If you’re Jewish and you write about TV, there’s a type of show you’ve likely gotten to expect. It’s the show that’s obviously Jewy to you, but not as obvious to a non-Jewish audience. This is the category shows like Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fall into — Jews have good reason to love their consistent references to Jewish life, but broader TV criticism doesn’t talk it up as their defining trait. “Jewish, Just For Us” is the loving term I’ve come up with for them.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s new Amazon pilot, is not that show. It’s “Jewish For Everyone.” It’s all Jewish, all the time.

The Gilmore Girls creator’s new series explores charming housewife Midge Maisel’s journey into stand-up comedy in 1950s New York, and it brims with joyous Semitism from the very first minute — literally. The show gets just 50 seconds in before its first jokey reference to the Holocaust, when Midge — soaking in the spotlight at her own wedding reception — mimics her dad’s reaction to wedding prices: “Do the caterers have any idea what the Jews just went through a few years ago?” Minutes later, she causes a panic by joking there’s shrimp in the egg rolls. The words “rabbi,” “brisket,” and “latkes” are repeated so many times in the episode it’s impossible to keep count. Marriage advice is framed in terms of finding the person who would hide you in their attic. And while it’s bad enough Midge’s schmuck husband leaves her midway through the episode, it’s even worse that he does it on Yom Kippur. A shonda if there ever was one.

Disappointingly, the show does suffer from the lack of ethnic diversity that’s sadly become signature in Palladino’s work. And for such a vibrantly Jewy show, it’s a little ironic to see so few members of the tribe in the main cast. Thankfully, Gilmore Girls alum Alex Borstein seems primed to correct that and take on a more central role in future episodes. But those reservations aside, the show develops into a true celebration of Jewish-American culture and a time when Jewish women specifically occupied a vibrant, brassy space in pop-culture.

Comedy nerds will likely be excited at the prospect of examining this iconic time in when Borscht Belt comedians started to define the art form, and those nerds won’t be disappointed. Lenny Bruce plays a key role in Midge’s transformation, Mort Sahl and Don Rickles get shout outs, and Midge herself is basically Joan Rivers reenacted.

This first episode was released as part of Amazon’s Pilot Season, which lets viewers vote to tell Amazon which of its new shows it should produce more episodes of. With the general buzz and glowing reviews the show is getting, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel seems likely to get picked up to series, which means we’ll probably see even more references to Jewish comedy greats in future episodes.

Who might we see next? Seeing a young Woody Allen seems likely; Rodney Dangerfield would be better. My vote goes for Sid Caesar or Carl Reiner. But with this era in Jewish history, let’s face it: it’s hard to go wrong.

Image by Sarah Shatz/Amazon Video

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Paris Geller, the frenemy of reader-waif Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel), may not have been the picture of a rich Jewess that Little Chandler had in mind. But Paris, played by Liza Weil, certainly is one, and almost definitely read Dubliners by the time she was 9. Paris would have scoffed while reading and blurted out some clever PG-rated insult about the Irish, or men, or half-brains. And as she did so, her dark eyes would have swelled with passion—windows to Paris’s fervent, often angry intensity—and Joyce would have been proven right.

The passion of Paris is not sexualized, of course, but channeled toward academic excellence. She is ambitious, competitive, hard-working—in essence, the picture of a college admissions slave—with the achiever’s impulse characteristic of suburbs where parents aspire to put certain college stickers on their car windows. Paris has a lot to live up to if she is not to let everyone down, including herself. Hence her dark eyes cower over textbooks, never allowing the slip of a tear, because there isn’t time enough to whimper when the PSATs approach.

Rory may be the effortlessly charming and bright girl we want to identify with, while Paris is an unpleasant reflection of who some of us may actually have been (or dared not become). Rory and her mother Lorelai—fast-talkers, coffee drinkers, fluent in pop-culture references high and low—navigate a pleasanter, quirkier world than Paris does. In turn, Paris finds herself alternatively at odds with Rory’s steadfast optimism, and placated by it. Ultimately, Paris becomes like a sister to Rory—a demanding, sometimes exasperating sister. For instance, after Paris loses her virginity, she arrives at Rory’s house under the pretense of debate club prep, and then unleashes her mixed emotions—“In the moments just before the act, we were actually discussing modern Marxism in America”— with vulnerable expectance.

