Category Archives: Arts and Entertainment

Lucky’s Not Good Enough

I wanted to love We Were the Lucky Ones, a Hulu original series.  After all, the story resonates with me.  Like my real-life Jewish family, the family in the show is dispersed by the Nazi invasion, set adrift in the world.  It’s a masterful series, well acted, realistically written, and beautifully shot.  Yet, after the second or third episode, I found myself feeling sick, resenting the artistry of it.  The why eluded me at first.

The drama is certainly harrowing.  An embattled family encounters every possible horror that the Holocaust meted. They witness, narrowly escape, suffer aftershocks, and move on. The music is Schindleresque sad, and the scenes of torture and cruelty are horrifying.  But that’s not it. Nothing in this show is any worse than what Keneally or Spielberg depicted or what Primo Levi described.  No loss is any more heartbreaking than those Daniel Mendelsohn memorialized.  There is nothing to see in this series that we haven’t seen in any one of the honorable Holocaust museums across the world.   So why does this show so offend me? 

Over my head, I hear the whirr of helicopters, and I run to the TV to check the local news. On the screen, hate-spewing,  pro-Palestinians rally on my Alma Mater campus, just up the street from my home.  An angry child-woman glares into the camera and shouts, “They are weaponizing the holocaust” while hundreds scream, “From the river to the sea.” 

At another gathering in midtown Manhattan, youngsters in checkered scarves and green, white, black, and red flags scream “Free Palestine.” A middle-aged man proudly waves a Hamas flag.  Online, a headline from the ADL: “Chicago Sees Rise in Antisemitism and Activism Amid Action by Anti-Israel Groups.”

There it is. Now I get it.

Our stories are betraying us.  It’s time to revise.

Real life has become scary, and those of us who inherited our parents’ PTSD, who were born with memories we cannot decipher, are reliving the dreams we cannot comprehend of the terror they fled.  The specters that used to visit only by night are fully animated by day.  Once upon a time, the anticipation of violence was easily quelled by stories that assured us that the world was sufficiently sorry; pogroms were a thing of the past. We believed our parents when they reminded us that this is America, after all, and we could feel safe.  No more.  Those night fears loom omnipresent over my home, my security, my grandchildren.  The stories no longer heal.

The haters are wrong.  It is not that we are weaponizing the Holocaust or antisemitism.  But we are hiding behind it.  We hold up our past like medals won in the Suffering Olympics that proclaim our capable willingness to suffer.  There is no more reassurance in the idea that it can’t happen here because clearly it can.  And it will if we let it. 

Those who wish for our annihilation are fueled by our pain.  Many display their own medals and say we have not suffered nearly enough.  Others are simply irritated by what they perceive as our whining insistence that enough is enough. 

We have to stop thinking that this approach will work. Many in the world deem it passive aggression.  We have to stop apologizing for our coreligionists who are fighting for the survival of Israel.  We have to stop disclaiming our right to fight back.  We have to take control of the rhetoric and paint ourselves as a far more positive, authoritatively powerful people. As Rabbi Diana Fersko recently wrote for Tablet magazine, “We have to stop running defense” (“American Jews Should Become a Little more Israeli” April 1024).  Just because millions of us were killed in the holocaust doesn’t mean we must beg for survival by reminding our foes we don’t deserve to be exterminated.  Would we be any less deserving if we had not suffered the mass murders? 

Art is a wonderful place to find relief and transformation.  Which is what so many writers and filmmakers, artists and curators have done by insisting on telling our truth.  But at this moment, the profusion of new Holocaust reenactments feels like a Hail Mary play that is doomed to failure.  We cannot think that because Hulu shows The Lucky Ones for ten weeks on their streaming app our detractors will suddenly see the folly of their ways and back off.  Will one Jewish family’s miraculous survival of that great apocalypse convince the world to watch any less dispassionately while the Ayatollah rattles Iran’s nuclear sword?   Not a chance.

We should have more films like Munich or Raid on Entebbe or even Exodus. We need to see heroes like Liev Schreiber’s character in “Defiance,” heroes who defied the stereotypes and showed our refusal to let the world beat us up.  There should be more series like Tehran that explore the ways in which Israel and world Jewry are endangered every minute of every day by adversaries who hate us for no reason but that they do. We should have filmmakers creating films like Watching the Moon at Night that expose Hamas leaders’ vitriolic calls for the extermination of all Jews everywhere. We need documentary footage of Jews standing up to the hate, holding their ground. . . winning.

