Ari Gold, the Hollywood super-agent with a manic determination to get the very best for his clients—and himself—never quits. He also doesn’t care who he has to crush in the process. The HBO show that revitalized Jermey Piven’s career might have been named after the eponymous entourage for Vincent Chase (Adrien Grenier)—the up and coming actor inspired by the experiences of the show’s creator, Mark Wahlberg—but the real star of the show was always Piven’s cutthroat Jewish agent. And he has three Emmys to prove it.

Piven’s Wahlburg is real life super-agent Ari Emanuel—currently at the helm of the William Morris Endeavor agency, one of the film and television industry’s leading talent agencies—and like him, the fictional Ari’s subversive effectiveness in the business is legendary. But so is his nonapologetic approach and incessant sarcastic mockery—something that became one of the show’s staples when taken out on his long-suffering assistant, Lloyd (Rex Lee), who is ridiculed relentlessly for his sexual orientation and Asian heritage.

It’s easy—and right!—to be offended by Ari’s insults and abuse, but it’s your dislike for him that makes watching his outbursts so enjoyable. There’s a reason Ari outshines the show’s ‘movie star,’ but this hardly makes him a banner of Jewish values. Then again, like any number-crunching Jewish businessman, Ari has a humanizing Achilles’ heel—his wife (Perrey Reeves).

Known simply as “Mrs. Ari” until the show’s final season, his wife is the only person who can bring him to his knees, begging for forgiveness. Such penance made for one of the most memorable episodes, “Return of the King,” which took place on Yom Kippur. Entourage never shied away from Ari’s Jewishness—his daughter’s bat mitzvah became a business opportunity for Ari to showcase his star client as the cake cutter—but Ari never seemed to take it seriously and often used it as shtick in his tirades.

The episode saw Ari belligerently pestering a producer during a Yom Kippur service to try to secure a movie deal, only to see his aggressiveness lead to its destruction. Admonished by Mrs. Ari for popping a breath mint and robbed by her of his phone (and the backup he hides in his sock), Ari even tells his daughter that the beauty of Yom Kippur is being able to sin during that day and apologize by sundown.

Hollywood is, perhaps, a better place to be a Jew than many other industries, but Ari still treats it like a crutch more than anything else. His need to barter and think only about business on Yom Kippur not only ruins his deal, it also shows his lack of appreciation for his religion. When he needs to find a way to get to the producer’s synagogue and realizes that he has no cash on him, he concludes “Like our desert-dwelling ancestors, we walk.” Ari’s Judaism is, like everything else in his life, a bargaining chip, something to help him achieve greater success.

But Ari is not without redemption, and the series finale finds him abandoning his life of work and quitting his job to show his wife how much he cares for her. But then, after the credits, Ari received a phone call offering him the job he always wanted: heading a studio. Now that the Entourage movie that no one asked for (in the words of Vulture’s Josh Wolk, “The only logical explanation for an Entourage movie is that Mark Wahlberg … is taunting everyone who vocally disparaged his show in its later years”) has been confirmed, Ari is coming back. Well, as long as too much sushi doesn’t stop him.

Previously on Network Jews:

Police Detective John Munch on Law & Order: SVU

Dr. John Zoidberg, the Klutzy Jewish Crustacean on Futurama

Jean-Ralphio, the status-obsessed sidekick on Parks and Recreation.

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I want to get close to Laney, to hear her say my name slo-wly. She is petite but taut-bodied in a yellow sundress, fabric so invitingly thin and wispy I wonder if I could blow it off her torso with a well-timed breath. She is telling me her fingers tremble when she drinks coffee, and that is why she has tiny green glops on the skin between the toenails she’s painted. Her small blue eyes twinkle, and I hold her gaze as if I’m spinning plates on my index finger: the longer I do it, the more likely she might be to applaud, take my hand, and invite me to rest my palm on the small of her back.

