Sarah Silverman, ‘Jewface’ critic, joins non-Jewish actor Bradley Cooper in Netflix’s Leonard Bernstein movie
Silverman is likely to be playing Leonard Bernstein’s sister, according to Deadline.
Sarah Silverman speaks on stage at Variety’s 2022 Power Of Women event in New York City, May 5, 2022. (Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Variety)
(JTA) – She popularized the term “Jewface” to describe non-Jewish actors playing Jewish roles, and kicked off a heated cultural conversation in the process.
Now, Jewish actor and comedian Sarah Silverman is joining the cast of a movie that casts non-Jew Bradley Cooper as widely influential Jewish conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein — with a prosthetic nose, to boot.
Deadline reported that Silverman has joined “Maestro,” an upcoming Netflix biopic of Bernstein starring, written by and directed by Cooper (and co-written by Jewish screenwriter Josh Singer). The movie will span multiple decades of Bernstein’s storied career and tumultuous personal life, and also stars Carey Mulligan, Jeremy Strong and Maya Hawke; Steven Spielberg is a producer.
Deadline speculates that Silverman will play Bernstein’s sister.
The film, which is filming now in preparation for a likely 2023 release, is being developed in cooperation with Bernstein’s family. But it still attracted controversy after recently released set photos showed Cooper donning the nose to play Bernstein as an older man. Critics on social media said the film’s choice to use the nose plays into antisemitic stereotypes, even if it does cause Cooper to look more like Bernstein.
Silverman has made herself into the most prominent voice on Jewish casting issues after angrily opposing a planned miniseries about Jewish comedian Joan Rivers which would have starred non-Jewish actor Kathryn Hahn.
“There’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews, and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish, but people whose Jewishness is their whole being,” Silverman stated on her podcast last year. “One could argue, for instance, that a gentile playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called ‘Jewface.’”
Silverman, whose autobiographical musical “The Bedwetter” based on her 2010 memoir just premiered off Broadway, has not yet shared her “Maestro” news in any of her social media channels.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
