Click here to see today’s countdown, starting with No. 75.

How do you decide which are the best 100 Jewish movies of all time? Does the subject matter count for much? The director? The stars? Or is there some other, fleeting essence that makes one film feel particularly Jewish? These are the questions at the heart of this list.

Today’s installment offers a wide range of interpretations, from two intellectuals engaged in endless conversation over dinner to three aging rockers trying their best to find the door to the stage and the key to success. Here are numbers 75 to 51.

Click here to start part two of Tablet Magazine’s list of 100 greatest Jewish films.

These are more than mere parlor-game musings: They open up a discussion about culture, identity, history, and the considerable Jewish contribution to what is perhaps modernity’s only true indigenous art form.

A.O. Scott, chief film critic for the New York Times, and Jody Rosen, music critic for Slate, a Tablet contributing editor, and co-author of the magazine’s list of the greatest 100 Jewish films of all time, spoke to Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz about Woody and Mel, the Brothers Marx and the Brothers Coen, and everything in between.

Subscribe to Long Story Short.

• Malcolm Hoenlein, the “unofficial King of the Jews,” attended secret meetings in Damascus on behalf of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Check out Allison Hoffman’s profile of Hoenlein from last May. [Haaretz]

• Obama administration adviser Dennis Ross heads to Jerusalem to try to accomplish … something. [Laura Rozen]

• Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev had to cancel a visit to Israel due to a strike by the Israeli Foreign Ministry workers’ union. [Ynet]

• A 24-year-old Jewish woman is the current mayor of the Temple Mount on Foursquare, the social network. I give this a few days before it becomes an international incident. [Observer]

• Speaking of social networking: Thank you, whoever you are, for making Tablet Magazine’s Twitter feed, @tabletmag, the 26th most influential Jewish feed. So if you don’t follow us already, you really really should! [JTA]

The Coen Brothers’ True Grit is good. The original is better.

Now he’s starring in Fyvush Finkel Live!, a musical revue that runs through November 7 in Manhattan. On his day off, Finkel regaled Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry with stories about the early days of Yiddish theater, his expedited entry into serial television, and the mesmerizing maggid of his neighborhood shul. And he sang for her, too. Running time: 14:22.

But Finkel is an even bigger star in the world of Yiddish theater. He is currently back on that stage for a three-week run of Fyvush Finkel, Live, a musical revue, which was the perfect excuse for Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to pay him a visit. The interview got off to a rocky start, however:

Soon, though, he and Sara became fast friends. Come back and give a listen Monday. It’s probably the most charming conversation you’ll hear during election week.

UPDATE: This list should have included An Education (see comments). Your guide follows:

An Education
• What: Nick Hornby adopted this film from a memoir about a young girl in early-’60s England who falls for an older Jewish man, played here by Peter Sarsgaard.

• Up for: Best Picture; Leading Actress (Carey Mulligan); Adapted Screenplay (Hornby).

• Will win: Its best chance is in Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 5. While the older man’s Jewishness isn’t the film’s dominant theme, or even necessarily his dominant characteristic, it’s certainly in there.

And now, the list.

5: Up in the Air
• What: This flick, adopted from Walter Kirn’s novel, stars George Clooney as professional fire-er. Fans say it’s very now; detractors say it’s very mediocre.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Jason Reitman); Adapted Screenplay (Reitman and Sheldon Turner); Actor (George Clooney); Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga); Supporting Acress (Anna Kendrick).

• Will win: Very long shot at Picture, Director, and Supporting Actress; slightly less long shot at Actor; favorite at Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 2. Largely on the strength of Jewy (and kind of insufferable) director/co-writer Reitman.

4: The White Ribbon
• What: German auteur Michael Haneke’s extremely dark film about a village in Germany immediately before World War I.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film; Cinematography.

• Will win: It’s the Foreign Language Film prohibitive favorite.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 3. Not really explicitly Jewish, but it is dark and German. Plus a prominent Jewish writer called it fantastic in a certain magazine of Jewish life and culture.

3: Inglourious Basterds
• What: Quentin Tarantino’s crazy, violent, hilarious, awesome World War II movie about a group of American Jews whose mission is to brutally kill as many Nazis as possible and then assassinate Hitler, as well as a French-Jewish movie theater owner who secretly plots, also, to assassinate Hitler. Spoiler alert: They succeed.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Tarantino); Original Screenplay (Tarantino); Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz); Cinematography; Film Editing; Sound Editing; Sound Mixing.

