Woke racism in full bloom

These days a director who casts a white actor to play Othello will be hauled over the woke coals faster than you can say ‘cultural appropriation’.

However, a black actor (or even actress) playing Hamlet would draw no such opprobrium. Neither would a woman (I’m sure that’s what the late Glenda Jackson was) playing King Lear.

Such is the crazy end of theatrical toing and froing. Yet, as far as I know, no one has so far insisted that any actor playing Hamlet must be Danish, any actress playing Hedda Gabler, Norwegian, or any actor playing Astrov, Russian.

Casting directors are allowed that much leeway, for the time being. But there are limits, certainly in cinema.

Thus the same jolly band of Italian actors migrate from one gangster film or TV series to another, and even such a good actor as Robert De Niro seldom plays non-Italian roles. Again, to the best of my knowledge, such typecasting hasn’t drawn too much criticism – and neither is De Niro charged with cultural appropriation on the rare occasions when he plays non-Italians.

All this makes the brouhaha about three gentile actors playing Jews in current films so much more intriguing. The culprits in question are Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir in the biopic Golda, Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein in the biopic Maestro, and Cillian Murphy playing the eponymous role in Oppenheimer.

All three goyim are cast as well-known historical personages who happen to be Jewish. Somehow that incongruity is supposed to be offensive, and I’d be surprised if it weren’t. Most things can be deemed offensive these days.

Specifically, I’d expect a straightforward charge of cultural appropriation. Or else a lament that those gentiles are stealing bread from the starving children of Jewish actors, such as Natalie Portman, Ben Stiller and Woody Allen.

Yet expecting something as simple as that would be denying just credit to the woke brigade. In fact, only the casting of Murphy suffers such obvious condemnation and nothing but. How dare they cast a gentile British actor to play a Jewish American?

According to the comedian turned writer David Baddiel, this is “complacent” and constitutes “doubling down” on “Jewish erasure”. He then complains that: “over a period of extreme intensification of the progressive conversation about representation and inclusion and microaggression and what is and isn’t offensive to minorities, one minority – Jews – has been routinely neglected”.

A piece of friendly advice to David: on the evidence of this passage, writing isn’t your thing, mate. Stick to the day job, will you? Yet the involute style of his remarks apart, their content signposts one line of attack against all three transgressors. The other two each add their own aspects.

Since Dame Helen Mirren herself is quite woke, one can say she has drawn friendly fire for her portrayal of Israel’s prime minister. Underlying her own woke credentials, she ruefully admits that such criticism is “utterly legitimate”. Though she was happy to accept the challenge, that role should have gone to a Jewish actress, and Dame Helen is genuinely sorry to have caused offense.

That isn’t the half of it, Helen. It’s not just about acting something you aren’t, which hardnosed reactionaries would insist is a useful definition of an actor’s trade. It’s not just about a gentile actress playing a Jewish woman. It’s also about her playing an Israeli Jewish woman.

It’s not just about Mirren playing Meir. It’s about anyone playing that role. Here is a brief selection of Tweeted attacks Dame Helen must regard as “utterly legitimate”:

“How sick making a biopic on criminal Golda Meir and yes no surprise Helen Mirren the racist is happy to portray the pure distorted version of a disgusting individual.”

“Helen Mirren doing a film about the first female prime minister of Israel is a slap in the face to all the people of Palestine, they are literally celebrating taking over Palestine and taking families out of their homes, murdering children, families! Tasteless film!”

“Hugely disappointing that Helen Mirren is volunteering for this role.”

“More fascism to show how ‘wonderful’ Israel is.”

I commiserate with Dame Helen. She has spent a lifetime promoting every woke cause going, and there she is, accused of racism. That would be like my readers complaining of my being a bleeding-heart leftie.

Now Bradley Cooper’s problem is different. He is accused of anti-Semitism for making Leonard Bernstein look like, well, Leonard Bernstein.

One would think it should go without saying that anyone playing a well-known figure in a biopic should strive for facial resemblance to the original. Thus Helen Mirren was pasted with all sorts of prosthetics to make her look like Golda Meir, who unlike Helen, wasn’t known for a physique conducive to frontal-nudity photography.

And Cooper sported a prosthetic nose to make himself look like a dead ringer for Bernstein. That, according to the critics, puts him side by side with Julius Streicher, whose Nazi magazine Der Stürmer published caricatures of sinister big-nosed Jews.

Neither Leonard Bernstein’s children nor the Anti-Defamation League nor the American Jewish Committee agrees. They all praise Cooper’s performance and assure the sensitive public that it’s not at all anti-Semitic.

Yet the sensitive public won’t be mollified. Its members reserve the right to be offended by anything they choose, most emphatically including ethnic stereotypes. If they say any attempt to look like Bernstein is anti-Semitic, then it is – and all those Jewish groups that disagree must themselves be anti-Semitic.

The role of Bernstein, they shout, should have gone to Jake Gyllenhaal, who half-qualified for being half-Jewish. Keeping him out was thus half-discriminatory, and casting Cooper was discriminatory full strength.

Chaps, I have a solution. Any thespian proposed for the role of a historical Jewish figure should have his cranial measurements taken and his genetic makeup tested.

Phrenology in particular is hugely promising. The Nazis used it to determine who was and who wasn’t Aryan; today’s woke fanatics can rely on it to measure Jewishness. And biochemical tests can show every input, no matter how minute, into an actor’s genetic makeup.

If according to the Nuremberg Laws anyone with one quarter of Jewish blood was Jewish, then the same standard could be used by casting directors. Or perhaps a laxer one: shall we agree on one-eighth?

To save their lives, German Jews often tried to falsify their birth certificates – perhaps today’s actors can do the same thing to save their careers. For example, I’m sure Bradley Cooper could bribe a friendly researcher to produce a certificate of some Jewish blood in his family barrel.

I bet Messrs Badiel et al. don’t even realise that their insistence on racial purity smacks of Nazism. There is no such thing as cultural appropriation: having the gentile Bradley Cooper play a Jew is no more offensive than having the Jewish Paul Newman play Butch Cassidy, which is to say not offensive at all.

What is offensive, in fact borderline fascistic, is woke fanaticism. It doesn’t matter whether it’s anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian or anti-anti-Semitic. Like classic fascism, it pretends to be inspired by sympathy and love, whereas in fact it’s driven by anomie and hatred.