Whatever your politics, Sean Hannity’s bullying of Palestinian-American political analyst Yousef Munayyer on The Sean Hannity Show on Thursday night was simply outrageous. Hannity’s behavior towards a guest he invited onto his show—which included finger-jabbing, shouting, and interrupting Munayyer to such an extent that Munayyer couldn’t utter a single complete sentence—was unconscionable and rude.

But to the relief of polite people the world over, Hannity’s despicable behavior caught the attention of a crusading celebrity. Intellectual bad-boy Russell Brand jumped into the fray yesterday to call out the Fox anchor’s treatment of his guest, posting a point-by-point video response to the segment on YouTube. It’s sort of like a director’s cut, with clips of Brand commentary spliced into the original footage of Hannity’s “interview.”

At one point, Hannity asks Munayyer over and over if he thinks Hamas is a terrorist organization. When Munayyer attempts to answer, Hannity cuts him off: “Is Hamas—what part of this can’t you get through your thick head?” Cut to Brand laughing. “That’s really rude!” He says, cracking up. Back to Hannity: “Is Hamas a terrorist organization? Yes or no?” Munayyer, for his part, stays remarkably calm.

“Sean’s not a solution-based guy,” Brand says, heaving a deep sigh. Rather than looking for insightful commentary and ways to arrive at peace, “Sean’s thinking, ‘We want conflict. What things can I say to exacerbate conflict?'” And, later: “Not that it’s not bad that Israel has to deal with terrorist attacks. Of course it is. But what are we looking for? A solution? Or just a verdict on who’s bad? Because that’s not going to get us anywhere.”

Testify, Brother Brand. And keep up the media manners watchdog. I’m a big fan.

Image: YouTube

Related: Joan Rivers: Nose Jobs Are the Key to Peace in the Middle East

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It’s a rare thing when a work of art makes me sit back and say, “Wow,” rarer still when it’s something Holocaust-related. The sheer volume of art that has been produced around the catastrophic events of WWII is overwhelming; but more than that, artists have a tendency to allow their emotions to rule unchecked, sure that the audience will forgive their indulgence; after all, it’s the Holocaust.

All this is to say that when Alexis Fishman’s Der Gelbe Stern (“The Yellow Star”) knocked me over sideways on Thursday afternoon at the New York Musical Theater Festival, I was as excited to be excited as I was charmed, thrilled, moved, and amused by her miraculous turn as Erika Stern, a fictional Weimar cabaret star performing for the last time in 1933 before a jealous, Nazi ex-lover shuts down her show. A mixture of original songs, stand-up comedy, and monologue, the show sparkles every bit as much as Fraulein Stern’s earrings under the spotlight.

For starters, Ms. Fishman, an Australian by birth, manages to convey the deep charisma crucial to pulling off her role as Berlin’s biggest cabaret star. She is laugh-out-loud funny with her Marlene Dietrich accent and her songs about the perfect boyfriend, Attila the Hun. She’s incredibly raunchy, too, in a way that conveys her delight with sex, rather than a two-dimensional performance of sexiness designed to appeal to the audience’s gaze. It’s a post-modern delight rather than a modernist one, but hey, I was into it! I only wished she had done something sexy with the Nazi flag; the forbiddenness of the swastika has, inadvertently, lent it an erotic quality that Fishman seems to know but not actualize. She is the person to do it.

There is real chemistry between Erika and her gay, closeted pianist, Otto, which makes for great fun. I was also reminded of the true pleasure one gets from watching a performer in a show they have themselves written; one feels the intelligence behind the work as a genuine part of the performance, rather than a performance of genuineness.

But the real brilliance of Der Gelbe Stern lies in Fishman’s masterful balancing of sentiment and irony. Just when you’re ready to relax into giggles, she elicits tears, and just when you’re ready to indulge those tears, she cracks the whip of her wit, as if to say, “Snap out of it!” It’s a truly masterful performance. Catch one of her two final shows on Monday, July 21. (Tickets here.)

Image credit: Hunter Canning

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In a way, the 2013 documentary “Brave Miss World” (recently released on Netflix) is two movies: It’s a celebrity biopic about Linor Abargil, the Israeli Miss World of 1998, and it’s the story of how a woman becomes an anti-rape activist.

