(Jewish Group) Winona Ryder opens up about her experience with anti-Semitism in Hollywood

[Behind the Aegis]

Actress Winona Ryder said she was passed over for a movie role because the studio head thought she looked “too Jewish” and Mel Gibson once asked her if she was an “oven dodger.”

Ryder talked about her experiences with anti-Semitism in Hollywood as part of wide-ranging interview published in the London-based Sunday Times.

“There was a movie that I was up for a long time ago, it was a period piece, and the studio head, who was Jewish, said I looked ‘too Jewish’ to be in a blue-blooded family,” Ryder told newspaper.

The incident with Gibson, at a party in 1995, was first reported in an interview in GQ in 2010. Ryder said that when something came up in the conversation about Jews, the actor-director said, ‘You’re not an oven dodger, are you?'” – a reference to the ovens that creamated the bodies of inmates in Nazi extermination camps. She added that Gibson later tried to apologize for the remark.

Ryder was born Winona Laura Horowitz in Winona, Minnesota.

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[question everything]

1. I hope that some day stories like that will be compiled and published

There was a scene - I am thinking L.A. Law, though it does not make sense - where there were several kids auditioning for a role in a movie, or a TV commercial. The actor just passed them one by one, with comments like "too ethnic" and all of a sudden caught herself of what it meant and she almost collapsed.

[Behind the Aegis]

2. What I hope is that people will wake the fuck up.

Too many view diversity in too narrow a term and fail to see bigotry and discrimination against other minority groups; and, because "they don't see it", they conclude it does not exist. Despite the "liberal" aura of Hollywood, shouldn't people be asking themselves, why do so many Jews hide their religion/ethnicity and why are so many LGBT people afraid to come out?