I went through my 20s with a beef. I didn’t like how Jews were portrayed in pop culture, or in the minds of my friends, Jewish and not. I didn’t like it when Henry Winkler, a Jewish graduate of the Yale School of Drama, portrayed the toughest character on TV, he had to play an Italian. I was aware of both text: Every actor gets the part for which he is suited. And subtext: If you’re a gritty, handsome Jew, you’re going to play a guy with a name like Arthur Fonzarelli. I found the stereotype affixed to Jews in my time and place—the Chicago suburbs in the 1980s—which was all about our suitability as husbands and excellence at math, narrow to the point of suffocation. A positive stereotype is still a stereotype. I wanted out.
I think director Josh Safdie was after something similar in Marty Supreme, now up for nine Oscars. Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is amoral, gifted, and reckless. He is single-minded in his pursuit of greatness, a narcissist who, though he wears his identity lightly—not once does he wonder if it’s good for the Jews—never forgets that he is a Hebrew in a world where that means something to nearly everyone. History, especially the history of the Jews, is on his mind, even if he doesn’t often say so. When asked his thoughts on an upcoming match against Holocaust survivor Béla Kletzki, Marty says, “I’m basically gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t.” So yes, Marty is Jewish, just not in the way his parents probably intended. He is determined to be his own man.
I know the feeling. When I became a writer, I took it as my mission to break the cage, bust the gates, and be free, even if it meant being deplorable—or writing about deplorable people who happened to be Jewish. For my book Tough Jews, I took as source material the gangster stories my Bensonhurst-born father told in lieu of traditional bedtime fare. Tales about Red Levine, the hitman who would not accept an assignment on a Saturday because you don’t work on Shabbat, and Tick Tock Tannenbaum, so-called because he never shut up, who committed a string of famous murders. Gangi Cohen, who fled the mob for LA, sought work in the movies, and was hauled back in cuffs after a cop saw him in the boxing picture Golden Boy.
