‘Licorice Pizza’ captures the moment when pop culture finally began to view Jewish women as beautiful

(JTA) – This year everyone seemed to have an opinion on how the entertainment industry views Jewish women.

Comedian Sarah Silverman and others openly railed against what she called the “Jewish face” or the trend of casting non-Jewish actresses as (Ashkenazi) Jewish women; a storyline for this year’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” season mocked a similar idea with Larry David casting a Latina actress as a Jewish character on a childhood show.

Whether you agree with Silverman or not, it’s hard to hear a term like “jewface” and not think about what Jewish characters have historically looked like on screen. For much of the 20th century, show business and popular culture were viewed as stereotypical “Jewish” traits – curly hair, olive skin, a prominent nose – either “exotic”, weird, or worse, which inspired countless Jewish women to undergo rhinoplasty undergo. It was not until Barbra Streisand put her “Jewish” appearance on display at the end of the 1960s – like Bette Midler a few years later – that culture began to change. Streisand, writes her biographer Neal Gabler, “somehow managed to change the entire definition of beauty.”

Now, at the end of 2021, there is a film set in the 1970s with a Jewish protagonist who is not only played by a Jewish actress, but also portrayed as a sex symbol.

The film is “Licorice Pizza,” the latest from acclaimed writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson, and after several weeks of limited release, it hit wide theaters this Christmas. And the character is Alana Kane, played by singer Alana Haim of the band Haim, who is making her screen debut.

In the film, Alana is an aimless, unsuspecting woman in her twenties in the San Fernando Valley who gains maturity and entrepreneurship after being friends with Gary Valentine, an over-the-top child actor (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman), who gets her involved in various business plans and convinces her to act. The two get into a funny, flirtatious co-dependency – Gary, not even 16 years old, shows his attraction to Alana early and often, especially when the two start a waterbed business together and he instructs her to sell the cheesy relics of “behaving sexy” over the phone.

But it’s not just Gary. Apparently everyone in the film, from lustful senior industry veterans to young politicians, is obsessed with Alana – not despite her obviously Jewish appearance, but because of it. Anderson plays Haim’s physical parallels with the Jewish beauties of the era: a casting director (Harriet Sansom Harris) raves about her “Jewish nose”, which she thinks is a very sought-after look, while the real producer Jon Peters (played) by Bradley Cooper as a manic, sex-obsessed maniac), gets very adept with Alana – after bragging about the fact that Streisand is his girlfriend.

“Licorice Pizza” is in line with the ideas of Henry Bial’s book “Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen” from 2005, especially its chapter on the 1970s, which Bial described as the time when “ Jews became sexy ”. At the time of her Broadway debut in the early 1960s, Streisand was described in reviews as a “homely frump” and “a slouch-eyed creature with hinged ankles.” But in the 1970s, fueled by her immense charisma and attitude towards her own fame, she was one of the greatest sex symbols in pop culture, and even made the cover of Playboy in 1977 – a year after she starred and produced her own ” A Star is Born “remake. Your physical appearance has not changed in the meantime; just the public’s reactions to it.

Barbra Streisand in the 1968 film Funny Girl, when she was beginning to be adopted as a Jewish sex symbol. (John Springer Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images)

Anderson himself was born in 1970, so the teenagers’ adventures in the film aren’t specifically his memories – they are mostly those of his friend Gary Goetzman, a former child actor who lived through many of the episodes shown in the film. And Anderson himself is not a Jew, but his long-time partner Maya Rudolph, who plays a small role in the film, is. Yet perhaps due to his birth in a world where Jewish women were suddenly considered sexy, Anderson seems to naturally understand the time-specific sexual, cultural, and spiritual dynamics that would lead to someone like Alana being celebrated for their looks.

Anderson wasn’t immune to this dynamic. As a child he had a crush on Alana Haim’s mother, Donna Rose, who was his art teacher: “I was in love with her as a little boy, absolutely beaten,” he told the New York Times, raving about her “long,” beautiful, flowing brown hair . “

For much of the film, Alana is unsure whether or how to use her sex appeal as she is also trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. An attempt to respect the wishes of her traditional family (the other Haims, including their real parents, playing the Kane clan) by dating a nice, successful, age-appropriate Jewish guy ends in disaster at a Shabbat dinner , as the guy himself, Lance (Skyler Gisondo), refuses to say the “Hamotzi” prayer.

The scene also touches on the debate about “religious” vs. “cultural” Judaism that has been raging in American-Jewish circles at least since the film was made. While acknowledging that he “grew up in the Jewish tradition,” Lance cites “Vietnam” as the reason he now identifies as an atheist and cannot bring himself to speak a blessing. In response, Alana got him to admit that he was circumcised before saying, “Then you are an Af-King Jew!”

The morality of the scene could be the movie’s biggest lesson about Judaism: it’s not just a belief system. It’s an innate part of you and affects everything from your hair to your nose to your genitals. It can cause you to be perceived as ugly one decade and a bomb the next.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company 70 Faces Media.