‘THE Young and the Restless" has made soap history by revealing a leading character’s deep, dark secret: Brad Carlton is (gasp!) Jewish.
And when was the last time that happened in the soap universe?"When I opened the script and saw the character’s [real] name . . . I called the head writer and said, ‘So Brad’s a Jew?’ " says Don Diamont, who’s played Brad for 19 years (and yes, he’s Jewish in real life)."And she said, ‘Yeah, are you OK with that?’ and I said, ‘Of course. I’m Jewish. But what does this mean going forward?’"Genoa City is a very WASPy community and that’s not what we do here," Diamont says. "We do baptisms and christenings."Brad, "Y&R’s" resident womanizer, shocked viewers and the townsfolk of Genoa City by revealing in last Friday’s episode that he’s really George Kaplan, the son of an Italian-Jewish Holocaust survivor (played by "The Diary of Anne Frank" star Millie Perkins) who was forced to go into hiding and assume the "Carlton" alias (don’t ask).And now that Brad Carlton has been "outed" as a Jew, Diamont says "Y&R" viewers can expect to see him be more open about his heritage."The head writer [Lynn Latham] said that we needed to shake things up a bit so, going forward, George is going to acknowledge the High Holy Days and Passover," Diamont says.
NY Post
I think this is a really sad form of publicity.