We cannot expect the world to feel sorry for us just because we wear our thorny laurels in public.  People are not moved by pictures of dead Jews.  They take those images for granted.

Travels With Grandma — Where Was Tina Fey When I Needed Her?

“What’d you think?” I asked my granddaughters as we made our way out of the theater. We had just seen Mean Girls on Broadway, had stood with the obligatory standing ovations, were still engulfed in the screaming appreciation from the audience. Typical Saturday on Broadway.

I wondered if my companions shared the enthusiasm.

“Well, it was good,” the younger one, who is nearly nine, proclaimed without a trace of self-consciousness. “I mean, the story was great. But what I didn’t like was there was just too much singing. Really loud singing.”

The kid’s got a future in theater criticism. She is the same granddaughter who, at age 4, left Lincoln Center declaring, in her loudest outdoor voice, that the children’s performance of the NYC Ballet we’d just attended was “. . . the worst show I have ever seen.” She was right then, and she’s right now.

The ballet was off the day we went; the choices seemed odd for a program targeting small children. And frankly, Mean Girls does have way too much mediocre music that is more shouted than sung. I kept wishing I could tell the Sound Supervisor that the balance was off, the overall effect totality deafening.

Also the show is preachy. Deliberately so. As the two misfit greeters tell us at open, “It’s a cautionary tale. . . . “ They ask, “How far would you go to be popular and hot? Would you resist temptation? You would not.” Clearly, we are here to be taught a lesson.

Normally, such a messianic tone would irritate me. Especially since I would never have chosen this particular experience had there been affordable tickets available for anything else a pair of preteenagers might like. Yet I found myself softening a bit as it coursed its way through, highlighting the best and worst in teenage girls, illuminating what they all need to know about themselves. In the end, I found myself tearing up.

Everyone in this made-up world learns their lesson. All the girls, every one a mean girl in one way or another, live happily ever after in the bosom of acceptance and empowerment. Why was there no Tina Fey Girl Power script for my generation?

How much different so many of our lives would have been – would be – were we encouraged to love ourselves, to seek success, to nurture one another. The messages we received sought to obliterate our self-esteem, our ingenuity, our independence. Some girls were lucky enough to have mothers who were unafraid to encourage them to defy the system, but for most of us, defiance meant dishonor. Mothers were embarrassed, fathers were angry, and teachers, like later employers, withheld the markers of success. We learned that we needed to play the game by rules the men made, and we needed to have their favor, which meant we were in competition with one another. No one undermined women more thoroughly than women.

Things haven’t changed much since then, which is why Mean Girls is so potent. Too many women still settle for second best, still acquiesce to standards that are beneath them, still seek to be whatever they think men want them to be, still undermine one another.

Thank goodness this vibrant musical is here to remind us (over and over) that 1) “It’s all fine till someone gets hurt,” and 2) “We’re all stars. . . . “

Unfortunately, as my pint-sized reviewer asserted, “They made music out of every little idea, even when there was almost no idea there. And the music wasn’t even that good.”

The songs are unmemorable – not one stuck in my head and had me humming my way out of the theater. Moreover, neither of the grandkids, both veterans of several school musical productions, who know everything on Spotify and the entire score of Hamilton backward and forward, left singing a single ditty.

Nowhere in this play is there a shred of subtlety. The instruments blare. The voices scream, even when they could whisper. The lyrics are simplistic, lacking grace. No poetry. Every message, every image is so emblazoned in neon it feels disingenuous.

Worst of all, it’s rarely funny. Tina Fey’s voice reading the “Turn off your cellphone” address just before curtain is the funniest thing in the show.

And yet, I warmed to the play. A little. And the youngsters in the audience – most of them girls – loved it. At the stage door afterward, 52nd Street throbbed with the excitement of well over a hundred females aged 6-20, waiting in the cold, screaming as each of the actors emerged from the theater, begging for autographs and selfies.

As my granddaughter said. It was pretty good.

