The Marginalized Group Inclusion Spaces Forgot to Include
My family comes from a small, persecuted, indigenous people from the Middle East. We have been refugees for a painfully long time. When my grandfather was a child, he was lined up with his family to see how many people a bullet could go through. His family thankfully got away and fled to the US. My other grandfather experienced segregation here. My father was regularly beaten up as a kid for his marginalized status.
I grew up in a middle-class home, but my parents still gave me the talk that almost every child in my tribe gets — either informally and/or once a year — when the elders share our national story. It goes like this: “In every generation our enemies rise up to destroy us.” I had nightmares throughout my childhood of when that day would come. This is not uncommon for people in my community.
My darker skin was called out throughout my childhood growing up in New Jersey, and I was verbally harassed for my marginalized status. My classmates noticed that I looked “ethnic,” and I was regularly asked what I “was” or if my mother ate too much chocolate when she was pregnant with me. My sisters and aunts have fairer features, but as far as we know, no one in our family ever married outside of our tribe. Systemic violence against our foremothers in past generations was common, but there is a lot of shame around this topic, so it is not often discussed.
In my teen years, I began to derive pride in our homeland and strength from the spiritual practices of our people, which I adopted. In the last year, both of my daughters were called slurs on the street because our traditional clothing gave them away. My community is the most attacked religious minority community in the US right now as well as the most attacked racial group per capita*. On TV and in movies, my tribe is portrayed through a colonialist lens. We are shown as having outdated values and practices that need fixing. Characters from my community only receive praise when someone is “courageous enough” to leave.
I am a Jew.
An Orthodox Jewish woman, to be precise.
Defining the Jewish Experience in Progressive Language
If the plight of Jews was seen in the aforementioned light, we would have been part of DEIA spaces from the very beginning. But Jews are rarely regarded like this. Even though our story of oppression — tracing the violent exile of the Jewish people from Israel by the Romans, including the murder of 1 million and the enslavement of the rest, blood libels, Crusades, expulsions, inquisitions, forced segregation behind ghetto walls, pogroms, and the Holocaust — is completely true. So is the systemic racism against Jews in the US that began with the limitation of voting rights and the ability to hold office in some states, quotas in Ivy League schools, Asiatic immigration restrictions, redlining, segregation in pools, hotels, and beaches, and gatekeeping in professional industries, like law and publishing and some country clubs, that persist to this day.
Instead, Jews are seen as European whites (thank you, Whoopi!), who magically sprouted of out Poland a couple hundred years ago. Too rich, too privileged, too powerful to be a protected class. All of these ideas are antisemitic tropes that are baked into progressive ideology. This needs to change.
Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews are considered brown, but as a Jew whose family was expelled to a land where they eat gefilte fish, I was led to believe that I am white, even though my lived experience has shown me that the world doesn’t view me this way. To be brown, and simultaneously gaslit that you are not brown, is very confusing.
I grew up as a proud Conservative Jew, the only Jewish girl for most of my years in public school, where I was told “Jews killed Jesus” and “Jewish people howl at the moon and pray to the devil.” A double murder/suicide of a classmate and her brother by their father when I was 8 years old pushed me into an existential crisis. After 7 years of off and on insomnia and minor panic attacks, I met an Orthodox Jewish teacher at an after-school Hebrew high. He was nothing like what traditional media had led me to believe he’d be like. He was kind and compassionate, a feminist and wise. I slowly grew in my observance, proudly retaining all of the wonderful parts of my secular identity, but adding wisdom and spirituality to my life. As an Orthodox Jew today, my family and I are identifiably Jewish on the street. I have been victim-shamed, told that we are the ones who choose to wear our yarmulkes and wigs and skirts. If we “only” looked more American and visited our kosher stores, yeshivas, and synagogues less frequently, we could be safe.
For Jews who are secular and white-passing, they are subjected to a purity test that other white-passing marginalized individuals are not. And richness negating marginalized status does not seem to apply to other groups such as Indian Americans, even though they are the wealthiest ethnic group in the US.
Success Does Not Negate Past Trauma and a Sense of Foreboding
Inter-generational trauma is a phenomenon that affects nearly all Jews, no matter how they look or what they practice. So is the foreboding most of us feel towards the future. Many of us have been feeling it more than ever, since Kanye made antisemitic rhetoric mainstream. Jewish baggage is never being able to fully unpack. And the one place we might have to flee to one day, to unpack in, is riddled with complicated politics, when so many of us simply want a place to exhale and to live in peace.
The “talk” that most Jewish parents give their children happens during the Passover seder. For some, it includes being told to always have your passport ready. With the most lethal attacks on Jews in American history occurring in the last five years and with Jews being the most targeted religious group, despite being only 2% of the population, more and more of us are wondering when we may need to dust off those passports.
