http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllJewsAreAshkenazi

If there is a Jew in any mainstream media (and the odds are better than you might think), he or she will most likely be portrayed as Ashkenazi , even when that portrayal does not fit that character's background or the setting. Oy vey!

This means that the Jew will be apparently of Central or Eastern European descent, will probably eat gefilte fish and bagels with lox, and may drop Yiddish words into their speech. The names of Jews will almost always end with -berg, -man, or -stein (less common are those ending with -witz/vitz/wicz, -eiser, -baum, -feld, -bach or -sky/ski). These "Jewish names" are actually Germanic names adopted by Ashkenazi Jews. The trope is so pervasive that viewers from outside Germany, Poland or Russia tend to think only Jews have these names.

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In Real Life, while seventy to eighty percent of the world's Jewish population are in fact Ashkenazim, there are many other Jewish ethnicities, including the Sephardim (Iberian), the Mizrahim (Middle-Eastern; there may, depending on who's counting, be more Mizrahim in Israel than Ashkenazim), the Temanim (those from Yemen in particular), the Kaifeng Jews (Chinese), Bene Israelites (India), and the Habashim (Ethiopian). Indeed, there are Jews from almost every country and culture, with their own distinct names and customs. And this is not even counting converts, who can (and do) come from every cultural background imaginable.

The trope has its origins in America, where Jewish culture, especially in New York and Los Angeles, is dominated by Ashkenazi tradition. This was not always so, however. In 1850, the considerable majority of Jews living in English-speaking countries were Sephardim, which can make works from this period with Jewish characters a bit confusing (even leaving aside the near-constant antisemitism). It was only in the late 19th and early 20th century that a great number of Ashkenazi Jews immigrated to the United States (and to a lesser extent, Western Europe) to flee from persecution in eastern Europe. The trope is also used to avoid leaving viewers wondering why a given character behaves like a Jew but looks like an Arab.

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In historical works, this can sometimes be a case of Translation Convention.note For example, the Jewish innkeeper in I, Claudius presumably spoke Latin with a recognizably Jewish accent of that era (based on his native Aramaic or Eastern-Mediterranean-Greek); arguably, having the character speak with a cliche Yiddish accent was a simple way to depict this, like giving the low-class Roman soldiers Cockney accents.

Note that this trope is not about the simple presence of Ashkenazi Jews in a work, but rather about the implicit or explicit assumption that all Jews are of Eastern European descent (e.g. by having Jewish characters speaking with Yiddish accents where their background and/or time period would make this improbable). Please do not add examples along the lines of "Character X is Ashkenazi" when it is nothing remarkable. Similarly, it's not worth listing an "aversion" if a work just happens to have a Jew who's Sephardi or Mizrachi.

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Examples:

Comic Books

Rule of Funny-based Asterix example in the album Asterix and the Black Gold - Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem in 50 B.C.

By the same token, The Cartoon History of the Universe, where Jews are often seen saying "Oy" and other historical non-Ashkenazi Jews use Yiddishisms (e.g. Salome calling her nephew Archelaus a "schmuck" and a "schlemiel" in a presentation to Emperor Augustus) purely for the humor value. Note that much of Larry Gonick's work - which covers topics ranging from statistics to human sexuality, all presented in comic book form - includes a certain amount of Borscht Belt humor, including Self-Deprecation (Gonick is of Ashkenazi descent himself), regardless of the topic at hand.

The Rabbi's Cat: The story takes place within the Sephardic community of Algiers in the 1920s, where Ashkenazi Jews are considered weird and foreign. The second volume introduces a singular Ashkenazi Jew, a Russian painter who smuggled himself into Africa in a crate full of prayer books (who is viewed as an oddball by pretty much everyone else). The second volume also involves a quest to track down a hidden city of Beta Israel/Ethiopian Jews. The trope is played straight in-universe by the character of El Rebibo, a Sephardic Jewish entertainer in Paris who has to portray a stereotypical Arab because he can't manage the Polish accent needed to portray a stereotypical Jew.

Lampshaded (and also subverted) in The Name of the Game by Will Eisner. In the opening narrative, Eisner goes into detail on the different waves of jews coming to America. Thus, the Sephardic arrived first, making up a Jewish elite. Then, from 1830 an onwards, the Ashkenazi Jews started their immigration, followed by the eastern European Jews (also Ashkenazi). These new immigrants were a crude and noisy people. But they were intelligent, resourceful and innovative, an ideal trait for life in this big and open country that was often crude and noisy itself but where opportunity was so abundant. The hard-working newcomers thrived. They were Ashkenazis, just one rung below the Sephardics on the Jewish social ladder.