• Will win: Waltz is all but a lock, and Tarantino is the Original Screenplay (though not Director) favorite. Also a threat in the technical categories.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 7. Except for Waltz’s SS agent and Brad Pitt’s commando leader, the major characters are Jews; the French-Jewish theater owner is even played by a young French-Jewish actress named Mélanie Laurent. On the other hand, at its heart, the movie isn’t about Jews, Nazis, or really anything besides other World War II movies. Also, Liel hated it (though Germans liked it!).

2: Ajami
• What: Israel’s third consecutive Best Foreign Language nominee, and the first in Arabic, its gangster plot depicts Palestinian-Jewish relations in the titular Jaffa neighborhood.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film.

• Will win: It’s a long shot.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 8. I mean, it’s Israeli!

1: A Serious Man
• What: The Coen Brothers’s quiet, comic, and in the end deeply serious tale of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor in late-1960s Minnesota who wonders why his life has gone totally to hell.

• Up for: Picture; Original Screenplay.

• Will win: In a just world, both of them (and Michael Stuhlbarg would have an Actor nomination). In this world, probably nothing.

•Jew rating (out of 10): 10. If it were just that all the characters were Jews, and that the comic climax took place at a bar mitzvah, then it would be an 8, maybe a 9. But this movie wrestles with what it is to be Jewish on the most profound level; short of Yom Kippur services, nothing will make you reflect on your Jewishness like sitting through it. The day after A Serious Man gets no love, go see it, even if it’s your fifth time.

Nominations [The Oscars]

Related: Painfully Good [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee

To begin with, I strongly urge you to read Liel Leibovitz’s careful consideration.

For Juliet Lapidos, giving the film a welcome second look in Slate, Gopnik’s defining quality is his essential meekness:

A physics professor, Gopnik knows that ‘actions have consequences,’ as he puts it to Clive, the student who’s trying to bribe him. He adds, ‘Not just physics. Morally.’ It seems more difficult for Gopnik to grasp that inaction may have consequences, too. But, intellectually at least, he knows that’s the case. When his brother, Arthur, complains that ‘Hashem hasn’t given me shit,’ Gopnik replies, ‘It’s not fair to blame Hashem. Arthur, please. Please calm down. Sometimes you have to help yourself.’ It’s his truest line.

It’s tempting to say that Gopnik is a latter-day Job. But Lapidos knows better. Job is not meek: Job is angry. More importantly, Job’s uncertainty is quite different from Gopnik’s. Job wants to know why God allows such bad things to happen to a good man. Gopnik wants to know if there even is a God to allow such bad things to happen to him. If the novel is the epic of a world abandoned by God, then this is a movie for that age as well.

Which is why, for me, a key part of the movie is its invocation of Schrödinger’s cat, a widely misunderstood physics thought experiment, which Gopnik tries, in vain, to explain to a failing student. Allow me to attempt a better job.

Schrödinger’s cat is in an opaque box, along with a Geiger counter and hammer poised to fall upon a vial of cyanide. The Geiger counter contains atomic matter with a half-life of one hour. Should the matter decay, the counter releases the hammer, which smashes the vial of cyanide, which kills the cat. After one hour, therefore, it is exactly as likely that the cat is alive as it is dead. But because of the way physics works at the quantum level, where we are totally unsure what that matter will do, there is a sense in which, for us, outside of the box, the cat is both alive and dead. And that’s where most people’s understanding of the paradox ends: The cat is, almost mystically, in a state of simultaneous life and death.

But, of course, the cat isn’t both alive and dead. Use your common sense! It’s either alive, or it’s dead; and if we were to open the box at any given moment, we would see the cat either alive or dead. The point of Schrödinger’s cat is to illustrate that existence at the quantum level is fundamentally different from the existence we know. In the observable world—think Isaac Newton’s laws—all actions have somewhat predictable or at least quantifiable consequences, and cats are either alive or dead. But at the level of subatomic particles, those rules are actually thrown out the window. It’s a post-Newtonian existence.

