In the last few years, Israeli and French television series have begun diversifying their Jewish characters. In Israel, series like Beauty and the Baker, Shababnikim, Unchained and Valley of Tears have explored cultural tensions and racism against the Mizrahi communities. In France, the hilarious series Family Business (basically, the French version of Breaking Bad) is frighteningly in concert with the recent Netflix documentary, Lords of Scam, both revealing a shady underworld filled with North African Jews.
Yet for the Sephardic community, unused to seeing the former glories of its modern history in the spotlight, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, which debuted in Israel in June, must feel like the television event of the century: it is a glossy, 44-part epic saga following a fictional Jerusalem-based Ladino-speaking family, the elegant and haughty Ermozas, each generation with its own stories of passionate love, dramatic loss, shocking betrayal, and even murder.
Starting in 1917 (the year of the Balfour Declaration) and spanning the end of the Ottoman Era through the years of British Mandate Palestine, Beauty Queen, based on the 2015 bestseller by Sarit Yishai Levi, offers a bit of everything for viewers. It’s action-packed, sex-filled, soapy, period-piece drama and is set to draw a large international fanbase soon with its heartthrob star, Michael Aloni.
Aloni in this series is a lot like Akiva, his Shtisel character : handsome, romantic and completely impractical. Although he’s the head of the Ermoza dynasty, we quickly see that Gabriel Ermoza is more puppy than patriarch. One look in his dreamy green eyes and women — his downtrodden wife, his sexy sheitel-wearing lover, his Arab mistress, his rebellious daughter, even his domineering mother — do all they can to make him happy. In turn, he generally disappoints.
But are those twinkling green eyes and fair hair, the pale skin, the Eastern European heritage, ultimately a problem? Last week, Tamsin Greig told the Telegraph she “probably shouldn’t have been” in Friday Night Dinner. Greig, who is not Jewish, played a pitch-perfect Jewish mother in the Channel Four series. She was acting! Isn’t the point of acting to pretend you’re something you’re not? I don’t think we want the end of this story to be Tamsin Greig only being able to play a character called… Tamsin Greig.
Of course, these ‘Jewface’ debates fit into larger discussions about representation, and many important changes have occurred because of such conversations.
In 2014, actor Simu Liu tweeted at Marvel that it would be great to see an Asian superhero in the MCU; five years later, Marvel hired him to play Shang-Chi. This is progress. Asian roles have not been plentiful in the past and, worse, actors sometimes played them in ‘yellowface.’ Nobody wants a latter-day Mickey Rooney reprising his role as I. Y. Yunioshi in a Breakfast at Tiffany’s remake today.
The casting of Michael Aloni, perhaps the most Ashkenazi actor in the history of all Ashkenazi actors, does make one think: can a Sephardic actor not be handsome enough for the lead role in a grand family saga? Indeed, in the Jewface debates, this is the charge that television critic Emily Nussbaum makes about the casting of Rachel Brosnahan as the too-beautiful Marvellous Mrs Maisel. Is there no Jewish actor beautiful enough to play her? Could a Sephardic actor be ‘relatable’ enough? Lovable enough? Don’t Sephardic Jews — to channel you-know-who — count? Why is it acceptable to tell their (exoticised, melodramatic) stories but not see their real faces?
Should we boycott Beauty Queen on account of ‘Sephardiface’?
For all its flaws, Beauty Queen foregrounds a community that has had far too little airtime. Today, it seems Ashkenazi Jews not only have most of the political power (in both Israel and the Anglo-Diaspora) but have also erased the histories of other Jews. Beauty Queen addresses lost history.
The series also has an amazing array of storylines, from star-crossed lovers (in lieu of Jets and Sharks, it’s Ashkenazim and Sephardim), to terror plots. And perhaps my personal favourite: there’s a witch character, Jilda, a soothsayer and healer whose milky eyes roll into her head. She embodies the orientalising and stereotypical tropes found in representations of Sephardic culture, but she’s also more than that. In one scene, she combines Jewish ritual, sorcery, and science. Guess what? Her treatments prove more potent than those provided by the white-faced doctor-men.
Does Beauty Queen have a ‘Sephardiface’ problem? Maybe a little. But I still hope that when it lands on televisions in the English-speaking world this coming year, we are more inclined to talk about the rich history of Sephardic Jews than Michael Aloni’s moderately successful attempts to play one.
