Hollywood: Where have all the Jews gone?

DAVID SAKS

The two festivals – one Orthodox-religious focused and the other more secular-cultural (but including Judaism-related presentations) – are illustrative of the high and growing levels of interest in and connection to Jewish learning in the local Jewish community.

Being part of such a strongly identifying and active Jewish community is certainly a compelling argument in favour of continuing to live in South Africa. Only once they have made the move to places like Australia, Canada, the UK and especially the US, do émigrés come to realise that the strong sense of unified identity, the multiple and easily accessible services and impressive communal infrastructure that they took for granted in South Africa is lacking in their new homeland.

Such is the relative strength of Jewish identity in their country that South African Jews have to a large extent been shielded from the far more sobering realities of Diaspora Jewish life.

For one thing, it is not always remembered how very small a proportion South African Jewry makes up of the Jewish world outside of Israel. One needn’t even mention New York – our (at a stretch) countrywide total of around 75 000 members would fit eight times over into the Jewish community of Miami alone.

Thus, while it is heartening to see South African Jewry buck international trends by becoming more rather than less Jewishly connected, we are at the end of the day just a small corner of the greater Jewish world. Elsewhere, with few exceptions, the story is now one of precipitous decline, with only a resurgent Orthodoxy apparently offering any long-term hope for a (much diminished) Diaspora Jewish presence in the future.

One can easily see what is happening through referring to the most recent Jewish identity surveys, which consistently reveal rampant assimilation rates in the US (home to 40 per cent of world Jewry) and Europe in particular.

For me, though, a more immediate – and poignant – way of understanding what is being lost, is to look at what is happening in the American film industry. Like many other Jews, I have over the years engaged in the enjoyable pastime of Jew-hunting when reading up on the great film stars of the past.

That Jews made up an unusually high proportion of producers, directors, screenwriters and film composers, is well known, but somehow these have been secondary in terms of emotional appeal to those who made their mark on the big screen.

It seldom happened that such Jews who did make it to stardom, had much to recommend them in a specifically Jewish sense. Most of them largely severed their connections with Judaism and the Jewish community once their careers were underway.

Still, nearly all of them came from strong Jewish roots – generally, they were scions of first-generation immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe – and by and large – their essential Jewishness was unmistakably stamped on the screen personas that they forged.

Some of the characteristics that one consistently finds in characters played by pre-1970 Jewish actors and actresses are a strong sense of individualism, a sharp intelligence, self-awareness, a certain brash intensity and a self-deprecating sense of humour, sometimes taking aggressive, in-your-face forms. Kirk Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Alan Arkin, Richard Dreyfuss, Barbra Streisand and even Tony Curtis – who despite his famous good looks never fitted comfortably into the image of the typical Hollywood leading man – come to mind, as do the many Jewish comic icons – including the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks – of the Golden Age.

Pecking out names on my Blackberry in bed each night, I still play “hunt the Jew”, but with much diminished enjoyment. How bland and non-descript today’s “Jewish” Hollywood stars are, and how little they differ, if at all, from their non-Jewish peers.

It is also striking to see how many of those who appear on Jewish actor/actress lists in fact have only one Jewish parent, and sometimes just one grandparent. Unlike previous generations, where usually being Jewish was not something people cared to make a thing about, today’s Jewish film stars are generally quite proud to refer to their Jewish origins, whether full or partial.

However, it is rare indeed that any of them are connected, even marginally, with any form of Jewish activity, and almost without exception, they are married to or involved with non-Jewish partners. Given these realities, what does it really mean to discover that such modern-day film stars as Daniel Day Lewis, Scarlett Johansson and Daniel Radcliffe are halachically Jewish, since they have Jewish mothers, or that Natalie Portman (now married to a non-Jewish ballet instructor) was born Neta-Lee Hershlag in Jerusalem?  

What is happening in Hollywood (and the phenomenon is just as pronounced in the British and European film industries) is indicative of an ever-widening gulf between those for whom being Jewish is a living reality and those for whom it is little more than an accident of birth.

It all is an inevitable result of living in a melting pot culture without being adequately rooted in a religious tradition that might prevent one from yielding completely to its smothering embrace.