… Yet it’s also a pre-Newtonian one, isn’t it? For God, if He (or She, or It, etc.) exists, is also capable of throwing all the observable rules out the window, and of producing consequences without actions. Larry Gopnik knows that things are different at the quantum level. And so the movie is about Gopnik trying to figure out if things are different at the cosmic level, too: whether all of his misfortunes—his wife leaving him; his kids ignoring him; his bosses forsaking him; his health failing him—possess cosmic meaning or are simply a random chain of events in the Newtonian world. This is why, as Lapidos notes, Gopnik’s heroic moments are those few instances where he acknowledges that he needs to help himself: not because God hates him, or won’t help him, or doesn’t exist, but because in the absence of that certainty, that is how we have to play the game.

For us, standing outside the box, God must appear in a state of both existing and not existing. But use your common sense! He either exists, or He doesn’t exist. We can never be sure, but that’s not the same thing as there not being an answer.

Which is all a very long way of saying: I strongly hope A Serious Man wins Best Picture. And I am very ready to be disappointed. Shrug.

“What’s Going On?” [Slate]
Taking It Seriously [Tablet Magazine]

This being Hollywood, several Jews were recognized for work that was not explicitly Jewish, including Up in the Air director and co-writer Jason Reitman, and David Rakoff, who had a hand in the writing of The New Tenants, a nominee for Best Short Film (Live Action). Did we mention that Rakoff is a Tablet Magazine contributing editor? Well, he is.

Finally, Ajami, Israel’s first-ever Arabic-language submission to the Academy, became the third consecutive Israeli offering to score one of the five Best Foreign Language Film nominations. Will it be the first to win? The Oscars are Sunday, March 7th, so we’ll find out soon enough.

Do read Tablet Magazine’s resident film buff Liel Leibovitz on A Serious Man (loved) and Basterds (hated). Plus—spoiler alert!—you will be able to read his thoughts on Ajami soon enough.

The 82nd Annual Oscar Nominations [ArtsBeat]

Earlier: Israel Nears Third Straight Oscar Nomination

Related: Taking It Seriously [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

There once was a Jew who felt his life was spiraling out of control. He had done some things he was certain were sinful, and found it increasingly difficult to quell his conscience. After a few sleepless nights, he decided to go see the rabbi and ask for his advice. On his way to the rabbi’s study, however, the man’s stomach began turning: there was no way, he realized, that he could bring himself to confess all of his shameful deeds to the pious, aged reb. And so, just a few yards away from the rabbi’s door, the man finally found a solution. He went in, shook the rabbi’s hand, and began talking.

“Rabbi,” he said, “I’m here on behalf of a close friend of mine. You see, this friend is a terrible sinner, and he’s done many awful things, but he couldn’t bring himself to come and confess to you and he asked me to go in his stead.” Feeling secure in his ruse, the man then proceeded to speak at length and in detail about all of his questionable behaviors.

A few minutes later, when the man was finally done talking, the rabbi nodded his head gently and smiled. “What a fool is your friend!” he cried out. “All he needed to do was come see me and tell me he was speaking on your behalf.”

The rabbi wasn’t being cute. He understood that the man, by way of his conceptual trickery, has found a way to live both inside and outside the boundaries of his own consciousness, to be himself and not himself at the same time. A few centuries later, quantum physicists would give a similar principle the name complementarity, and acknowledge that it was entirely possible for things that intuitively seem antithetical to each other to coexist without much conflict.

In theory, Larry Gopnik, the Coen’s new protagonist, portrayed with rare gentility by Michael Stuhlbarg, should understand such principles well. When we see him at work, teaching physics at a Midwestern college in the late 1960s, he’s scribbling interminable equations on an enormous blackboard and droning on about Schrödinger’s Cat, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and other staples of quantum mechanics. But when his marriage collapses, his career begins to careen out of control, and a swarm of other niggling concerns descend on him with alarming proximity, Gopnik has little use for modern abstractions. What he needs is an answer, clear and definitive, to the question “why me.” Looking at Stuhlbarg’s restless brown eyes—they press themselves against the thick lenses of his glasses like fish contemplating an escape from their tank—one could easily be tempted to believe it’s the only question that has ever truly mattered to mankind.

