Does Hollywood Have a Jewish Problem?

While Avalon was favorably reviewed and earned Levinson an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, the film grossed a disappointing $16 million. Some would cite the film's poor performance as proof that too many moviegoers felt excluded by it — a logical leap that Molen, who won an Oscar as one of the producers of Schindler's List, finds unforgivable. ''Levinson did a marvelous job with Avalon,'' he says. ''The movie wasn't successful because it lacked drama.'' Including Jewish characters, says Molen, is a way to educate ''someone who maybe lives in a community where there are no Jews, or where they make fun of them.'' Turturro, who directed and starred in 1992's Mac, agrees. ''It was about three Italian brothers, and people from all different backgrounds said, 'That's my family.'''

Turturro's difficulty in getting cast for Unstrung Heroes is not unusual. Frequently, actors who look ''too Jewish'' by Hollywood standards — whether or not they are Jewish — are not the first choices to play Semitic characters; some of the actors Disney executives originally mentioned to play Lidz's uncles in Unstrung Heroes were John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, and Nicolas Cage. And when the 1992 film Used People was being cast, actor-turned-screenwriter Todd Graff, who had based the characters on members of his family, watched the role of his Jewish grandmother go to Shirley MacLaine. ''Is MacLaine somebody who has in her bones what it is to be a Jewish woman from Queens? No. But there doesn't happen to be a major Jewish movie star except Barbra Streisand, who was too young,'' Graff says. ''I know Shirley was concerned and talked to everyone from Barbra to whoever she channels.''

Three years later, Graff is having no such concerns with The Beautician and the Beast, a screenplay he's writing for his longtime friend Fran Drescher — who has become a TV success with CBS' The Nanny, her sitcom riff on a Jewish woman from Queens. Disney, which is producing the film, ''has made no move to de-Jewish it,'' says Graff. ''It may be that there's some kind of cushion because she's famous.''

That cushion may be enough, at least, to get the studio past its fear that America just won't understand, a concern not limited to religion. LaGravenese remembers that when he was writing A Little Princess for Disney, ''one of their notes on a first draft was to make [the girl] American and come to the States rather than England, because they felt audiences wouldn't relate to an English girl.'' (The film ended up at Warner Bros.)

Ironically, what paralyzes Hollywood the most may be the ambivalence of its own executives, many of them Jewish, about seeing Jews represented on the screen. ''There are so many Jews who came out here and figured out how to pass,'' says Graff. ''It's hard for them to make a movie about the kind of Jewishness they've turned their backs on.''