Something is troubling Rachel Shukert. Despite all of the bells and Steve Buscemi whistles, HBO’s Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire just doesn’t do it for her. Why? “It’s because I want Boardwalk Empire to be a show all about the Jewish gangsters,” she explains. After all, they’re the most unpredictable characters on the show:

What we get on the show is just enough to whet my appetite. I thrill every time the legendary criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein (played by the great Michael Stuhlbarg), the man who fixed the 1919 World Series and inspired the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, appears on screen, demurely sipping a cup of coffee and smiling quietly at something known only to himself; why do we get him in such small doses, and mainly reacting to the machinations of Nucky Thompson, the world’s most sheepish crime boss? When Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusuf) first showed up, I let out a Belieber-esque squeal; this season he’s playing second fiddle to Gyp Rosetti (Bobby Cannavale), your standard-issue maniac killer/sex pervert (he likes women to tie him up and choke him. Snore.) I was fascinated by the character of Manny Horvitz, the garrulous kosher-butcher-cum-bloodthirsty-gangster who calls everybody “boychik” and dry-ages his enemies on meat hooks in the deep freeze, until (spoiler alert!) they let the guy with half a face (who is Anjelica Huston’s nephew and even with his Phantom of the Opera mask on, is still attractive beyond all sense) blow him away in the first episode of the new season. That was five weeks ago. I’m still sitting shiva.

Read the rest at Tablet Magazine.

Jewcy on Boardwalk Empire: Culture Kvetch: The Jews of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’
Meyer Lansky Lives: Talking With Anatol Yusef Of Boardwalk Empire
The Unkillable Kosher Butcher Of Boardwalk Empire
From Boardwalk Empire To Gatsby: Top Five Arnold Rothstein Pop Culture Moments

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This Sunday night, the 64th annual Emmy Awards will honor the best in television. Each year a handful of episodes from each of the nominated series are selected to showcase a show’s best work. Since we’re in the business of honoring the best in Jewish television, we present the top five Jewish moments from this year’s Emmy-nominated shows, from Palestinian chicken and Camp Ramah to terrorists and concentration camps.

1. Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 8: “Palestinian Chicken”)

Larry (Larry David) and Jeff (Jeff Garlin) try a new popular Palestinian chicken place and deem it the perfect place for Jewish men to bring their mistresses since no Jews would ever eat there. (Alan Dershowitz even sent Bibi a copy!)

Air Date: July 24, 2011
Choice Line: “We’re probably the only Jews that have ever walked in here.”

2. Homeland (Season 1: “The Weekend”)

Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) opens up about his lonely Jewish upbringing to his terrorist suspect passenger while driving back to CIA headquarters, creating an unexpected parallel between their situations.

Air Date: Nov. 13, 2011
Choice Line: “I’d gladly say their prayers, sing the songs. I just wanted to not be alone.”

Unfortunately a YouTube clip doesn’t exist (let us know in the comments if you find one!), but the entire episode is available on iTunes—the scene starts at the 37-minute mark.

3. Boardwalk Empire (Season 2: “To The Lost”)

Butcher Manny Horvitz hides out in the basement of a synagogue as he nostalgically remembers his Ukrainian past and plots out his future.

Air Date: Dec. 11, 2012
Choice Line: “I wake up sometimes and think I’m still there [Odessa], 12 years old, my whole life ahead of me, but then I realize I’m in America. That world is gone.”

4. Mad Men (Season 5: “Far Away Places”)

Copywriter Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), explicitly hired to appease Jewish client Manischewitz, reveals that he was born in a concentration camp, turning a punch line about the token Jew into a far more serious self-reflective matter that haunts the office.

Air Date: April 22, 2012
Choice Line: “Are there others like you?” / “I don’t know, I haven’t been able to find any.”

Again, there’s no YouTube clip available, but the entire episode is on iTunes—the scene starts at the 12 minute mark.

5. Girls (Season 1: “Hannah’s Diary”)

The excitable Shoshanna runs into an old friend who remembers her best from a raid she led during their days together at Camp Ramah.

Air Date: May 6, 2012
Choice Line: “You led the most intense kitchen raid I ever saw in my time as a junior counselor.”

Have another favorite Jewish scene from this year? Let us know in the comments!

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Television writers face a quandary when writing historical fiction. References to famous historical events can seem quaint or like a substitute for originality. Downton Abbey especially relies on historical tragedies to set its plot in motion: the show begins with the sinking of the Titanic and continues, in the second season, with World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. Nearly any show set in England in this period should acknowledge these events, but when is it a narrative necessary, and when is it a crutch? And when are scriptwriters just trying to make their audiences feel smart for recognizing historical Easter eggs?

