A few months ago, when trailers and stills from Maestro—a film about the conductor, composer, and pianist Leonard Bernstein—first appeared, there was a minor controversy about the costume of the actor playing him: Bradley Cooper (a Gentile) had been equipped with a prominent and elongated prosthetic nose so as better to resemble Bernstein. Was this simply an attempt at verisimilitude, or a crass exploitation of the stereotype of the hooked-nose Jew?
From the vantage point of the end of 2023, the issue seems quaint. John Podhoretz, a writer anything but insensitive to anti-Semitism, ignores the nose completely in his review of Maestro. Bernstein—who was best known for his virtuoso conducting and for scoring musicals like West Side Story and films like On the Waterfront—was a child of Russian Jewish immigrants whose first composition was a setting for Psalm 148 (thought to be influenced by his childhood synagogue attendance) and who conducted a concert in Jerusalem just after the Six-Day War. Yet what strikes Podhoretz is that Bernstein represented an American Jewish high-water mark that has long since faded:
Bernstein was one of the key markers of the moment in time when America took unambiguous control of center stage in the West. He mixed popular culture, middlebrow culture, a now sadly anachronistic hip-Jew culture, glamor, riches, fame, trendy progressive politics, and (at a key moment when his star seemed to be dimming) out-of-the-closet gay culture in a resonant and enduring stew.
And Bernstein also demonstrated a particular kind of Jewish political stupidity, to use Irving Kristol’s phrase:
No one forced [Bernstein] to host “That Party at Lenny’s,” as Tom Wolfe originally called his deathless essay “Radical Chic,” when Bernstein and his glam wife Felicia brought New York society together with the Black Panthers in 1970. One of the Panthers answered a question from Bernstein by advocating Communist revolution: “If business won’t give us full employment,” he said, “then we must take the means of production and put them in the hands of the people.” Bernstein’s answer, as he sat comfortably in his Park Avenue duplex: “I dig, absolutely.”
That same year, Stokely Carmichael, the Panthers’ famous leader, told an interviewer that Adolf Hitler “was the greatest white man,” while the party’s newspaper complained about “Zionist exploitation” by “bandit merchants and greedy slum lords.”
Read more at Washington Free Beacon
More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Hollywood, Irving Kristol, Leonard Bernstein