Abargil was brutally raped in Milan at the age of 18 by travel agent Uri Shlomo Nur, just seven weeks before winning the Miss World crown. In order to heal and raise awareness about the prevalence of rape, she started a website for women to share their stories, and the film (produced and directed by Cecilia Peck) picks up in 2008 as she prepares to travel to meet them.

“Brave Miss World” offers viewers two distinct kinds of voyeurism: we see Abargil’s journey from Miss Israel to model to activist to Orthodox mother of twins, and we hear the tragic, intimate narratives of the rape victims Abargil visits and interviews, her brow furrowed in consternation and anger as she listens to their storms.

With no qualifications other than her own experience and her fame, Abargil travels from Ohio to South Africa doling out advice—even commands—to women who have been brutalized in countless ways. “I’m not going to tell you, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for you, it’s so sad’,” Abargil says to one victim who doesn’t want to come forward to her family. “Ok, I can tell you that, but it’s not going to help you recover.” She valiantly goes on, telling the survivor, “You need to heal yourself and we need to push each other to do it, no mercy.”

Abargil has a message: speak out about your assault, for that way lies the land of the healed. “It’s the hardest thing to do, I know, to speak, but then, it’s like the best pill,” she tells a survivor. “It heals you.”

She is absolutely convinced of this by her own experience, and astounded by survivors who might prefer to mourn and heal privately. Her reaction to such women is equal parts endearing and unsound. “Why do you think all the victims—it’s really bother me, it’s why I’m asking—on TV they cover their faces? Why they don’t stand and talk about it?” She demands of a rape crisis center director, who patiently explains that many victims fear being shamed. Thanks to supportive family and friends, and a natural tenacity, Abargil is remarkably impervious to this stigma.

There is something supreme and even magnificent about her confidence. A group of teenage girls in South Africa—some as young as 13—confide that people don’t listen to them when they talk about being raped. “She just wants attention,” one says, mimicking the attitudes of their supposed protectors. “Even though she cries, she wants attention,” another girl recalls being told. They all nod in recognition.

“You know what you say when they tell you you want attention?” Abargil says. “You tell them, ‘Yes.’” The girls all laugh. “True! This is what I want. And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll cry louder.” It’s such a wonderful and restorative message for women of all cultures who are silenced and told that they are attention-seekers when they report rape, and Abargil conveys it with a zealous charisma.

It’s her confidence and intuition that told her how to talk to her rapist on the night she was abducted and attacked (It was only a one night stand, Don’t worry, I swear I’m not going to tell anyone), which probably saved her life. That same confidence took her from moderating a website where women write in with their rape stories, to meetings with Fran Drescher and Joan Collins—who both share their rape stories on camera—to law school and the office of the Attorney General.

But anti-rape activism is only one of the things Abargil becomes stubbornly attached to, against the advice of family and friends. She also begins a transformation midway through the film from a secular to a wholly religious—and I mean religious—existence. With the help of a flirtatious Breslov rabbi, Abargil pulls her family, gay best friend, and boyfriend (later husband), into the sphere of her new spiritual existence, replete with head covering, modest dresses, and a refusal to touch men. This is not a person who does things in half measures.

Victims of rape could do worse than have an advocate in the stunning, stubborn Abargil. But still, there’s something discomfiting about the way her grim cause is boosted by the cult of celebrity. While visibility is crucial to help raise awareness about important causes—think #BringBackOurGirls, or even Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy op-ed—”Brave Miss World” prompts the question: isn’t there something smarmy about those who need a celeb to say “I was raped” in order to care? Also, what is the long-term impact of public confession on rape survivors? Abargil’s thesis—that talking about sexual assault publicly is healing and cathartic—is not one she has arrived at through an education in psychology.

The two main threads of the film—celebrity biopic and activism—exist in tension with one another, rather than being complementary. Abargil’s conversion to ultra-Orthodox Judaism is surprising and largely unexplained; unsettling, even. And the fact that we need a white beauty queen to stamp her disapproval on African rape for it to come to our attention is extremely depressing.

But despite these aesthetic quibbles, the film is inspiring. There is something uplifting about a woman like Abargil, whose dogged approach to the things she wants spills over into a desire to help other women. A woman who gets everything she wants. A woman who survives a brutal rape by telling her rapist exactly what he wants to hear, who presses charges against him unsuccessfully in one country and—never discouraged—jails him in another. It’s uplifting to see a woman with such power, who never doubts her story or her right to happiness, or her belief that all other women deserve the same.

