8 | The Jewish Press | January 14, 2022
Voices
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Editorials express the view of the writer and are not necessarily representative of the views of the Jewish Press Board of Directors, the Jewish Federation of Omaha Board of Directors, or the Omaha Jewish community as a whole.
Bad News
ANNETTE VAN DE KAMP-WRIGHT Jewish Press Editor When I open my various apps on Monday morning, the news is either bad (death, war, famine), irritating (Washington D.C.), or both (also Washington D.C.). Only once you scroll way, way down, do you arrive at any ‘feel-good’ stories, and they mostly involve things like pandas playing in the snow and dogs being rescued. It’s not all the fault of the news outlets. Human beings, it seems, gravitate towards bad news. Last night, while my husband and I compared notes (he shared the death of Bob Saget, I talked about the apartment fire in the Bronx) our daughter commented: “Maybe keeping up with the news isn’t always that good for your mental health?” She has a point. Coincidentally, a friend posed a similar question a few days earlier when she questioned why, as human beings, we always seems to focus on the worst news possible. How much trauma can we take, and have we arrived at a point in history where we simply take it for granted that bad things are happening, all the time, everywhere? I’ll be honest: I used to feel a little judgmental every time someone mentioned avoiding the news. You have to stay informed, I’d think, how could you not? Knowing everything all the time, I felt, was both a responsibility and a need; I hate the feeling of having missed something. And yet, the older I get, the more I think we’ve lost the balance. And, of course, there is a certain level of sensationalism involved.
A few days ago, my mom sent pictures of the floods that are happening in her hometown. Just outside Rotterdam, I vaguely recognize the boulevard where I walked with my grandfather long ago.
It’s hard to tell since it’s under several feet of dirty water. But I know this place; as a child, I spent practically every weekend here. The Chinese restaurant, the one that spells its own name wrong on the marquee, is just to the right. We used to have big, rowdy family dinners there. I wonder if they’re okay. Still, no one I know still lives there anymore and it’s far away. Should I feel sad? Should we pretend to own every bit of bad news that’s out there? Then my mother starts talking about the memories that come to the surface. The big, devastating flood of 1953, when those who lived near the har-
bor evacuated before the water crested. Back then, my grandparents lived closer to downtown and opened their house to evacuees; my mother remembers how she had to share a single bed with her sister because they ran out of space. The house was filled with family members who had lost everythingagain. She remembers not sleeping; listening for the church bells, which were used to warn of impending doom. As she is talking, I hear in her voice how vivid those memories are. What was it like, to grow up and watch this massive flood wash away any progress that had been made in the eight years since the end of the war? I imagine that for the adults, it was a similar ‘when will this end?’ feeling as what people experienced after the fires in Boulder, the recent tornadoes. And I realize: bad news, whether it is far away or close by, affects real people. And even if that person isn’t me, I should pay attention and take it seriously, because that’s what empathy looks like. While we can probably skip the headlines about dead celebrities, we certainly can take a moment to witness what happens to others and ask ourselves how we can help. Maybe we send money, maybe we simply listen. Would we not want them to do the same if it were us?