Also by Eisner, the autobiographical To the Heart of the Storm, telling the story of Eisner`s childhood and family. Rose, his maternal aunt, stands out as the most stereotypical ashkenazi, with phrases like this: Hah! A dentist with a college degree she wants yet!

Fan Works

Nathaniel Kurtzberg in Marc Being In A Gang Rights devolves into speaking Yiddish when he is trying to complain about someone to their face without them knowing and even unknowingly when he is regaining consciousness, implying that it is his first language.

Film

Literature

Live-Action TV

Rachel Berry of Glee fits this, because in order to figure out whether or not Puck was Quinn's baby daddy she told Quinn that her cousin was worried about her baby having Tay-Sachs, and tells Quinn that she only has to worry about the disease if the father of her baby is Jewish. This is despite the fact that Rachel Berry's actress, Lea Michele, is actually of Sephardic ancestry. (Ironically, Quinn's actress, Dianna Agron, is actually Ashkenazi.) Though it may be debatable, as she may have simply made it up to learn the truth about the paternity of Quinn's child.

she told Quinn that her cousin was worried about her baby having Tay-Sachs, and tells Quinn that she only has to worry about the disease if the father of her baby is Jewish. This is despite the fact that Rachel Berry's actress, Lea Michele, is actually of Sephardic ancestry. (Ironically, Quinn's actress, Dianna Agron, is actually Ashkenazi.) Though it may be debatable, as she may have simply made it up to learn the truth about the paternity of Quinn's child. The supposedly-Israeli businessman Ari Frankel in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia not only has a Yiddish last name, but also speaks completely unaccented American English. While there are a few natural-born Israelis who can do this (usually American-educated or born to American parents), the obviously non-Israeli actor hardly portrayed a typical person from Israel.

In an episode of Mad Men, one of the executives remarks that the Israelis don't look anything like New York Jews, who would largely be Ashkenazi. Don Draper later asks a New York Jew to tell him about Israel, and she admits that she doesn't know much about it, besides advising him not to cross an Israeli.

In an episode of Raising Hope, when Burt goes to a deli with Jimmy to find out what it means to be Jewish, they all burst into song detailing stereotypes about Jews and their cultural features, all of which refer specifically to Eastern European Jewish Americans.

Zigzagged on Will & Grace. Grace hires a new secretary from Iran who gets away with answering the phone in Farsi and acting extremely unprofessionally in general, to the point she shreds plans Grace worked on all night for an important client. She is overjoyed when she discovers that the secretary is Jewish and gleefully fires her. It looks like an aversion of this trope at first glance, but the employee said she was Jewish like a brisket, which is hardly a universal staple of Jewish cuisine.

There's an episode of Law & Order where an Iranian character accuses the police of being involved in a Zionist conspiracy. In response, Anita gestures to Kevin and herself while sarcastically asking "Do we look like Zionists?" She's presumably trying to calm the man down by insinuating that she and Kevin can't be Jewish because they're black, even though there are many black Jews in certain parts of the world.

Murder in the First: Averted with Raffi Veracruz, who appears to be Sephardic judging by her name (like the actress playing her, Emmanuelle Chriqui, who comes from a Sephardic family).

Videogames

In L.A. Noire, the prime suspect in one of the cases is a Jewish jeweler. Though his swarthy complexion and decidedly un-ashkenazi name "Kalou" suggest that he is of Sephardic descent, he still peppers his speech with Yiddish.

Averted in Crusader Kings 2: While the autogenerated, randomly appearing Jews in Europe are mostly Ashkenazi, there is also a chance that they are Sephardim, especially if you have Iberian culture yourself. Also, the two big Jewish nations in the game are the Ethiopian kingdom of Semien (later Auxium) and the Jewish Khazar Khaganate, both of which follow their own culture and speak their own language (Ethiopian and Kazar respectively). Any character with any culture can be converted to Judaism while keeping their original culture, resulting in things like Jewish Sweden or Jewish Afghanistan. All in all, the game does a pretty good job at portraying Jewish culture during this time period.

Web Original

Western Animation

Played with in Elena of Avalor (which takes place in a world connected to the Earth via "the second star to the right"), where the Galonians are Latino Jewish and observe both Ashkenazi and Sephardic traditions.

In Family Guy, Peter Griffin's retelling of the Exodus story via his ancestor "Moses Griffin" portrays the Biblical Israelites (i.e. a generation of ancient Hebrews born and raised in Egypt) as stereotypical Ashkenazi Jews.

Averted in M.K. 22, though since it's an Israeli series, it's a given. Out of the show's four main Jewish characters, two (Shukrun and Chanuka) are Mizrahi, and two (Shulman and Levinstein) are Ashkenazi.

Real Life