There's nothing funny about Farrakhan

How You People fails to further the discourse about Black-Jewish relations

After scrolling through the mixed reactions in articles and on Twitter to Jonah Hill's new rom-com You People that dropped on Netflix in Canada last week, I decided I needed to see it for myself. And to put it briefly, as I expect the following to be anything but, I have some feelings. 

The movie, if you have not seen it, stars Jonah Hill, Eddie Murphy, Lauren London, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, David Duchovny, and Nia Long, and centres itself on the fallout after Ezra Cohen, a Jewish boy from Los Angeles, falls in love with Amira Mohammed, the daughter of a member of the Nation of Islam. 

For a premise that had real potential to be part of the discourse on Black-Jewish relations, and interfaith and interracial relationships, the film consistently falls short. Instead, it promotes and relies on tired and problematic Antisemitic stereotypes, makes a mockery of Islam, and is vaguely homophobic. On multiple occasions it reels you in with the glimmer of a scene that could lead to engagement in a difficult discussion about any of the topics it purports to highlight, but then immediately backs away. It's also shockingly short on jokes for a comedy. 

With all of that being said, I still believe it's worth taking a moment to talk about You People because of how many people seem to be watching it.

Representations of Jews on Screen

The depiction of Jewish characters in film and television is a topic that has been coming up a lot in my life this year, most recently around the films Armageddon Time and The Fablemans, but also in discussing TV shows like Never Have I Ever, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, to name a few. It's a topic that, in the current climate of rising Antisemitism, is in my mind when watching something in the same way as the Bechdel Test and other markers for how minority characters are portrayed on screen. 

Jews are not a monolith. This is something that myself and others have repeated like a mantra when talking about our community. As such, I'm always somewhat reticent to comment on the depiction of Jews who live their Judaism differently from how I do. However, there is a time and a place for everything, and certain decisions can set a tone about how you portray Jews as a group. You People, certainly falls victim to this. After a brief opening credit scene, the movie truly begins at Yom Kippur services. The camera pans down the aisle, focusing on black and brown dress shoes of the men before coming upon a pair of immaculate Nike high tops. The camera darts past them to the next pair of dress shoes, and then returns to pan up the body of the sneaker-wearer. We see rolled up sleeves revealing tattoos and a head without a kippah. While the characters do quickly address the lack of kippah at Yom Kippur services, what we are clearly being shown is someone rejecting tradition (customarily, one could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery if they had tattoos, something which the growing passing of Holocaust survivors is forcing discussion around, and men would never enter the sanctuary with their heads uncovered). 

There is nothing wrong with centering a film on secular Jews, or having characters where their Judaism was less at the forefront. There has always been something kind of great about how Rachel Green’s Judaism on Friends was just a part of life that didn’t require a lot of discussion. But our only glimpse of Jonah Hill’s Ezra Cohen as a practicing Jew felt less like the portrayal of secular Judaism and more like a depiction of someone who was so much cooler than the stuffy world of suits and dress shoes that they are from. Someone too cool for a kippah. 

This overly stereotyped portrayal of Jews continues with Ezra’s overbearing mother, portrayed by Louis-Dreyfuss who pushes him into a boring date with a girl from the synagogue; family dynamics that are better suited to the era of Mrs. Maisel than to tie-dye-tracksuit-wearing Jews in LA in 2022. 

The depiction of Jews is one that relies on the increasingly popular misrepresentation of Jews as being the pinnacle of Whiteness. To be clear, while there are many Jews like me who are among the most fair-skinned people you will meet, as any self-respecting White Supremacist will explain, we are not “white people”, and our experiences with full access to society in North America and around the world is still quite recent. There were Jewish quotas at universities into the 1960s. On multiple occasions the film makes implied references to a perceived “Jewish privilege”, initially with assertions that Jews did not have to work hard to achieve success in America because they had become wealthy from the African slave trade (a discussion too complex for both that film and this piece, but that has recently become wildly misrepresented given that covenants restricting Jews from purchasing land in certain areas in the United States and Canada are still turning up when land is sold) and later when Ezra offers to put Amira (London) in touch with a relative to help her find work. 

