Jewish Actresses, Show Business, and Anti-semitism
By Arianna Ratner
I am Jewish. When I say that, people automatically
think I am a religious Jew, but I don’t go to Hebrew school or temple
because I was not brought up that way. My mother is Jewish, but
her family never went to temple. My father, whose father was Jewish
and whose mother was not, was brought up in the Unitarian Church.
My parents have raised me and my sister as non-religious, secular
Jews, although we often celebrate Passover and Shabbat at our home.
I am also an Actress. Because I am Jewish and I love
acting I decided to make my presentation about American Jewish actresses
and the anti-semitism many of them faced, especially earlier in
the 20th century.
When I was little I made up my mind that I
wanted to act. I grew up acting in commercials and plays. I have
been a member of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation
of Television and Radio Artists since I was four years old.
During my six years at Sholem, among many other
things, we have discussed anti-semitism. And I have acted in two
Sholem plays which had to do with Jews in crisis, emigration
from Europe, and terrible working conditions in the sweatshops.
Wandering Stars, originally a Sholem Aleichem novel, tells the story
of a troupe of Yiddish theater actors who were hounded out of Europe
by Czarist laws and established their own Yiddish theaters on New
York City’s Lower East Side.
The second Sholem play I acted in,
Bread
and Roses, is about a Jewish American family whose roots go
back to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and who honor their
heritage by supporting workers and unions today.
Since I plan to be an actress, I couldn’t help
but wonder how Jewish actresses in America dealt with anti-semitism.
I think anti-semitism has become less common in America, but I wonder
what it would have been like if I had been a Jewish actress earlier
in the last century.
Years ago, powerful Jewish show business producers
often hid their Jewish backgrounds by changing their names, dropping
their religion, and marrying non-Jews. Louis B. Mayer, of MGM studios,
was one of the most powerful and highest paid film executives in
Hollywood history. Mayer wanted so much to be thought of as
an American and not as a Jew that he actually changed his birthdate
to the Fourth of July--the most American day of the year.
Mayer made sure that his stars at Metro Goldwyn-Mayer Studios reflected
his pure American fantasy.
In the mind of the Jewish show business executive,
the “gentile ideal” was born--the Shikse Goddess. Author Marjorie
Rosen calls her “Popcorn Venus,” in her book of that title. The
blonde-haired, blue-eyed, small-nosed fantasy of the early Jewish
entertainment bosses was a goddess--exotic, unattainable, desirable--and
she looked like what these men thought Americans should look like:
innocent, blonde, perky, pure, and definitely not Jewish. Marjorie
Rosen believes that the invention of this beauty ideal has affected
every generation of Americans since. And today with only minor adjustments,
the movies, television, magazines, and the fashion industry continue
to sell this perfect blonde ideal to the world.
However this 20th century American beauty
ideal was born earlier, on Broadway. By the early 1900s the Shubert
Brothers owned theaters all across the country and were the equivalent
of the big Hollywood executives, controlling the stage instead of
the screen. According to show business historian Foster Kirsch in
his book “The Boys from Syracuse,” the Shuberts employed the ideal
of the Shikse goddess in their Broadway productions. Unless an actress
preferred the chorus or comic relief to a leading part, any Jewish
girl, or for that matter any girl whose looks didn’t embody the
ideal, had to disguise her ethnicity in order to be hired by the
Shuberts, even though the Shubert Brothers themselves were Jewish
although they had virtually no affiliation with organized Jewry,
didn’t practise Judaism, and more often than not they married their
shikse chorus girls. (Pause)
As I researched Jewish actresses, I was surprised
at how many stars were Jewish, from the very beginning of Hollywood
to our own time. For instance, silent star Theda Bara was born Theodosia
Goodman, Fanny Borach became Fanny Brice, Betty Joan Perske became
Lauren Bacall, Ethel Zimmerman became Ethel Merman, Sophia Kalish
became Sophie Tucker, Natasha Gurdin became Natalie Wood, Joyce
Penelope Frankenburg became Jane Seymour, Stephanie Federkrewcz
became Stephanie Powers, Elaine Berlin became Elaine May, Judith
Tuvim became Judy Holliday, Marion Levy became Paulette Goddard,
Ella Geisman became June Allyson, Karen Blanche Zeigler became Karen
Black, and even today, Noni Horowitz is Winona Ryder.
I have decided to look behind the scenes into
the lives of a few outstanding Jewish actresses and find out if
anti-semitism stood in their way on their paths to success. I will
focus on some very different women--Molly Picon, Fanny Brice,
Lauren Bacall, and Barbra Streisand. All dealt very differently
with their Jewish heritage. I was curious to know whether their
appearance determined the kind of roles they got. Did the fact that
they “looked Jewish” affect their careers?
