(JEWISH GROUP) Jew People...
You People, a “romantic comedy” that premiered on Netflix on Jan. 27 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day, as well as the day on which seven Jews were murdered by Palestinian terrorists in a synagogue in Israel), has been generating considerable blowback for its tone-deaf treatment of antisemitism. Marketed as an updated Look Who’s Coming to Dinner that revolves around an engaged couple, the Jewish Ezra Cohen (Jonah Hill) and the Black Muslim Amira Mohammed (Lauren London), who together set out to bridge cultural divides between their two families, the film is, in the eyes of many Jews, an offensive shanda.
The movie opens on a scene in which protagonist Ezra Cohen (Jonah Hill), a Jewish, Los Angeles-based stockbroker-turned-podcaster covering the Black pop-culture beat, is accosted at shul following a break in Yom Kippur services. Ezra’s childhood orthodontist asks to see his penis. Another elderly congregant asks him, “You don’t like getting pussy?” Yet another makes an adolescent joke about Ezra liking to “smoke Hebrew Nationals.”
As one high-profile Hollywood producer told me, the scene “ricochets around a particularly nasty characterization of old Jewish men, all of whom seem to be sexual deviants. It’s as if [white nationalist] Nick Fuentes directed a remake of the opening party scene in The Graduate.”
Indeed, if this opening scene had been the only questionable one in the movie, directed by Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and co-written by Barris and Hill, it might have been easier to overlook. According to a number of Hollywood Jews I spoke to, however, You People is not the feel-good, star-crossed love story it advertises itself as, but a revisionist hatchet job on the Jewish people, full of dangerous and frankly lazy tropes in which Jews are accused of everything from racism to orchestrating the North American slave trade. It is also currently the No. 1 film on Netflix.
Behind the scenes, many in the film industry are appalled. “I was horrified at what was considered acceptable,” says filmmaker Stuart Acher of You People. “It is open season on Jews.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/you-people-antisemitism
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