An analysis of a televised interview, in Israel, of an actress playing a role in a play is presented as an illustration of politeness marking in modern Israeli Hebrew. The interviewer is well-known as an educated Ashkenazi Jew, the actress a singer well-known for her vocal portrayal of Sephardic Jews, and in this case playing an exaggeratedly stereotyped role of a Sephardic Jewish maid. Analysis focuses on the locally-produced discourse pattern in the interview, and it is assumed that the actress's ethnicity is at the core of the pattern. Use of two words, "yahabla" and "kapara," is closely linked to the ethnic heritage and stereotype of Sephardic Jews, and their contextualizations in this interaction are seen as reflections of speaker-hearer solidarity and the projection onto the actress of certain negative associations. The responses of 55 native Israelis to a tape of the interview are viewed as suggesting that an entertaining but vicious interaction was taking place in it. An English transcription of a segment of the interview and data from the analyses of interpretive filters are appended. (MSE)