Yes, Gilmore Girls is a show about mothers and daughters. But it’s also a show about sisterhood: the bond between Rory and Lorelai disrupts the typical intergenerational relationship setup, and so too, all the women (Sookie, Lane, Emily Gilmore) forge connections of a Ya-Ya variety. Paris isn’t just the rival smart girl in school; she’s Rory’s true foil and friend.

Jewish by birth, raised by her Portuguese nanny, Paris is not deeply observant but participates in perfunctory religious rituals. In the first season, we learn that she had a bat mitzvah, for which her dress was not particularly fashionable. “I’m not trendy girl OK? I don’t haunt the boutiques hoping to find that one fabulous little top. I study and then I think about studying and then I study some more,” Paris explains to Rory when seeking wardrobe advice on her first (and only) date with Tristin Dugray (Chad Michael Murray, the WB’s resident heartbreaker). Paris brings to Stars Hollow the entire contents of her closet, “just in case there was some sort of hidden potential in something that I just didn’t see”—everything, that is, “but my Chilton uniform and my bat mitzvah dress which has menorahs on the collar.”

Paris celebrates Hanukkah, although after she breaks from tradition to visit her boyfriend Jamie’s house for Christmas in Season 3, she comes to a realization: “I’m looking at this mound of gifts and I’m thinking ‘eight days of Hanukkah,’ who was the skin flint that thought up that deal?”

Rory asks, “Don’t the eight days symbolize something?”’

“Yes,” Paris replies. “They symbolize eight days of ripping off kids who can’t have a Hanukkah bush.”

We also come to know that Paris, diligent worker that she is, does not take a break on Shabbat. In preparation for a special issue of Chilton’s school newspaper, Paris not only comes in to work on a Saturday, but also demands that her peers do the same. She makes her case: “There is only going to be one 75th anniversary issue ever, and it’s on our watch. We screw this up and we basically mooned a piece of history. Is that what you want?” Yes, it seems that is what they want. “We’re working Saturday!” Paris shouts, and then walks away, muttering to Rory.

When Paris finally goes to college (rejected from her dream school Harvard, she arrives at Yale) she is forced to recalibrate—with the help of a life coach and a craft table—before she is back to her old self. She takes on the religion beat at the Yale Daily News, and then works herself into a frenzy as the paper’s chief editor before being driven out of office. Rory replaces her, and talks her down, “This job, Paris, being editor, you don’t need this, this hassle. You’re gonna be a doctor.”

“Surgeon,” Paris corrects.

“And a lawyer,” adds Rory.

“Judge.”

Indeed, journalism does not prove to be Paris’s true calling. By the end of the series she applies to top law schools and medical degree programs—and gets into all of them. Good Jewish girl that she is, Paris decides to become a doctor, at Harvard.

Previously on Network Jews:

Kyle Broflovski, South Park’s Resident Jew

Ziva David, the ass-kicking Mossad agent on CBS’s naval drama NCIS

Rachel Berry, the overachieving Jewish superstar-in-training on Fox’s Glee

The post Network Jews: Paris Geller from Gilmore Girl appeared first on Jewcy.

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a Paul Auster apologist. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ve spent a lot of time defending him to friends who don’t share my enthusiasm. I have been a fan of his for years, but my interest blossomed into some kind of obsession roughly two years ago, upon the looming publication of Invisible, when I decided I wanted to interview him. When I asked Auster for an interview at one of his readings, he flatly and unsurprisingly said no. In response, I launched a year-long campaign of following him through the city, attending readings, events and parties I thought he might show up to. In the end, I succeeded—I managed to convince his publicist to grant me access—and it was, at the time, the highlight of my literary life. During the interview Auster mentioned the book he had just finished writing, describing it as a novel about a group of twenty-somethings living in an abandoned house in Brooklyn, to be called Sunset Park.

A brief aside: Around the time when I received the Sunset Park galley, I was rounding out a two-month obsession with the Gilmore Girls. I always thought the Gilmore Girls was annoying when it was on TV: The two characters around which the show revolves—quick-witted single mother Lorelai Gilmore and her overly-intellectual daughter Rory—seemed unbearable to watch. But one frozen Sunday I sat down and watched three episodes of the Gilmore Girls in a row. For the next eight weeks I found myself spending an embarrassing amount of time with Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, and becoming completely invested in their fictional lives. Amy Sherman-Paladino, who modeled the main character after herself, wrote and directed the show for six years, flawlessly crafting emotionally complicated and dynamic characters that were not only pleasurable to watch, but easy to relate to. That is, until she quit the show after learning of the producers’ decision to tack on a seventh season after Paladino had planned to terminate it. A new writer was brought in to replace Paladino for the last 18 episodes. It was an undisputed disaster.

