Amazon's Woke Smokescreen
A few years ago, my friend Dan Ahdoot was auditioning for a sitcom on Fox. And things were looking good; he’d heard from his agent that he made it to the last round. Then, he got a call from one of the creators of the show, a friend of his who was calling to say sorry: Dan wasn’t going to get the part. The reason, he said, was that he wasn’t “diverse.”
Dan is Iranian. He has photos of his parents in Tehran before the revolution and the eyebrows to prove it. (Don’t worry, I asked Dan if I could objectify him.) But Fox apparently didn’t see Iran as “diverse.”
Given that Dan is not just Jewish but also Persian and therefore in possession of more than the usual amount of chutzpah, he then thought to ask: What about Afghanistan? Was Iran’s neighbor sufficiently diverse?
In the meantime, Dan says he hopped onto his Wikipedia page and inserted a little edit: He was now an “Iranian Afghan Jew,” despite the fact that nobody in Dan’s lineage is from, nor has ever visited, Afghanistan.
