The newly released film about the atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer makes several references to its subject’s Jewishness, as to that of many of his Manhattan Project colleagues. But viewers in the Arab world won’t be aware of this fact, writes Jordan Hoffman:
[T]he Lebanon-based company that translated the film for the region has dodged the specific word for Jews and, instead, has opted to use word ghurabaa that translates as “stranger” or “foreigner.”
The Egyptian film director Yousry Nasrallah criticized the decision, saying, “The Arabic translation of the dialogue was strikingly poor. There is nothing to justify or explain the translation of Jew to ghareeb or ghurabaa. It is a shame.”
An unnamed representative for the film told [reporters] that this is not atypical for Middle Eastern censor boards. “There are topics we usually don’t tackle, and that is one of them. We cannot use the word Jew, the direct translation in Arabic, otherwise it may be edited, or they ask us to remove it. . . . This has been an ongoing [situation] for the past fifteen or twenty years.” (In 2013, though a large section of the Brad Pitt action film World War Z was set in Israel, Turkish translations changed all references to simply “the Middle East.”)
Thus, in one scene, the physicist I.I. Rabi refers to himself and Oppenheimer as “a couple of New York Jews”—and the Arabic subtitles read, “inhabitants of New York.”
Read more on Messenger: https://themessenger.com/entertainment/oppenheimer-censored-remove-reference-jews-arabic-speaking-countries