To say I was reluctant to watch the new Netflix film, You People, is an understatement. I first heard about the film through social media, when my feeds were suddenly full of exasperated Jews venting at yet another lazy, inaccurate, and harmful portrayal of us.
For those who don’t know, You People is a romcom starring Jonah Hill and Lauren London as Ezra Cohen and Amira Mohammed, a couple whose relationship is almost scuppered by (Netflix’s words) his ‘progressive and semi-woke Jewish parents’ (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny) and her ‘unyielding yet concerned Muslim parents’ (Eddie Murphy and Nia Long). The outcome is supposed to be a hilarious ‘interfaith, culture-clash twist on the relationship rite of passage [i.e. meeting the parents].’
So why are people in the Jewish community, myself included, upset about the film?
Well, where should I start …
How about the fact that while Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny both have Jewish roots on their fathers’ side, neither actor actually identify as Jewish themselves. [For other recent cases of ‘Jewface’, please see: Rachel Brosnahan as Mrs. Maisel and Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir. In the recent words of Sarah Silverman: “In a time when the importance of representation is seen as so essential and so front and center, why does ours constantly get breached even today in the thick of it?”
Or there’s the fact that they manage to spectacularly misrepresent Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. They do this in a number of ways, the strangest of which is having Jonah Hill’s character, Ezra, go out for lunch with a fellow congregant following the service, despite the fact that Jews fast on Yom Kippur – an inaccuracy which, to my mind, shows an almost callous level of disregard for our traditions and a complete lack of interest in painting a truthful picture of who we are.
But look, these inaccuracies are just… well… actually, I don’t know what they are (laziness? Stupidity? Arrogance? ) but they’re probably not going to cause any real-world harm. Some of the other things they get wrong, however, could.
Let’s start with the fact that, SHOCKER, The Jews are rich. Rich, rich, rich. In case you don’t get the more subtle hints (the BIG HOUSE, the FLASHY CAR, the fact that Hill’s character works in finance), they throw in some more direct references too, just for good measure.
The trope that Jews are wealthy and greedy is malicious, ancient and deeply woven into our society (see: Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’s Fagin). You can read more about it in this great article, but needless to say, it’s not true. In fact, it’s recently been reported that one-third of Holocaust survivors in Israel live below the poverty line – a national disgrace (and I’m a Zionist), and a reality made even more tragic by the fact that this disgusting racist trope is still so commonly believed today.