Next week is Holocaust Remembrance Day, but frankly I’m sick of the Jewish people only being remembered as a group that was murdered often or a people too privileged to need protection. Instead, I want to be known and celebrated for the proud, vibrant, self-actualized Jewish life that I live, which bursts with meaning and joy. But since it’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, I’ll invoke the Nazis who used propaganda to turn the world against Jews. They are a reminder of how damaging media can be for a marginalized group and the responsibility the entertainment world has to prevent and counter-act this.
A History (And Present) of Harmful Media Portrayals
The vilification of Jews throughout Western media started much earlier than the Third Reich. In ancient Egypt, in the third century B.C.E., Jews were accused of being the Hykos people and spreading leprosy. Jews being seen as vectors of disease continued with them being blamed for spreading the Bubonic Plague, the Nazis accused Jews of being lice and spreading tuberculosis, and shockingly, this trope has appeared in modern day traditional media. Blood libels of Jews began in the Middle Ages, when Christians accused them of kidnapping Christian children to bake their blood into matzah. Depictions of Jews as bloodthirsty baby-killers has popped up in communities all over the world and continues to this day. Also in the Middle Ages, a mistranslation of the Old Testament led to Jews being depicted with horns. This trope recently appeared in a Netflix advertising campaign. The Book of Revelations describes the antichrist as having horns and a tail and clubbed feet. With Jews already having horns, this resulted in the portrayal of Jews as all out demons. Starting in the 12th century, Jews became hooked-nose in paintings. The two church councils in 1267 forced Jews to wear pointy hats. Those hats, coupled with the hook-nosed trope, led to Jews becoming the inspiration for witches.
Jon Stewart was right about the goblins in Harry Potter looking Jewish, not because anyone associated with the films is necessarily antisemitic, but rather because little men with big noses counting money is yet another trope that was born out of the Jew-hatred. Take 3 minutes to watch Funny or Die’s animated short on how greedy, big nosed Jews became cartoon villains. The practice of “stage Jew” began in the 1600’s, when non-Jewish actors would dress up in Jewish garb to mock and make fun of Jews. While Sarah Silverman popularized the term “Jewface” to mean non-Jewish actors regularly getting cast in Jewish parts — a topic worthy of discussion in its own right, especially when contemporary movies put large noses on gentile actors to play Jews (see Maestro) — it has an older and even more sinister origin.
Jewface was done in vaudeville-style minstrels, both in Eastern Europe and the US, starting in the 1800s. Sometimes it was secular Jews mocking their religious brethren. Other times, antisemitic regimes, like the Bolsheviks, manipulated secular Jews with the promise of self-preservation to throw religious Jews under the bus. (Tragically, the Bolsheviks ended up killing those Jews too.) Nazis also employed Jewface in their 1940 propaganda film “The Eternal Jew.” Jewface persists in Hollywood today, often perpetrated by fellow Jews (see our mini documentary “Hollywood’s Orthodox Jew Problem”), even though this practice is thankfully verboten for other marginalized communities.
On that note, let’s dig into the trope that Jews run Hollywood. Jews don’t run Hollywood, but they founded it because more prestigious industries shut them out due to antisemitism. The Hollywood founders hid their Jewishness, assimilated and relied on self-deprecation to survive. Sadly, many of today’s Jews in Hollywood seem to have internalized so much Jew hatred that the depictions we often see are caricatures who are not fully human and are often insufferable. Non-Jewish writers and producers are also guilty of embedding these tropes into storylines. A CSA member recently told me that Jewish actors usually play down their Jewishness, lest it negatively impact their career. In an age when every other marginalized group is proudly leading into their identity, when will the Jews be ready for this too??
Reshaping Jewish Identities in Hollywood
What if Jews on screen could be more often portrayed as endearing individuals, with shared struggles and shared joy? While the viewer may never get to know someone from this background in real life, the screen can be a conduit to building a relationship of admiration and respect. That’s why my organization launched the first and only Hollywood Bureau for Jews last year. No one had done it before, because no one was ready to lay this out like we are. And if you’re wondering why a small nonprofit that no one ever heard of had the chutzpah to take on Hollywood, there is nothing more Jewish than being a little guy, who doesn’t know his place. Or in my case, a little woman.
Fortunately, my inspiration to be courageous comes from looking at Jewish heroines from my tradition, like Queen Esther of Purim fame (movie idea, people!), instead of taking cues from the meek and voiceless Orthodox Jewish women Hollywood depicts.
Already, we are commissioning an in-depth character analysis and impact study with a leading academic entertainment group, to explore bias in media and the negative ways inaccurate depictions of Jews shape viewers’ opinions. We’re about to have a panel at Sundance on problematic Jewish representation in Hollywood (the first of its kind) and attended the Television Academy Inclusion Summit in November. We have met with all the major studios and are creating materials with the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity (TTIE) to train showrunners. In time, we hope to place consultants and proud and knowledgeable Jewish writers into writers’ rooms so that we can prevent harmful tropes and silly caricatures of the secular nebbish Jew, the evil, extremist Hasid, or the only-white Jew. Characters like these increase judgement, derision and hate.