——————————————————————

Mean Girls

Story by Tina Fey                     Music by Jeff Richmond                Lyrics by Nell Benjamin

Now playing at the August Wilson Theater, 245 W. 52nd Street, New York, NY 10019

 

 

Were that it Were

As a fan of the New York Times “Modern Love” feature, I eagerly binged through the eponymous new series on Amazon Prime. I wish I could say my fandom has extended itself. I cannot. Turns out to be just one more proof of how willingly pop culture aggrandizes schmaltz.

Schmaltz , in the colorful, metaphor-laden Yiddish language, means poultry fat and also hyper-emotion. Bathos.

I imagine the proliferation of melodramatic sentimentality is a reaction to the seething anger that surrounds us. Ugly racism on the Alt-Right and pandering on the Alt-Left leave no one safe from vitriolic accusations and slurs, physical jostling, social discomfiture out in the world. Whoever we are, wherever we go, we are assaulted in one way or another. Soppy, mindless nostalgia is a reasonable soporific. I wish it helped me. I guess I’m too cynical.

I’ve never been good at soporifics. They trigger anxiety. For me, hyper-emotional dramas are like post-op pain pills. They briefly soothe the symptoms, but when they wear off, everything hurts more than before the medication. Escapist entertainment reminds me how much work life requires, how much more pain there is when you expect none. Then too, it comes dangerously close to inspiring resentment.  Why can’t I find what these phenomenally lucky folks have found? What a colossal loser I must be.

I don’t enjoy being jaded. I am by nature an optimistic pragmatist. When at first I don’t succeed, I plod on. I want to believe I’ll discover gold in one of the veins I’m exploring, but if I don’t, well, the work’s its own reward.  That’s a lot harder to pull off when prevailing media offerings constantly suggest that everyone else can easily find what remains for me elusive.

Every episode of Modern Love tantalizes with elements of truth. The actors in the series are wonderful – not a bad one in the bunch – but the writing is shallow. Okay, the stories are based on essays that are 1500 words or less. But a screenwriter should be able to create fleshy characters, who talk like people talk. And am I the only one who notices that there is not one episode that follows someone who lives in a middle- or working-class world? That poverty is nonexistent here? Every one of the lovers here has a fabulous apartment that is fabulously decorated. They all have amazing jobs and work among titans. More reasons I should feel unworthy.

In the episode entitled “When Cupid is a Prying Journalist,” Katherine Keener plays an almost-believable character . . . an older woman giving advice to a thoroughly make-believe young genius (Dev Patel) millionaire (of course) about the pursuit of happiness. The characters in “At the Hospital” are so hopelessly hip their love seems fake and contrived. The heroine of “So He Looked Just Like Dad, etc . . . “ is boringly stupid. Is any young woman working in NYC (and living in such upscale digs) really naïve enough to think a leering, sex-starved older man would moon so unabashedly over a girl for whom he has only paternal affection?

Jane Alexander, an actor I deeply admire, plays a character who serves cheap baloney in “The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap.” Up to a point, women might possibly imagine that being over 70 is romantic in some way, but we who have passed that Rubicon know better. And the actual probability of finding the kind of love Alexander’s character discovers is as likely as finding a clean spot on the subway floor.

Or is this just one more way of telling me how inadequate I am?

Older men who seek older women invariably look for someone to mother them, someone to listen to their monologues, someone to call 911. I would love to believe there is a man like James Saito’s character for each of us out there, a gentle man who listens enthusiastically, who shares interests but revels in each of the couple’s individualities. Forgive me if my experience makes me skeptical.

My most recent disappointment happened last month. I met a man who enticed me with what seemed to be a real interest in me and in my work. But the moment I ventured to get to know him – first by electronic messaging, then telephone, and finally on an actual date with him – he became a lecturer. He took to telling me what I like, what I look for, what I am. Assuming I knew nothing, he regaled me endlessly with his erudition. He asked me what I’m writing about, and before I got to sentence number two about the project I am struggling with, he was off on a tale of how he saved a woman writer he had been hired to edit.

On our date, when the monologue turned personal, and he was discussing his marriages or children or something, I made a comment about the complexities of motherhood, how women are easily eclipsed by childbirth and child-rearing. He interrupted with a story about how lucky his first wife was to have had him in the delivery room because he was able to relieve all her pain because he knew the right place to touch. That was immediately followed – without so much as a breath – by the story of how he sailed up the coast of Spain to save a woman who would have bled to death had he not liberated her and applied his EMT skills.

