, as opposed to overt antisemitism like the white-supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, and it’s a toxic stew. For example, a person I know well was sued by a man for ‘wrongful termination’ after he fired him for stealing a lot of money from his business. Of course, firing someone for stealing from you is hardly wrongful. This person I know counter-sued. After depositions were filed, it was decided that it would be a jury trial. This person was then advised by his lawyers to settle, because the man who stole from him was a white Christian, and the jury was ‘unlikely to trust the word of a Jewish doctor.’ No wonder we’re rarely trusted to tell our own story. 

But herein lies the problem. And it’s the same problem that I spoke of when it comes to trans representation. Because we are such a small percentage of the population, most people’s first encounters with us are either in biblical stories, or they are in media. Stories have a unique power, as does accurate representation. We’ve seen massive shifts in perceptions of LGBTQ people thanks to shifts in how we are portrayed in film and television. But when it comes to my other identity, we barely register in the discourse.

And so the problem that Sarah Silverman brought into the spotlight stretches beyond the disparity in opportunity, which is certainly a problem. When Jews are misrepresented in media by non-Jews doing their best caricatures of us, it enshrines us as a character in someone else’s passion play rather than human beings and a living culture that is still here. It perpetuates misunderstanding of who we are. And when our population is so small, it becomes impossible for many people to have real life living breathing Jews that they know to hold these representations against.

This isn’t just problematic. It helps to perpetuate antisemitism in all of its mutations.

So I sit across from my friend and I say, “Well, to answer that question, I need to go back to about 1600 B.C.” I watch as their mind explodes a little bit. 

I tell them about the various historically-based theories of our ethnogenesis. I explain the consolidation of Jewish national identity at the dawn of the 1000s B.C. I talk about the Romans, and Bar Kokhba. I talk about Beta Yisrael. I talk about Shammai and Hillel and the origins of rabbinical Judaism. I talk about The Crusades, The Inquisition, and Sephardi Pirates; Sabbatai, Chassidism, and Haskalah; Pogroms, the Dreyfuss Affair, and of course The Holocaust; Farhud, Operation Magic Carpet, and Operation Solomon. I talk about the diversity of the American Jewish experience, where intermixture with other ethnic groups has often strengthened our community and made it better. 

But most of all, I talk about Jewish pride and Jewish resilience, and the fact that while people still try to tell us who we are, we refuse to be defined by others.

Media matters. It especially matters for marginalized people. And we are marginalized people. One only needs to look at the last few years; we’ve had multiple deadly shootings, stabbings, arsons, physical assaults, car attacks, and murders motivated by antisemitism. The claim that we’ve assimilated to the point that hatred of our community is a non-issue falls apart with the barest interrogation. Jews deserve all of the same consideration and care that any other marginalized group does.

It is high time that we are allowed to wrestle ourselves out of someone else’s narrative, and instead, with clarity, honesty, and the lived experience that only Jewish artists can bring to our own stories, have the chance to tell our own. After all, our histories live in our blood, from generation to generation. 

The post The Jewish (Casting) Question appeared first on Jewcy.

The National Museum of American Jewish History hosts a residency program called OPEN for Interpretation that invites a diverse array of artists and thinkers to contribute their perspectives on the Jewish American experience. Emmy-nominated filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain and UC Berkeley artist and robotics professor Ken Goldberg are the current artists, and last night they premiered their short film, The Whole Cinemagillah, their best effort to capture Judaism in America as shown in film and television over the course of the past century. Clip ideas and submissions were – and still are – welcome for this truly collaborative project. Jewcy had the chance to speak with Shlain and Goldberg as they prepared for the big night.

Jewcy: How did you become involved with OPEN for Interpretation and the National Museum of American Jewish History?

Shlain: I met Josh Perelman [Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions & Collections at the museum] at the Future of Storytelling conference a few years ago, and he asked us to do this artist-in-residency program. We did a film together ten years ago called The Tribe that explores the American Jewish experience through the history of the Barbie Doll. We came to the museum and saw an exhibit about the history of Jews in film and TV and Vaudeville, and we knew we wanted to work on this.

