A Serious Man.
ETA Nevermind, just realized that both of these posts said “Non-historical” and A Serious Man takes place in the 60’s.
This writer claims there are virtually no female Jewish lead roles outside of Holocaust films- True?
Lorraine Bracco (Karen) is the lead actress in the film—Maybe she didn’t have as much screen time as Robert De Niro or Joe Pesci, but I can’t imagine not counting her as a lead in Goodfellas.
She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for that movie.
Not quite within the Oughts, but see The Governess (1998).
See, I don’t get this. It seems to just be saying that they are complaining because there aren’t enough stereotypes. If someone doesn’t really “really Jew it up” as Ellis Dee puts it, there is no way of knowing that they are Jewish or not.
Oh and I just thought of one movie of the past 10 years where the leading lady was a Jew: “Enemy at The Gates”. While not the protagonist, she was the second most important character in the movie.
Now, the reason why I thought of that was because of the idea that people can identify Jewish characters by the way they act, even if they aren’t specified as such in the dialogue. Now maybe I’m dense, but if that character hadn’t been identified in the dialogue there is no way i would have known she was Jewish. For those who think that characters can be readily identified as Jewish without specifying it, what should I have seen that would make that character Jewish?
Let’s see there are 13,155,000 Jews in the world. Of which 5.6 million live in Israel and 5.2 million live in the USA.
It seems to me proportionally speaking there SHOULDN’T be many leads with Jews.
Perhaps it’s not female Jews are under represented in the 00s but rather they were over represented in the past and that it just seem off, now that the field is correcting itself.
Aren’t we being a bit specific here?
Jewish AND female.
Personally I decry the lack of roles for left handed Fijian dwarves with a stutter and a glass eye.
And its about bloody time that Hollywood addressed this issue.
I wish I had my old Lenny Bruce autobio where he talks at length about what makes some things in the culture Jewish and others goyish. Peppering dialogue with Yiddish terms, being a snob about using brown mustard instead of mayo on a corned beef sandwich (or about using Miracle Whip instead of mayo in tuna salad), gushing about the pure joy of an egg cream, championing the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen or Billy Joel decades after their respective primes, owning numerous Allan Sherman albums on vinyl, ranting about the injustices suffered by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or Jonathan Pollard… There are lots of cultural clues that a character is Jewish. A really bad way to do it was in Casino, where everybody kept reminding the audience that Robert DeNiro’s character was supposed to be Jewish even though he acted like the same Italian hood he’s played in innumerable prior movies.
There’s also a Yiddish cadence to dialogue for Jewish characters, like “For this, I gave up tennis?” instead of 'i gave up tennis for this?" A schmaltzy, borscht-belt sensibility not generally applied to gentile characters.
Out of the timeline for the OP, but what about A Stranger Among Us (1992)? Melanie Griffith goes undercover in a Hassidic community to solve a murder. I think Griffith’s character was supposed to be a lapsed/agnostic Jew.
Don’t forget Marilyn Hack’s nearly Oscar-nominated performance in Home For Purim.
What, Yoda wasn’t close enough?
Enchanted. Giselle is pretty obviously the white and white bread fantasy princess. But Nancy, who is the one who actually gets to be the princess in the end, seems pretty ethnically Jewish…although maybe its just that she’s a stereotypical New Yorker.
Real convincing casting there.:rolleyes: Not that it would’ve necessarily made much difference in the quality of the movie, but why they didn’t cast Ellen Barkin in that role I’ll never know.
Yup. I watched this last night and that’s the movie I came in to mention. Loved it, by the way. It even sort of figured into the plot somewhat, so it was a germaine Jewish role. 
As others have said, in most movies you’re not told what religion a character is unless it’s a plot point. In a movie about the Holocaust, being Jewish is a plot point. In non-Holocaust movies, it usually isn’t.
How about A Price Above Rubies?
There is, I’ve noticed, a taboo in movies and tv, which is to have a “just incidentally” Jewish female lead. They really are off limits most of the time as romantic interests, heroines or “girls next door.”
The reason surely is that it’s not Jews as such who have such disproportional influence in entertainment; it is, more specifically, Jewish men. More specifically, it seems to be ethnically Jewish men who grew up in certain parts of the country and who have a fairly traditional - ie: stereotypical - attitude toward women of their own ethnicity.
Yeah, I get that, at leats osme of it. Thought I have to confess that I doubt many gentiles qould know whether Jew uses mustard or mayonnaisse on corned beef sandwiches. (Which is it, out of interest?)
But to me that is “really Jewing it up”. It’s the equivalent of having an Italian wear loud suits, or or having an gay man with an in depth knowledge of broadway musicals. To me it’s a real cheap gimmick that a hinges on stereotypes. The thing is that most Jews in the real world aren’t like that, at least in my experience. Middle aged and older maybe, but younger Jews just aren’t that stereotyped. In most cases they are just indistinguishable, ordinary people.
My question is how should Hollywood should portray/I should identify a character who just happens to be Jewish. A character who is Jewish the same way that another character might be Italian. You said we are talking about ethnicity here, rather than religion. But any random female lead could be Jewish or Italian by ancestry. Unless they are deliberately stereotyped there is just no way to know that.
To go back to my example of “Enemy at the Gates”, there was a character who happened to be ethnically Jewish but could just as easily have been ethnically Italian. How exactly would we know this? My position is that we wouldn’t and shouldn’t. In very, very few cases is a character’s ethnicity in any way relevant.
Complaining about the dearth of ethnically Jewish female leads is silly, since they greatly outnumber the number of ethnically Italian female leads, and there are far more Italians than Jews. The truth is that any lead may be Jewish or Italian for all we know. It just isn’t relevant for 99% of characters. The idea that we must keep reminding the audience that a character is of ethnicity X is just racist silliness.
Mustard.
I didn’t quote the rest of your post, but I think it’s spot-on.