I’ve been thinking about these questions while watching Boardwalk Empire, HBO’s crime drama about bootleggers, gangsters, and corrupt politicians, centered in 1920s Atlantic City. (Season 3 of the show premieres September 16.) A friend recently suggested to me that TV writers might lean heavily on history in order to make viewers feel intellectually engaged while they sit glued to their flatscreens. But there are times when historical verisimilitude can be unsettling. When the Jews of Boardwalk Empire are called Christ killers and other epithets, do we call it a nod to historical accuracy, or is it something more pernicious, a way of vicariously enjoying bygone racism?

I haven’t found tidy answers to these questions, but I’ve enjoyed watching the Jews of Boardwalk blast their away across the screen, even as I sometimes wince at their hackneyed Yiddish accents. Jewish gangsters were big machers in the bootlegging era, and chief among them in the HBO series is Arnold Rothstein, who was also known for fixing the 1919 World Series. Michael Stuhlberg—who starred as the sad sack Larry Gopnik in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man—plays Arnold Rothstein as a courtly but dangerous powerbroker, an inveterate gambler but a deeply cerebral and successful one, with a sociopath’s dead-eyed smile.

His deputies are Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the latter played by Anatol Yusef. The real-life Lansky didn’t even crack five feet, and his HBO incarnation isn’t much taller. Yusef’s Lansky is streetwise and good at talking himself out of squirrely situations, but his voice—all rounded vowels and Yiddish street theater, it overflows with “oy veys”—can grate. It’s a sign of how parody can come to replace the real thing. A linguist might be able to rate Yusef’s accuracy, but otherwise, he resembles the ye olde New York accents we all take on when imitating our elderly grandparents.

For a study in contrasts in Jewish power, you couldn’t ask for a better pair than Agent Eric Sebso and Manny Horvitz. Played by William Forsythe (whose accent is of the fresh-off-the-boat variety), Horvitz is a burly, silver-eyed butcher who, after surviving a shotgun blast from a would-be assassin, kills the intruder with a cleaver to the skull. Forsythe carries himself with tremendous physicality; he has that heft that could conceal a pack of hard-earned muscle or just the residue of too many years feasting on brisket. He reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s description of a diner owner in A Good Man Is Hard to Find: his belly looks “like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt.”

By the end of Season 2, Horvitz has thrown his lot in with Nucky Thompson, the show’s main protagonist and anti-hero, played by Steve Buscemi. I couldn’t tell you quite how Horvitz got to that position, as Boardwalk Empire is so filled with deals and counter-deals, many of them never consummated, that it’s often difficult to tell who owes whom money and who wants whom dead. The show is, frankly, a bit of a mess, with a couple dozen characters forming a spiderweb of relationships. But Boardwalk Empire is also like Horvitz: brash, violent, often witty and menacing, and steeped in an old-world charm.

Pour out some Manischewitz for Agent Sebso, who never really stood a chance in this rogues’ gallery. Sebso (Erik Weiner) is a government agent charged with enforcing prohibition in Atlantic County. He’s partnered with Agent Nelson Van Alden, a fanatically religious Christian whose profound discomfort with Atlantic City (“Sodom by the sea”) leads actor Michael Shannon to new frontiers in bitter beer face. Sebso isn’t so clean himself—he’s secretly on Nucky Thompson’s payroll and kills a witness on his orders—but his default mode is simpering and pathetic.

In the penultimate episode of Season 1, after Van Alden has begun to cast doubts about Sebso’s role in the death of the witness, Sebso asks how he might regain his partner’s trust. “Repent,” Van Alden replies, leaving the Jewish Sebso baffled. Later, the two are investigating a still in the woods, where they stumble upon a black church group conducting baptismal rites in the river. Filled with fundamentalist fury, Van Alden repeatedly dunks Sebso in the river, demanding that he repent. One dunking goes on for too long and Sebso drowns. Van Alden is shaken but convinced that he’s committed a godly act.

This is one of the most extraordinary scenes Boardwalk has produced. It works so well, in part, because the show’s frequent displays of violence tend to be so bloody, the camera focusing on a slit throat gushing blood or showing us each pounding as a man’s face collapses in on itself. Here the death is visceral but not exploitative, atavistic without being pornographic in its bloodlust. Instead, Agent Sebso’s death reveals the show’s deep religiosity. For all of its characters’ waxing about loyalty and building criminal empires, Boardwalk Empire is, at heart, about faith versus reason, puritanism versus individual freedom. Agent Sebso dies, in a sense, because he is Jewish—he literally can’t repent, he is beyond baptism—but also because his corruption is too simple, making him a natural sacrificial lamb. He doesn’t have the loquacious swagger of Meyer Lansky, the debonair menace of Arnold Rothstein, or the brutish presence of Manny Horvitz. In a show obsessed with re-enacting out America’s sordid history, Sebso is only a footnote.

Related: Vigor Juice [Tablet Magazine]

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Even though he looks nothing like the real life Jonathan Ames who created the show, there is hardly anybody out there to play a neurotic Jewish private dick/writer better than Jason Schwartzman.

