Actor Bradley Cooper will play Leonard Bernstein in the late composer’s upcoming biopic Maestro, a controversial move that continues Hollywood’s problematic practice of casting white actors in minority roles. The film industry has become more diverse and inclusive over the years, but unfortunately continue plenty of harmful practices, such as whitewashing. Bradley Cooper, a white actor, will don a prosthetic nose and play a historic Jewish composer, which is not only the latest instance of Hollywood’s whitewashing but also part of the industry’s enduring erasure of Jewish creatives.

Whitewashing, the practice of casting a white actor in a non-white role, has been around as long as the film industry itself, blocking performances from Black, Asian, Jewish, and Latinx actors and actresses. Whitewashing is a symptom of institutional racism, and although progress has been made in recent years to allow marginalized groups to tell their own stories, the film industry still slips into old habits. A particularly problematic and unfortunately popular trend that persists to this day is casting white (or otherwise non-Jewish) performers as Jewish characters, with Bradley Cooper’s upcoming role as Leonard Bernstein being one of the most recent and offensive examples.

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Bradley Cooper, as shown in production photos for Maestro, will don a prosthetic nose to mimic Leonard Bernstein’s Levantine features in Maestro, despite there being plenty of Jewish actors better-suited to the role. Casting a white actor as a Jewish historical figure or fictional character is intrinsically disrespectful (as it would be for a white actor to play the role of any other racial or ethnic minority), but Maestro’s use of prosthetics adds insult to injury when Jewish performers have historically been denied roles as a result of their appearance or given the caveat that they undergo plastic surgery to conform to Eurocentric standards of appearance. Cooper’s casting is blatant whitewashing, and it is past time that Hollywood allows Jewish people to tell their own stories and play Jewish roles.

Bradley Cooper Bernstein white washing

Comedian Sarah Silverman once wrote: “If they deserve love or are courageous, the Jewish character is never played by a Jew,” and this has unfortunately been proven true in numerous recent works. In addition to Leonard Bernstein, other real-life Jewish figures, such as Joan Rivers, Felicia Montealegre, and even Golda Meir are depicted by white performers, to say nothing of fictional Jewish characters. The pop culture-dominating Marvel Cinematic Universe, which already has a problematic history with Jewish characters, failed to tastefully depict the Jewish Marc Spector in Moon Knight, changing his origin with problematic tropes and lacking Jewish writers and cast members.

In a film industry that is gradually becoming more inclusive, the practice of whitewashing needs to be left behind. Bradley Cooper’s casting and prosthetics as Leonard Bernstein allow a white performer to profit off of features that Jewish people are disparaged for in and out of Hollywood. In what could have been a tasteful biopic of a famous Jewish conductor, Maestro may actually – however inadvertently – perpetuate the film industry’s institutional bigotry instead.

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