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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What exactly inspired Rick Ross to name his latest mixtape The Black Bar Mitzvah? There’s not much in the text to give us any clues. Ross mentions the mixtape’s name a few times, but no more or less than he does Meek Mill’s upcoming Nightmares and Dreams (to be subtly released the day before Halloween!), his own previously released God Forgives, I Don’t, the upcoming Maybach Music Group tour, or the assortment of other projects and groups and associations that come with a mixtape released by the most powerful name in radio rap.

The only direct focus comes in the “Rosenberg” skit, in which New York DJ Peter Rosenberg sells out his heritage to take on the role of rabbi commenting on a “lavish” lunch spread and “the beautiful titties hanging out at the bar mitzvah service” (to be fair, I’d probably do this too if Rick Ross asked me). Weirdly, church organs and a Latin-sounding choir play in the background, strongly suggesting that Ross has never actually been to “Beth Shalom, Miami,” as Rosenberg claims.

Logic dictates that Ross got this idea from Drake. Drake, who brought the age of getting re-bar mitzvahed down from 73 to 25 with his “HYFR (Hell Yeah Fucking Right)” video earlier this year. Drake, who is actually Jewish. In the instant-classic music video, Drake’s re-bar mitzvah is a mixture of your typical synagogue-going crowd—and Lil’ Wayne and DJ Khaled. As Rembert Browne wrote in Grantland, the video was both ridiculous and deeply personal. Not entirely logical from the outside, it clearly felt right for Drake and the moment: “His world is a collision of cultures, so why pretend that any of them live in silos?”

Drake shows up on The Black Bar Mitzvah, but doesn’t bring any Talmud quotes with him. Instead, he’s got the most victory-lapping verse on the whole victory-lapping album; he sounds drunk and it’s terrific. “You let Drizzy get a verse, you gon’ get this worrrrk!” he slurs, like your best friend celebrating a promotion. Ross’ mixtapes have a way of bringing the out the best among those chosen to guest, and Bar Mitzvah is no exception. Rap baby Rockie Fresh steals the show with lines like “Like racism/I’ma be around,” 2 Chainz shows up because Obamacare made it illegal to have a mixtape in 2012 without him, and the whole thing runs pretty smoothly. Ross comes off as a slightly weird, very rich person who can make people feel successful just by being around them.

Basically, it feels like a normal mixtape, which makes the Jewish trappings even odder. The cover art, with a golden Ross popping out of a Star of David, feels like the end result of some historical fiction where Israel’s main export is customized 1970’s shag vans. It’s absurd—and absurdly eye-catching—which is precisely the point. It could raise questions about black-Jewish relations, but of course it doesn’t. This is a Rick Ross mixtape, and the guy who has claimed incarcerated drug dealers like Big Meech and Larry Hoover as role models isn’t exactly interested in an intercultural dialogue.

The closest historical point of reference is Jewish Mafioso Meyer Lansky, who’s been given shout outs from all-time legends Jay-Z and Raekwon. Lansky, who ran casinos in Cuba for a decade and was denied the right of return by Israel for his criminal activities, was also fictionalized as Hyman Roth in The Godfather. This would be a natural meeting point for Ross and The Jews, given how so many Maybach album covers tend to resemble the poster for Coppola’s masterpiece. Yet while the Jewish Mafia is given a namecheck on Ross’ version of Future’s “Gone to the Moon,” Lansky is nowhere to be found.

The Black Bar Mitzvah will definitely cement Ross’ place among 14-year-old Jewish private school kids looking to spend their bar mitzvah money while also wanting to be black, but that’s about it. He’s taken a stereotype once used as an excuse for vicious discrimination and presented it to be as harmless as it actually is. That we can look at an album cover like this and see nothing but the universally bizarre is without a doubt a good thing. If you’re keeping score at home, you can call this one Good for The Jews. Ross thought up at least one good tagline for The Black Bar Mitzvah, and it’s a fitting one: “Everyone’s invited.”

Previously: Watch: Drake’s HYFR Bar Mitzvah Wins Best Hip Hop Video at MTV VMAs
It’s Drake’s re-Bar Mitzvah, and You’re Invited!

From this author: Why I Gave Up God But Still Keep Kosher
The Beastie Boys Album That Changed Everything

The post Why Rick Ross’ ‘Black Bar Mitzvah’ is Totally Fine for the Jews appeared first on Jewcy.

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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