“Have you ever eaten at Belle Luna?” she asks me as we stroll the streets of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve just eaten crepes at a French café: it’s our first date. “Nope,” I say, walking a little behind her to admire her bronzed legs. “Have you ever had a drink at Sapphire?” she asks. “No, but I’d like to, sometime,” I say. “Have you ever gone inside Sterchi Lofts?” “Well,” I say, laughing. “What?” she asks. “No,” I say, “I haven’t been there either.”

Outside of us both being law students and laughing at Will Ferrell movies, Laney and I don’t have much in common: it’s not just that we haven’t frequented the same bars or restaurants; it’s that we don’t like to visit the same regions of human experience. I love reading novels; she doesn’t care for them. She loves shopping; I get headaches at T.J. Maxx. But she’s a sweet girl, and that body…

I sit her on a bench and tell her I can read palms—“because my parents are Russian”—and she either buys my line of reasoning (Russian parents = metaphysical insight) or she accepts that I’m inventing a way to get my hands on hers. I disclose to her a future of three children, a husband, and good health. “Cool,” she says. “Oh, did you see the Christmas lights all along this street last year?”

“Yeah,” I say. “They were really cool.”

“Did you decorate your house for Christmas?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”

“What?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Seriously?” Laney registers my Jewishness with a squirrely wiggle of her nose.

“Yep,” I say. “So no Christmas.”

“Are you joking?”

I laugh aloud. “Why would I joke about that?”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Have you ever met a Jewish person before?”

Laney is from a tiny Tennessee town where controversy can break out if a Baptist considers going to a Methodist church. She thinks to herself and answers no, she’s never met a Jew before. “Do you go to church?”

“Sometimes I go to synagogue.”

“Is that Jewish church?”

“Basically, but it’s called synagogue. Sometimes I’ll go on Friday nights.”

“So you don’t go to Jewish church all the time?”

“Synagogue,” I say.

“Oh, sorry!” she says. “Do you eat special foods?”

And that’s when it hit me: I, a man who has never fasted on Yom Kippur, who has not read the Torah since his bar mitzvah, and who has eaten pork and assorted trayf by the boatload throughout his life, is to be the Spokesman of the Jews for an inquisitive girl from Small Town, Tennessee. Her curiosities and judgments about the whole of the Jewish people will likely be filtered through me in the future; me, the first Jew she’s ever known. I feel underqualified for the job and eerily aware of its weight: I can picture Laney at a dinner party, maybe five years from now, and the talk shifting to something or other related to Jews and Laney saying, “Ya’ll, I know one.”

In my life, I have been cocooned: I went to Jewish Sunday school until my bar mitzvah, I went to a private high school that, while not predominantly Jewish, had its fair share of them, and then I attended a university with a largely Jewish student body. Though I lived in places where Jews were the minority, I had never before been put into a position where I was to be quizzed (in the nicest possible way, of course, because Laney’s smile was very nice) about my faith, identity, culture, and religion. I even feel presumptuous using the possessive “my”: who I am to feign expertise on such a rich, complicated people, for the very word Jew unfurls into thousands of connotations depending on what books you read, who you talk to, and what you experience.

“Some people eat special foods,” I tell Laney. “Kosher.”

“What’s kosher?”

“Well, you can’t eat pork…and certain foods have to be treated a certain way.”

God. It was as if I’d sped-read Judaism for Dummies.

Even though I tell Laney that holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are more significant in the Jewish calendar, Laney wants to know about Hanukkah. “Is it like Christmas?” she asks.

My Sunday school education, long warehoused and growing musty with disuse, was suddenly called upon. I deliver what I know in fragments: the story of the noble Maccabee warriors, how they thought they had oil to help them survive one cold night, only to discover that the oil, miraculously, would last them eight. “So that’s why we light the candles on eight nights,” I tell Laney. “On this candelabra-looking thing.” I forget to tell her the candelabra-looking thing is called a menorah. “Have you ever eaten potato pancakes?”

“No…” she says, as if she thinks I might offer her one from my pocket.

