The famed Hollywood sign marks the 100th anniversary of the first time it was lit. Photo by Getty Images
In a 2021 episode of the NBC drama Nurses, a Hasidic yeshiva student’s leg is crushed by a car. He needs a bone graft, but he and his stern father refuse because it could be “a dead goyim leg — from anyone. An Arab, a woman.”
Allison Josephs, founder and executive director of Jew in the City, immediately tweeted about the show’s ignorant and bigoted portrayal of Hasidic Jews, which included incorrect Yiddish and perpetuated the falsehood that Jewish law forbids organ transplants from gentiles.
Josephs’ tweet reached a million views within 24 hours. NBC pulled the episode from all platforms and future airings, and the story was reported on around the world.
A month later, Josephs and her team protested outside 30 Rock with life-size cutouts of Hasidic characters that had appeared on NBC shows over the years. It wasn’t flattering.
By the following year, JITC had been invited to meet with NBC executives to discuss how to improve representation.
Josephs, an observant Jew living in New York City, worked for Partners in Torah and other Jewish organizations before starting JITC, first as a YouTube channel in 2005 and then as an independent nonprofit in 2014. “I saw an opportunity to tell the story in my own words and to basically reclaim the narrative,” she told me.
Then, in March 2020, just as the world was shutting down due to COVID-19, the Netflix show Unorthodox became a massive hit.
“The world was so obsessed with watching this show,” Josephs said. “We got more traffic in March and April 2020 than we had gotten in the entire 2019.”
The problem was, she said, the show’s depiction of Hasidic life was wrong and harmful.
Josephs realized that she needed to address how the Jewish community is depicted in the media, which is where most people learn about Jews.
“I’m noticing that everyone else’s representation is getting better,” she said. “You’re seeing the Muslim character on Jack Ryan stop in the middle of the day to pray, and he’s enjoying this spiritual moment. And I’m thinking, ‘when can a Jew do that? Why can’t we be happy?’”
Josephs launched the JITC Hollywood Bureau in 2021, the first of its kind, to champion “authentic and nuanced portrayals of Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the entertainment industry” and to “combat antisemitism by sharing stories of our people, history, culture, and traditions.”
While Hollywood has been reckoning with its misrepresentation of different minorities and has taken steps to improve it, Josephs maintains that studios and showrunners don’t consider Jews, who make up about 2.4% of the American population and 0.2% of the global population, a minority and tend not to depict them with the same thoughtfulness that they treat other minority groups.
“Since Oct. 7, I think what we’ve seen is how dehumanized Jews have become,” Josephs said. “That we could be tortured in the most unspeakable, unimaginable ways, and we have people celebrating, invalidating, downplaying, justifying [it]. You can only do that when you don’t actually see the people being harmed as fully human. If it was actually humans that were being held hostage, you couldn’t rip their fliers down.”
According to Josephs, the Bureau has met with studio and network executives to encourage more authentic representation of Jews and Jewish life, and have held DEI trainings. They’re in the process of creating the first-ever Jewish fact sheet for writers, as well as conducting the first significant study, with the Norman Lear Center, measuring the impact of Jewish stereotypes in movies and shows on attitudes toward Jews.
Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is hosting its Governors Awards, a gala dinner that attracts more stars than the Oscars.
This morning, the Bureau sent out an open letter to the Academy, criticizing its new representation and inclusion standards for excluding Jews.
The letter has more than 200 signatories, including David Schwimmer, Julianna Margulies, Debra Messing, Ginnifer Goodwin, Brett Gelman, Michael Rapaport, Marta Kauffman, Gary Barber, Gail Berman and Nancy Spielberg.
“No one’s done this for the Jews because nobody wants to have this fight,” Josephs said. “We are an oppressed community and deserve nuanced and proud representation too. I’m ready to have that fight.”