Maybe it’s because his character seemed like an even bigger nebbish this season, or maybe it was the episode where the real life Ames can be seen sporting nothing but a yarmulke, running down the street, but Bored to Death was officially our favorite show of 2010.

Runners up:

Boardwalk Empire, Sons of Anarchy, Breaking Bad.

The post Jewcy’s Favorite TV Show Of 2010: Bored To Death appeared first on Jewcy.

In the world of television there are Jews as far the eye cans see, and the Jews grow as high as an elephant’s eye: writers, directors, producers and actors — there are Jewish names all over the small screen, with the one exception tending to be when it comes to Jewish characters.  Ask anybody to name a Jew centric show barring Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and we wouldn’t suggest holding your breath.

With that said, Jews are represented on television; it may be mostly when the credits roll, but these are our ten favorite Jews –fictional characters or important behind the scenes people–on television.

1.  Mathew Weiner (Producer/Mad Men)

We began Jews Watching Mad Men in the first place because there were Jews were watching Mad Men, in droves!  During JWMM this season, conversation often flared about the unique and interesting portrayal of Jewish women on the show.  Thus far, Mad Men has produced two of the most dynamic Jewish female characters on TV.   Doc Faye Miller (played by Cara Buono) and Rachel Menken (played by Sons of Anarchy’s Maggie Siff) were two women that came into Don Draper’s life and made their presence known, each leaving their own special mark on Don’s already bruised psyche before their grand exit. Matthew Weiner, a former writer for The Soprano’s originally pitched Mad Men to HBO and when they turned him down, Weiner set out to make Mad Men that much better, thereby turning the network that acquired it into HBO’s biggest competition.  Slowly but surely, AMC is shaping up to be just that, forcing HBO to compete for their much-coveted high brow audience.

2.  Katey Sagal (Actor/Character/Sons of Anarchy)

As far as Jewish TV characters go, Gemma Teller is one of the most fleshed out, as well as one of the most unexpected when it comes to going against the grain of Jewish stereotypes.  Son’s Of Anarchy is a show about an outlaw motorcycle club that draws from Shakespearean drama archetypes in a way that no show has since The Wire.  Gemma Teller is the queen bee or “Head Old Lady” of the Redwood Original Chapter of The Sons Of Anarchy, perhaps not what you would expect to see at the number 2 slot on this list.  One might not have even known that she was Jewish had it not been for a scene during the second season where she faces off against the leader of the local Aryan Motorcycle gang, warning him to watch his step with the anti-Semitic remarks.  Gemma is a survivor, who proves herself capable of overcoming the most trying situations.  Though, her number one priority, is always to protect her family.  Of course, Katy Sagal is best known for her role as Peggy Bundy, perhaps the least Jewish TV character in history.  She recently married Sons of Anarchy Creator, Kurt Sutter and continues to contribute her voice to Futurama.

3. Michael Stuhlbarg (Actor/Character/Boardwallk Empire)

For all the young Jewish boys who used to like to play pretend, “Mobster” was always exceptionally fun, because there were so many Jewish mobsters to choose from: tough guy maniac Bugsy Seigel to stoic and ruthless puppeteer Meyer Lansky to, of course, Arnold Rothstein, or “The Brain.”  Rothstein was known for mentoring up and coming gangsters and teaching them how to dress.  However, he’s best remembered for paying the Chicago Black Sox to throw the 1919 World Series (and a few great fictional representations).

On the show, Rothstein is one of the most confident calculated criminals portrayed on television since Omar from The Wire.  Stuhlbarg, who studied at Julliard, was nominated for a Tony for his role in the outstandingly dark play, The Pillowman and also appeared in the infinitely Jewish film, A Serious Man.  His portrayal of Rothstein, with his velvety, laid back voice, illustrious taste and urbane facade is the perfect model for the Jewish gangster of yore.

4.     Allison Brie (Actress/Character/Community)

Allison Brie got her start acting at her local Jewish community center.  She did a little TV work before auditioning and being chosen for the role of Trudy Campbell on Mad Men.  However, it wasn’t until she began playing the role of Annie Edison, the recovered pill-popping perfectionist with doe eyes and innocent crush on everyone, that she really began to shine as a force in the TV world.  She also became the new fantasy girlfriend for every Jewish boy who’s ever added his surname to Mila or Winona to see how it sounds.

5. Paul Lieberstein (Writer/Actor/The Office)

If Paul Lieberstein had his way, he’d have almost no screen time on The Office.  Lieberstein, who spent years on the writing team for King Of The Hill, is not only one of the main writers on The Office but his portrayal of Toby makes for one of the most beloved small, but important roles on the show.

