The Bradley Cooper “Jewface” Backlash Is Worse Than Just Misguided

The first thing to know about the fall movie season’s opening tempest-in-a-teapot controversy is this: It’s not really about the nose. Or, more accurately, the noses: Bradley Cooper’s real nose, Leonard Bernstein’s somewhat more prominent nose, and the prosthetic nose intended to make up the difference between them. Cooper sports the prosthetic in Maestro, the biographical film about Bernstein that will be unveiled at the Venice Film Festival in September, at the New York Film Festival in October, in theaters in November, and on Netflix in December. On Aug. 15, Netflix released the teaser trailer for the movie. People had feelings about it, and especially strong sentiments about the nose. It’s too big. It’s distracting. It’s different from Bernstein’s. And, of course, because it’s 2023 and we’re apparently still doing this, it’s “problematic,” a word signaling that you don’t want to get into specifics but oh, you could. Never mind that Bernstein’s three children signed off on Cooper’s look with a joint statement reading, in part, “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.” Within 24 hours, “Jewface” was trending on the social media network formerly known as Twitter, the idea being that Cooper, who is not Jewish, should not be playing Bernstein, who was, with a fake nose because something-something-something antisemitism.

The “something-something-something” has to stay vague because nobody making this very (to steal a term) problematic argument can fully connect the dots. There is a long and ugly history of antisemites caricaturing Jews by drawing, painting, or otherwise portraying them with big noses, and … therefore … wearing a nice, big nose to portray a great Jewish artist who had a nice, big nose is antisemitic? That doesn’t track: Something isn’t antisemitic just because it shares an element with something different that is. Or is the argument that nobody playing a Jewish role, even of a recognizable public figure, should do anything prosthetic because the subject of Jews and noses is a sensitive one? That also requires a little more connective tissue. (By the way, did you know that connective tissue is why some men’s noses, including Bernstein’s, appear to grow as they age? According to the experts I just Googled for at least five minutes, our noses do not actually enlarge after a certain point, but gravity and aging causes our muscles and cartilage to loosen and let our noses drop downward so that, even though they’re not bigger, they look bigger.)

Back to the point, or the point beneath the point, which, for many people, seems to be, in short: How dare Bradley Cooper? To me, this all comes back to a pair of deeply disheartening attitudes, one about acting, one about Jewishness. I’ll get to both, but first, let’s agree to dispense with the term Jewface, which is not only kind of gross but, as an intended analogy, so inaccurate as to be useless. “Jewface” is meant to bind the idea of any non-Jewish actor playing a Jewish role to the inarguably reprehensible traditions of blackface, brownface, and yellowface. Those benighted practices, in which white actors slathered on heavy and often grotesque makeup to play Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian characters, are intimately connected both to the ongoing reality of ethnic and racial caricatures and to the long history of nonwhite actors being locked out of playing their own race in favor of the cartoon versions—sometimes well-intentioned, often not—offered up by white directors and producers and embodied by white actors.

But Jewish people are not one race (and “Jewish” itself is not a racial category), and no matter how much expertise you imagine you may possess as to who “looks” Jewish and who doesn’t (not a road down which anybody, Jewish or otherwise, should be too eager to travel), our religious identity only occasionally correlates with an identifiable set of facial characteristics. Moreover, there is not really a case to be made—at least, not when looking at the past 50 years—that there has been a concerted effort to bar Jewish actors from Jewish roles in favor of non-Jewish actors, or to bar Jewish actors from non-Jewish roles. Jews have played non-Jews; Jews have played mafiosi; Jews have played Nazis; Jews have even played American WASPs. (Today’s discovery: Remember John Forsythe, the actor who played Dynasty’s Blake Carrington during the Reagan ’80s? Jewish! He was born Jacob Freund.) It’s something of a running joke that Jews and Italians are interchangeable on casting lists; they didn’t complain when James Caan played Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, and we didn’t complain when Al Pacino played Roy Cohn in Angels in America because, overall, we had sort of gotten to a place of comfort with some degree of interchangeability, from Daniel Radcliffe (Jewish) taking on “Weird Al” Yankovic (not) to …

Finishing that sentence is a problem, because non-Jews playing Jews is suddenly, for some, not OK. I’ll concede that some current examples, on paper, make me giggle. (Helen Mirren as Golda Meir? I mean, we’ll see, but let’s at least note that nobody howled about it much decades ago when Ingrid Bergman played the same role, even when makeup artists “buil[t] up her nose.”) But, perhaps since I don’t really care what an actor’s religious practice is, most examples of cross-religious casting elicit nothing more from me than a shrug. Cillian Murphy, a breakthrough star as J. Robert Oppenheimer, is not Jewish; he’s also not American. It didn’t matter—and it shouldn’t—because his talent and commitment to the title role in Oppenheimer speaks eloquently for itself. But the voices of those who object to this casting are getting louder. Kathryn Hahn (not Jewish! See, I warned you it’s hard to tell!) was recently warned away from playing Joan Rivers. And last year, The Fabelmans was briefly sideswiped for the casting of Michelle Williams and Paul Dano as Steven Spielberg’s parents. (Full disclosure: That movie was co-produced and co-written by my husband—a Jew who would probably best be played by John Turturro—and also co-produced by two of Maestro’s producers.) They were spared a full-blown controversy primarily because of the persuasive defense that Spielberg was probably better suited to select actors to play his own mother and father than @FilmTroll519485 was, and also because, last fall, The Whale’s Brendan Fraser was there to absorb all of the internet’s how-dare-he-play-this-part fury. (Reader, he won the Oscar.)