I am lucky Laney is asking me about Hanukkah, because if she had asked me a broader question like, “What is a Jew?”, I would be flummoxed. The History of the Jews: a history of faith and strength and perseverance over oppression, of tradition and literature and art and family and. And and and. I wasn’t getting to the ands: I was only talking about Hanukkah. But then again, what else could I tell her if she did ask? Where would I start?

Talking about some of the basics of Judaism made me keenly aware of the scattershot knowledge I had of my own Jewish identity, and how difficult it would be for me to explain to a person who had no familiarity with it. My Jewishness has been passed down from my parents, Russian Jews who came to the United States as political refugees in 1979. On their Soviet passports, their nationality was listed not as RUSSIAN, but as JEW. They fled to America for the reasons so many flee: opportunity, freedom, both economic and religious.

In my family, I was a first-generation American Jew, born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised in Memphis, Tennessee on the soothing storyteller sermons of my Reform rabbi and the sing-song cadence of my cantor. However, my day-to-day Jewishness, especially past my bar mitzvah, was molded more by cultural than religious forces: Jerry Seinfeld’s nasal twang, Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song.”

Hanukkah again. “The potato pancakes are called latkes,” I tell Laney.

I don’t ask Laney if she’s ever heard of Moshe Dayan or Philip Roth or Larry David. I don’t try to present and flatten the contusions of the word Jew itself: is it a signifier of identity? Race? Religion? Culture? All of the above? How much do such distinctions matter when, in the dark pages of history, those who hate don’t care if you’re Orthodox or Reform or Conservative or culturally Jewish, or a Jew for Jesus, or an atheist Jew, or a Jewish Neurotic. For those who hate them, a Jew is a Jew—period. And while many Jews may be reluctant to define their people, even in defiant pride, with the same vocabulary that their enemies use, I am reminded of an Israeli speaker who hated the word “Jewish.” “Why,” he said to me and my fellow Birthright trip travelers in a hotel conference room in Jerusalem, “are you Jew…ISH?” He stressed the palms-raised-in-the-air nebbishness of the ISH. “No, you’re not Jewish,” he scolded us. “You can’t ish your way out of our family. You’re a JEW!”

I am a Jew. This is what I had told Laney, the shiksa goddess from the Tennessee country, and she had asked me if I was kidding. If I had been kidding, what was the joke? What was its set-up, its punchline? What comic ammunition would I have gotten out of pretending to be a Jew?

With the fearlessness of an Israeli commando and the calm dignity of Moses, I ask Laney, “How would your dad feel if you, say, married a Jew?”

She turns her pillowy lips to me. “I think he’d be okay,” she says. “But he’d be mad if I married a black guy.”

Oy.

(image via Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year
Did My Commitment to Dating Only Jews Make Me a Racist?

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My friend Meredith and I were standing in line at Starbucks when she mentioned she would like to get lunch at Chick-fil-A to which I obviously responded “I can’t eat there because it’s not Kosher.” Marriage material, I know. It was then that the guy in front of me turned around and butt in with a “Wow. You keep Kosher STILL.” Um … STILL? I’m sorry, were you at my fifth birthday party at the ceramics center? Do I know you? He then barked out another weirdly worded question. “Have you lived in Israel YET?” This guy had bizarre grammar choices. Meredith was taken a back by this freak, but not me. As someone who exudes more Jewishness than Barbara Streisand in Yentl, I’m used to people trying to “bagel” with me. Yup, I said “Bagel,” you know, when someone tries to bond with you by awkwardly and sometimes not so subtly by letting you in on the fact that they’re Jewish.

I can’t take credit for the term, but it is brilliant. Lord knows we had a bageler on our hands, but this bageler was an amateur. Upon noticing a fellow Jew in line at the supermarket, a tasteful, professional bageler would break out the good ol’ “Oh, I forgot the challah!” It works like a charm. Less is more. I felt bad for this guy so I helped him out, “Judging from your hair, I see you too are part of the tribe.” Of course he had a massive Jew fro. “Yes,” he responded in a highly socially awkward way. Good talk. Glad we did this.

