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Netflix’s hit sitcom You People has been called “terribly damaging” to Jews for pushing stereotypes that they are “white, privileged and racist.”
The new movie from Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris has over 55 million hours of viewing and is currently ranked number one on Netflix after its release almost two weeks ago.
The main premise of the film follows a Jewish man (Hill) who falls in love with Amira Mohammed (Lauren London), who is a black Muslim woman. Their relationship is put to the test as their respective families react to cultural differences.
Critics called the film “harmful” after claiming that it relied too much on stereotypes and that it was anti-Semitic.
Jews Don’t Count author David Baddiel tweeted: “It’s a Jews Don’t Count festival. The Jewish family is positioned as white, privileged and racist. The black family only has a stern father. In the end, there are many Jewish apologies for racism. None for antisemitism. That word never appears.
You People has been branded ‘irredeemable’ by the Jewish community for taking ‘cheap’ photos of the Holocaust and playing on stereotypes.
The author of The Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel, said the film depicted the “Jewish family [as] positioned as white, privileged and racist’
Allison Josephs, executive director of the nonprofit Jew in the City, agreed, calling the film “very, very bad.”
“Not sure what they were hoping to achieve but it didn’t work out,” she tweeted. “Jews and whites are the same in this movie.”
“I’ve talked to so many Jews who are really upset about this movie,” Josephs said. news week. “I think one of the biggest frustrations for me watching the movie was not being able to answer some of the outrageous claims that were made.”
She said the film took “cheap” takes on the Holocaust and suggested that Jews succeeded through their large communities of connections and came from wealthy generations.
“In the trailer, they were already making Holocaust jokes and downplaying the Holocaust. So that’s not good when your trailer includes cheap, really offensive humor about the Holocaust,” he told Newsweek.
Allison Josephs, executive director of the nonprofit Jew in the City, said it was “an erasure of Jewish history and like an invalidation of everything we’ve been through.”
He called the movie “very, very bad” in a tweet.
‘I couldn’t even imagine how bad it would be. The things they did here are different from other forms of anti-Semitism that I have seen in the past.”
In one of the trailers, the progressive parents of Hill’s character (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny) joke that Jews are the ‘OG slaves’.
“Technically we were original slaves,” Duchovny’s character Arnold told Akbar (Eddie Murphy), Amira’s father.
Akbar replied: ‘Are you trying to compare the Holocaust to slavery?’
“Our people came here with nothing like the rest,” replied Shelley, the Dreyfus character.
“They make a comparison of slavery with the Holocaust. It certainly shouldn’t be a competition, but the pain of the Holocaust also shouldn’t be downplayed as unimportant or insignificant,” Josephs told Newsweek.
“It completely erases the fact that most Jews came to this country fleeing systemic hatred of Jews, whether it was Cossacks or Nazis or a systemic exile from the Arab world in the mid-1940s. There are very few Jews who they came to the United States in positions of power.
He also criticized the Holocaust and slavery jokes seen in the trailer between the parents of Hill’s character and his girlfriend’s family. “It certainly shouldn’t be a competition, but the pain of the Holocaust also shouldn’t be downplayed as unimportant or insignificant,” Josephs said.
Baddiel also claimed that the only black stereotype in the film was the ‘dour’ father, played by Eddie Murphy.
‘Yes, there were some Jews who owned slaves in the south. That was one thing. But this idea that Jews had a disproportionate role in the slave trade is not true. It’s honestly some kind of Louis Farrakhan crap.
The Mohammed family follows Farrakhan in the film, whom Josephs called a “virulent anti-Semite”.
“A direct quote from him is that he is not anti-Semitic, he is anti-termite,” he told the outlet. His is a guy who literally uses Nazi-like language to describe Jews. It is deeply disturbing that Farrakhan is on this pedestal. [in the film].’
Also, when Hill’s character buys his girlfriend a ring, he jokes about the small stone being passed down from the Holocaust, which Josephs said was “probably the most disgusting ‘joke’ in the film.”
The movie is currently the number one movie globally on Netflix.
‘Why [the message is] the Holocaust is just not a big deal. So it’s something you use when they want to get fake sympathy,” he told Newsweek.
The hardest part about Josephs is the fact that the Jewish community has to sit back and watch Hill, who is also Jewish, make fun of their culture and not be able to respond to it.
“As a viewer, you are only subject to listening to the conversation. There were so many falsehoods, or so many claims presented without any challenge. And now that becomes part of what people can accept as true. It is an erasure of Jewish history and like an invalidation of everything we have been through and everything we continue to go through. It was a really painful movie to watch.
“I think the film is irredeemable.”