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“You’re allowed to go right up to him, yeah. You just can’t touch him!” So says one yeshiva student, holding a camera pointed to another, about a guard stationed outside one of London’s royal buildings.

The young man pictured moseys—yes, moseys—toward the soldier, then stand next to him. The difference between the two is obvious, palpable, already comic: a yeshiva bochur in black and white with jaunty payos and a big black yarmulka, pictured next to a becloaked, behelmeted guard, the strap under his chin both infantilizing him and preparing him for battle.

While posing for the camera, the young man starts to weave an entire narrative about his relationship with the soldier, docu-drama style. “We went to school together,” he says, gesturing towards the soldier. “He went his own way.”

At first, the guard seems in charge of himself, quite capable of fulfilling his duty to not laugh. The yeshiva student speaks of their days at school together, choosing the guard’s school as the context for their shared past, where they studied martial arts. He starts out with a questioning kind of tone, as though he isn’t sure whether the soldier is the person he is describing, but as the narrative progresses he grows more confident.

“He was never talkative,” the yeshiva student says, and starts to describe the guard as a youth. At this point, it is clear that the guard is listening, and moreover, struggling to maintain his composure. As the student launches deeper into his fiction, things get worse for the guard, until the final epic breakdown. The student interrupts his own narrative as he alights on the perfect weapon: “His mother always picked him up from school. You know, he was that type of guy, until he was twenty, his mother always picked him up from school.” At this point, the guard breaks. And I mean, breaks. He doesn’t just smile, or grin, but breaks into a full-on giggle, halted as quickly as possible by a shake of his head and a blush. The students dance away, ebullient.

What’s amazing is that the thing that finally breaks the guard is a shared experience which totally dissolves the distance between them: they both can relate to making fun of the guy whose mother picks him up from school, “until he was twenty.” While it is possible to find two people more different than these two, they are different enough that their shared experience—and the humor that derives from it—is touching, as well as hilarious.

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Another of Jill Soloway‘s gems has slipped onto the internet with very little fanfare, so we at Jewcy thought we’d bring both the fans and the fare.

Wifey.TV is “a curated video network for women”—sort of like the love child between Jezebel and Upworthy, minus the snark and sentimentality. Soloway and co-creator Rebecca Odes promise to “explore the interweb far and wide to gather video that tickles us pink, makes us think or moves us—then we put it out there for you!”

And no, you don’t have to be married to appreciate the site:

“Wifey isn’t really for wives, or about them. Wifey’s your bestie, your go-to female, the one who gets you. Our audience is anyone who needs content that gets deep inside of women as actual multi-faceted human people. Subjects, not objects…

We’ve been in those meetings where it’s a struggle to get people to invest in portrayals of women that aren’t satisfying to your average male. The powers that be promote their own imaginary idea of wish fulfillment for women…

The audience is out there, but the structure is hanging onto old mores. It’s time for a new paradigm. The female gaze is ready and waiting.”

With a variety of cleverly-named categories like sheroic and—my personal favorite—lolsob, Wifey.tv curates content from other sites and produces some of its own. There are great videos of Jill Soloway getting all up in someone’s grill, like when she interrogates Jenn Tisdale about whether she had an orgasm while filming a porno with James Deen, or when she asks a group of women at a book party whether certain things (like anti-rape underwear) are feminist or misogynist.

There’s a heartrending video of Maya Angelou in Richard Pryor’s short lived comedy—LOLSOB!!—and an utterly hilarious cartoon about why there are no strong female characters (just watch it. Right now. Trust me.) And the Women of Wall Street is a magnificent, gender-reversal satire of the Wolf of Wall Street trailer.

In “Woody’s Daughters,” Soloway meditates on the experience of watching Manhattan at the age of 14, and her conflict over the presciently creepy final scene:

“Today this scene reads like there is a gun to her head, just off camera… But the truth is, we are all his children. We inherited his rules and took them as emotional gospel. One was that a sad sack Jewish man can re-imagine himself as the object of desire for the impossibly young, impossibly beautiful Mariel Hemingway – as long as he is brilliantly funny. For a post-Holocaust generation, that math was a life raft in the face of humiliations like old, Jewish, short, ugly. His voice gave me something to hold on to, a way to win again.”

