Is Zohan Good for the Jews?

I don’t see a lot of movies in the theatre. Maybe it’s the fact that going to the movies today requires a trip to the atm. Maybe its because there is not a lot of good stuff out there. But I was intrigued by the latest Adam Sandler film, Don’t Mess with the Zohan. The trailers were hard to miss: Adam Sandler leaping from rooftops, catching terrorists' bullets with his bare hands, and going all "Crouching Tiger" on some bad guys. It was Sandler as an Israeli Mossad agent wunderkind whose fondest dream was to leave the high-intensity world of international intrigue and the cycle of violence in the Middle East and become a hairdresser at the Paul Mitchell salon in New York City.

He resists his parent’s plea to go to New York and join the family electronics business. As we know, every Israeli in this country is in the electronics business and, as the movie shows, not very reputable. When he shares his dream, they brand him as gay and squash his dream. The gay bashing in the movie was a big problem. Nevertheless, Sandler finds his way to New York and begins the journey to fulfill his dream.

He lands in a part of New York where there is a street with Israelis on one side and Palestinians on the other. And the shop where he finds a job cutting hair is owned by a Palestinian woman who, remarkably, is fleeing from the cycle of violence that led Sandler towards his goal.

Every stereotype of the Arab/Israeli conflict emerges in the film. Bad accents, bad fashion, and bad behavior combine to give this a “west side story” kind of feel. And of course, when a evil developer pits one side against the other, the story comes full circle Arabs and Israelis join together to fight this evil.

Sandler gets some aspects of Israeliness right, but the accent is horribly off--more Italian than Israeli--and the overall result is like a mash-up of every Israeli stereotype known to man. Zohan is a killer with bad fashion sense; a secret agent who likes wearing Mariah Carey t-shirts to kick some terrorist butt. He looks and sounds more like a parody, or a broad sketch, of an Israeli than the real thing: sandals and cutoff jeans; a bushy goatee and Jew fro; tortured English grammar; and an insistent, ringing chorus of "no, no, no" that punctuates his conversation.

Sandler's Zohan is the latest in a fairly lengthy line of Hollywood depictions of Israelis. Remember blue-eyed, sandy-haired Paul Newman as the brawny, heroic Ari Ben-Canaan in Exodus. Or Kirk Douglas in Cast a Giant Shadow as a half-American, half-Israeli hero. Playing Mickey Marcus, the Jewish American army officer whose astute guidance helped the Israeli army triumph in the 1948 war, Douglas (himself Jewish, born Issur Danielovitch) exuded the same radiant glow that Newman had.

Richard Dreyfuss played Yonatan Netanyahu, and Anthony Hopkins was Yitzhak Rabin, and Burt Lancaster was Shimon Peres in 1976's television movie Victory at Entebbe (which had the added pleasure of Elizabeth Taylor in a small role). It was also a goldmine of ludicrous accents, hairstyles, and wardrobes. The unbuttoned white shirts and copious chest hair of the Israeli politicians were particularly notable in their unintentionally parodic silliness.

In 2005, Steven Spielberg's Munich appeared. Even here, Munich retained the stunt-casting, "that-guy-couldn’t-possibly-be-Jewish" feel, with James Bond, Daniel Craig as a South African explosives expert. Eric Bana was more serviceable as Avner, an ex-Mossad agent turned global vigilante, but finally Spielberg's film, in small doses, went with the most audacious Hollywood casting decision of all: having Israeli actors depict themselves.


So the question that is asked after every one of these horrible stereotypical movies hits the screen is “is it good for the Jews”.

Zohan deals humorously with the Arab Israeli conflict by moving it from the streets of the west bank to the field of a “hacky sack” tournament and then into the streets of New York City. Can Arabs and Jews live side by side. The movie’s answer is yes. It also suggests that there is evil in the world and that those who perpetrate evil do not distinguish between cultures.

I do not know yet if Zohan is good for us. I know that I laughed at much of it, which is good. I also recoiled at some of the stereotypes and I questioned others.

Nevertheless, in the blogosphere, where much has been written, the general consensus is that while the movie was marginal, the message was good. Coexistence is a great value and but Arabs and Israelis who have seen the movie, relished that as a Hollywood message for the 21st century.