opinion
Ben Cohen
“T hen the Lord God said to Moses/All the
Jews shall have long noses.”
This spiteful playground barb has been
leveled at Jews in one form or another for centuries.

While antisemitism typically involves defamatory
claims about Jewish behavior — dual loyalty, fi nan-
cial domination and similar themes — the hatred
has also extended to the supposed Jewish physiog-
nomy, with its attendant stereotypes of enormous,
hooked noses, high-pitched, excitable voices and
stunted, corpulent bodies.

Many of the caricatures of Jews distributed by the
Nazis accentuated these supposed features. Like
the other tropes about Jewish fi nancial and political
power, those that trade on Jewish physical ugliness
have persisted throughout the postwar era. They are
dangerous for the same reason that other expres-
sions of antisemitism are dangerous, in that they
transmit not just a message of sinister Jewish other-
ness but the notion that Jews are somehow less than
human. And for the Nazis, of course, the claim that
Jews were subhuman, untermenschen, was the key
to their ideology.

Yet in keeping with the trajectory of postwar antisem-
itism, assertions about Jews that many hoped had been
junked with the defeat of the Nazis have persisted,
turning up in the most unexpected places.

Like a press conference given in early February
by a woman who, last week, was elected to lead the
Democratic Party, Italy’s main center-left opposition.

Elly Schlein is a 37-year-old U.S.-Italian dual national
whose mother is Italian and whose father is an
American Jew. In 2008 and 2012, Schlein worked as
a volunteer in Chicago for former President Barack
Obama’s election campaigns. In 2013, she moved to
Italy, joining forces with a far-left insurgent group that
sought to unseat the party’s centrist leadership. Last
Sunday, they succeeded, when Schlein unexpectedly
defeated her establishment rival Stefano Bonaccini
with 54% of the vote.

Given that Italy is governed by an ultranationalist
party, the Brothers of Italy, it is reasonable to assume
that a country whose recent history neatly illustrates
the perils of polarization is fated to continue along this
path with Schlein’s election. The most obvious paral-
lel for the PD is the fi ve years that the British Labour
Party spent under its far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
who was elected in 2015 and whose term came to an
ignominious end with Labour’s overwhelming defeat
14 MARCH 9, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
in the 2020 general election.

What marked out the Corbyn period were the
serial accusations of antisemitism in Labour’s
ranks on a near-daily basis. Whether Schlein will
force a similar set of obsessions upon the PD
is still an open question, but the portents are
worrying. This brings me back to that press confer-
ence. Schlein was asked about the disgrace-
ful abuse she had received online, targeting
her because she has a female partner,
because she grew up in an affl uent home
and because her father is Jewish — and
therefore the source of her long,
arched nose.

Schlein began her remarks
by denouncing the “army
of haters … who start from
my nose and my surname to
express vile antisemitic senti-
ments.” But, she went on, “as proud as I am of the
Jewish side of my paternal family, I am not Jewish,
because as you know, that is passed down through the
matrilineal line.”
Then she turned to the insults that invoked her nose.

“But the craziest thing is the debate over my nose,” she
told the assembled reporters. “Why is it not a ‘Schlein
Jewish nose’ that I inherited from my father, as racists
write on the web? It’s a typically Etruscan nose.”
There is a great deal to unpack here, most obviously
Schlein’s determination to deny that she is Jewish in
the same breath as condemning antisemitism.

Technically, of course, she is correct: In terms of
halachah, Jewish religious law, she is not Jewish. But
under the defi nition of a Jew outlined in the infamous
Nazi racial laws, she most certainly is — and would be
entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Israeli Law of
Return as a consequence.

Given that the context of this discussion was antise-
mitic incitement and not an academic seminar on
Jewish identity, the Nazi defi nition was certainly more
pertinent than the halachic one. Had she wanted to
condemn the antisemites without distancing herself
from her Jewish origins, Schlein might have said:
“While I’m not considered Jewish under religious
law because my mother is a non-Jew, as far as the
antisemites are concerned, I am very much a Jew and
equally a victim of the prejudice and bigotry that Jews
have suff ered throughout history.” Those words, or
something similar, would have had the benefi t of being
both truthful and a resounding declaration of solidarity
with the victims of antisemitism.

Yet the phrasing of Schlein’s objec-
tions suggested that the antisemitic
barbs she faced didn’t really make
sense because she’s not Jewish after
all, and that’s what bothered her. The
implication here is that these would
be more understandable if they were
directed at an individual with two
Jewish parents.

Then there is the description of her
nose as “Etruscan.” The Etruscans were
an impressive civilization that dominated
the northern Italian peninsula before the
Roman Empire. Among their contri-
butions that have survived was
the “fasces,” a bundle of rods
wrapped around an axe that
became a Roman symbol and,
much later on, a fascist one.

The Etruscans were also known
for their ornate sculptures, depicting facial features
with almond-shaped eyes and pronounced noses.

Hence the visual evidence for Schlein’s “Etruscan
nose” claim.

But there is something more sinister here at work;
essentially, she is saying that while she does indeed
possess a large nose, it’s an organically Italian one,
rather than a foreign Jewish one. What is implicit here
is not a protest against antisemitism but a complaint
about being lumped in with Jews.

That is why Schlein’s past comments about Israel —
while fairly standard from someone on the European
left — give rise to an extra layer of concern. The core
challenge of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict, she insists,
is its “asymmetrical” nature, with the Israelis holding all
the power and the Palestinians none. As a result, she
declared in a May 2021 statement during the 11-day
confl ict in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas,
the Jewish state is guilty of “ethnic cleansing,” and the
world community must insist on a solution based upon
“the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people by
ending Israel’s illegal settlements and occupation.”
To hear these words from a leading politician who
also believes that there is such a thing as a “Jewish
nose” is unsettling, to put it mildly. If Schlein doesn’t
want to get labeled as an Italian Jeremy Corbyn —
and perhaps she does — then she needs to reverse
course now. ■
Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and
author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and
international aff airs for JNS.

olllikeballoon / AdobeStock
Elly Schlein’s Etruscan Nose