As is the case with existential conundrums of this magnitude, the very act of pondering could get tricky, for character and audience alike. If drama, as Alfred Hitchcock neatly put it, is life with the dull bits left out, metaphysical musings—the kind involving God, the universe, and our reasons for being—can too often seem like the dull bits with the rest of life left out. What unfurls on the screen lacks a particularly defined plot, any semblance of character development, or any of the other tropes that constitute cinema as we know it. Which, of course, has sent some critics reeling: the film, they argued, was too bleak, the protagonists too stereotypical, the narrative too lackluster. A viewer about to see A Serious Man would do well to ignore these voices and, like Gopnik, get ready for some serious grappling.

And grappling is what the film is about. The plot, or whatever little of it matters, is is concerned less with Gopnik’s questions and more with those he entrusts with answering it. The hapless physicist seeks the advice of several rabbis. It would betray much of the film’s considerable charm and dramatic tension to disclose just what each one says, but it comes as no surprise that a definitive, convincing, elegant explanation of God’s plan for the universe fails to materialize.

What Gopnik gets instead are platitudes about perception, empty praise, and repeated exhortations to soldier on with life even as it makes less and less sense. The exhorters include not only rabbis but also lawyers, colleagues, neighbors, family members, and friends, all of whom offer Gopnik a measure of assurance—some fake, some sincere—taken largely from modern society’s infinite supply of certainty. A real estate-minded esquire, for example, promises to resolve a dispute over yardage with precise measurements, and a fellow professor blurts out awkward reassurances about Gopnik’s ongoing quest for tenure. Even the sultry next-door neighbor—who tans in the nude and speaks with that deflated, matter-of-fact voice common to the incurably bored—sounds more like a physician than like a temptress when she offers Gopnik a touch of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll.

All these individuals fail the film’s sweet, suffering hero because their very outlook—the outlook of the upwardly mobile middle class that trusts that everything can be measured and understood—is inherently ill-suited to exploring the far more elusive and infinitely more profound terrain with which Gopnik is concerned. They may know the law or the science or the culture, but he’s interested in the Meaning of Life. In many ways, Gopnik is like the cat in Schrödinger’s box, whose condition is entirely unknowable for the duration of the experiment.

Lesser artists might have used this weighty premise as the backdrop for a modest character study, or, at the very best, engaged in Charlie Kauffman-style metaphysical mindbenders. But the Coens, serious men, came into this film curious about the very same questions Gopnik hurls at his conversationalists. They want to know why. And, like Gopnik, they’re not afraid to ask.

This intellectual ferocity makes A Serious Man a very rare film. More than the tale of Gopnik and his petty woes, it tells another, far more universal story. In short, here it is: once upon a time, there was a people, the Jews, whose faithful sons and daughters lived in small shtetls and spoke Yiddish and realized that certain phenomena lay past the realms of their understanding and accepted that God moved about in the world in ways they couldn’t possibly know. When members of this nation immigrated to the New World, however, and shaved off their beards and shook off their mamaloshen, their mother tongue, they quickly became besotted with the promises of modernity. They were urged to replace the yearnings for Olam Ha-ba, the messianic and redemptive world to come, with lust for the trappings of Olam Ha-ze, the earthly realm in which we live. They exchanged the Talmud for the law book, the medical text, the tax code. Even when they pursued theological studies, they did so with deference to the principles of the Enlightenment that had emancipated them. And, like other sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, they embarked on the pursuit of the precise, devoting their lives to erecting strict systems of thought that sought to explain life in all of its infinitesimal detail. This transformation came with its rich rewards, but it also exacted a devastating price, chief among which was the loss of the ability—to paraphrase a quote by Rashi the Coens use as an epigraph—to receive with simplicity everything that happens.

Simplicity is the enemy of modernity. So is doubt. Modernity—in its American strand, at least—requires of its practitioners a growing specialization, an increased sophistication, a neverending striving towards certainty. It is, in other words, the very opposite of the Talmudic undertaking, in which the argument itself is the central pursuit and a finite truth, should it ever materialize, is of little concern. When Jews rid themselves of the Talmud, the ars gratia artis, the scholarly license to see the world for all of its competing and contrasting strands, and when they immerse themselves instead in the target-oriented, painfully concrete, and intolerably specific modern world, then, the Coens tell us, they’re in deep spiritual trouble.