And thus we arrive at Bradley Cooper, internet villain du jour, and the implicit contention that This is why you shouldn’t let a gentile play a Jew, because they just slap on a big nose because that’s what they think Jews are. Never mind that, from the teaser, it’s apparent that the nose is just one of several cosmetic alterations that Cooper has deployed in the service of making himself look more like Bernstein (a goal that certain shots suggest he has come uncannily close to achieving). The most benign of the charges—that Cooper and the movie simply got the nose wrong—rests largely on a widely circulated side-by-side comparison that juxtaposes an early publicity still with a photo in which a very young Bernstein’s nose was minimized by angle and lighting; other pairings make the prosthetic look far more accurate and sensible. The sterner critique is: He shouldn’t be doing it. Not with a nose, and maybe not at all. It’s insensitive, it’s wrong, it’s treading on turf that isn’t his.

It’s hard not to respond to this as many do, by saying, “It’s called acting.” That’s glib and oversimplified, but it reflects the frustration many of us feel that the long-standing definition of performance (and of artistic creation in general) as an act of expressive empathy, of leaping into the life of another, of inhabiting someone you are clearly not, is being discarded by those who think of an acting role as a prize to be won by someone whose life, identity, and inherent qualities most clearly match the person they’re playing. In this cosmology—in part, an outgrowth of a trend in arts education in which all creative work is encouraged as an expression of personal identity rather than of imagination—any character you play is an extension of yourself and of the suitability that got you the gig. You are not a vessel whose training and talent allows you to fill yourself with a character; you are a manifestation of triumph whose skill lies in making each character you play an adornment of your personal journey.

Even if you do view acting this way, doesn’t this moment call for more good faith? Trailers are meant to get people talking and even judging, so fair’s fair, but at a time when Cooper can’t speak for himself because of the SAG-AFTRA strike, why not be more curious? Sitting in the makeup chair every morning to have complicated elements applied to one’s face—an actor’s greatest instrument—is a hard, physically uncomfortable, time-consuming way to begin each shooting day, so let’s assume that he, as both the director and star, had a more considered set of reasons for doing it than “I wanna look Jewish.” And let’s also assume that those reasons may be more apparent in the movie than in a two-minute teaser. That is not a plea for everybody to be nice to the rich, handsome movie star, only to make room for the interesting question of why Cooper felt he wanted or needed this metamorphosis instead of jumping to the worst possible accusation about it.

I am not in sympathy with a view of acting that centers an actor’s identity rather than a character, or with the blanket disqualification of certain kinds of transformational artistry that is inherent in that approach, and I’m troubled when Jewishness is enlisted to support it. To start with, Jewishness is neither a characteristic nor a word that can support any assumption about experience or internal feeling. I’m Jewish, and was raised culturally Jewish, but because I had a Jewish father and a Catholic mother and am therefore not a matrilineal Jew, I grew up hearing from various schmucks and nudniks that I was “not really Jewish,” “not technically Jewish,” and “not Jewish enough.” I bring this up only to note one area in which the comparison to blackface is useful, which is that, just like any ethnic minority, Jews are an astonishingly heterogeneous people, physically, intellectually, politically, culturally, religiously, and experientially. Our upbringings and backgrounds vary vastly, the intensity of our faith runs along an immense spectrum, and what we believe and what we have lived is absolutely uncategorizable by any single generality. There’s a reason for the old joke that if you want to start a fight, all you have to do is “put two Jews in a room.” No two of us are alike.

So when I hear “Only Jews should play Jews,” what rings in my ears is overanxiety from some members of my religious cohort and ignorance from outside it. I won’t belabor the anxiety here. (But hey, put me in a room with a Jew who’s upset about Maestro and I’ll make that joke come true!) I’ll just say that I don’t think any argument about the systematic denial of opportunity to Jews in [checks notes] the Hollywood entertainment business is going to stand up very well to scrutiny. We are not so direly mistreated by movies and television that we need a category of role reserved for us, and as for having the right to tell our own stories, we tell them (and many others, as everyone should have the opportunity to do) all the time. It’s the righteous certainty that I find cringe-inducing, containing as it does the assumption that all Jews share some deep, ineffable, biographical commonality, some ooky-spooky cross-generational muscle memory or psychic bond that hyper-qualifies us for certain acting assignments and should at least move us to the front of the line.

Here’s the thing: We don’t. And when, even with the most earnest intentions, people (some Jewish, some not) sentimentalize and insist upon the existence of that quality, that mysterious Jewish thing, they are not only advancing the dubious premise that any movie with a Jewish protagonist ought to be at least in part about Jewishness; they are making us into what we are not, a monolith, or worse, a stereotype. This belief ultimately siloes us, because the conviction that Jews are exceptionally qualified to play one thing will eventually be flipped against Jews when they go up for non-Jewish roles. When I hear a non-Jew insisting on the specialness of Jews, I don’t think, Oh, they’re looking out for us—how culturally sensitive. I just wait for the other shoe to drop. In 2023 America, in politics, in rhetoric, and on the social media site where all of this regularly gets fought out, antisemitism is staring us right in the face. We don’t need to waste time and energy trying to find it in a fake nose.