Jews Don’t Count: A Times Book of the Year 2021

* A wrinkle has appeared with this point, which is that – spoiler alert – in the final episode of Hunters it’s revealed that Pacino’s character is not Jewish. He’s an ex-Nazi himself who has been pretending to be Jewish to become a Nazi hunter, all part of exorcising his guilt. When I discovered that, I was going to cut this bit. Then it occurred to me that it’s a very generous – and very meta – reading indeed of Pacino’s performance to imagine that his employment of stereotypical Jewish mannerisms as an actor was a deeply buried clue to the fact that the character isn’t actually a Jew.