Wherein, then, lies salvation? For that, the Coens suggest, we should turn to Danny, Gopnik’s teenage son, whose Bar Mitzvah is one of the film’s funniest and most poignant narrative threads. A stoner who is obsessed with trashy television shows and rock music, he, too, is searching for enlightenment. But whereas the father looks up to the guardians of an ossified religious establishment, thoughtless and irrelevant, the son looks to popular culture, as whirling and as potent as a tornado. When, in the film’s final scene, Danny finds himself face-to-face with an actual storm, with Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” screaming on the soundtrack, one feels an odd sense of purity: the tremendous spirit of the Jews won’t die, but will be reborn in a new generation of seekers, far less traditional than their ancestors but equally as capable of transcendence.

That the film is a vaguely autobiographical account of the Coens’ own childhood, and that Danny—celebrating his 13th birthday in 1967—is the exact same age as Joel Coen was that year, is no coincidence. Even as they remain as reticent as ever to talk about the meaning of their work, it is hard not to see the film as the brothers’ cri de coeur. The movie’s eponymous serious man, after all, isn’t Gopnik, but the tartly named Sy Ableman, the lover of Gopnik’s wife and a man whose every becalmed baritone pronouncement betrays the lust and greed lurking just below the surface. For his pretense, Ableman is revered by his community and enjoys the kind of virile and accomplished life Gopnik père is too timorous to imagine. But in the Coens’ moral and intellectual universe, it’s the junior Gopnik who shall inherit the earth, even if, for the time being, he experiences it through eyes reddened by marijuana smoke and ears cracked by Grace Slick’s howling.

That the reefer mad youths grew up to be filmmakers, and that they produced a masterpiece as profound as A Serious Man, should surprise no one who’s been paying attention to the film. If there’s anything that quantum mechanics and Judaism both teach us it’s that the exact path of anything can never be exactly determined. With some luck, the same would apply to the film itself, and this philosophical and theological gem—unadorned by famous actors and strongly rooted in the fertile soil of American Jewish communal and religious life—will receive the consideration and admiration it so richly deserves. As for us Jews, all we need in order to renew our spiritual thrust, to reconcile the ancient and the modern, and to understand our place in the world are a few serious men.

Years ago, the Coens told The New York Times for Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section, they wanted to make a movie about a bar mitzvah boy who studies with a very old rabbi, “a Semitic Wizard of Oz,” says Ethan Coen. “He never spoke, but he had great charisma.” (In A Serious Man, the son studies for his bar mitzvah by listening to “Rabbi Youssele Rosenblatt Chants Your Haftorah Portion, Volume 12.”) The brothers says beyond the fact that their own father was a professor and that, like the boy in the film, they too had an affinity for the sitcom F Troop and a distaste for Hebrew school, the story is not autobiographical.

As for the Yiddish beginning, Ethan Coen explained it at a preview in Minneapolis: “You look at a shtetl, and you go, ‘Right—Jews in a shtetl.’ And then you look at the prairie in Minnesota and you kind of think—or we kind of think, with some perspective on it, having moved out, ‘What are we doing there?’ It just seems odd.” Added Joel Coen: “Mel Brooks once had a song called ‘Jews in Space.’ I guess that’s sort of the idea.”

Biblical Adversity in a ’60s Suburb [NYT]
The Coen Brothers Talk—Reluctantly—About Talking [MinnPost]
The Coen Brothers’ ‘A Serious Man’: More Jewish Than Matzo Balls? [LA Times]

A friend called one evening while we were both watching Knocked Up on HBO. It was during the scene in which Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) and Alison Scott (Katherine Heigl) are on their way to a doctor’s appointment, talking about the relationship between Alison’s sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and her husband Pete (Paul Rudd). The fight escalates into a more general discussion about sacrifice and responsibility. Alison orders Ben to get out of the car, right there in the middle of the street. Ben, his defiance turning to resolve, gets out of the car. He walks the rest of the way to the doctor’s office. They continue their argument, loudly.

“This is my favorite scene,” my friend said, “because it’s so Jewish.”

