Disney has an illustrious history of Jew-coding its bad guys.
“Tangled” got me first.
Mother Gothel is the cinematic foil for the predictably wide-eyed, button-nosed Rapunzel. Gothel, that magnificent, mercurial manipulator. So miserly with her food and money. So separate from the other golden-haired kingdom. So distinctly othered.
She so happens to be animated with the curly black hair and hooked nose stereotypical to Jews
But beyond Gothel’s suspicious phenotype, “Tangled” follows an eerily familiar story. Blood libel, an antisemitic canard that reverberates through history, accuses Jews of stealing Christian children to bake their blood into matzah. It was particularly prevalent in the Middle Ages, when it was not uncommon for European Jews to be hunted down and murdered whenever a child went missing. Jews stealing pretty Aryan children to sustain their dark magic. Sound familiar?
Angst led me further. One rabbit hole, excellent Twitter thread and confusingly upbeat Hava-Nagila-themed rap history of Jewish stereotypes in media later, my suspicions were confirmed: Disney villains are almost ubiquitously Jew-coded.
Cinderella’s evil stepmother slays the high-brow high-nose sneer. Maleficent from “Sleeping Beauty” rocks demon horns like those twitchy demon Jews of yore. Hades from “Hercules” is a snide, familiar outsider with thick New York diction who spits Yiddish phrases with endearing punctuation. In “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula has got the sweetest little purple hooked nose you’ve ever seen.
I’m tempted to dismiss all of this as incidental. The cartoon villain is always ugly. But the lengthening list begs the question: why are the phenotypic features common to Jews and other minorities the “ugly” ones?
