British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones will be playing American music legend Carole King in a new biopic called Beautiful—a fact that was exclusively brought to my attention by the unhappy response of some of our people on Twitter.

King is Jewish. Edgar-Jones, evidently, is not.

I did the only thing you can do in such situations: I Google-image-searched Daisy Edgar-Jones. I found myself, despite myself, trying to assess things such as: is her hair naturally dark brown, or is it lighter but she dyes it? Naturally straight or flat-ironed? Because she looks to be a pale woman with dark eyes and dark hair. Much like so many Jews, movie star and (glances in mirror) otherwise.

And then Carole King, in her younger days. I see a blonde, light-eyed woman. Jewish-looking, but with specific traits that would seemingly make her less conventionally so than the non-Jewish woman playing her.  

And what an awful person I am for doing this. Didn’t I get the memo that there’s no such thing as looking Jewish? What am I even trying to find here?

I say that much of Jewish Twitter wasn’t pleased with the casting choice—even if the original report from Variety included Carole King herself offering her full-throated endorsement—but as always with this topic, there was a haziness around what, exactly, the problem was.

Contemporary progressive Jews have gotten themselves (do I say ourselves?) into a bind. On the one hand there’s this insistence that there’s no one way to look Jewish. On the other, there’s the impulse to flag whenever a straight actor is cast as LGBT, or when a white actor is cast as a racialized character. There is a cultural script for this situation, but if your hands are tied, you can’t apply it.

This was not the first time the question of whether Jewish roles can go to Jewish actors has come up. (See Sarah Seltzer’s 2021 analysis, as well as previous coverage this year at The CJN.) If the correct stance is that Jewishness is not a race, that only a Nazi would think there’s such a thing as looking Jewish, then any actor can play Jewish.

It’s not just about the idea that it’s antisemitic to say someone looks Jewish (which is itself arguably antisemitic). It’s also, more nobly, about inclusivity towards Jews of colour, who face racism within and outside the Jewish community.

Some is also about the in some ways more complicated plight of white Jewish converts, etc., who read as non-Jewish in Jewish spaces, and face discrimination there, while at the same time having the privilege of reading as unambiguously white (aka Christian) in mainstream spaces. A plight shared, kind of, by people whose every last ancestor was Jewish but who for whatever reason look Swedish.  

A part of Emily Tamkin’s book Bad Jews that I didn’t bring up in my review, but keep thinking about, is her insistence on the white privilege of white Jews such as herself, and whether it matters, not in terms of her Jewish authenticity generally but in this context, that she’s the child of a (white) convert to Judaism.

Are Jews racialized? Seems like potentially a different question than whether Jews are white.

How is physical Jewishness even understood? It all gets extremely subjective and personal. I find myself insisting that dark, frizz-prone hair is Jewish but that the nose thing is a stereotype, because… I, to my knowledge descended solely from Ashkenazi Jews, have Gilda Radner’s hair on Tina Fey’s face.

A Jewish woman with fine blonde wash-and-go hair and a Jennifer Grey “before” nose—and there are many such cases—might see the world differently.

It all seems intractable (not to mention exhausting) until you remember that there’s a framework for this exact situation.

What we need is a Jewish version of the Black-but-not-only concept of colourism. Which is to say: a person can be Black without having very dark skin (Meghan of Meghan and Harry comes to mind), and it’s rude to suggest otherwise. They, too, face racism, along with, at times, questions about whether they count. They count. They count!

Black people who do have particularly dark complexions and certain other features, however, face specific discrimination for their physical appearance. I don’t think anyone disputes this. (Who’m I kidding I’m sure there’s someone right now yelling at people online, disputing this.)

Something like this is going on for Jews. There is a material significance in the world in which we actually live to looking Jewish. It impacts how you’re received in and outside Jewish settings. Remember lived experience? There you go.

Until this can be spoken aloud, without preceding it (as I’ve done, alas) with 10 hours of handwringing about how yes, yes, you’re thoroughly Jewish if you’re Jewish however you look yes, don’t worry, I promise, not that anyone sensible would possibly care what I think… until that time comes, I do not see the point of even remarking about casting decisions.

I will nevertheless leave you with one such remark, which is that in any eventual biopic of Reece Shearsmith, the only acceptable selection is Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @bovymaltz