Almost every character on Freaks & Geeks could have been Jewish. After all, it was a Judd Apatow show. Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini), all dark hair and trigonometry prowess, and her scrawny little brother, Sam (John Francis Daley), totally could have been Jews. Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) also had a Jewish way about him, so nerdy and hairy was he. James Franco and Jason Segel are Jews in real life. And Ken, as played by Seth Rogen? Forget about it. So Jewish.

But this was network television. Though our beloved Freaks & Geeks ultimately (and cruelly) lasted only one season, the Weirs were probably conceived as a spin on the market-tested, relatable every-family, the kind at the center of a long line of family sitcoms. That means not Jewish. For all of Judd Apatow’s Jewish influence, the other creative force behind the show was Midwesterner Paul Feig, whose Michigan upbringing provided the basis for many a Freaks & Geeks (but mostly Geeks) plotline. So it makes sense that the Weirs were goyim. But it also entirely amazing that Neal was so Jewish.

Neal Schweiber, arrogant but mostly loyal friend to Sam and Bill, played by Samm Levine (why the double m, Samm?), probably wasn’t the only Jew in his school or town. But he was enough of an outlier that the class bully singled him out with cracks about his circumcision and, as Neal once confided to a fellow William McKinley High minority, a black kid, “Last year I was elected school treasurer. I didn’t even run!” The show went out of its way to point out Neal’s Jewishness at every opportunity. When the geeks needed to buy nonalcoholic beer to neutralize the potential danger of a kegger, it was Neal’s bar mitzvah money that provided the funds. When the geeks considered whether ninth grade was too old for trick-or-treating, Neal declared that when he hit 13, he became a man. As a part of the show’s ensemble, Neal helped flesh out the different shades of geek that appear in the wild: as opposed to sub-100-lb. Sam or nut-allergy-prone Bill, Neal’s geekdom was expressed in the form of … well, annoying, crotchety Jewiness. It’s almost surprising that to call someone a Schweiber doesn’t carry the same cultural weight as calling someone a Shylock. It’s kind of like being a Jewish Eddie Haskell.

Like Seth Cohen would a few years later, Neal took a special pride in his own comedic stylings, dressing up as Groucho Marx for Halloween and confidently but haplessly advising his fellow geeks that the way to land a woman is through one’s sense of humor. The three geeks were all obsessed with comedy—Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Saturday Night Live—a detail easily attributed to Mr. Apatow’s own youthful interest in funny business. Neal took it a step further, though. See, Samm Levine didn’t play Neal like he was playing of a Jewish high school freshman; instead, Neal was more of an elderly Jewish man, perhaps a veteran of the Catskills comedy circuit, trapped in the body of a 14-year-old boy. Witness his penchant for sweater vests, the throwaway detail that he chose to write his book report on an autobiography of Sammy Davis, Jr., and even the small but perfect way Neal posed during the show’s credits sequence, a picture day montage set to Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation”: other characters smiled awkwardly, embarrassed, but Neal plastered on his best Lounge Lizard grin, as if to say “Who loves ya, baby?” Neal was so confident about his own wit that when the position of school mascot became available, he was convinced he could revolutionize the job with his use of props and physical comedy. And of course, when he had problems at home, his mode of acting out was to take up ventriloquism, performing cringe-inducing routines with a dummy he called Morty.

The show’s portrayal of Jewishness wasn’t all shtick. Freaks & Geeks drew class distinctions between the freaks that we were to understand came from the wrong side of the tracks and the nicer, middle class Weir family, in which Mr. Weir owned a sporting goods store and Mrs. Weir was a homemaker. But then we can compare the Weirs to the Schweibers, headed by dentist Dr. Schweiber (who had vanity plates reading “I Flossem”) and the kind of mother who took tennis lessons and ordered in for dinner, which is to say, one with more disposable income. Their house was slightly nicer, and Neal was slightly more spoiled—remember, he was the first to get an Atari. And can we pause here to appreciate the immaculate casting of Amy Aquino as Neal’s mother and David Krumholtz, in one episode, as Neal’s older brother home from college? Rarely have two Jewier Jews Jewed (well, Googling doesn’t confirm that Amy Aquino is Jewish, but her hair on the show was so flawless). If the show had gone on to a second season, surely Lisa Edelstein would have appeared as an aunt or Hebrew High teacher.