I took the advice of the Madagascar penguin. “Smile and wave, boys. Smile and wave.” I smiled – and nodded – and waved goodbye.

Every day for the following week, I received endless incoherent soliloquies or solipsistic PM messages on Facebook. Each time I replied and asked questions, he rejoined with yet another harangue. None of my questions or comments was acknowledged. I finally asked him point-blank if he had any interest in me. If so, I said, please demonstrate it. Call me, write me a question you allow me to answer, engage with me. Interact. I haven’t heard a word from him since I made that request.

If I were to judge myself by Modern Love standards, I would have to assume I am a ragtag reject.

If only life were so winnable as it is in the series. Would that playing tennis might have volleyed my marriage back to life as it did for Tina Fey and John Slattery’s characters in “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive,” written by Dennis Leary’s real-life wife Ann. Would that any one of the few boyfriends I have had since I divorced twelve years ago had been so quick to acknowledge their role in our absence of communication. At least this episode was honest in its depiction of the separate worlds we build when we are supposedly fused to one another. That was something.

The one episode I really liked was the one I expected to hate. I am not an Ann Hathaway fan, and I was put off at first by the specter of Hollywood glitz. But in “Take Me as I Am, Whoever I am,”  I was won over by the sensitive, detailed glimpse into the bi-polar world it provides. Hathaway, with no little assistance from the script, nailed both the manic hyper-high and the paralyzing despondency, the need for a truly accepting ear, the struggle to maintain the most basic of human relationships. Let alone love. Finally, a protagonist who doesn’t miraculously get everything she ever wished for in 50 minutes flat. Finally, an episode that ends realistically.  Hathaway’s character vows to stay on her meds and talk often to her physician. That is all. She is content.

And that is the best kind of happily ever after I can imagine.

 

Notes From A Temporary Curmudgeon – Day 4

4. Mary Poppins Returns 

My daughter and I love Mary Poppins, and we share a high regard for Emily Blunt and Lin-Manual Miranda. How could we resist trekking to the theater the day the new film opened in Bangkok?

How could we know that the best part of the film was that which followed the previews but preceded the feature. The part where we stood at attention to show our abject admiration for the King of Thailand, to watch a short documentary covering his life story and listened respectfully to the rousing national anthem? After that, the experience was generally tedious and vacuous. A complete disappointment.

 Nothing was fresh except Blunt’s performance. Miranda’s expression never changed from beginning to end of the film, and his songs and scenes were sappy, over-acted, void of either humor or interest. Fortunately for us, some of the cartoons transfixed my grandson for a little while, and he was happy to eat popcorn and sit quietly. But before long, we had to pull out his little iPad so that he could return to the thrall (for the 90th or so time) of the endlessly repetitive episodes of Paw Patrol we had previously downloaded. I was relieved to have the Paw Patrol distraction myself. Rob Marshall’s film is a kettle of tasteless, rubbery squid. Not exactly delicious fare for a diehard vegan.

I know I’m not “normal.” I’m back to where I am with Mrs. Maisel. Everyone else loves the achievement. I feel like that lone little boy at the storybook parade shouting, “But the emperor is naked . . . .” At least with Mary Poppins, I am not alone. My daughter shared the displeasure.

This was especially upsetting for me. I am an inveterate Poppins fan. I began reading the books to myself before I was 5, and I read them to my many siblings in the intervening years before I grew up and shared them with my own progeny. I saw the trailer for Mary Poppins Returns, and I could not wait to see the whole movie – it looked like it might have something in common with the original P.L. Travers’ stories on which it was based.

Alas, I was wrong. This so-called adaptation bore almost no resemblance to the material co-writers David Magee and Rob Marshall theoretically translated for the screen.

Magee and Marshall eliminated everything Travers wrote. Except the title character, who is, I should add, played superbly by Emily Blunt. Were that she had had a script worthy of her talent.

To be fair, they did insert Blunt’s Poppins into momentary glimpses of the various sequels P.L.Travers actually wrote. For the most part, however, the writers have created an entirely new set of characters that they have stuffed into a story that is no more than a very distant cousin of the fantastical tales Travers told about her mesmerizing British nanny.

I have read that the writers at Disney found the original material too dark. Ironic that.

