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The Jewish Press

(Founded in 1920)

Margie Gutnik

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Annette van de Kamp-Wright

Editor

Richard Busse

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Susan Bernard

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Lori Kooper-Schwarz

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Gabby Blair

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Mary Bachteler

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Jewish Press Board

Margie Gutnik, President; Abigail Kutler, Ex-Officio; Danni Christensen; David Finkelstein; Bracha Goldsweig; Mary Sue Grossman; Les Kay; Natasha Kraft; Chuck Lucoff; Joseph Pinson; Andy Shefsky and Amy Tipp. The mission of the Jewish Federation of Omaha is to build and sustain a strong and vibrant Omaha Jewish Community and to support Jews in Israel and around the world. Agencies of the Federation are: Community Relations Committee, Jewish Community Center, Center for Jewish Life, Jewish Social Services, and the Jewish Press. Guidelines and highlights of the Jewish Press, including front page stories and announcements, can be found online at: wwwjewishomaha.org; click on ‘Jewish Press.’ 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. The Jewish Press reserves the right to edit signed letters and articles for space and content. The Jewish Press is not responsible for the Kashrut of any product or establishment.

Editorial

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The Jewish Press welcomes Letters to the Editor. They may be sent via regular mail to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154; via fax: 1.402.334.5422 or via e-mail to the Editor at: avandekamp@jewishomaha. org. Letters should be no longer than 250 words and must be single-spaced typed, not hand-written. Published letters should be confined to opinions and comments on articles or events. News items should not be submitted and printed as a “Letter to the Editor.” The Editor may edit letters for content and space restrictions. Letters may be published without giving an opposing view. Information shall be verified before printing. All letters must be signed by the writer. The Jewish Press will not publish letters that appear to be part of an organized campaign, nor letters copied from the Internet. No letters should be published from candidates running for office, but others may write on their behalf. Letters of thanks should be confined to commending an institution for a program, project or event, rather than personally thanking paid staff, unless the writer chooses to turn the “Letter to the Editor” into a paid personal ad or a news article about the event, project or program which the professional staff supervised. For information, contact Annette van de KampWright, Jewish Press Editor, 402.334.6450.

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The Jewish Press (USPS 275620) is published weekly (except for the first week of January and July) on Friday for $40 per calendar year U.S.; $80 foreign, by the Jewish Federation of Omaha. Phone: 402.334.6448; FAX: 402.334.5422. Periodical postage paid at Omaha, NE. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: The Jewish Press, 333 So. 132 St., Omaha, NE 68154-2198 or email to: jpress@jewishomaha.org.

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 harbor 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 often, especially when the two open a waterbed business together and he instructs her to “act sexy” when selling the kitschy relics over the phone. But it’s not just Gary. Seemingly everyone in the movie, from lecherous older industry veterans to upstart young politicos, is obsessed with Alana, not in spite of her obviously Jewish appearance, but because of 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 debut in the early ’60s, was described in reviews as a “homely frump” and “a sloe-eyed creature with folding ankles.” But by the ’70s, bolstered by her immense charisma and no-apologies attitude toward her own stardom, she was one of popular culture’s greatest sex symbols, even appearing on the cover of Playboy in 1977, the year after starring in and producing her own A Star is Born remake. Her physical appearance didn’t change in the intervening time; only the public’s reactions to it did. Anderson himself was born in 1970, so the teenaged adventures in the film aren’t his memories specifically, they’re mostly those of his friend Gary Goetzman, a former child actor who lived through many of the episodes depicted in the movie. And Anderson himself is not Jewish, though his longtime partner Maya Rudolph, who has a small part in the film, is. Yet perhaps by virtue of being born into a world in which Jewish women were suddenly

being considered sexy, Anderson seems to innately understand the period-specific sexual, cultural and spiritual dynamics that would lead to someone like Alana being celebrated for her looks. For much of the film, Alana is unsure whether or how to leverage her sex appeal, as she also tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life. An attempt to respect the wishes of her traditional famAlana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza. Credit: Paul Thomas Anderson/Metro-Goldwin-Mayer Pictures Inc. ily (the other Haims, including their real parents, play the Kane clan) by dating a nice, successful, ageappropriate Jewish guy ends in disaster at a Shabbat dinner when he refuses to say hamotzi. The scene also touches on the debate over “religious” vs. “cultural” Judaism that has been raging in American Jewish circles since at least the time period when the film is set. While acknowledging he was “raised in the Jewish tradition,” Lance cites “Vietnam” as the reason why he now identifies as an atheist and can’t bring himself to recite a blessing. In response, Alana gets him to admit he’s circumcised before declaring, “Then you’re a f–king Jew!” The moral of the scene might be the movie’s biggest lesson to impart about Judaism: It’s not just a belief system. It’s an innate part of you, affecting everything from your hair to your nose to your genitals. It can make you be perceived as ugly in one decade, and a bombshell in the next.