LOLSOB!!

But my favorite one of all is the video that makes people in relationships wish they were single, and single people feel like they have more purchase on that secret, quiet thing that we’re all searching for.

When asked by Forbes about why they created Wifey.TV, the duo answered as follows:

Odes: “We want to be the go-to source for women who want something to watch, whether that’s on their phone or their television. We want to produce the kind of media we want to see.”

Soloway: “To topple the patriarchy. Create a worldwide feminist revolution. To silence anonymous misogynist trolls. Emmys, Oscars, house on the beach, renovated farmhouse studio in Amagansett, private jets, quiet minds, thicker eyelashes, a friendship with Fran Lebowitz.”

Indeed. Keep it coming. We’re watching with bated breath.

RELATED: Must-watch: Jill Soloway’s New Amazon Original Pilot, “Transparent”
Jennifer Aniston Interviews Gloria Steinem At Feminist Makers Conference

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They say we are living in a golden age of television. If that’s the case, Jill Soloway’s new pilot deserves its own unit of commerce. Ruby? Sapphire? It’s a cut above the rest, and it’s fucking amazing and you should drop everything you are doing and watch it right now.

A dark family comedy about sex and self, “Transparent” is “Girls” meets “Parenthood,” with some “Louie” mixed in. The plot revolves around a classic Jewish L.A. family, including divorced parents Judith Light (sublime!) and Jeffrey Tambor (almost unbearably good, equal parts vulnerable and funny), and their offspring: Jay Duplass as Josh, a music producer who we meet in bed playing with the boobs of a blond cutie; Amy Landecker as Sarah, a housewife we first glimpse hurriedly rushing her kids to school; and the astoundingly good Gaby Hoffman as Ali, a depressive twenty-something with big ideas and no money. The kids are touchingly close, and they are called in by Tambor for a family summit in which the truth he plans to tell them ends up buried, rather than revealed.

The show is equally compassionate and disdainful towards its characters, both distant from and reveling in their upper-middle-class lifestyle. (“If you don’t raise five grand for Tu B’Shevat, Dana Goodman just implodes,” quips Sarah’s erstwhile lesbian lover during school drop-off.) But it also seems to be asking viewers whether to accept or deny the father’s accusation that his children are selfish and unable to see beyond themselves, especially since the carefully guarded secret of this family’s patriarch—his transgender identity—has seeped into his kids’ psycho-sexual lives.

As the pilot unravels, we see the siblings responding individually to the truth their father fails to reveal. They seem somehow to intuit that the masculine center of their family is in flux, or perhaps, was never quite there. Ali goes in search of a trainer in the park for an old-fashioned dose of discipline in its modern masquerade—a punishing workout. Josh finds himself in the lap of someone quite the opposite of his blond bedfellow, a woman with big curly hair and large floppy breasts who tells him to get comfortable. He lies down on the floor (in the exact position in which we first see Sarah’s son), and lays his head near the woman’s crotch. Is he looking to replace his emasculated father? Or perhaps searching for the mother figure he senses waiting to emerge? And Sarah finds herself reignited by her college girlfriend, seeking out her less hetero-normative former self. The kids do see their dad for what he is, if only unconsciously, evidenced by their search for a father—or mother—figure. And Dad, too, has something to learn, should the series get picked up.

In addition to being smart and sexy, “Transparent” is also genuinely funny. “Dad’s not getting engaged—he’s too much of a pussy-hound,” says Josh on their way to the summit. “Really he’s a Marcy-hound,” Ali corrects him. “Haven’t the last six been Marcys?” (I won’t ruin it, but when the three kids try to pronounce the Jewish last names of the Marcys, hilarity ensues).

With characteristic aplomb, Jill Soloway gives us something to wonder about, something to be surprised by, something to be aroused by, and something to laugh at. A lusciously downcast soundtrack lends the whole thing a distinctively Soloway melancholy; one senses that things are not going to be OK, but somehow, it’s better that way. The only weakness is the portrayal of minorities—Ali’s black trainer and Sarah’s lesbian ex-girlfriend seem a little too close to a white liberal’s fantasy. But perhaps Soloway means this as a critique of her characters, who put these individuals to use in satisfying their cravings. We’ll only know if the show gets picked up by Amazon, so watch it and say yes to “Transparent”!