#Neveragain is feeling closer than ever, but meaningful changes in the entertainment industry could stem the tide. We will usher in a new generation of Jews who are ready to lean into our heritage and demand proud and authentic representation. Perhaps when we Jews see our heroes on the screen, we’ll be overcome with self-love, and then the world will follow.
*Annual rates of hate crimes against Jewish people and Black people in the US are nearly the same number despite the Black population being almost ten times larger.
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Scholars & Storytellers.
“Patience is a Virtue”
It can be hard to remember that patience is a virtue in today’s fast-moving, always-on culture. Every day, we are bombarded with advertising, online apps and other media that promises to deliver on a product or service at increasing rates, instilling in us a greater desire for instant gratification of our wants and needs. But is that always a good thing? After all, we’ve all seen the harmful consequences of impatience: a driver runs a red light and gets into an accident; holiday shoppers shove each other on Black Friday and fight over discounted electronics and toys; students drop out of college because getting a degree feels like it’s taking too long.
It’s easy to lose sight of the many benefits of having patience because sometimes the frustration is all too much. However, research has revealed time and time again that the short term discomfort we might experience while we work toward our desired outcome is well worth the wait.
The Marshmallow Study
One of the best (and cutest!) studies on patience was conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University in 1972; it is famously known as the Marshmallow Experiment. Children between the ages of 3 and 5 were asked to sit a table and a marshmallow was placed in front of them. The researchers explained to the children that they had two options: either eat the marshmallow in front of them immediately (small reward) or wait 15 minutes and eat two marshmallows instead of one (large reward). The children were tracked by the researchers, well into adulthood, and the study revealed that those who were able to exercise patience and wait for their larger reward were more successful later on in life. They were also found to be better able to cope with stress and frustration as adolescents, suggesting that developing patience as children can lead to better coping skills later in life. Additional research by Dr. Sarah Schnitker, a psychologist from Baylor University, revealed that increased patience leads to higher achievements, which leads to greater well-being.
Research Findings on Delayed vs Immediate Gratification
What differentiates those who can delay gratification from those who can’t? The answer may lie in our brains. Researchers conducted brain scans of the marshmallow experiment participants after a period of 40 years had passed and the children well into adulthood. They found that the group that could delay gratification had greater activity in the prefrontal cortex area of the brain. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for thinking and planning, especially when it comes to actions that are relevant to our goals. It acts as the “control center” of the brain and is ultimately responsible for what actions we take. This finding suggests that the prefrontal cortex played a large part in helping people prioritize controlling their impulses in order to obtain a desired reward. Conversely, those participants who had trouble delaying gratification showed more activity in the ventral striatum area of the brain; the ventral striatum is part of the reward system of the brain. This finding suggests that those who could not delay gratification were drawn to the possibility of immediate rewards, which had an overriding effect on the rational, thinking parts of their brains.
The Marshmallow Experiment might lead you believe that patience is a trait that is hard-wired into our brains, but Dr. Schnitker’s research suggests that patience is a trait that can be developed. One way to increase patience is by tying a delay of gratification to a larger goal. By thinking about goals, we activate the prefrontal cortex and are therefore more likely to control our impulses. For example, we can teach children and adolescents that waiting to play video games until they’ve finished studying is tied to the goal of doing well in school, which in turn gives them greater choices in terms of occupation when they become adults. According to Dr. Schnitker, spirituality and religion can also help with the development of patience, perhaps because so many spiritual and religious practices emphasize keeping calm in the face of adversity. Religion and spirituality can also provide answers to the question of why humans suffer, which can give us the ability to bear hardships in life.
Therefore,apps or media that have clearly stated goals and can link children and adolescents’ actions to those goals can help children develop patience.
Similarly, creating media that emphasizes the spiritual, rather than the mundane, aspects of human existence can also help children and adolescents look towards something higher instead of becoming frustrated by the small annoyances in life.
Other methods of developing patience are demonstrated by the techniques that the researchers used in carrying out the marshmallow study. Recall that the experimenters took the children into a room and placed a marshmallow in front of them, then left the room. The children who were successful in not eating the marshmallow exhibited a variety of behaviors in order to avoid temptation: They would "cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can't see the tray, others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal.” In other words, the children distracted themselves in order to avoid temptation.
This suggests that techniques that promote distraction – of not always focusing on what’s in front of us – can help develop patience.
It’s also important to have multiple goals or objectives in life, so that we do not grow frustrated if we are not making progress in one area.
Suggestions for developing patience in children and adolescents using media:
Develop apps or games with multiple objectives and ways to succeed
Develop apps or games that require a level of patience in order to advance to the next level
Create media that emphasizes the spiritual aspects of life
Show examples of people who have overcome suffering through perseverance, such as Ghandi or Nelson Mandela
Create media that ties short-term objectives to long-term goals
Wenwen Ni is a PhD candidate in Social Psychology at UCLA. She is passionate about using psychological research to improve well-being.
https://huolab.psych.ucla.edu/people/
This blog was originally created to support Baylor University in hosting its Technology Innovation Request for Proposal: Improving Character Strengths of Adolescents through Technology Innovation.