Hollywood, writes John Podhoretz, has a long history of assigning overtly Jewish roles to gentile actors. The most recent instance is Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, based loosely on the story of the shady American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky, whose dealings with the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert resulted in the latter’s serving time in prison. In his review, Podhoretz points to the problem of casting Richard Gere in the title role:

Norman is a brilliant piece of work, as sophisticated and knowing a satire of contemporary politics as I’ve seen. . . . But there’s something about Norman that doesn’t work, and that something is Richard Gere. He tries. He tries very hard. He does his best to look Jewish and to sound Jewish and to act Jewish. But—and this is the tricky part—Norman is a complicated and devious character, and it is likely Gere did not feel comfortable making Norman as unattractive as he needs to be at certain points in the film.

[The writer and director, Joseph] Cedar is open to playing on Jewish stereotypes throughout Norman, in part to undermine them. It’s a very tricky business Cedar is up to in this picture, and there’s just no way Gere could truly be in on it.

Cedar surely didn’t cast Richard Gere because he wanted this nice Buddhist matinee idol to deracinate his movie’s central character and distract from Norman’s Jewishness, [as Jewish directors of yesteryear might have done]. That Jewishness is central to Norman’s character and to the movie itself. Cedar probably just thought he was getting a relatively big star for his relatively low-budget movie. But the effect is the same, and it robs the film of some of its power. For Norman to have been the movie it should have been, only a Jew could have played this Jew.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.