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I don’t get sports. I mean, I get playing them. I’m as competitive as the next person, and I enjoy coupling that with random energetic efforts that increase endorphins and involve friends. But I don’t get watching sports. I don’t get how it’s fun to watch other people do something, even something you really like. Would you watch people watch television? Or read a book? Or sing in the shower? It’s sort of like watching porn, but without masturbating and you’re rooting for one of the parties involved. HUH? Consider what you’re watching: a bunch of people chasing a small round object around, and often engaging in conflict over said ball. HUH?? As big of a fan as I am of the cute butt encased in tights, there are less boring ways to get even this.

Here to share my amazement, and do a fantastic job making fun of it, is our favorite Jewish-British comedian, back with a new character. Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film will star him as a Northern football thug, Mirror reports. We are certain that the former model, famous for his roles as Ali G., Borat, and Bruno, will deliver a stellar performance as a crazy football hooligan.

Baron Cohen is no stranger to controversy. When in character as Borat, he freely espoused anti-Semitic views. “People really let down their guard with him because they’re in a room with somebody who seems to have these outrageous opinions,” he told NPR’s Robert Siegel about Borat. “They sometimes feel much more relaxed about letting their own outrageous, politically incorrect, prejudiced opinions come out.” Baron Cohen is a mastermind of this gambit, in no small part due to his ability to enter and stay in character.

Keep it real, Sacha. Can’t wait for the next one.

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How can you tell if a television show is good? Well, you can just ask yourself, did I like that? But sometimes that feels wrong because sometimes you enjoy things that you consider trashy, and sometimes you don’t enjoy things that are, on some level, considered “good”. So, I’ve created a metric for how to judge a show by breaking it down to its components. After our lesson, we’ll judge the new Fox show starring Andy Samberg, Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Aesthetic judgments are a composite of three things: the intelligence of the object in question, its emotional quality, and what I like to call the sensibilities the object in question promotes—its core values as they are exposed by certain plot lines and aesthetic choices. These three aspects of any work of art can be broken down in order to get at some of the ways the work affects us, or fails to. It’s a helpful metric for analyzing one’s own ambivalent feelings about encounters of the third (in the Kantian sense) kind.

Let’s start with intelligence. There are three essential levels of intelligence that television shows are aimed at. A show pitched at the first level is that show that comes on in the mornings while you’re in the waiting room at your doctor’s office. The host stands in front of the participant who is for some reason dressed as a pirate and bellows at his or her face: “Here is a FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR BILL! Do you want this five hundred dollar bill, or WHATEVER SECRET THING IS HIDDEN IN THAT BLACK BOX?” The participant presumably makes the choice and either satisfaction or dissatisfaction ensues. While the emotions of the show are quite compelling—that stupefaction that comes with high stakes choices absent the information necessary to make them—the show insults our intelligence, for it has no constraints associated with the task demanded of the participant.

The second level of intelligence can be found at shows aiming to intrigue their viewers, yet failing because once intrigued, they overplay their hand. In this category we have the show that is excellent with set up, but insults us by telling us what we have already learned via hints and clues that the show has assiduously planted. These shows always cause a spectator to say, “Wait. You mean he must have killed his victim before 6 p.m., because the clock with the gunshot is stuck at 6 p.m.?” In this category you have your Law and Order, your Aaron Sorkin, and any show with a laugh track except for Will and Grace. Sorkin’s mistake is that he thinks he has one up on the viewer. He doesn’t. It’s embarrassing.

The third level of intelligence occurs in shows whose producers are not only intelligent but who believe in the intellectual capacity of their viewers. They treat their audience as if they can be trusted with basic functions of inference. For example, in these shows, sometimes the producers will purposely withhold information from their audience, and they trust that the audience can read it is as such. In this category, you have your Good Wife, your Breaking Bad.

But these shows can fail in other ways. Take Breaking Bad. Intellectually, I am not insulted. The creators and actors clearly expect me to keep up, which I appreciate. But I am insulted emotionally by the show, which expects me to be carried along by the paltry emotional palette of a man who wants power. Furthermore, the show’s sensibilities offend: it has a serious race problem. It is essentially a show about the family as a corporation, the corporation as a family. The whole concept of the perfect product winning the day when applied to drugs—to meth—well, it offends the sensibilities, more than the intellect, insofar as it betrays a dishonorable bias the show has toward conservative values.

