Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in a trailer for “Maestro.” Photo: YouTube screenshot

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has defended Bradley Cooper for wearing a prosthetic nose to play Leonard Bernstein in an upcoming Netflix biopic about the prolific Jewish composer and conductor after the actor was accused of perpetuating Jewish stereotypes.

“Throughout history, Jews were often portrayed in antisemitic films and propaganda as evil caricatures with large, hooked noses,” an ADL spokesperson told The Algemeiner. “This film, which is a biopic on the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein, is not that.”

The American Jewish Committee similarly told TMZ on Monday about Cooper’s prosthetic nose in the film: “We do not believe that this depiction harms or denigrates the Jewish community.”

Bernstein was the son of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants to the US and died in 1990. He was best known for writing the music for West Side Story and won 16 Grammy Awards, seven Emmys, and two Tonys throughout his career.

Las week, Netflix released the official trailer for Maestro — which Cooper, who is not Jewish, directed, co-wrote and starred in. He plays the lead role and actress Carey Mulligan plays his wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein.

Since the trailer’s release, many users on social media have criticized Cooper’s use of a prosthetic nose to portray the late composer, saying it amplifies the antisemitic stereotype that Jews have noticeably large noses and noting the prosthetic is larger than the composer’s actual nose.

British Jewish actress Tracy-Ann Oberman reportedly considered it “the equivalent of Black-Face or Yellow-Face” in an Instagram post that has since been deleted. She also went on air criticizing the use of prosthetics, noting that Cooper played deformed English man Joseph Merrick in The Elephant Man on Broadway without prosthetics.

“Jewish people and the stereotyping of their noses goes back,” she said. “There are photos of Nazis measuring the size of people’s noses to decide whether they were ethnically acceptable and if they were too Jewish — on their way to the concentration camps. There is enormous sensitivity towards this stereotype … I don’t think [Bradley Cooper] needed to put on an amplified prosthetic nose to play a Jewish man.”

Among those who have defended Cooper against the criticism include Bernstein’s children, who said in a statement issued on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, last week that their father did in fact have “a nice, big nose.” They added that “Bradley chose makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with it. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”

Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the Israel-based International Legal Forum, said he does not understand the outrage and David Draiman, the Jewish frontman of the heavy metal band Disturbed, called the “Jewface” accusations “nonsense.”

Maestro will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2. It will then be released in select theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20. Watch the film’s trailer below.