My friend is also Jewish, but her comment struck me as odd: not anti-Semitic or pro-Semitic, but definitely Semitic. “What’s so Jewish about it?” I asked.

“The whole thing. It’s at a doctor’s office. He gets to complain about the weather before he rips into her. It’s aggressive whininess, or whiny aggression. And it has a moral component too.”

After a little while, I asked, “Are you sure that Ben’s Jewish?” This was not a rhetorical question, but it may have been a stupid one. Ben Stone is played by a Jewish man. He has conversations with his doting, sensitive father, who is played by a Jewish man (Harold Ramis). And, of course, he has a Jewish name: Ben Stone. So he seems identifiably Jewish. But is he remarkably Jewish? In other words, is his Jewishness worth remarking upon? Ben himself remarks upon it a number of times early in the movie. He tells his friends, “If any of us get laid tonight, it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.” When he meets Alison and she asks him if he uses any hair product, he says “I use Jew.” But this dimension of the character falls away as Ben’s relationship with Alison comes to the fore, and by the time the movie gets to the fight in the doctor’s office that my friend identified as highly Jewish, Ben’s Jewishness has been suppressed, if not forgotten. As he moves forward in his life, he learns to cope with the consequences of sex, learns to leave the safety of his community (read: roommates), and learns to have a relationship with a non-Jewish woman.

The confusion persists in the newest movie from the Apatow stable, Pineapple Express, which opens today. It’s a companion piece to last summer’s Superbad, in the sense that it’s a buddy movie cowritten by Rogen and Evan Goldberg. (Full disclosure: I have published a book titled Superbad, which is unrelated to the movie, and I once wrote a letter comically attacking Rogen and Apatow for the nontheft of my title. We are not actually feuding, though I did threaten to cut off Rogen’s fingers.)

James Franco and Seth Rogen in Pineapple Express

Here, Rogen costars with James Franco, who is best known as Harry Osborn/Green Goblin Jr. in the Spider-Man movies, but got his start playing the sensitive stoner Daniel Desario in Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. Daniel Desario was probably Italian, as are other prominent roles Franco has played—Joey LaMarca in City by the Sea, Dan Carnelli in In the Valley of Elah. Franco, though his last name sounds Italian, is in fact a mix of Swedish and Portuguese (on his father’s side) and Jewish (on his mother’s). In Pineapple Express, his character is a sweet, somewhat hapless drug dealer named Saul Silver.

Saul Silver is a Jewish name, and, like Ben Stone, Saul Silver is Jewish in more than name. In fact, he is Jewish exactly like Ben Stone. In the early going, he makes a point of discussing his Bubbie, who is in a nursing home, and then there are a few stray jokes that use his Jewishness as a springboard. But at several other moments where it might surface (confrontations with cops, softer moments of reminiscence) it doesn’t; his Jewishness isn’t as pronounced as, say, Alvy Singer’s. There’s no scene where he imagines that non-Jews see him as a stereotypical Hasid, complete with sidelocks and a black coat.

Apatow’s population of slightly Jewish Jews raises a number of questions about ethnicity and genre. In certain American film genres, ethnic names are part of the equation: look at the long and complex relationship between Italian characters and crime movies. To some degree, this is the result of stereotyping. To some degree, it’s the result of history. And to some degree, it’s the result of a profitable interdependence between crime stories and the sensibilities of directors like Scorsese and Coppola and actors like De Niro and Pacino. Is it fair to look for an analogue in the work of Apatow and his associates?

Some of the work seems to suggest so. The protagonist of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell), has a Jewish name, though not a Jewish actor portraying him; the protagonist of Superbad, Seth (Jonah Hill [born Feldstein]), has both. In You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Jewishness is central to Adam Sandler’s character, though it’s a case of an American Jew playing (and lampooning) an Israeli Jew. In Pineapple Express, as I’ve said, Jewishness doesn’t figure so prominently in the film’s plot, and Franco isn’t read as a Jewish actor (no one I asked knew he was half-Jewish, and only some of them believed me when they were told). All that’s left is the name, and it sticks out like a sore Jewish thumb, all the more so as the film lifts away from its buddy-movie premise and heads into bloodier action-movie territory.