While none of the actors in the film are particularly known for their subtlety, given the current climate, one would have expected at least a modicum of consideration to the message this depiction of Jews might send.  

Depiction of Nation of Islam on Screen 

While it only arises a few times in the film, references to the Nation of Islam and its adherents are hardly flattering. What it does reinforce is that there is nothing funny about Louis Farrakhan. In one of the only scenes where the question of faith is raised in the film, association with Farrakhan seems to be the crux of the joke. But, particularly for Jewish audiences, his mention sucks the air from the room. The film then goes on to rely on traditional Muslim garments and the practice of saying grace before a meal (one that also exists in Judaism, but is not depicted), as comedic devices, without offering any further or deeper discussion as to what adherents of the Nation of Islam believe or why Akbar joined the faith. 

Depiction of Black Characters on Screen

The message that the film seemed to be trying to send is that those of us who are not persons of colour will never understand what it is like to be Black in America. And I think that’s true. For all the affection, admiration, and comradery I feel for my Black friends, colleagues, and members of my Jewish community, I will never fully understand what it is like to walk through the world in their shoes. But for all that the movie effectively sends this message, it also relies on tropes and stereotypes in depicting a lot of the interactions between Black and non-Black characters.

Eddie Murphy’s character is depicted as reactionary and vindictive; incapable of taking a joke or honestly engaging in a nuanced conversation with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss about the historical persecution of both Black and Jewish persons and their experiences arriving as an unwanted other in America without trying to ignite the Olympics of persecution that is so frequently and unnecessarily used to throw a monkey wrench into Black-Jewish relations today. This is exemplified during the dinner scene, one of few notable scenes in the film, where in response to a suggestion about taking a trip on a boat, Eddie Murphy and Nia Long’s characters make evidently sarcastic comments about how Black people don’t have the best history with boats or water to which Louis-Dreyfuss joins in to say, “like Jews with trains”. Rather than letting what could actually have been a passable joke about both slavery and the Holocaust stand, Murphy and Long’s characters immediately have an intense reaction to Louis-Dreyfuss trying to join in on the self-deprecation. While on a certain level this is reflective of where we are culturally right now and the struggle to find the line between when we can make a joke and when we can’t, it creates an unfair impression of Murphy and Long’s characters as unreasonable people who are on the lookout for ways to attack their Jewish future relations.

Blending It All Together

The character of Ezra Cohen solidified that Jonah Hill is not the person I am not ready to have replace Sacha Baron Cohen as our dedicated spokes-Jew. The character is so desperate to ingratiate himself to his future in-laws that he refers to Louis Farrakhan, longtime promoter of Antisemitism, as the “GOAT”. He is a Jew with trembling knees, and one who seems to have no problem rejecting his own identity in order to please others. This is not the depiction of Jewish characters that young Jews and others need right now. Just like every other minority group, we need to see characters who are relatable and at the same time stand by who they are, even when being who they are is difficult as being Jewish so often is. We saw an honest representation of that in The Fablemans and it would have been nice to see it here too. 

While the depiction of the Jewish characters’ over-enthusiastic desire to ingratiate themselves to Amira and her family and to blend in with their culture is campy and somewhat tone-deaf, what astonished me was the complete and utter lack of reciprocity. At no point in the film do we see Amira or her parents trying to learn about life as a Jewish person or trying to embrace or understand Jewish culture. Nor, do we see any expectation placed on them to do so by the Jewish characters. 

The cultural exchange that the film set out to demonstrate is entirely one-sided. We don’t see a true example of two families with different cultures and life experiences coming together to better understand each other and support their children. You People could have been a really good film. It could have been a moment to talk about the supportive relationship that used to exist between the Black and Jewish communities that has somehow been forgotten and how essential it is for all of us to restore it. It could have been a chance to talk about the increasing incidence of interfaith and interracial relationships and how they can be supported. It could have been a moment to talk about how minorities and minority experiences are intersectional in ways that are not always visible just looking at the colour of someone’s skin or the texture of their hair. 

Someone on Twitter commented that the movie covers the discourse on race relations for the first half of 2023, and all I can hope is that we find a better piece of art that portrays everyone in it more fairly to ground that conversation.