As strange as it is that Neal’s most notable character trait was his Jewishness, and that this was often portrayed as a punch line in and of itself, knowing that he was created by Judd Apatow & co. makes it seem like a loving, rather than offensive, portrayal. Neal feels like a special Easter Egg—or perhaps hidden Passover matzo?—for all the Jews who were watching. I like to think that he paved the way for all the Network Jews that came after him, all of whom he schmoozes with on the high holidays at the big TV Temple in Jewcy’s imagination.

Previously on Network Jews:

George Bluth Sr., the erstwhile Jew and patriarch of Arrested Development

Fran Fine, the nasal-voiced star of The Nanny


Noah Puckerman, the coolest Jew in school on Glee

The post Network Jews: Neal Schweiber From Freaks & Geeks appeared first on Jewcy.

Seth Cohen was one of the first times I noticed “indie” being represented in the mainstream. Get in line Zooey Deschanel, because Seth invented adorkable, and the idea of taking something that seemed cool in its own right and packaging it for the masses. I guess if the show had stayed good past the first couple of seasons, and Adam Brody had gone on to bigger and better things, this wouldn’t seem so bad, but given how things turned out, I feel weird about it. I felt weird rewatching the pilot and realizing that Seth, who present-day me would place on the autism spectrum, was so specifically engineered to appeal to teenage me. But that’s Gen Y for you. Before the recession sidelined our economic prospects, we were the first tweens, a new market research category identified for the spending power we wielded. It was nice to matter.

So in the boom days of 2003, here was this 90210-esque redux designed to appeal to teenagers and their lowest-common-denominator taste, and yet like a Trojan horse Josh Schwartz snuck in Seth, talking about graphic novels and Magic: The Gathering and Death Cab for Cutie. The people who beat up Seth shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister, but someone like Seth got his clothes at PacSun (being as he was alternative, but not so alternative that he would have worn Hot Topic gothwear). That they were all stores found in every American mall escaped our notice.

A key aspect of Seth’s alternativeness was that, unlike his water polo-playing, debutante ball-curtseying classmates, he was Jewish. Even though, strictly speaking, he so wasn’t. His father Sandy (Peter Gallagher) was a member of the tribe, but his mother Kirsten (Kelly Rowan) was a WASP, and it’s the mother’s religion that determines the child’s. However, Seth did occasionally refer to his bar mitzvah, so until Talmudic scholars pass down a verdict, we’ll have to consider Seth one of those territorial half-Jews who not only sees himself as an heir to the Jewish comedic tradition of wise-cracking, but also wants it to be known that there are core differences between him and Mischa Barton’s Marissa Cooper. The Jewish dad factor was convenient in that it allowed other characters (namely, shiksa goddess Summer, played by Rachel Bilson) to refer to Seth by his last name, Cohen, a little reminder every time they spoke to him that he was a Jewy Jewersonfeld.

On TV when we have a half-Jew, we round up. We focus on the –ukkuh part of Chrismukkah, the hybrid holiday that Seth popularized (as Kirsten said, “We didn’t really know how to raise Seth”), and ignore the fact that Seth thought Moses was the hero of it. Whenever his adopted brother Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) does something particularly at odds with his punch-first, ask-questions-later Chino roots, we smile at Seth’s implication that Ryan’s embracing a kinder, gentler, Jewish-er way: “You just got your butt kicked and you didn’t even fight back. Dude, you really are a Cohen.”

Of course, it’s only through teen soap opera magic, and forcing him to stand next to people like Chris Carmack, that Adam Brody would pass for a skinny, nebbishy geek (this same magic allowed textbook Black Irish Peter Gallagher to stand in for an all-purpose ethnic). Seth may have lacked the muscles that accessorized Ryan’s wife-beaters, but scrawny he wasn’t. The “Jewfro” he rocked was hardly as unruly as Timberlake’s in its prime. He was cute, undeniably so, and he got all the best lines on the show. Were teenage girls suddenly interested in the video games and indie bands Seth Cohen espoused? Sometimes, but mostly they were interested in Adam Brody. What if getting us all to fall in love with Seth was a subliminal message from B’nai B’rith International, a way to get a generation of Jewish girls to give their male Hebrew school classmates another look? It would have been a pretty successful campaign. Even girls who skipped Birthright still hold out the hope of finding their Seth Cohen.

Previously on Network Jews:

Hesh Rabkin, Jewish Loan Shark on The Sopranos

Eli Gold, The Good Wife’s Political Operator

Howard Wolowitz, the nerdy, sex-obsessed engineer on The Big Bang Theory

Heather Schwedel is a writer and editor who is still waiting for her super sweet bat mitzvah.

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