Offensive trope, IMO, seeking others' opinions: You Have To Have Jews

So let me start off by saying yeah, I'm Jewish, so I do have a personal reaction to this trope. It revolves around the idea that there are a lot (too many?) Jews in media, and thus there are Jewish actors/references where you wouldn't expect them (where they shouldn't be?) At best it has a very anti-Semitic subtext (I'd say anti-Semitic text, but YMMV on that).

I do see that more people than just the original creator have added examples to it, so I wouldn't go ahead and cutlist it a this point, but I'd kind of like the Mods' imput on their thoughts.

To give an example of why it's troubling- check out this excerpt from the descriptor from All Jews Are Cheapskates, "In Great Britain, this trope is less common, since despite the fact that You Have to Have Jews, Jews are in fact a much smaller minority, and their economical niche is filled by Scotsmen"

It seems like, using that example as an illustration that the trope is sort of a substitute for the phrase "Jews control the media".

Well, the first thing to do is clean up the wicks where it's being used to simply mean "There are Jews here." along with other misuses.

Hmmm. I have always accepted Harry Golden's explanation from one of his books based on his newspaper The Carolina Isrealite. He wrote that when it comes to achieving success and acceptance in American culture, the simplest and most direct paths are sports and the entertainment industry. He then gave examples of successive generations of immigrant athletes and entertainers who cracked those barriers, from the Irish through to the (current at time of writing) Puerto Rican populations. Maybe that was a bit naive on my part but it seemed reasonable.

I think the phrasing in the description is er, uh, patronizing isn't the exact right word, I'll settle for unfortunate for now.

I also do not like the title. There was a book called The Jewish Connection that was published years ago that described what the author called the "hidden influence" of the Jews throughout history. It was fascinating and not the anti-Semitic rant you might expect. Hmmm

edited 8th Mar '11 9:55:31 AM by blackcat

IIRC, it was written less... sympathetic in the YKTTW, and it seems like that's changed in the current description, but still kind of off.

I also had a thought about one of the examples, the one from Snatch. While that example involved around pretending to be Jewish, there's also similar cases of a guy pretending to be Irish in Boardwalk Empire so he can get in with the Irish mob, or similarly, people in Always Camp professions who pretend to be gay. Fauxreigner might cover the first two, or if not, there seems to be a broader trope than "pretends to be Jewish".

I think that may have been what Maddy was talking about when she mentioned removing the examples that clearly don't work. Not sure, won't put words in her mouth. She bites.

Only occasionally.

But what I was trying to say is that we need to check the wicks to see if it's being used accordingtothe definition, or whether it's morphing on pages other than it's main page. I have to admit, I wasn't really enthused about this one back when it was proposed, both because it was nebulous (too many Jews? compared to what? In the YKTTW it was apparently based on the disproportionate number of Jews depicted in Media compared to the percentage of Jews in the whole population, but it was ignoring that there is a disproportionately high number of Jews in the entertainment fields, compared to their percentage in the whole population.) and because it has a high potential for misuse and simple complaining.

edited 8th Mar '11 10:41:01 AM by Madrugada

I'm Jewish, and this is not offensive in my opinion.

It hasn't been used all that much to be honest.

One of the misuse wicks, although misspelled is one entry on The Most Interesting Man In The World- it lists for Fake Nationality "The actor who plays him, Jonathan Goldsmith, is a Jew from New York", and for Jew from New York is a pot hole for You Gotta Have Jews.

There's also an example from some work that I think has to do with a Bar Mitzvah shown in a work set in rural Indiana or something- the idea being that there aren't many Jews in that location so "obviously" it's an example of this trope.

"Disproportionaly high number of Jewish characters to actual population" is a valid trope, and it can be cleaned up.

That might be a statistic, but I don't know if there's really a trope there. I think there might be a possibility that Jews function as the "readily available minority" (I'm thinking of how on a Christmas Episode, you'll always have one Jewish character who will be Jewish for that occasion).

Conversely, and what this trope seems to argue is that there's Creator Provincialism in which whether Jewish or not, people from New York or Hollywood have a lot of Jewish characters- the idea seems to be that the presence of Jews indicates that the creator is out-of-touch with the norm.

edited 8th Mar '11 10:58:01 AM by Jordan

Go to the discussion page and read the original YKTTW. There's a very sound reason that the number of Jews in Media is higher than the proportion of Jews in the population as a whole. Most media comes from Either New York or California, both of which skew incredibly high on the proportion of Jews in the population compared to the rest of the US, and the US has 40% of the world's population of Jews.

Oh it's another fucking trend page with a bunch of examples that don't point to any consistent pattern. Crap on a cracker, if i saw the two film examples elsewhere, I'd think they were about something else completely and the main description seems to use "subjective" incorrectly.

I just want to cut this. I've seen this before. "Ooh, there's a pattern that indicates the underlying strata of the film making business" and then the good pages show definite specific ways that the underlying strata imposes itself on the landscape while the bad pages just give us a bunch of hills.