Some shows succeed intellectually, but fail emotionally, like 30 Rock. “But it’s not supposed to do anything emotionally!” you might argue. Untrue. It’s full of emotions—they just don’t reach me. And some shows can succeed with their sensibilities, but fail in the other departments. Shonda Rhimes has sensibilities I can really get behind, like, women who are really good at their jobs! Who put men in their place! Who own bad-assery! But when that amazing woman shouts for the nth time, “I need you to do your job because I do my job and I’m really good at it! Because everything can be fixed!” I then become a little intellectually insulted because I remember that speech from the first thirteen episodes; I don’t need a reminder.

And some shows are perfect. Friday Night Lights. Top of the Lake. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Veep. Green Wing. Sigh.

Now that we’ve mastered our metric— intelligence, emotions, sensibilities— lets take a closer look at Andy Samberg’s new show, Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Do you know if you like this show? Allow me to assist you in breaking it down. Brooklyn Nine-Nine features Samberg as Detective Jake Peralta. Samberg is the brilliant detective who gets away with all his antics because he is so good at detecting. Samberg has the funniest lines. Samberg is often surrounded by gorgeous women, who gaze up at him, waiting for his next funny line. Samberg wins every match, everyone’s good will. It’s like a fantasy of the man-child life, but it’s portrayed as a reality. Peralta gets away with being irresponsible and idiotic, and he’s loved regardless. And for this reason, it’s insulting. It asks us to accept this fantasy as an objective. To think that we wouldn’t notice—this is second tier intellectual stuff. To idealize the man-child—this insults our sensibilities. The way it plays with the beta-males in Peralta’s vicinity—-this insults us emotionally. The verdict? This show is bad.

The post A Metric System To Evaluate Television Shows appeared first on Jewcy.

The Senate has reached a bipartisan fiscal deal, but we at Jewcy are doing what we do best— watching TV so that you don’t have to, leaving you time to catch up on the debt ceiling news.

What’s with the Jews taking over TV? Last week a yarmulka graced the small screen, meant to be ignored, which we over at Jewcy took as ample evidence that Jews were ubiquitous enough to be invisible—the sign of having truly made it in Hollywood. But on this week’s episode of New Girl, further evidence for our thesis—that being in with the Jews or in on the Jewish joke is a new kind of standard—came to light.

Tuesday night’s episode, “The Box,” could have been called “Jews and Money”, though the writers/producers/directors cleverly separated the two plot lines into “Jews” and “Money” and allowed Nick Miller (not a Jew) to handle the money end of things. But it’s the other plotline that interests us: after being discovered to be dating two women at once, Schmidt (Max Greenfield), the explicitly Jewish character, is worried that he isn’t a good person. We find him lying on a couch, earnestly running through a list of his symptoms (“I can’t sleep. My tweets have been extremely literal.”) to…camera pan out… his rabbi—ba-dum ching! While complaining to a rabbi like a therapist has become a staple of post-Coen brothers humor (“Were the girls Jewish?” the rabbi asks), what follows feels like new territory. The rabbi (Jon Lovitz) suggests that Schmidt seems “awfully concerned” with himself, and that he might try thinking of the needs of others. Lo and behold, on the street outside the synagogue, Schmidt saves a bike messenger from choking on a piece of gum.

“You saved my life, dude,” the bike messenger says, or something of that genre.

Schmidt, jubilant, stands up, and begins to recite, as Romy Zipken called it aptly, “the most boastful Shema you’ll ever hear.” And here’s the kicker: Schmidt gets the Shema all wrong. He mispronounces it— “Shema Yisroel Adonay EloCheiynu,” he proudly shouts, Jewing up one of the Jewiest utterances, second only to “Auf Mir Gesugt!” He also says it at the most inappropriate of all times. Shema is famously recited when someone is about to die, not when someone is saved, and surely, not when someone has just saved someone else. His pride, as Zipken points out, is another thing that makes the scene absurd. In other words, this is Shema camp, but astoundingly, the joke is on Schmidt. The writers (or perhaps this was Greenfield’s genius) must have assumed that their viewers would be canny to all the ways that Schmidt gets the Shema wrong. They are in on the joke; otherwise, the joke doesn’t work.