Goldberg: The museum is new and elegant. It’s chronological on multiple floors tracing the letter from George Washington to modern times. OPEN for Interpretation invites artists in from outside to provide some sort of response – cabaret to photograph to anything else – that engages with their exhibit to open it up for new interpretations.

Jewcy: Had you seen other films or books that covered this topic?

Shlain: When we first came up with the idea to do it, we found so many articles and a couple books, but nothing like a montage all together of most of the clips that we thought would be very compelling to see. So much written, but not visualized.

Goldberg: We found a lot of great clips of these Jewish moments but hadn’t found anyone who had put them together.

Shlain: There was no comprehensive list. There were plenty of lists like The 10 Best Jewish Moments in TV, but not one exhaustive list.

Goldberg: We were very conscious that for a lot of young people, the digital generation, their attention span is geared around something that only lasts about 10 minutes. We wanted to make something compact to get conversation started.

Shlain: There was something powerful about the way the way Jews are represented and represent themselves in this 12-minute gestalt. We wanted the whole pastiche, the evolution of representation.

Jewcy: What was the most surprising clip you received?

Shlain: The clip of Frank Sinatra from The House I Live In. Towards the end of making it, someone found this clip from his movie about anti-Semitism which I just didn’t expect to exist.

Goldberg: I had never seen The Believer with Ryan Gosling. Looking back, I found that to be incredibly riveting and powerful.

Jewcy: Were you pleased with all of the clips and recommendations you received, or were you hoping to find something more?

Shlain: As a woman, I found most of the woman characters very stereotyped, whereas the men were very nuanced. In the end, it couldn’t be 50/50 screen time – there was so much more for men. This is an evolving project. There is a booth at the museum where people can add their own favorite moments, and a Facebook where we’ve gotten over 20,000 people participating. We hope to add to this and make a new version.

Goldberg: We didn’t want to have a bias, or come at this with an axe to grind. It’s actually a really complex tapestry that’s opened up a lot in the past 20 years.

Shlain: The first film we showed is from the 1920s. It’s interesting to see how much we’ve revealed of our true selves in the past 100 years. Back then, it was very veiled and hidden. Seeing that evolution is very interesting.

Goldberg: In 2012, the book The New Jew in Film talks about a “Jew-aissance.” It’s a perspective on the stereotype. We get both irritated and insider pleasure from the stereotype – we can reclaim it.

Shlain: It’s like how Jews can tell jokes about Jews, but others can’t.

Jewcy: What is your favorite clip, and why?

Shlain: that’s like asking for a favorite child. I will never forget seeing Private Benjamin when he lists all of the 10-15 things about him that are very Jewish and then says, “I’m Jewish.” Then in the next scene they’re having sex.

Goldberg: The Believer was originally very long as part of the film, now it’s not even in there. He does a prayer and then goes into an amazing monologue, but as the film got shorter and shorter, it didn’t fit.

Shlain: We loved it so much it didn’t even make it into the movie! The more we cut down the clip, the less it was contextualized. We couldn’t do it justice unless we spent three minutes on it.

Jewcy: What’s next?

Shlain: We’re excited to start entering it into film festivals. We had a lot of fun with that when we did The Tribe. In terms of film, that’s a good question. We’re taking a nice break. I just had another film come out a month ago called 50/50: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Women + Power that explores the history of women in power.

Goldberg: On Sunday, I’m hosting 200 people for a robotics conference. [laughs]

Jewcy: Is there anything else you would like Jewcy readers to know?

Shlain: Our film website has all the info on it. You can’t watch the movie on it, but it’s a call for entries. To watch the movie, come to the museum! Soon, we’ll have other plans to share.

Learn more about the film’s premiere at NMAJH.

Image via Facebook.

The post Jewcy Interviews: The (Whole) Cinemagillah appeared first on Jewcy.