There must be a Disney trope that demands that, in order to be significant, a film for children must begin with youngsters dealing with the tragic and sudden loss of their mothers. This seems to constitute a leit-motif for young audiences. I’m confused. What’s darker than the premise that three children under 11 have had to grow up all too quickly in the wake of their mother’s horrific, untimely death?

The “too-dark” material of the P.L. Travers books features no dead mothers. In Travers’ Mary Poppins Comes Back or Mary Poppins Opens The Door, all the Banks family members are very much alive. Including the parents who first endure and then engage Mary Poppins over and over again. Jane has not grown up to defy her class station and take up the sword of socialism as is her Emily Mortimer film shade, and Michael Banks is not the widower portrayed by Ben Whishaw.

Both siblings remain children through every one of the Poppins books. Two of five very realistic children, in fact. Their fantasies are not always sweetness and light, but they are always wildly creative. The children wander in and out of conundrums and dilemmas they encounter in their dream worlds, but they never fail to come home to their ever-loving if somewhat misguided parents. Two of them.

Conversations with sea slugs and other unlikely animal heroes, who figure adorably and prominently in the books, are apparently too disturbing for a children’s film. By contrast, the threat of homelessness is clearly unthreatening enough an adventure for modern children. The original Travers material never once suggests, as the film insists, that the house the family lives in is in jeopardy. Mary Poppins’ role as savior is to liberate the children from the ignominy of unmannerly behavior. She protects them from the failure to be imaginative. She struggles against their individual and collective loss of innocence. She never has to fight thwart the bank manager’s evil intentions.

Obviously, Travers wrote far too darkly for a children’s musical.

On the other hand, a dance sequence populated by multitudinous men cavorting with a single female becomes, in the world of Disney, no more than a tasteful romp. Dozens of dirty chimney sweeps in step with one young Poppins and a leering Miranda felt creepy to me. Not one female dancer in the crowd. I guess kids must accept that women can never be cast as chimney sweeps (we certainly can’t ask women to play males), especially not in the 1950s version of the 1890s that’s been put on this screen. It just wouldn’t be right.

An aside here . . . did the Script supervisor not notice that the skyline shots were far too modern for the theoretical setting?

In both Mary Poppins Comes Back and Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Travers takes the children to places where they are forced to learn about their responsibilities to self and country, to parents and each other. Many of the characters are loony. But there is no person or situation nearly as sinister as any of those Marshall interjects into his version.

In the book, for example, Mrs. Turvy, played in the film by Meryl Streep, is madly contrary. She has to be. She is happily married to Mr. Topsy. The concept of a husband-wife partnership in comic turmoil must have been a controversial concept for Marshall and his merry men. Mr. Topsy has been eliminated from the film. The magical couple that spends most of their episode laughing at the absurdity of it all have been replaced by the innocuous cardboard figure allotted to Ms. Streep. Turvy without Topsy floats obnoxiously in a tone-deaf, flat-bottomed skiff of a song. Oh well, at least there’s a happy message — Meryl Streep can still do accents.

My favorite of the Travers sequels was Mary Poppins Comes Back. Poppins returns just when Jane and Michael appear to be turning into impossible children. They won’t bathe properly, won’t sit at the table long enough to finish eating, won’t speak respectfully to their parents. The Banks family has expanded to include twins Jon and Barbara, who are just about to age out of infancy and become toddlers.

Another aside here: Unfortunately, Marshall wrote Jon and Barbara out of the equation entirely, along with Annabel, the youngest child, who appears somewhat later. I understand compressing the three characters into one. Composite characters are a great way to avoid clutter. But did they have to dump three children and add a Georgie? Would a spirited little girl child have been less viable an idea than this vapidly incorrigible Georgie Disney has invented here?

Anyway, in Mary Poppins Comes Back, the twins’ moment of maturity is a poignant one. Their friend the local starling, who lives on the Banks’ second story ledge, has been coming daily to converse at length with the twins, who have always been fluent in starling. Then one day he arrives and asks, as he does every day, for a bit of biscuit. Neither twin responds. Neither twin is pleased to see him. Neither twin has anything to say. Poppins explains to the frustrated starling that human children lose their ability to talk to animals when they are no longer infants, no longer connected to their primitive past.

Yup that’s just the kind of scary reality that could keep your preschoolers up at night. Good thing this film has protected us by providing the un-terrifying mediocrity of a meaningless script peopled by vacuous characters performing derivative musical numbers.

