jewish-privilege:

…Imagine my reaction when I opened up the trailer for On the Basis of Sex last week and saw Felicity Jones grace the screen. British Felicity Jones, with her fine features and her awkward American accent, beautiful, perfectly manicured, and erasing any trace of Ginsburg’s roots.

…But I think what hurts more about watching Jones portray the first female, Jewish Supreme Court Justice is how little they physically look alike. Justice Ginsburg has strong, identifiably Ashkenazi Jewish features. She looks Jewish. Missing from Felicity Jones is any trace of RBG’s large Jewish nose. In its place is a delicate, slightly upturned nose. One that conforms more closely with White Western Christian standards of beauty. Frankly, the absence of RBG’s schnoz is bumming me out.

…This issue is more than skin deep. Judaism is a huge part of Justice Ginsburg’s identity now, but it also provides another dimension to her early career. While it’s definitely true that when RBG went to law school, it was uncommon for women to attend, and when she challenged legal precedent she was a young woman disrupting what has historically been a boys’ club, it was also unusual to be a Jew in these contexts at the time.

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered law school, many top universities still had “Jewish quotas.” Not many Jews were practicing law, and not many historically had done so. So it was not just that she was a woman disrupting these norms and defying conventions in the legal field, she was a Jewish woman in a professional field that did not have many Jews or women. She was a double anomaly. She is doubly impressive.

And yet, any trace of her Jewish identity — from her accent to her face — is erased in the casting of Felicity Jones in the role. This should be pissing people off. Prosthetic makeup is used all the time to transform actors into their roles in biopics. Prosthetics were used to make Nicole Kidman into Virginia Woolf in The Hours and Meryl Streep into Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. So why is it missing here? Why are we allowing a key component of this icon’s identity to be erased? Why do we need a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who, it should be noted, was a total babe but really that’s beside the point — to be conventionally beautiful?

The way I see it, this is really problematic for two reasons. First of all, the irony of altering the appearance of a historic figure in order to make her more conventionally attractive in a movie about her combating sexual discrimination is almost too rich to put into words.

Second of all, representation is important.

…Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up with identifiably Ashkenazi Jewish features at a time when it was not easy being Jewish in her professional field or in society in general. When RBG’s character is robbed of these features, the story loses something. We all lose something. Something important and integral to Ginsburg’s, and America’s, struggle.

And beyond the story, we lose something else. As a girl growing up with a big Jewish nose, I hated my nose because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I thought my nose was actually incompatible with delicate femininity. How wonderful it would have been to have more examples of that in popular media, to know that it could be otherwise. And how wonderful it would be now to see the story of a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg: hard-headed, trail-blazing, beautiful, and Jewish.

Read Anna Miriam’s full piece at Alma.

We. Are. Not. White.

I’m Not Okay with Felicity Jones Playing Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Her New Biopic