Yes, Bradley Cooper’s fake nose is anti-Semitic

Bradley Cooper is not anti-Semitic. If he was, he’d surely have let it slip by now; as Mel Gibson proved (‘The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!’), it can be hard to hold such things in. And Cooper certainly wouldn’t be portraying a Jewish composer sensitively and affectionately on screen if he was.

No, his decision to use a rubber nose when playing the role of Leonard Bernstein – to nose up, if you will – was likely not animated by the anti-Semitism of Hitler or Gibson. But it was animated by something and it is useful to consider what it was.

Yesterday, Bernstein’s children rushed to the actor’s defence. ‘It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose,’ wrote Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein in a statement. ‘Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.’

Maybe. But there’s a context here. The siblings were closely involved in the making of the film, so to admit that they had missed the anti-Semitic undertones of a rubber conk would make them look rather foolish. Moreover, as the rest of their effusive statement shows, they are understandably buoyed by the experience of having a lovely film made about their late father. They don’t want anything to go wrong. An anti-Semitism scandal overshadowing the release of the movie means that things are going very wrong indeed.

In his diaries, Victor Klemperer, the German Jewish diarist who predicted the Holocaust, described the Jews as a ‘seismic people’. Thousands of years of persecution has taught them to feel the early tremors of an earthquake, he argued, so that they may move to higher ground. In the Bernstein siblings, it seems, this instinct has become dulled by the giddiness induced by this flattering project. Any Jew can see that nosing up is one of the tremors. A small one, perhaps, and not one that would lead inevitably to the Holocaust. But a tremor. We can feel it.

Why was it necessary to nose up? Did Cooper fear that we’d miss Bernstein’s ethnicity without it? What is a Jewish composer without a prosthetic nose? Maybe some Jews –Ashkenazim, perhaps, possibly those of Iraqi or Egyptian origin, though not necessarily ones from Ethiopia or Morocco – tend to have bigger noses than their gentile compatriots. Jewishness is, after all, a genetic inheritance as well as a culture. But this is not the point. For centuries, Jews have been depicted as money-grubbing, curly-haired, beady-eyed, lascivious, devious, malevolent, bloodsucking, conspiratorial subhumans. The grotesque nose is always part of the picture. Not sometimes. Always.

Cooper’s false nose fell squarely in that tradition. Have a look at the pictures. Bernstein’s nose really wasn’t especially big. It didn’t define his face. Cooper’s prosthetic, applied to his visage with the skill and devotion of a Der Stürmer cartoonist, made him look less like Bernstein than he did before (unless you perceive a Jew nose-first, and the rest of him only later). It made Cooper into a living caricature.

I’m not saying Bradley Cooper hates the Jews. As the Bernstein siblings pointed out, ‘We were touched to the core to witness the depth of his commitment, his loving embrace of our father’s music, and the sheer open-hearted joy he brought to his exploration’. This is not the behaviour of an anti-Semite. But like the rest of us, the actor is a porous being raised in a Christian society. Thousands of years of prejudice and its symbols – from blood libels to bags of gold to big noses – cannot be erased overnight. This isn’t about the nose. It is about the instinct to caricature it.

As the actress Tracy-Ann Oberman has pointed out, Cooper played the deformed Elephant Man in a 2014 stage play. He didn’t use prosthetics on that occasion; he just contorted his mouth, his hand and his gait. But Jews are a subtle and malevolent race. Without overt physical markers, they can live unnoticed among us. Without a yellow star, they need a big nose. They need exaggerated shrugs and oy-veys and beetling brows; they need vampire squids and bags of cash. Otherwise, how will we spot them? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Hath not a Jew a bloody huge conk?

Bradley Cooper is not anti-Semitic. The bigotry is in the air we breathe. It’s in our blood.