Thank goodness my grandkids are safe. 

Notes from the Temporary Curmudgeon – Day 2

2.The Great Let-Down – The Amazing Mrs. Maisel!!  

Even to those of us who subscribe to the various entertainment portals, there is a distinct limit on what is available for consumption overseas. Netflix is quite generous, offering a wide range of choices, but I had watched all I cared to see on the interminable flights over. Which I thought was okay as I could not wait to binge on The Amazing Mrs. Maisel. But ten minutes into the first episode, I was already fed up with this season’s offering.

Sorry, my many friends and family who love this show. I’m no longer with you!

The show seems to have diminished to a series of one-liners delivered by hollow caricatures posing as characters, every one of which is a solipsist with no genuine concern for anyone else. The writers resort to easy, improbable resolutions for every dilemma, and they vacillate between including awareness of the title character’s children and forgetting they exist. No kidding – I was screaming for a Script Supervisor watching the second episode, when the baby was left in the car for hours, and no one even remembered she was there till nearly the next day.

Clearly, the writers have not studied Chekov’s rules for writers of scenes and short stories. There are dozens of interludes, characters, props that exist with no tie to anything essential. And there are far too many props, characters, and interludes that portend surprise and fail to deliver. The Jewish characters are played by fakers, who have no clue what it means to be Jewish, and the script relies on Clichés and stereotypes to tell their ridiculous tales.

Which brings my rant to something more widespread than simply a problem in an Amazon original series.

When will Hollywood get it that it’s okay for Jews to play Jews?

Yellow facing has ended. Asians are hired to play screen versions of themselves. Hollywood and the outlying broadcast gods make at least a modicum of effort to cast Native Americans (including native South and Central Americans) in native roles, to allow South Asians to play Indian and Pakistani characters, etc. Yet gentiles still play Jews pretending to be Jewish. Pretending. Not acting.

This is all part of a long-standing tradition with Jewish characters in film and television. Jews are rarely played as deeply nuanced, real-life people. Instead, they persist as cardboard cutouts. Cartoons. Intensely, grotesquely broad-stroked, either ultra-religious, ultra evil, or ultra ridiculous. In this series, we are totally, ridiculously evil and pseudo-religious.

We all laughed back in 1960 when Otto Preminger cast Sal Mineo as Dov Landau, whom Leon Uris wrote as a scrawny, malnourished concentration camp inmate, who barely survived by learning the art of counterfeiting. Preminger didn’t trust the author’s character and changed him to a swarthy, hale and hearty explosives expert. Okay, it was the ‘60s. And Preminger was making a statement.

A box-office statement enhanced by his casting the gorgeously gentile Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan. At the time few knew that, as Adam Sandler would attest, Newman was half-a-Jew.

Jews were used to being played by Italians and WASPS. Gregory Peck was terrific in Gentleman’s Agreement, but he sure wasn’t believably Jewish. It was okay. We all understand that films were, as they still are, driven by their potential ticket sales. In the 1960s the Jewish actors with the mojo to put bums in seats were scarce at most.

The actors were there in Hollywood. Working undercover. Because once upon a time in the West being Jewish – like being gay or Lena Horn black, etc. – out in the open, was to concede to a career of being consigned to playing Native Americans and Asians and all those “lesser” ethnicities who couldn’t get SAG cards.

Today there are many Jewish people out there in the entertainment world. They are out in the open. And as popular as any of the goyim. Which renders ridiculous that British gentile Clair Foy should be cast as Brooklyn-bred, defiantly Jewish Ruth Bader Ginsberg (On the Basis of Sex). The days when one would cast Sir Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi are thankfully behind us. Clair Foy was a remarkable Queen of England, but as a Jewish intellectual, she’s a silly cartoon.

I guess I’d be less insulted if I thought Rachel Brosnahan, Tony Shalhoub, and Marin Hinkle deserved all the accolades they’re getting. All three are wonderful actors – I am a particular fan of Tony Shalhoub. But they have all swerved way out of their lanes. Their accents are as flat as their affect. None of them made me laugh, despite being in constant one-liner delivery mode. They all persist in imitating characters for whom they lack empathy. There are so many terrific Jewish actors out there. Why was none of them cast?

It would have be so nice to have our people look like real people for a change.