First, let's be clear. These aren't tropes, things which aren't patterns of fictional elements that replicate across works aren't tropes so broad trends in show business aren't tropes. They are interesting so we'd be happy to have them but they also tend to hold up as well as an orbital chocolate teapot. If they are to stay they have to first accept that the example system we have means that just having a bunch of jewish characters on the page doesn't mean jack because a single example doesn't show the trend in itself and won't form a proper sampling of fiction by the very wiki process that works wonderfully for actual tropes. Second, it better had be clear on what it is about. Jews ruling the world is not the trend we are talking about, jews having money is not what this is about and in fact characters saying "Jews run business" is even less what this is about. You've started talking about a real life trend, you don't get to include things that aren't talking about that trend just because you've managed to make it seem respectable by having it come from fiction.

And the name's a pile of ass too.

edited 8th Mar '11 11:17:20 AM by SomeSortOfTroper

I won't deny the statistics. That being said, there's a difference from pointing out a "write what you know" and taking seriously a joke from a musical and actually thinking there's some kind of obligation for media to have Jewish characters.

Also interesting, as someone (not sure who) added to the main article- during the time in Holywood in which there were a whole lot of Jewish directors, producers, and actors, there actually weren't a whole lot of Jewish characters.

Edit- in a somewhat paradoxical way an article (like Useful Notes) talking about Jews in Hollywood would actually be less offensive. For instance, this kind of reminded me of how (in a kind of unfortunate implications example), the crooked businessman Dibbler is particularly Ambiguously Jewish in [1] the novel where he plays a part in creating that verse's version of the movie industry.

edited 8th Mar '11 11:16:12 AM by Jordan

Also interesting, as someone (not sure who) added to the main article- during the time in Holywood in which there were a whole lot of Jewish directors, producers, and actors, there actually weren't a whole lot of Jewish characters.

But also at that time religion was much less likely to be mentioned or indicated at all for any character. It's a faulty correlation.

edited 8th Mar '11 11:32:12 AM by Madrugada

I've read the page but I'm not sure what the trope is. And there's no laconic. I'm getting something about how Jews pursue some field, but I'm not sure how that's a trope.

I agree that this is problematic, at least.

The title suggests obligation — You Have to Have Jews because the Jewish media says so, or something.

The description suggests a demographic fact — there are plenty of Jewish people in the American entertainment industry — but stops short of explaining what visable effect this has on the media, if any. In fact, it says this is "noticeable to viewers and readers who live in areas where Jewish populations are much smaller" — noticeable how? Without that, it's not especially relevant, and that vagueness makes it possible to read something anti-semitic between the lines; if we don't have anything to say about it, why are we bringing it up?

If the trope was something like Jewish Entertainer, I could see that — it's a stereotype, it shows up in fiction, fine.

edited 8th Mar '11 8:14:30 PM by Bailey

I don't really see whats offensive about it.

The trope idea I'm getting from some of the examples is Token Jew, but I'm not sure that's distinct enough from Token Minority to be worth while.

^ It's more that Jews are too widely used, not that they're tokenized.

I was thinking of this quote a couple of posts up- the comment about "noticeable to viewers and readers who live in areas where Jewish populations are much smaller".

Is this really a widely felt thing wherein people think it's odd to see Jewish characters?

Jewish populations are frankly small everywhere except Israel, so I'd wonder why if true, this wouldn't be equally true in areas with comparatively large Jewish populations, which are still fairly small.

And while I can see why Jewish characters might be unusual in another country, it's unusual in the same way that there's noticeably more South Asian characters in British media than you'd see in American shows. Countries have different demographics, etc., but those aren't tropes in themselves.

How many Jews are (is?) too many Jews?

edited 8th Mar '11 7:43:20 PM by Jordan

^ Like I said earlier, I had doubts about this when it was proposed. Those doubts have only gotten worse as time has passed. I'm not going to argue to keep it. I frankly don't see a trope here.

I read the trope page, its hardly offensive in my mind, it points out the disproportion and then explains why there is a disproportional showing of Jews.

I will agree that the title is offensive and I will also agree that this is not a trope. Its a useful note at best but is not a building block of fiction so much as a fact of life that happens to be somewhat reflected in fiction by coincidence.

We have a lot of articles that aren't tropes that could be cut or at least separated into the useful notes page, but I won't bring them up right now(Like Executive Meddling), we'll just focus on you have to have Jews. If nothing else I suppose we could change the title, but Jew population is practically non-existent in practically every place I've lived, so I have no idea what they may find offensive.

I'm Jewish and I can't find anything particularly offensive. Then again, I am a bit thick skinned.

Entertainment tends to be a "winner takes all" profession and Jews tend to be overrepresented in such occupations because they are more likely to be crazy smart.

Nothing really sinister about it.

Why thank you