Streisand, Barbara – Actress & Director
Updated 2024-07-30
2023-11-07 The Unabashed Jewishness of Barbra Streisand In the history of Hollywood schmaltz, few moments quite beat the sight of Barbra Streisand dressed as a yeshiva boy, on her knees in prayer as the night sky swirls around her, plaintively singing in her buttery soprano, “Papa … can you hear me?”
In 1983, Barbra was at the height of her stardom, a well-established diva with Funny Girl, A Star Is Born, and The Way We Were behind her. A silhouette of her nose was enough to identify her. She used that accumulated capital to make this: a musical adaptation of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” about a girl in the old country who wants to study Talmud and disguises herself as a boy to do so.
It took 15 years from that day until she was finally able to make the film. Along the way, all manner of people cringed when she would describe her passion for the project. Among the studio heads, in rejection after rejection, she began to sense a common theme. The whole project appeared too Jew-y to them, she recalls:
When the studio executives refused to see beyond the Jewish context of Yentl to the larger themes of gender equality … This was about a woman who simply wanted the same opportunities as a man … Their real concern was unspoken but I could feel it. They did not want to draw attention to Jews and their world. As I wrote in my journal, Jews were apparently considered too “different, alien, especially now, and again, and it seems always …”
The struggle to make a film about Jews dovetailed with her struggle to be taken seriously as a woman director. Streisand constantly needed to affirm her power and assert her ideas for the film. She did seem to have to fight, however, throughout the shoot in Czechoslovakia and into the editing booth, all the while dealing with misogynistic whispering in the press about her being a control freak. Many of these stories do show a director intent on getting exactly what she wants, even if it means driving her crew crazy—she had to have the shot of sunlight falling on a stream in exactly the way she imagined, even if it meant doing it over and over again. But every auteur director is like this, including Kubrick and Spielberg—they’re just men. https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/the-unabashed-jewishness-of-barbra-streisand/ar-AA1jwL7g?
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