But what is “Looking Jewish”? The age-old
stereotype of course is: big hooked nose, dark frizzy hair, and
dark eyes. Before the Second World War the idea of the “Jewish look”
was purveyed by Hitler’s Nazi educators. Nazi propagandists created
posters and pseudo-educational materials to teach German school-children
in the thirties what a “
real Jew” looked like. When I studied
the Holocaust at Sholem in sixth grade I saw Nazi cartoons portraying
a fat old man or woman with a big nose and dark, frizzy hair. During
the “Golden Age of Cinema” these same “Aryan” ideals unfortunately
were upheld, often by Jewish show business executives.
One actress I studied who fit the stereotype
is Barbra Streisand because of her big nose, of which she happens
to be very proud. In fact on the covers of many of her albums, she
purposely and proudly shows off her nose in profile.
Fanny Brice thought she herself had a big
nose, but unlike Streisand, Brice got nose-straightening surgery.
By the time Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler became famous, some
performers were keeping their Jewish names and not straightening
their noses or dying their hair.
Today, when I go to auditions, casting agents
are usually looking for a rainbow of faces. The “American look”
ideal has changed over the years to a more representative look--what
America REALLY looks like. But one reason behind the new rainbow
of faces in today’s advertising and film and tv programming is merchandisers’
desire to reach all consumers and relieve them of their cash, regardless
of their color or ethnicity.
Latinos, Asians, and African Americans still
aren’t represented to the extent they should be on television or
in films. However, for
Jews things have changed, with shows
like SEINFELD (a very Jewish sitcom even though it was never made
clear that Jerry and his friends were actually Jewish).
When I look at clothing catalogues aimed at
girls my age - Delias, Girlfriends L.A., etc. — I do see African-American
faces, Asian faces, faces of girls who might be Jewish or Palestinian
or Persian, as well as blonde girls. United Colors of Beneton
is an interesting trans-national corporation that actually has a
social conscience and tries to employ models who look like the human
race--even featuring gay models who are HIV positive. But unfortunately
Beneton is rather rare. (Pause)
With all of this in mind, I will start with
a great Jewish actress who began in the Yiddish theater, Molly Picon.
Recently many Sholem Community members saw the one-woman show performed
by Sholem Teacher Sandy Kanan-Shipow about Molly Picon’s life. Even
though Molly Picon was born in America, she was always thought of
as the “Jewish actress.” And not without reason. She played her
Jewishness without fear of anti-semitism because she was hired to
perform for primarily Jewish audiences. She started her acting
career on a trolley car at the age of five when she and her mother
were on their way to the Bijou Theater in Philadelphia for a contest.
A drunk on the trolley wanted Molly to sing right there; so she
did, and she concluded with an imitation of the drunk himself who
was so impressed, he collected pennies for her from passers-by.
Molly won the first prize--a five dollar gold piece at the contest
in addition to the loose change the amazed audience had thrown up
onto the stage. So Molly Picon began her theatrical career.
She then continued on to the Yiddish theater
where she married the great producer Jacob Kalish who eventually
made her a star. Because Picon spoke Yiddish with an American accent,
Kalish took her to Europe for several years. There in Poland and
Austria her Yiddish improved and she make several films. Although
she was so wonderful on the Yiddish theater stage, Molly Picon didn’t
perform on Broadway until she was an older woman. She was “too Jewish”
for the mid-town casting offices. Once an English director told
her not to use her hands so much because it was considered “too
Jewish”.
She appeared in many, many plays including
Oy Is Dus a Meydl (Oh what a girl) and
The Circus Girl,
where she dangled by one foot from a rope, and the Yiddish motion
picture
Yiddl mitn fiddle which was filmed in Poland and
was the most popular Polish movie of all time. D.W. Griffith called
her “The most interesting actress in America” and tried but failed
to raise money for a film for Picon called
The Yiddisher Baby.
Recently I watched the movie version of “Fiddler on the Roof”
in which Molly Picon played Yente the Matchmaker. She uses her funny
“very Yiddish” style in the film, and I was convinced that she really
was an old, Jewish matchmaker. As an actress, I found this to be
an inspired choice. (Pause)
Another actress who based her career on a
Yiddish accent was Fanny Brice--the classic ethnic comedienne on
Broadway. Fanny’s career was based on caricaturing her Jewishness,
a caricature based on stereotypes. This is ironic because she had
changed her name from Fania Borach. She insisted it was because
she was sick of being called “borax” and “Boreache” but it was really,
according to an interview with Brice, to “broaden her appeal” Irving
Berlin cast her in
The College Girls where Brice sang “Sadie
Salome, Go Home.” This was the first time she used a Yiddish accent
for comic effect. While she actually didn’t speak Yiddish, she knew
enough to be able to perform a parody, much like Al Jolson, the
Jewish actor, who parodied African-Americans with his career-long
blackface minstrel routine.
