New York Magazine

This week Adam Sandler appears as an Israeli and Rob Schneider as an Arab in You Don't Mess With the Zohan. Both seem to have taken a dip in the same substance used to honey up Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart.

Courtesy of Sony

Meanwhile, Mike Myers’s The Love Guru is quite possibly the first Hollywood comedy entirely devoted to tittering over turbans since Peter Sellers played Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party, from 1968.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Mena Suvari, in Stuck, employs cornrows and "ghetto-fabulous nails" to portray a woman who, in real life, was black.

Courtesy of THINKFilms

This week's blockbuster casting news had the decidedly non–Middle Eastern Jake Gyllenhaal named as the hero in Prince of Persia.

Courtesy of Ubisoft, Getty Images

Robert Downey Jr.’s character in Tropic Thunder is an actor, you see, a white one: “I’m a dude playin’ a dude disguised as another dude,” he drawls in the trailer, massaging his vowels like Samuel L. Jackson.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

If Americans were ready to laugh at a Hebrew-speaking British Jew pretending to be a Russian-speaking Kazakhstan oaf, then why not fake Arabs and Israelis?

Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Perhaps we simply didn’t notice when the taboo began to expire, sometime around 2003’s The Human Stain with its almost Dadaistically ludicrous casting of Sir Anthony Hopkins as a black man passing for Jewish.

Courtesy of Miramax Films

Fred Armisen as Saturday Night Live's Barack Obama.

Courtesy of NBC