The fact is that Jewish names have certain connotations, and high-octane action isn’t among them. To get a sense of the oddness, it’s worth importing the same idea into other films. What if Tom Cruise’s character in Top Gun had been named Melvin Goldstein? What if Indiana Jones was Indiana Mandelbaum? That tension between Jewishness and physical power is one of the successful surface jokes of Zohan, and it ripples through our pop culture. The great Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten raised a version of this issue a few years ago in a column about a man who wanted rock stardom and felt that to get it he needed to get rid of his Jewish name, à la Robert Zimmerman or Chaim Witz.

To recap: Franco, who is half-Jewish but has a name that doesn’t sound Jewish at all, is playing a lightly Jewish character with an explicitly Jewish name. So what, you ask? Well, so this: The practice of assigning actors who don’t seem Jewish to roles that do returns films to an earlier era. In the thirties, Sam Goldwyn discussed the complicated nature of onscreen ethnicity: “You can’t have a Jew playing a Jew,” he said. “It wouldn’t work on the screen.” Goldwyn’s remarks were made in connection with Counsellor at Law, a 1933 William Wyler film that is based on an Elmer Rice play about a Jewish New York attorney named George Simon. Goldwyn wanted his protagonist to be generic enough to appeal to the broad base of moviegoers. The non-Jewish actor hired to play the role, John Barrymore, tried to act extra-Jewish, despite explanations from the director and screenwriter than an assimilated Jew was indistinguishable from an assimilated Mexican or Baptist. In the 1931 melodrama Street Scene, also based on a Rice play, the main character, Sam Kaplan, was portrayed by the Irish actor William Collier, Jr. (To make things even stranger, his Irish girlfriend was played by a Jewish actress, Sylvia Sidney, a counterweight that is employed in Pineapple Express as well—Rogen’s character, more obviously Jewish in his looks and bearing, is given the highly un-Jewish name of Dale Denton.)

The practice may have been rooted in the thirties, but it wasn’t easily uprooted. Until fairly recently, the majority of explicitly Jewish roles went to non-Jewish actors, including Mickey Rooney (Lorenz Hart in Words and Music), Shirley McLaine (Gittel Moscowitz in Two for the Seesaw), Alan Bates (Yakov Bok in The Fixer), and Warren Beatty (Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy). John Turturro (not Jewish) played the Jewish Barton Fink (in Barton Fink) and Herb Stumpel (in Quiz Show), and

Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, and John Goodman in The Big Lebowski

John Goodman (not Jewish) played the observant convert Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski. Meanwhile, Jewish actors, many of whom changed their real names to assimilate into American culture, were playing non-Jewish characters, which should come as no real surprise—that’s what actors do. Think of Elliott Gould in M*A*S*H, playing Trapper John McIntyre, or the flying synagogue that was the Starship Enterprise. It should be pointed out that many Jewish actors did play ethnic, just not Jewish ethnic—James Caan tended to play Italians, as did Peter Falk, while Sasha Baron-Cohen prefers Kazakhistanis. But was Benjamin Braddock Jewish? Was Mr. White? Was Chas Tenenbaum?

You can certainly find Jews playing Jewish. Just look at the work of Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, and Mel Brooks. And there are other famous roles: Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) in The Heartbreak Kid, Alexander Portnoy (Richard Benjamin) in Portnoy’s Complaint, Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) in The In-Laws. There are more, but the list doesn’t run on and on. In fact, even archetypal roles like Billy Crystal’s Harry in When Harry Met Sally aren’t as Jewish as they seem. Harry’s last name, believe it or not, is Burns, which is what, Scottish?

So what’s the rationale behind Apatow’s decision to give Franco’s laid-back, sleepily charismatic drug dealer a Jewish name? Was the character conceived as Jewish? Is it a comic move, because the combination is so unlikely? Or is it something more, a victory for the race or even a declaration that the race no longer needs to worry about victory? When people speak of Saul Silver, will any of them describe him by his religion? Is it one of his main characteristics, or merely incidental? Would its status be the same if he was a sidekick on a sitcom, or is there something about the big screen that simultaneously magnifies and levels ethnicity? Have we officially entered a period of post-Jewish identity, when Jewish names are as typical as Smith or McIntyre or Bush? Is “Saul Silver” as loaded a name as, say, “Barack Obama”? And what does Franco’s real Jewish grandmother think?