It is 2023 and yet we are still dealing with this. The first trailer for Maestro, a biopic about famed American conductor Leonard Bernstein, dropped, and oh boy is it antisemitic.
If you don’t know, Bernstein was a prolific musician whose best known work is the musical West Side Story. Bernstein was also Jewish. That’s where the controversy comes in. Bradley Cooper plays Bernstein in the upcoming biopic (which Cooper also directed), but for some godforsaken reason, they decided to give him a large nose prosthetic. Social media erupted, rightfully calling it “Jewface” and mocking the very callous antisemitic tropes on display.
As explained by the Media Diversity Institute, the “hooked nose” Jewish stereotype is fairly old, going back all the way to the 13th century. The Nazis formalized Jewish physical traits into phrenologic pseudoscience in the 1930s as part of their genocidal witch hunt against Jewish people. This awful trope didn’t go away after Nazi Germany fell, unfortunately, and is perpetuated to this day through media. And movies like Maestro only give further validity to age-old white supremacy.
To make matters worse, Cooper isn’t even Jewish. As reported by The Jewish Chronicle, Jake Gyllenhaal, who is Jewish, was going to play Bernstein in a biopic at one point. Some people might say that non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters is no big deal, but they’d be dead wrong. There’s a long history of Hollywood not getting actual Jewish people to play their film counterparts. As The Mary Sue has discussed before, some Jewish celebrities, like Sarah Silverman, have called this out better than I ever could.
Hollywood loves nose prosthetics for Black people, as well. Zoe Saldaña caught serious heat for playing Nina Simone in the biopic Nina, as she donned dark skin makeup and a prosthetic nose to fit the part. Saldańa, being a light-skinned black woman, was able to benefit from colorism.
Another problem with the film is that Carey Mulligan, a white English woman, is playing Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein’s Costa Rican-American wife. It’s two flavors of yikes rolled into one: whitewashing and antisemitism. Everything about this film seems like a disaster so far, before it has even come out.
It’s a dangerous time for Jewish people right now. Antisemitism is on the rise, and white supremacists are acquiring positions of power at breakneck speed. The production team behind Maestro should have known better than to play into centuries-old bigotry.
(featured image: Netflix)
