Here we go again.

It’s hard to discern whether this is a subject that genuinely has moviegoers outraged or (more likely, I’d say) is a topic of intense but fleeting interest to maybe seven people on Twitter — but Bradley Cooper is getting his turn in the stocks for a perceived cultural offense.

The promos are out for the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, and they reveal that not only is the lead actor playing the legendary conductor not Jewish (this was known), but he wears a prosthetic nose for the role.

Oy gevalt!

This kind of controversy has become a genre unto itself. As in other cases, it is silliness.

First, intent matters. As an Anti-Defamation League spokesman told the Washington Post: “Throughout history, Jews were often portrayed in antisemitic films and propaganda as evil caricatures with large, hooked noses. This film, which is a biopic on the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein, is not that.”

His children agree that this is a dud of an attempt to stir up outrage. They said in a statement: “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”

But there’s another layer to the pushback: the spreading idea that only a representative of a certain ethnicity can tell the stories pertaining to it, whether directing, writing, acting, cooking, etc.

Stop Antisemitism sneered that Cooper, “a non Jew,” was playing Bernstein, before condemning his “disgusting” fake nose. This was a theme among certain aforementioned Twitter users as well.

Sebastian Junger’s NR magazine piece last year on the cancellation of the Jihad Rehab documentary explained the power wielded by zealots who insist upon the “authorship” principle:

The “authorship” or “inclusion” principle, as this is known, insists that filmmakers share the ethnic and cultural identity of their subjects. According to these standards, not only are outsiders incapable of understanding the experiences of others, they don’t even have the right to try; to do otherwise would be to take an opportunity away from a better-qualified person of color.

But this is simply gatekeeping. Netflix should ignore this instance of it.