The true ‘Tragedy’ of Joel Coen’s Macbeth is the breakup of a great Jewish filmmaking duo

AMELIA MERRILL

JTA There is a Jewish interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve that situates the two back-to-back. Instead of God creating woman from the stolen rib of Adam, the two walk away and split — crack — into separate beings. This is where we now find the Coen brothers, the Jewish filmmaking duo who have captivated audiences with their wacky, zany, beautiful, grandiose work for over thirty years: once a single unit, each indistinguishable from the other to the eyes of the average moviegoer, now improbably split — crack — into separate beings. Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which is seeing a theatrical release on Christmas in advance of an Apple TV+ screening premiere Jan. 14, 2022, is the first truly solo Coen film — that is, the first to be helmed by only one brother in either of their careers. (Though Joel was given sole directing credit on some of their early films, this was due to a Directors Guild rule, and did not reflect their actual collaboration; his brother Ethan has previously written plays solo, as well.) In addition to adapting and directing “Macbeth” himself, Joel also co-edited the film under the pseudonym “Reginald Jaynes” — perhaps a newly ascendant brother to “Roderick Jaynes,” the fictional alter-ego the brothers used for decades when they would edit their films together. The Torah is full of stories of brothers who betray each other, but Joel and Ethan’s breakup, according to their collaborators, isn’t as grim as Cain killing Abel or as dramatic as Jacob buying Esau’s birthright. In an interview with LA Magazine earlier this year, the duo’s longtime composer Carter Burwell claimed that the brothers simply don’t want to work on the same projects anymore. Ethan, feeling burned out on filmmaking, is now turning his attention back to theater. Maybe Joel feels some kinship with his latest protagonist: like Macbeth, he pushes forward with his ambitions against the odds of his own legacy, if not prophecy. A newly individuated director, known for his idiosyncratic approach to storytelling, looking to make a statement on his own: you’d hardly expect adapting one of history’s most frequently staged dramas to be Joel Coen’s next logical move. And in fact, in its close fidelity to the Shakespeare play’s text, Macbeth is a tonal departure from every other Coen Brothers entry. Even when the duo is adapting another’s source material, as in No Country For Old Men and True Grit, their films tend to emphasize their creators’ singular (and, until now, single) voice — a voice of relentless Americana, quirky dark humor and occasional off-kilter nods to Jewishness. These signifiers — which in the past have included explicit Jewish philosophical musings about the nature of suffering in A Serious Man, as well as gags about Jewish rituals and beliefs in The Big Lebowski and Hail, Caesar! — have now been replaced by the Bard’s all-too-familiar iambic pentameter. The dense, macabre language is layered over an all-consuming atmospheric dread, as Denzel Washington’s gullible Scottish general and his scheming, seemingly ruthless wife (Coen’s actual wife Frances McDormand) execute their misbegotten plot to seize the throne by murdering those who occupy its line of succession. Thus, a quirky, distinctly Jewish American sensibility (one that once allowed for a Vietnam War veteran to scream about being “Shomer f**king Shabbos” onscreen) has been exchanged for a classical one that echoes European cinematic traditions. This is true not only regarding the source material, but also in the visual allusions to the works of Scandinavian auteurs Ingmar Bergman and Carl Dreyer — both lapsed Christians whose works frequently invoked an absence of God. At face value, there is no overt Jewishness coursing through Macbeth — neither Shakespeare’s original, nor Coen’s version, with the exception of the three witches’ curious spell recipe that calls for one “liver of blaspheming Jew” alongside “gall of goat and slips of yew.” (This brief moment is not, of course, Shakespeare’s most famous foray into depictions or discussions of antisemitism.) Yet the material is oddly appropriate for a storyteller known for spinning yarns about men who get caught up in their own doomed schemes.

As seen through Coen’s eyes, the ramping paranoia that seizes the title characters also echoes the watchful, calculating eye of our traditions. The inclination to celebrate success is nullified by the need to look over your shoulder, out the window, above your head, to always be on the lookout for who or what may spurn you. In this way, the creeping tension of Coen’s Macbeth is quintessentially Jewish, capturing the apprehensive need for validation at every turn and the Torah, of course, has its share of power-mad kings consumed by fears that those around them may grow too powerful. The witches’ warnings, which alternatively edge Macbeth down his dark path and predict his own demise, become a substitute for our sages’ superstitions. What is to be made of the most influential Jewish filmmakers of a generation parting ways, if brothers can ever truly do so? Some have posited that Joel Coen’s shift to a bleaker, more deliberate story with Macbeth represents a new journey, one that he was unable to undertake with his brother sharing the helm. Perhaps Ethan was responsible for more of the duo’s characteristic stylized zaniness, while Joel’s sensibility tilted more to traditional dramas. Perhaps they really are a modern match for Esau and Jacob, respectively, with Joel now channeling his desire for the birthright of theater by laying claim to one of the most famous tragedies of the English language. (This metaphor sours when you remember that Joel is actually the older brother.) But evaluating Macbeth only by what it may have been with Ethan Coen onboard serves no artistic or critical purpose; it neglects the film in front of us. A more fruitful conversation, instead, is what mark Joel Coen will leave as a solo filmmaker whose vast library of influences has always included his own work. With no reports of a feud between the brothers, it’s unlikely that Coen will eschew future references to Ethan’s work, even if only the sharpest, most Coen-obsessed minds in the audience can distinguish whose hand was responsible for what. Will Coen’s singularity be the honor that he, like Jacob, loves beyond all other possessions? Or will his grasp for creative control liken him to Shakespeare’s tragic hero, dampening his achievements with the stain of what could have been?

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

Writer-director Joel Coen and his wife, actress Frances McDormand, on the set of The Tragedy of Macbeth, Coen’s first film

without his brother Ethan. Credit: Apple TV+

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