Actress-comedian Sarah Silverman slammed Hollywood over what she called its “fucked up” tendency to cast non-Jewish actors to play Jewish characters, referring to this type of casting as “Jewface.”
“Look, I think acting is acting, but when it’s never or always, I think it’s something to look at, and maybe point to,” Silverman said during Thursday’s episode of her podcast, The Sarah Silverman Podcast. Silverman pointed to actress Kathryn Hahn recently having been cast to portray the late Joan Rivers, who was Jewish, in an upcoming limited series.
“Kathryn Hahn did absolutely nothing wrong. Singularly, I have zero problem with it, but 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,” Silverman said. “One could argue, for instance, that a Gentile playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called ‘Jewface.”
Watch below:
“Jewface,” the School of Rock star explained, “is defined as when a non-Jew portrays a Jew with the Jewishness front and center, often with makeup or changing of features, a big fake nose, all the New York-y or Yiddish-y inflection.”
“And in a time when the importance of representation is seen as so important so front and center, why does ours constantly get breached even today in the thick of it?” she inquired.
Silverman, a staunch supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), went on to answer her own question, stating, “as David Baddiel points out: Jews don’t count.”
“I mean, what do you hear all the time? ‘Jews run Hollywood,’ ‘Jews are rich,’ ‘Jews are powerful’ are just a few examples of perpetuated anti-Semitic tropes that renders people very righteously unsympathetic towards Jews, and I wish they would realize that that is by design,” she said.
Silverman then stated that there is a “pattern in film” that is “just undeniable,” which is, “if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is neve played by a Jew, ever.”
She mentioned Felicity Jones playing Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the film On the Basis of Sex, and Rachel Brosnahan playing the fictional Jewish character Miriam Maisel in Amazon Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, among other examples.
“And none of these actresses are doing anything wrong,” Silverman reiterated. “But collectively, it’s fucked up a little bit.”
In 2019, Silverman revealed that producers fired her from a movie she was set to co-star in after discovering a photo of her in blackface, which stemmed from a comedy sketch in 2007.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.