Flight MH370 probably crashed into the ocean as a result of tragic technical failure (when in doubt, think Occam’s razor), but that hasn’t stopped the media from speculating ad nauseam about terrorism, black holes, and sinister supernatural forces for the past couple of weeks. Leading the vanguard were the cable news networks (lookin’ at you, CNN), and Jon Stewart took them to task last night, sparing no-one from his eviscerating wit.

Will this change cable news’ coverage of future tragedies? Of course not! But at least there’s Jon to remind us all that, yes, Lost really is just a TV show.

Related: Michael Sam Comes Out, Jon Stewart Rips Into NFL Hypocrisy And Homophobia

The post Jon Stewart Eviscerates CNN For Terrible Coverage Of Flight MH370 appeared first on Jewcy.

Another of Jill Soloway‘s gems has slipped onto the internet with very little fanfare, so we at Jewcy thought we’d bring both the fans and the fare.

Wifey.TV is “a curated video network for women”—sort of like the love child between Jezebel and Upworthy, minus the snark and sentimentality. Soloway and co-creator Rebecca Odes promise to “explore the interweb far and wide to gather video that tickles us pink, makes us think or moves us—then we put it out there for you!”

And no, you don’t have to be married to appreciate the site:

“Wifey isn’t really for wives, or about them. Wifey’s your bestie, your go-to female, the one who gets you. Our audience is anyone who needs content that gets deep inside of women as actual multi-faceted human people. Subjects, not objects…

We’ve been in those meetings where it’s a struggle to get people to invest in portrayals of women that aren’t satisfying to your average male. The powers that be promote their own imaginary idea of wish fulfillment for women…

The audience is out there, but the structure is hanging onto old mores. It’s time for a new paradigm. The female gaze is ready and waiting.”

With a variety of cleverly-named categories like sheroic and—my personal favorite—lolsob, Wifey.tv curates content from other sites and produces some of its own. There are great videos of Jill Soloway getting all up in someone’s grill, like when she interrogates Jenn Tisdale about whether she had an orgasm while filming a porno with James Deen, or when she asks a group of women at a book party whether certain things (like anti-rape underwear) are feminist or misogynist.

There’s a heartrending video of Maya Angelou in Richard Pryor’s short lived comedy—LOLSOB!!—and an utterly hilarious cartoon about why there are no strong female characters (just watch it. Right now. Trust me.) And the Women of Wall Street is a magnificent, gender-reversal satire of the Wolf of Wall Street trailer.

In “Woody’s Daughters,” Soloway meditates on the experience of watching Manhattan at the age of 14, and her conflict over the presciently creepy final scene:

“Today this scene reads like there is a gun to her head, just off camera… But the truth is, we are all his children. We inherited his rules and took them as emotional gospel. One was that a sad sack Jewish man can re-imagine himself as the object of desire for the impossibly young, impossibly beautiful Mariel Hemingway – as long as he is brilliantly funny. For a post-Holocaust generation, that math was a life raft in the face of humiliations like old, Jewish, short, ugly. His voice gave me something to hold on to, a way to win again.”

LOLSOB!!

But my favorite one of all is the video that makes people in relationships wish they were single, and single people feel like they have more purchase on that secret, quiet thing that we’re all searching for.

When asked by Forbes about why they created Wifey.TV, the duo answered as follows:

Odes: “We want to be the go-to source for women who want something to watch, whether that’s on their phone or their television. We want to produce the kind of media we want to see.”

Soloway: “To topple the patriarchy. Create a worldwide feminist revolution. To silence anonymous misogynist trolls. Emmys, Oscars, house on the beach, renovated farmhouse studio in Amagansett, private jets, quiet minds, thicker eyelashes, a friendship with Fran Lebowitz.”

Indeed. Keep it coming. We’re watching with bated breath.

RELATED: Must-watch: Jill Soloway’s New Amazon Original Pilot, “Transparent”
Jennifer Aniston Interviews Gloria Steinem At Feminist Makers Conference

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