We finally got up to the register and the barista asked the bageler what his name was so they could write it on his cup. “Neil,” he said, and then turns around and looks me dead in the eye and says “I mean Nachhhhhmann.” Oh, boy. Sweet Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Why do we feel the need to bagel? Is it because being Jewish is special and we all want to reach out to our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters to establish a sense of community no matter where we are … OR … is it because we need to scout out who is Jewish at all times just in case there’s a pogrom or something? Or is that just me? Either way, why do I have to be bageled all the time, sometimes I want to bagel too! And so I will admit I have been guilty of bageling others, and not just regular bageling, but competitive bageling. The absolute worst kind.

I was doing some work in Starbucks when a young man wearing a yarmulke sat down across from me at the table and started studying Talmud. I must mention that 99 percent of all bageling happens at Starbucks. That is a REAL statistic. The young man was deep into his Talmud studies and this was my time to shine. I wanted to be slick but still let Talmud Kid know he was in the presence of a big Jew. I let out a few subtle “oy veys” and kept it classy. All of a sudden this other kid across the table, let’s call him “Moses” just for the hell of it, popped up out of nowhere with a “What mesechta (volume) are you learning?” Oh screw you, Moses. What do you know? I knew it was Talmud too! Moses and Talmud Kid carried on with a very Jewish related conversation until I self consciously butt in with “Yeah I learned Talmud too because I went to a Jewish day school.” Silence. I was desperate and had hit an all time low. I was being competitive with Moses because I wanted Talmud Kid’s approval of my Jewishness and I wanted it NOW. To my disappointment, he was completely unimpressed by all the bageling.

A few minutes later, I had to go outside to make a phone call so I asked Talmud Kid and Moses to watch my laptop. “I trust you,” I said while I dazzled them with my bageling eyes. They got the picture. Clear as day. We were all Jews and could therefore leave our laptops with one another worry-free. Bageling at it’s finest.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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Drake ~ HYFR Feat. Lil Wayne from OctobersVeryOwn on Vimeo.

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So, I was interested, on this visit, to find myself examining Sherman’s photographs through a Jewish lens, if you’ll pardon the pun. (Was that even a pun?) Jewish culture has always been rife with precisely the type of archetypes Sherman has interrogated; not for nothing does Tevye introduce the villagers of Anatevka each as their own special “types.” From the shtetl we inherited the yenta, the yeshiva bucher, the gonif, the shtarker; the postwar era gave American Jews self-hating punchlines like the JAP and the nebbish; the Soviet Union had its “Rabinovich” jokes and Israel its brash “muscle Jews” who know how to clean a gun and never saw a line they didn’t want to push to the front of. (I even got elbowed out of the way by a couple of them while I was waiting in line to get into the exhibit.)

Type-Faces [Tablet Magazine]

(Image credit: Artnet)

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Friday November 18, Noon-1:30 pm
Girls In Trouble in Conversation and Song
Free w/ museum admission

Sunday November 20, 1-3 pm
Girls In Trouble participates in Midrash, Biblical Women, Poetry and Music: A Conversation
Free w/ museum admission

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Released by Rounder Records on September 14, 2010 and featured in the New York Times and on NPR and NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly, Clare Burson’s latest album, SILVER AND ASH, is a concept album that imagines Burson’s maternal grandmother’s life in Germany, from her birth in 1919 to her escape in 1938, as well as Burson’s own struggles with rupture, silence, guilt, empathy, and continuity.

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Next Thursday August 4th, 2011 we will be having our planning committee meeting at Aroma Cafe. Stop by to learn more about our mission and bring your ideas.

Our next event will be a super soaker battle ‘Water Wars 2011’. We will have Jewish inspired hip hop like you have never heard. Do you know a sponsor? Everyone likes yummy kosher bbq… just saying.

<— The photo is by the notoriously secret poster artist Z.B.

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Click here to watch the banned, unedited version of the SFJFF31 trailer now!

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