In 1910, after being fired from the George
M. Cohan-Sam Harris revue, Fanny Brice was hired by Florenz Zeigfeld
and became one of the Zeigfeld Follies Girls--not the prettiest,
but the funniest, and she appeared on stage as much as the other
girls. In 1915, she hired song writer Blanche Merrill who came up
with the 1918 piece “Why Worry?” However a
dramatic role
for Fanny did not click with her audience, though she tried several
times. Brice was a walking paradox. She would play up her
Jewishness, and yet change her name. She would caricature her own
ethnic group whose Yiddish language she did not understand, and
in 1923, she underwent nose straightening surgery. Fanny Brice is
remembered as a Jewish comedienne, not from any deep-seated connection
with her ethnicity, but from the comedic stereotypes of the time.
Brice finally hit it big on radio in the 1940s with her stage persona,
Baby Snooks. Fanny Brice’s life was turned into a Broadway musical
in the 60s--“Funny Girl”--a star vehicle for another young Jewish
actress...Barbra Streisand whom I’ll talk about in a few moments.
(Pause)
One of the most famous and glamorous actresses
of the late 1940s was Lauren Bacall. Bacall, the creator of
“the look” and the actress who married and starred in many movies
with Humphrey Bogart, was Jewish. Although she didn’t “look Jewish”
she faced her share of anti-semitism in show business. She grew
up in New York and tried very hard to break out of the “nice Jewish
girl” stereotype. She had always dreamed of being an actress. She
kept auditioning for plays when she was a teenager and became an
usher at a Broadway theater just to get noticed. She was first a
model. When she was seen by Hollywood film director Howard Hawks
in the magazine
Harper’s Bazaar, she was summoned to California
where she landed her first film,
To Have or Have Not co-starring
with Humphrey Bogart, her soon-to-be husband. Her first encounter
with anti-semitism in her acting career was when Howard Hawks cracked
a joke about Jews, not knowing Bacall was Jewish. On another occasion
they were in a cafe and Hawks said, “Do you notice how noisy it
is in here suddenly? That’s because Leo Forbstein just walked in--Jews
always make more noise.” It was Howard Hawks who suggested she change
her name from Betty to Lauren.
Lauren Bacall didn’t fit the Jewish stereotype.
She was tall and blond and aristocratic. She could pass for a “shikse
Goddess.” Warner Brother’s first press release about her stated
that her family had been in America for many generations and that
she came from high society, implying of course that Lauren Bacall
could not be Jewish. When she married Humphrey Bogart she allowed
him to prevail in the choice of family religions, and they raised
their two children as Episcopalians. Later, after Bogart’s death,
Lauren married actor Jason Robards, whose own father, a 1920s stage
actor, openly expressed his distaste for Jews. Bacall not
only endured Robards’ alcoholism and her in-law’s undisguised Jew-hatred,
but she also nearly didn’t marry Robards because of an ugly experience
in post-war Vienna, Austria. When the couple applied for a
wedding certificate there, Viennese officials asked her religion.
When she replied “Jewish,” the mood in the Austrian government office
suddenly became icy and uncomfortable; the officials began to grill
Miss Bacall about her marriage status, and ultimately she and Robards
were not allowed to marry in Austria.
Although in her autobiography, “By Myself,”
Lauren Bacall claims to identify strongly with her Jewishness, it
appears to the casual observer that she actually spent her adult
life running away from anything resembling Jewish family life. (Pause)
Barbra Streisand’s rise to stardom began
in the early sixties in New York City, and she may have faced less
anti-semitism than female Jewish performers who came before her.
She was proud of her Jewish heritage. One of her first acting roles
was in an Off-Broadway revival of the musical “Pins and Needles”
that was created in the 1930s by members of the International Ladies
Garment Workers Union.
Streisand was, in my estimation, the first
Jewish Feminist showbiz rebel. She was the first Jewish actress
to flaunt her Jewishness to a broader audience and live out her
dream of being a movie star on her own terms. She could play the
romantic lead...and not just the old grandmother or the wacky comedienne
sidekick. Most of the roles she played were based not her ethnicity,
but on her singing and acting abilities. Streisand once said, “I
didn’t know the rules, therefore I didn’t know I was breaking any.”
She never got a nose job. She was also unafraid to play characters
in films that, a generation earlier would have been considered “too
Jewish”--Funny Girl, Funny Lady, Yentl, The Way We Were, and Up
The Sandbox, to name a few. Her career broke the mold of the blonde
shikse Goddess. Barbra’s mother never paid a lot attention to her,
and her father died when she was a baby. Of his death she was quoted
as saying “I always felt like an outcast; everybody else’s father
came home from work at the end of the day. Mine didn’t.” Streisand
once told of her need for attention in her Yeshiva Kindergarten.
