I'm Jewish and don't care at all if the actor playing Fanny is Jewish. I'm also, and not parenthetically, like the great majority of American Jews, Ashkenazi Jewish.
All I care about is that the actor cast is wonderful and authentically plays Fanny both as a personality and as a stage personality. Which Michele does with flying colors.
But when we discuss Fanny Brice's Jewish identity as a woman and as a comedienne we are invariably discussing Fanny Brice's Ashkenazi Jewish identity.
Brice's cultural identity is Ashkenazi. Her parents came from Hungary and the Alsace. Her comedy came from a specific tradition that is essentially Ashkenazi. That may mean a great deal to many people.
As it happens, Leah Michele is not an Ashkenazi Jew. Her mother is Italian whose ancestors are from Rome and Naples, and a Roman Catholic. Her dad is a Sephardi Jew whose ancestors are from Thessalonika, Greece. Michele was religiously raised as a Roman Catholic. Her ancestral cultural background is Mediterranean, highly distiguishable from Fanny Brice's central European roots, especially when it comes to the tradition in which Brice performed comedy.
Ashkenazi and Sephardi cultures are very different. Brice's ethnic qualities as a performer might be quintessentially described as "Yiddish," in a very specific theatrical sense, referring to the Germanic Asheknazi culture and language, not the Romance/Med. Sephardic/Ladino.
That Michele's roots are very different than Brice's ultimately means, forgive me, bupkis. Or in Ladino, poco.
What means a lot is that Michele is captivating as Fanny.
She is.
Updated On: 11/13/22 at 10:11 AM