The next scene carries on the same vein. Schmidt encounters Nick in a bar, and greets him with the hilarious, “Nicholas! Gut Yontif! Are you well?” This greeting, like Schmidt’s Shema, is only funny if you are in the know. Even viewers who might not know what exactly Gut Yontif means, know that it is not an appropriate salutation on any old day in a bar. The writers are directing these jokes at a crowd who is in the know, who knows more about Jewish culture than Schmidt, the Jewish character. Schmidt importunes Nick to try giving “charity—or tzedakah as my people call it” and Nick begins to call tzedakah “tzaziki,” which is hilarious, again, because the word tzedakah is familiar enough to the viewers that they will hear the joke, recognize the infelicity. Imagine a similar joke being made with the word Kwanzaa. The resounding “ew” you just heard in your mind is the difference between having made it in American media and not having made it.

(Photo by Jason LaVeris/Getty)

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Over at Jewcy, we are big Jessie Kahnweiler fans, so when she released her new video Meet My Rapist, Romy Zipken covered the “dark yet humorous” film immediately. The piece is a masterful work of comedy and tragedy that changes the discourse about rape irreversibly by forcing the viewer through a mosh-pit of all the feelings, rather than one.

The conceit of the film—but do watch it—is that as Kahnweiler goes about her daily life, she is dogged by the silent specter of her rapist. I won’t ruin any of the lines—they are too good. Her delivery and those of the supporting cast is flawless, but suffice it to say that the responses of her friends and family and even herself serve as a hilarious critique of the way rape victims are treated, even by themselves.

The ending inspired in our office a little discussion: Was it a happy ending? Or was it a drug-infused ironic send-up of happy endings?

This week on The Hairpin (which we at Jewcy also luuurv), Jessie Kahnweiler weighed in on the ending she chose in a lovely interview with Emma Carmichael:

Jessie: It was also really empowering because I am the one who imagines this guy—I created my rapist’s persona. I only knew him in my real life for about three hours total. But I knew that if I could imagine him, I could also maybe say goodbye to him in my own way. It’s not that he is ever fully gone from my life, but I think it’s possible to reach a healthy level of detachment, and making the film gave me just that.

Emma: Right, so you could sort of create your own version of a happy ending?

Jessie: Yea. And to me, what’s so happy about it is that it’s an ending that’s dripping in beginnings—with my sexuality, my identity, and my confidence. It’s not that there is this big mega shift in me, but there is maybe a moment of like, “Yeah, this girl’s on her way.” And that’s so how life is. Any big change happens in a billion seconds over a trillion years.

But Kahnweiler’s little film is important for another reason: she reminds us of what good art is capable of. Good art can move while mocking; it can stir while being satirical. From the choice of the rapist’s appearance to Kahweiler’s own physical comedy to the therapist’s hair to the montage’s music, Kahweiler’s craft is wielded with the sharpness of a knife, and to great purpose. She reminds us that not only can a woman take back an experience that was forced upon her by an assailant, but that good art can change both artist and audience. And I felt myself changing as I watched this video. I emerged from viewing this brilliant seven and a half minutes a person who thinks about rape differently. It’s not that I feel politically altered—it’s hard to imagine where I would go on that front. It’s that Jessie Kahweiler has turned rape into a different thing, a thing that is funny and sad and pliable. A thing that is ugly and horrific but also a thing that can become the fruit of something beautiful, like heartbreak and death and trauma and loss.

Kahnweiler becomes more herself as the film goes you feel like you’re seeing a part of her that her other films don’t quite access. As she tells Carmichael, “the film deals a lot with my frustration and trying to reconcile being a “strong/ badass feminist” with a “hurting victim,” and being a sexual being as well. There is such a certain amount of guilt and shame around my own body with this experience, and the film was a chance to confront all these lurking fears.”

Kahnweiler is a true artist, for her experiences become our enlightenment. What happens on the screen alters us and therefore the kinds of encounters we will have and the kinds of encounters we will tolerate. Kahnweiler’s choice of a mash-up of humor and horror ends up being so much more powerful than a straight-up sob fest, for by engaging the viewer on both levels at once, Kanhweiler forces the viewer to be her—to encounter the material, as Kahnweiler does, as both horrifying and humorous.

Testify, Jessie Kahnweiler. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

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