
6 minute read
A Time to Speak Out; A time to Hold Back
A Time to Speak Out; A time to Hold Back
Zachary Benjamin | Chief Executive Officer, Jewish Long Beach
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Like all of us, I sat glued to my electronic devices throughout January 15 as an assailant took four hostages – including a congregational rabbi – during Shabbat services at a Dallas-area synagogue. The perpetrator’s demands included the release of a convicted terrorist from a nearby federal prison. While all four hostages ultimately escaped physical harm, this was, by any measure, a bold and violent act of antisemitism. It underscored the reality that any sense of security that we as Jews may feel, even in our sacred spaces, is tenuous at best, and at times false.
As if to place an exclamation point on the events of that weekend, just days later, I experienced my own brush with anti-Jewish bias in an Uber ride from my home to the Long Beach Airport. Shortly after pickup, the driver launched into a philosophical dissertation on COVID and what he viewed as the various nefarious forces behind ongoing masking and vaccine guidelines. He noted emphatically that “The Jews are behind [enforcement of COVID protocols],” and that “the people who killed Christ are responsible for the world [being out of sorts].” His profanity-laced screed, which continued for the duration of the 10-minute journey, was no less than a greatest hits list of hateful tropes, myths, and accusations against the Jewish people.
I texted my wife a play-by-play of the encounter, in response to which she suggested that I report the incident to Uber. Despite the fact that it is deeply important that we name and draw attention to the scourge of antisemitism, I chose in this case not to pursue punitive action against the driver. He had picked me up from my home, and thus possessed a record of where my family and I live. It was ultimately more important to me to preserve the safety and security of my wife and daughter than it was to make an example of a cartoonish bigot, even in the current tinderbox of a discursive and rhetorical environment, where Jewish lives like those of the four Texas hostages are too often endangered.
This experience caused me to reflect on the concept of situational nuance, with which many who have dedicated themselves to combating antisemitism likely struggle. I have dedicated my career and, in many respects, my life to helping create the most favorable possible conditions for Jewish identity and peoplehood to continue for generations to come. I subscribe wholeheartedly to the philosophy that we have a responsibility to treat antisemitism with the same urgency and abhorrence with which we treat so many other forms of vicious and potentially lethal bias. However, it is also important that we understand when to exercise strategic or tactical restraint in protesting bias and ignorance against us.
Last year, Jewish comedienne Sarah Silverman spoke on her podcast against the concept of non- Jewish actors portraying Jewish characters. “There’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews, and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish, but people whose Jewishness is their whole being,” she said. “One could argue, for instance, that a Gentile playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called ‘Jewface.’” Ms. Silverman was, of course, using an adaptation of the phrase “blackface,” which refers to white actors portraying Black characters, in many cases adorned in grotesque makeup designed to portray the characters in the most inhuman, marginalized possible manner.
While I admire her efforts to appropriately elevate the intensity of the national conversation on antisemitism to the level of that reserved for other forms of bias, in this case, Ms. Silverman doth protest too much.
Indeed, hundreds of examples exist of non-Jewish actors portraying with great respect, nuance, and sensitivity characters whose Jewishness is central to their story arcs. We as Jews are, by all means, an ethno-religious group whose shared characteristics run far deeper than simply religious affiliation. However, no equivalency exists between an actor of a different skin color or cultural background mockingly, maliciously and with profound disrespect portraying a character of Black, Asian, Latino, or other ethnic descent and a non-Jewish actor sensitively, respectfully portraying a Jew.
Tony Shalhoub, the Lebanese-Christian actor who expertly and with significant skill portrays Jewish professor Abe Weissman in Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, pushed back on the notion that non- Jews should not portray Jewish characters.
“I was trained to…not play myself, to play characters, and so it’s troubling to me that they’re limiting actors,” he noted in an October 2021 interview in Page Six. “If we start to go down that road, I don’t know where it ends.”
Mr. Shalhoub is correct. Furthermore, to automatically link antisemitism with the instance of a non-Jew portraying a Jewish character on stage or screen is to potentially dilute the perceived gravity of true antisemitism when it all too often emerges, as it did in Texas and, to a much lesser degree, in my Uber ride in Long Beach. When we are too quick to cry bias, we run the risk of eroding our credibility by demonstrating a lack of discretion.
Sarah Silverman is to be commended for speaking out against what she feels is a Hollywood double standard. Why, she asks, are blackface or, for example, the portrayal of Asian characters by non- Asian actors so roundly and rightly rejected, while non-Jewish actors often portray Jewish characters and are applauded for doing so in ways that one might sometimes perceive as advancing stereotypes? It is certainly important that any performance portraying a Jewish character, regardless of the actor’s ethnic or cultural background, be carried out with respect and fidelity to the character’s nature as intended by the screenwriter or playwright.
However, we must also be careful not to rush to the conclusion that certain practices are anti-Semitic, just as we must also be selective at times in when we push for those who engage in bias to pay a public punitive price for their bigotry. The ongoing fight against anti-Jewish hate is a long game. It is one in which we as activists for Jewish continuity and selfdetermination will only advance if we are armed with credibility and the ability to practice nuanced discourse in support of our activism. These tools will, in turn, earn us the necessary social capital to fully leverage alliances, both within the Jewish community and outside of it, in service to a Jewish future in which we are able to successfully isolate and mitigate existential threats against us.