Licorice Pizza captures the moment when pop culture finally started to see Jewish women as beautiful STEPHEN SILVER JTA This year, everyone seemed to have an opinion about how the entertainment industry views Jewish women. The comedian Sarah Silverman and others openly inveighed against what she deemed “Jewface,” or the trend of casting non-Jewish actresses as (Ashkenazi) Jewish women; a plotline on this year’s Curb Your Enthusiasm season mocked a similar idea by having Larry David cast a Latina actress as a Jewish character on a show about his childhood. Whether you agree with Silverman or not, it’s hard to hear a term like “Jewface” and not think about the way Jewish characters have historically looked onscreen. For much of the 20th century, show business and popular culture considered stereotypical “Jewish” traits: curly hair, olive skin, a prominent nose; either “exotic,” comic or worse, inspiring countless Jewish women to undergo rhinoplasty. It wasn’t until Barbra Streisand flaunted her “Jewish” looks beginning in the late 1960s — as Bette Midler would a few years later — that the culture began to shift. Streisand, writes her biographer Neal Gabler, “had somehow managed to change the entire definition of beauty.” Now, at the end of 2021, along comes a film set in the 1970s with a female Jewish protagonist who is not only played by a Jewish actress, but is also portrayed as a sex symbol. The film is Licorice Pizza, the latest from acclaimed writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, and it opened wide in theaters on Christmas after several weeks of limited release. And the character is Alana Kane, played by singer Alana Haim of the band Haim, making her screen debut. In the film, Alana is an aimless, guileless San Fernando Valley twentysomething who gains maturity and an entrepreneurial spirit after befriending Gary Valentine, an overconfident child actor (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) who enlists her in various business schemes and convinces her to make a go at acting. The two of them enter a teasy, flirty codependency. Gary, not even
16, makes his attraction to Alana known early and being considered sexy, Anderson seems to innately often, especially when the two open a waterbed understand the period-specific sexual, cultural and business together and he instructs her to “act sexy” spiritual dynamics that would lead to someone like when selling the kitschy relics over the phone. Alana being celebrated for her looks. But it’s not just Gary. Seemingly everyone in the For much of the film, Alana is unsure whether or movie, from lecherous older industry veterans to up- how to leverage her sex appeal, as she also tries to start young politicos, is obsessed with Alana, not in figure out what she wants to do with her life. An atspite of her obviously Jewish appearance, but because tempt to respect the wishes of her traditional famof it. Anderson plays up Haim’s physical parallels to the Jewish beauties of the era: a casting director (Harriet Sansom Harris) gushes over her “Jewish nose,” which she notes is a very in-demand look, while reallife producer Jon Peters (played by Bradley Cooper as a manic, sex-crazed lunatic), gets very handsy with Alana after pointedly bragging that Streisand is his girlfriend. Licorice Pizza is in line with ideas espoused in Henry Bial’s 2005 book Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen, particularly its chapter on the ’70s, which Bial described as the period when “Jews became sexy.” Streisand, at the time of her Broadway Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza. Credit: Paul debut in the early ’60s, was described in Thomas Anderson/Metro-Goldwin-Mayer Pictures Inc. reviews as a “homely frump” and “a sloe-eyed crea- ily (the other Haims, including their real parents, ture with folding ankles.” But by the ’70s, bolstered play the Kane clan) by dating a nice, successful, ageby her immense charisma and no-apologies atti- appropriate Jewish guy ends in disaster at a Shabtude toward her own stardom, she was one of pop- bat dinner when he refuses to say hamotzi. ular culture’s greatest sex symbols, even appearing The scene also touches on the debate over “relion the cover of Playboy in 1977, the year after star- gious” vs. “cultural” Judaism that has been raging in ring in and producing her own A Star is Born re- American Jewish circles since at least the time pemake. Her physical appearance didn’t change in riod when the film is set. While acknowledging he the intervening time; only the public’s reactions to was “raised in the Jewish tradition,” Lance cites it did. “Vietnam” as the reason why he now identifies as an Anderson himself was born in 1970, so the atheist and can’t bring himself to recite a blessing. teenaged adventures in the film aren’t his memories In response, Alana gets him to admit he’s circumspecifically, they’re mostly those of his friend Gary cised before declaring, “Then you’re a f–king Jew!” Goetzman, a former child actor who lived through The moral of the scene might be the movie’s many of the episodes depicted in the movie. And biggest lesson to impart about Judaism: It’s not just Anderson himself is not Jewish, though his long- a belief system. It’s an innate part of you, affecting time partner Maya Rudolph, who has a small part everything from your hair to your nose to your genin the film, is. Yet perhaps by virtue of being born itals. It can make you be perceived as ugly in one into a world in which Jewish women were suddenly decade, and a bombshell in the next.
