Last week the government of Lebanon announced that it was banning Wonder Woman, the latest cinematic treatment of a comic-book superhero, a film that’s likely to be one of the summer’s big blockbusters. Is it because the Amazonian princess’s costume is a little too revealing for a Muslim-majority Middle Eastern country? Nope—The Scrapbook has seen swimwear around the pools of Beirut hotels that make Wonder Woman’s form-fitting outfit look like a burka.
The problem isn’t the character but the star, model and actress Gal Gadot. She’s Israeli. While lots of Lebanese would be happy to live in comity with the country to their south—or at least to watch movies starring some of their breathtakingly attractive neighbors—the Lebanese government is controlled by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia at war with Israel. Accordingly, Wonder Woman will not be allowed to pollute the pure air that feeds the beating heart of the “resistance.”
It’s doubtful the film’s distributor Warner Bros. is sweating the boycott much. Lebanon’s film-going population is peanuts compared to the world’s second-largest film market, China. And the Chinese are obsessed with Israel and the Jews—in a good way.
China, the world’s second-largest economy, sees the Jewish state as a “powerhouse of innovation,” says the director general of Israel’s economy ministry Amit Lang. The Chinese are curious to know how the tiny Jewish state became so successful—not just surviving in a hostile environment, surrounded by lots of bellicose neighbors, but becoming a global powerhouse in the IT sector. The answer, the Chinese surmise, may be in Judaism itself.
As Newsweek pointed out years ago, books such as Crack the Talmud: 101 Jewish Business Rules, The Illustrated Jewish Wisdom Book, and Know All of the Money-Making Stories of the Talmud have been required reading for Chinese businessmen, entrepreneurs, and other aspiring masters of the universe who want to make it big, like the Jews.
“Stereotypes and misinformation about Jews remain widespread in China. But they seem to have inspired admiration for Jews, rather than anti-Semitism,” James Ross wrote in the 2016 book The Image of Jews in Contemporary China. “Despite the lack of a significant Jewish presence in China, Jews remain a model for success.”
Given how sensitive Hollywood is to its huge Chinese audiences—due to overtake the U.S. market in 2019—one suspects that the filmmakers behind Wonder Woman knew exactly what they were doing in casting Gadot. She’s not just a model playing a superhero, but maybe a model for super-success.