6.  Puck From Glee (Character/Glee)

Puck from Glee, played by Mark Salling must be one of the most visible Jewish characters on television right now, and fortunately, in writing him, Glee scribes don’t bow to the pressure of writing him as “a Jew in a box.”   The character of Noah Puckerman is a tough rebel without a cause, who plays football and constantly has epiphanies that he needs to be a better Jew or only date other Jews.  Hell, he’s probably the most believable Jew on TV in that respect.

7.  Fred Savage (Director/It’s Always Sunny In Philiadelphia/Party Down)

Any child of the 80’s who aspired to be an actor, worshiped Fred Savage.  Not only did he star in The Wizard, the first and only awesome video game movie, but he starred in the best coming of age TV show of all time, The Wonder Years, and lets not forget Little Monsters with Howie Mandell.  Now, Savage’s efforts go towards directing some of the best comedies on TV.  Savage has come to hone a very unique and identifiable style through his work in Party Down and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia; juxtaposing off beat comedy and biography style drama in a way that nobody else can.  Early episodes of Party Down perfectly illustrate what has become, “the Savage Style,” or “Savage verite.”

8.  Andy Botwin (Character/Weeds)

Without Andy Botwin, Weeds would hardly be worth watching.  Andy’s non-stop neurosis and constant confidence completes the show and makes for a character we can all relate to, managing to stay charming even when your want ring his neck.  Watching him go from a hardcore pothead slacker to studying to become a rabbi to living off the grid has made for reliable TV fun. The question is, will he and Nancy ever get it on?

9.  Ginnifer Goodwin (Actress/Big Love)

Ginnifer Goodwin is a Tennessee born Jew who’s first big role came in the movie Walk the Line playing Johnny Cash’s first wife, but it’s her role as Margene Heffman on Big Love, that has made her a standout.  Margene is not only one of the most dynamic characters on the tube, but she has one of the most prominent arcs of any character on TV.  Starting as a naïve babysitter turned third wife, she’s become much more assertive in her role as lowest wife of the totem pole, able to identify where her power in the relationship lies and how far her charm can take her.  However, her little tryst with her husband’s son this past season has put her in a precarious situation. Big Love may be the most well acted show on television right now and Goodwin’s skills are a major part of that.

10.  Howard Wolowitz/Simon Hellberg (Actor/Character/The Big Bang Theory)

The Character, Howard Wolowitz (played by Simon Hellberg), reinforces every possible Jewish stereotype.  He is a sex-obsessed nerdy momma’s boy, who often finds himself helping his mother in and out of the bathtub.  He’s willing to do just about anything to get laid, even if it means wrecking a multi million dollar government robot and his sleaziness towards women is damn near cartoony..  Luckily, the actor and writers have the tact to make these flaws funny, without being a offensive, dishing it out to everyone equally, and giving Howard enough self-awareness to be realistic and charming.  Besides, who could possibly deny I that if there are two things Jewish men like, it’s sex and brisket, what else is new?

The post The Top Ten Jews On Television appeared first on Jewcy.

Boardwalk Empire is easily one of the most talked about new shows of the season and for good reason: great cast, fantastic scenery, and well researched.

While the show features several Irish, Italian and African-American antiheroes and bad guys, it’s also given us one of the best pop culture representations of the greatest Jewish gangster of them all: Arnold Rothstein.  In Boardwalk Empire, Rothstein, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, is given something of a dandy persona.  But as you can see below, what is known about Rothstein is more fictional than fact.  The real Arnold Rothstein was a man whose life and death were shrouded in mystery, and he’s been represented several different ways over the years.

1. Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby

While there’s always been some debate as to whether Gatsby himself was a Yid (his real last name is Gatz), there is no doubt that his associate Meyer Wolfsheim had a bar mitzvah. F. Scott Fitzgerald leaves little to the imagination as Gatsby tells Nick Carraway that Wolfsheim is the man behind the thing Rothstein is most known for: fixing the 1919 World Series.

2. Tough Jews Rich Cohen and King of the Jews by Nick Tosches

Both books are great reads.  Cohen gives you a more straightforward account of Rothstein and his fellow Jewish gangsters, while Tosches attempts to use him as a springboard to explain Western civilization as a whole.

3. Mobsters

If ever there was a role that made people think F. Murray Abrams was a Jew, playing Rothstein with a pencil mustache may have been it.  Even though this early 1990s buddy drama was a total stinker, at least you can say you saw Patrick Dempsey playing Meyer Lansky, and an appearance by Fyvush Finkel.

4. Eight Men Out

Watch this 1988 film about the 1919 Black Sox scandal, then try and tell us you see any sort of resemblance between Boardwalk Empire’s Rothstein, and the larger sized version played by Michael Lerner.

5.  Hyman Roth in The Godfather 2

Possibly the most well-known fictional Jewish gangster ever says that Rothstein was his inspiration.  It’s good to have role models  — even if you’re a gangster.

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