There’s a difference between absence and imposition—and The New York Times Magazine piece arguing that something is “missing” from films about Jewish cultural figures collapses that distinction in a way that feels less like criticism than projection, particularly in its reading of Song Sung Blue. Representation is not a checklist, and Jewishness is not a mandatory narrative insert, especially when the story being told is not, in fact, about a Jewish life. Sometimes what’s missing is not erasure but relevance.

Take Song Sung Blue, which has somehow become Exhibit A in this argument despite not being about Neil Diamond at all. Song Sung Blue is a film about two struggling Midwestern musicians who find love, purpose, and modest glory through a Neil Diamond tribute act. The movie is explicit about that framing. Diamond is the music; he is not the subject. Mike and Claire Scardina are not avatars for Diamond’s biography or identity, and there is no indication that they are Jewish. To insist otherwise is to demand that Judaism function as atmosphere rather than meaning.

That demand misunderstands how storytelling works. Song Sung Blue is not asking who Neil Diamond is; it’s asking why his music resonates across geography, class, and generation. The answer it offers is not genealogy or theology, but emotion. That may not reflect one particular viewer’s personal relationship to Diamond, but cinema is not obligated to mirror our memories back to us intact. It is allowed to tell a different story using the same songs.

The comparison to race-based narratives—the idea that this absence is akin to making a James Brown cover-band movie without acknowledging Blackness—is rhetorically striking but analytically flimsy. Neil Diamond is not James Brown, and Judaism does not function in American culture the same way Blackness does. Jewish identity can be explicit, coded, submerged, or irrelevant depending on context. Treating those modes as interchangeable flattens Jewish experience rather than honoring it.

The same problem arises in the discussion of Oppenheimer. Yes, J. Robert Oppenheimer was Jewish. Yes, Christopher Nolan cast a non-Jewish actor in the role, which is a fair and serious casting critique. But the film itself depicts a man whose Jewishness was not central to his daily life or self-conception, even as the historical moment makes antisemitism unavoidable at the margins. Nolan’s failure is not that he didn’t shoehorn Judaism into the narrative, but that Hollywood still defaults to non-Jewish actors for Jewish roles of this magnitude, even when they themselves are non-practicing Jews.

With Bob Dylan, the critique becomes even stranger. A Complete Unknown is a film narrowly focused on a specific artistic moment: the lead-up to Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. It is not a cradle-to-legend biopic, nor does it claim to be. Dylan’s Jewishness, while real and meaningful, is not the engine of that story. What exactly is the Jewish experience that is expected to be depicted in the movie? The expectation one might have of showing Dylan going to shul or celebrating holidays with others in Greenwich Village means confusing identity with ritual and biography with obligation.

What’s missing from the Times essay is any acknowledgment that Jewishness, unlike many other identities, has long contained the option of invisibility—sometimes chosen, sometimes imposed. That doesn’t make it less real. It makes it more complicated. A film can reflect Jewish experience without depicting Jewish practice, just as a film can center Jewish creators without narrativizing Jewish suffering or pride.

There is a real conversation to be had about casting, about who gets to embody Jewish historical figures, and about when universality becomes a euphemism for flattening difference. But Song Sung Blue is not guilty of that sin. It is not a film about Jewish identity pretending otherwise; it is a film about love, music, and survival that happens to orbit a Jewish artist’s work without attempting to explain him.

Not every story touching Jewish culture is required to announce itself as Jewish. Sometimes the most honest representation is letting a story like Song Sung Blue be exactly what it is—no more, no less—and resisting the urge to turn personal grief, however moving, into a universal mandate for art.

Focus Features released Song Sung Blue in theaters on December 25, 2025.

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