As I watched the Gilmore Girls egregious seventh season—uneven characters, contrived dialogue, unrealistic plot twists that seemed to go against the very ethic of the show—I was struck: My disappointment was palpable, and matched only by my disappointment in Sunset Park. Like Amy Sherman-Paladino, it was as if the Paul Auster I know and love had left the building and was inexplicably replaced by someone going through the motions. It looks like Auster and sounds like Auster—it looks like Lorelai and (sort of) talks like her—but it isn’t, not really.

Sunset Park, like so many other Auster novels, plays with the ideas of chance, destiny, luck and memory. It is predominantly a story of wreckage and ruin—broken houses, families, economies, relationships, hope, belief, humanity. Miles Heller, a tortured young man haunted by the death of his brother and racked with guilt at the possibility of having caused it, is the character around which the novel revolves. After dropping out of a prestigious school on the East Coast he moves to Florida and takes a job “trashing out,” going through houses that have been abandoned upon the threat of foreclosure and ridding them of all remnants of their former residents. He is, in effect, a collector of garbage, but also a collector of memories, stories, refuse—all that is, or was, attached to the objects he disposes of.

In reality, Miles is the broken thing the others in the story painstakingly try to repair, or at least understand. After his brother’s accident, Miles went into hiding, isolating himself from his friends and family, including his publishing tycoon father Morris Heller who is by far the most well-rounded and sympathetic in a cast of damaged, misguided and self-involved characters. After meeting and falling in love with his muse—a brilliant and bookish seventeen-year-old girl named Pilar, though as a reader I detected no signs of the intellectual depth and maturity the author so often refers to—Miles is forced to relocate due to forces beyond his control. And he does, to a derelict house in Sunset Park with three other lost souls: Bing Nathan, a gentle giant and the leader of the pack who runs the Hospital for Broken Things, a repair shop for obsolete items of a bygone era; Ellen Brice, a young woman with self-esteem issues, her own guilt surrounding a tryst with a minor and a mind full of perversions; and Alice Bergstrom, the hyper-intellectual graduate student with a part-time gig at PEN America. Systematically, Miles’ new roommates all fall in love with him in various capacities, though the reader is given almost no insight into what makes Miles tick. Auster explicitly shows and tells us that Miles is an introvert, unwilling to expose himself to those around him—even to his beloved Pilar—but he deprives the readers of too much. His pain is familiar to those who have read Auster’s previous novels, and is centered around a certain denial, but unlike Adam Walker, the protagonist of Auster’s last novel Invisible, there are far too few redeeming qualities about Miles and, as a result, I found him undeserving of the affection, admiration and devotion of his peers.

The structure of the novel is so classically Auster—disjointed, slightly post-modern but incredibly methodical. It is broken up into sections about each of the five central characters, and narrated in the third person, creating an even greater distance between the reader and the subjects. Interspersed throughout the story are anecdotes about baseball players who have either been the victim of, or the beneficiary of, fate including Jack “Lucky” Lohrke, who cheated death time and time again, and Herb Score, whose career was cut short by a baseball to the face. Miles loves these characters, these casualties and heroes of destiny, and while he tells their stories freely, he tells us nothing of himself.

What Auster has created, in his preoccupation with broken things, are a set of broken—or better yet, incomplete—characters. What we know of them is so flimsy, and so heavily based around their fixations on Miles, that the development of each is shallow.

There are moments of sincerity—the ritual of Morris and his son eating at a local diner when Miles was a boy—but other than that, Sunset Park was wholly disappointing. Like the Gilmore Girls. The difference is, the last episode of the seventh season of the Gilmore Girls was sort of alright—Rory got the job she deserved, Lorelai ended up with the right guy and I was able to, if not forget the contrivance that was the previous seventeen episodes, at least appreciate the last one for doing right by loyal fans and followers. By contrast, Auster’s packs all of the action missing throughout the rest of  Sunset Park into the last ten pages of the novel, which ends in a cacophonous, disastrous dash through a cemetery.

So, if you’re a planning on reading Sunset Park, you should probably just watch the Gilmore Girls instead.

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