“We couldn’t cross our fingers, and we weren’t allowed to say ‘Christmas.’
So as soon as the rabbi went out of the room, I would close my eyes,
cross my fingers, and say ‘Christmas, Christmas, Christmas’ as much
as I could.” At elementary school she was known as “big beak” and
teased for her skinny frame, close set eyes and prominent nose.
Barbra’s singing voice was discovered when
she entered a talent contest that led to a job at a nightclub for
$108 a week. There she met her manager, Martin Erlichman, who told
her she would reach stardom
because of her differentness,
not in spite of it. Then she landed a role in her first Broadway
show. Her role in
I Can Get It For You Wholesale, as Yetta
Tessye Marmelstein, was originally conceived as a middle-aged spinster
but was re-written for Barbra and her spectacular voice. After
Wholesale,
Barbra got her big break in the Broadway musical,
Funny Girl,
about Fanny Brice’s life.
As we know, Fanny Brice was not the usual lighthearted,
simple-minded Broadway musical comedy heroine. She was a woman with
strong character with whom audiences could identify. Streisand’s
biggest problem with audiences and critics was being
compared
to Brice, who had died only twelve years earlier and had been much
loved by the American public. Barbra worked hard on the script and
the music, and finally,
Funny Girl was well-received.
In the next few years she acted in
Hello
Dolly, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, The Way We Were,
Funny Lady, and many other films. Finally, Streisand became
powerful enough in Hollywood to direct her own movie.
She had wanted to make Yentl since she read
the Isaac Bashevis Singer story in 1968. It was an obsession with
her. Her agent David Begelman joked: ”You’ve been after us a long
time to change your image because you’re tired of playing the little
Jewish girl from Brooklyn, and now you want to play a Jewish
boy?”
Yentl is about a girl in Poland who disguises herself as
a boy in order to enter a scholarly world forbidden to women.
When preparing to film
Yentl Streisand took an emotional
journey back to her roots. Although never a deeply religious Jew,
she nonetheless felt her Jewishness strongly. To understand the
culture and motivations in Yentl, she carefully researched the history
of the Eastern European Jews and the laws and social structure that
formed their world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At
the same time, her son Jason was studying to become Bar Mitzvah,
so they would study Talmud together. The production of Yentl, shot
on sound stages in Eastern Europe, was grueling, over-budget, and
took two years to complete. But, to quote the review from the Hollywood
Reporter: “Yentl is a triumph--a personal one for Streisand as producer,
director, co-author, and star, but also a triumphant piece of filmmaking...At
long last...She has realized her dream.”
Barbra Streisand has continued to make movies,
some of which deal with painful areas of her own life, and she is
active in Democratic politics, the anti-nuclear movement, gay rights,
and other social issues. She said in l996, “I’m a feminist, Jewish,
opinionated, liberal woman; I push a lot of buttons. (Pause)
Winona Ryder, who changed her name from
Horowitz, is the child of l960s intellectual beatniks who raised
their children in counter-culture San Francisco and on a commune
in Northern California. Winona was raised on gangster pictures and
film noir, and she idolized James Cagney. She spent her afternoons
studying theater in San Francisco and by the age of twelve she had
an agent. During high school her parents only let her work in the
summers. Today she has over twenty-four films to her credit,
including
Heathers,
Edward Scissorhands,
Beetlejuice,
Little Women, and
The Age of Innocence. She has been
nominated for an Academy award twice. She was both the star and
the executive producer of "Girl Interrupted" for Columbia
Pictures. Although barely in her 30’s she is a strong, successful
and confident Jewish woman in Hollywood today.
Some Jewish actresses in my generation are
not changing their names, as, for example, Natalie Portman who played
Queen Amidala in the most recent Star Wars movie. She is just
a few years older than I am. Raised on Long Island, N.Y., she attended
her local public high school, was an honor student, and went on
to act in Star Wars and played the lead in
Where the Heart Is.
(Pause)
From all the information I have found during
my research, I have realized how lucky I am to be a Jewish actress
in the twenty-first century. It would be difficult for me to deal
with the anti-semitism and troubles that Molly Picon, Fanny Brice
and Lauren Bacall had to deal with. Barbra Streisand broke the ice
for Jewish women like Winona Rider, Natalie Portman and countless
others, not only as an actress, but also as a director and producer
of her own films and as an individual who controls own career destiny.
In my opinion Streisand, and in their own ways, all the other great
Jewish women performers on screen and stage, paved the way for powerful
young Jewish women of today to be whatever they wish to be: writers,
producers, studio executives, directors...and actresses. We
owe them all a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Thank you.
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