Taken from Facebook with permission. Clarification of a point that I think needs to be clarified: there are Jewish actors who get leads. But theyāre not VISIBLY Jewish. They donāt discuss their religion, or their culture.
If your character is announced as Jewish, youāre either a totally assimilated and undifferentiated white person with no shred of Jewish culture or observance ever (The Goldbergs, Seinfeld), or a double-dealing murderous spy (Quantico, Homeland, Munich), or itās the Holocaust (this includes Magneto), or youāre there to be awkward, sex-obsessed, neurotic, and ugly.
jewish women where it is known they are jewish youāve got nothing totally assimilated with comment here and there, but other then that totally white and hear nothing about anything related to jewishness (annie-community felicity-arrow), crazy sex-crazed slut who is super kinky, overbearing crazy mother who makes son crazy especially with germs and health related stuff, cold frigid fish in bed, or bitch who who is money and power hungry who has parasitic relationships with rich powerful men.
of course there are some that hit several of these types
Openly Jewish characters only come in three settings: victim, villain or joke.
Oh, wait! Thereās also Blink And You Miss It.
Jews in the media also serve as more subtle race-coding when whiteness wants to find a scapegoat that can fly under the radar as politically acceptable, but still palatable to a resentment-filled white audience. Itās a very weird liminal space - whiter than PoC, but not truly part of the club, and the first out the proverbial door whenever convenient for whiteness to reassert itself and its boundaries.Ā
And the whole reason white or white-passing Jews even occupy this liminal rung is because of how easy it is to pass - a privilege that visible PoC do not have access to, and yet paradoxically, exactly what racists fear from Jews. Racists are obsessed with āsneakyā JewsĀ āpolluting the white raceā because the existence of this (diverse, widespread) ethnic minority, many of whom look just like everybody else (and who that āeveryone elseā is often depends on your geographic locale, but in the case of white bigots, this is āmostly white and olive-ish skin tones in European countries or colonies thereofā) proves that race as a social construct is complete bullshit. Racists feel threatened in their identity as white people (and therefore superior) when they canāt easily pinpoint the Jewish interloper. Thatās why āJewish featuresā ie common phenotypes in our ethnic group are so racialized.
And have you noticed that single Jewish characters only ever connect romantically with NON-JEWISH characters? :(
I wouldnāt say that Jews are never exoticized. La belle juive is a very old trope (that you still see today), and thereās the whole recent meme of calling Jewish men āugly hotā, acting like finding them attractive is in some way transgressive
