The past few years have produced a relative explosion of media about Jewish women. Most notably, shows like Broad City and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend feature Jewish protagonists who use Yiddishisms and reference their Jewish mothers. Particular highlights include the episode of Broad City where Abby and Ilana (almost) go on a thinly-veiled Birthright trip to Israel, and Patti LuPone as a rabbi exhorting Rachel Bloom’s character on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to “remember that we suffered.”

These shows showcase the Jewish cultural experience, but rarely if ever discuss religiosity. As a traditionally observant Jewish woman, I love to see Jewish women in media. But while the Jewish experiences depicted on TV often resonate (Rebecca Bunch, in one episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, hangs three different “Happy Hannukah” banners, each with a different spelling), the complexities of being a religious woman moving through the world are not a part of these shows. I’ve found that experience represented on TV not by Jewish characters, but by nuns.

Call the Midwife, a BBC show that just finished airing its seventh season in the US on PBS, depicts the lives of Anglican nun-midwives and other nurse-midwives living in the East End of London in the 1950s and 60s. The show is both delightful and poignant, political and sometimes silly. Call the Midwife is remarkable for many reasons, including in the age diversity of its cast; recurring characters range from their early teens to their eighties, not to mention—of course—the babies.

The nuns whose convent, Nonnatus House, is at the center of the show, are remarkably nuanced characters. They are deeply devout; God is often discussed, and many episodes punctuated with the sound of their voices singing together in prayer. However, in their work in the economically disadvantaged neighborhood of Poplar, they serve people whose religious beliefs and lives are radically different from their own. The nuns’ work is characterized by compassion and understanding, as they help women both give birth and recover from illegal abortions, navigate both challenging family relationships and the absence of family. All the while, their religion informs their work, as they discuss their duty and pray for their patients. In the sixth season, Sister Julienne, the Sister-in-Charge of Nonnatus House, grapples with whether or not to prescribe the newly-available birth control pill.

This nuanced depiction of women who are deeply committed to their religion, but who have their own needs and hopes, is a rare treat on television. To see a nun realize that she has fallen in love, and leave the convent, and then to watch a nurse realize she is called to be a nun herself, all while in a supportive community of women, is deeply moving. In some ways, these nuns’ lives are more relatable to me than the lives of the secular Jewish women depicted on TV.

Religious commitment is an underrepresented experience in the media. The day-to-day interaction of prayer and work, reading texts and building community is so fundamental to so many people and yet so rarely captured. The quiet beauty of these experiences is part of what Call the Midwife does so well.

Call the Midwife, though it largely focuses on the religious life of the Christian nuns and nurses, does sometimes portray Judaism; the first episode of this season featured an accurate and moving Jewish funeral. However, the show’s uniqueness makes me wonder: why is Judaism always a culture in the entertainment media and never a religion? Why do nuns get air time, but rarely women of other traditions?

Judaism remains more a punchline or a gag than a meaningful way of life on shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Religion is the subject of flippant comments, like when Rebecca tells her childhood rabbi that no, she hasn’t found a shul in California yet because she doesn’t believe in God. Why can Christianity be a meaningful part of women’s lives, while religious Judaism is something to move past? The answer, of course, is Christian hegemony.

Religion has an odd place in Western culture; though religious imagery remains commonplace in our society, practice and belief are increasingly little-discussed and seen as outside of the mainstream. A depiction of religiosity, then, must be normative in other ways. To showcase the unconventional life of religious devotion, the other elements of the narrative must be more standard. Christianity is the default religion, and so while the lives of religious women are an unusual story for television to tell, which religion that is is not the strange part.

I look forward to the day when I can see religious Jewish women portrayed with the kindness and generosity of the nuns of Nonnatus House. Perhaps Disobedience will be the beginning of a moment where Jewish women’s religiosity is seen as a compelling and exciting part of character development, where the media’s religious women can be not only nuns but practicing Jews. In the meantime, I will live my own exciting and compelling life among religious women.

Image via Facebook

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Not every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race has a Jewish contestant (we’re looking at you, All-Stars Season 3), but there have been plenty. In fact, two self-identifying Jewish queens have taken the crown— Jinkx Monsoon and last season’s Sasha Velour. So with Season 10 upon us, do we have another Semitic contender in the person of one Miz Cracker?

Miz Cracker is the drag persona of Maxwell Heller, 33, a New York-based performer (she has referred to herself as “Harlem’s Jewish princess”). She’s a self-described comedy queen, and the drag daughter of previous Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen— already establishing her as a potentially fierce competitor. Her name, which used to be Brianna Cracker, comes from her favorite snack (brie? crackers? get it?), but it was too long, so now she’s embracing being, well… a cracker.

As for her Jewish identity, she’s far from quiet about it. For example, she was in the Pharrell parody video, “Jappy” (get it?), with other Jewish queens, including season 9 contestant Alexis Michelle. She has embraced the description of her style as “Jewish Barbie on bath salts.” She also hosts a RPDR review show on YouTube called, really, Review with a Jew.

Besides, her catchphrase is “Okay, It’s time for dinner!” She’s like a young, hot, Jewish mom!

While we’re on the subject of Jews and RuPaul, it’s worth mentioning (again) that the show host is aggressively philo-Semitic. He has worn a magen david necklace multiple times onscreen, spoken about how he wishes gay culture could emulate Jewish culture, and even kept an English-to-Yiddish dictionary under his chair while filming.

We don’t tend to endorse reality-show contestants on Jewcy— we leave it to Miz Cracker to prove her own merits as she rises to the top. That said, the new season debuts tonight, and we pray that at this time next week, Miz Cracker will still be on the show. It’s a start.

While you wait, get to know the queen in this intro video.

Image via Facebook

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If television had a prophet, he was called Rod Serling, a Space Age Jeremiah, come to edify the masses. So long has his reputation stretched over the medium, that any anthology series produced in its wake—from British import Black Mirror to the recently premiered Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams—is often tagged as “The Next Twilight Zone.” Chided gently these days for the same bluntness that ensures the show’s longevity, Serling’s weekly doses of mussar nevertheless characterized The Twilight Zone as a series informed by his experiences as a veteran and a Jew writing in the aftermath of World War II.

The roots of science fiction may be Judaic in spirit (if you believe Asimov, after all, the golem was our first stab at robotics), but The Twilight Zone actually fits just as well, if not better, in a different cultural landscape: the World War II novel. In a strange turn of events, the history of the Second World War in America was largely carved out by returning Jewish American GIs, and it was largely a way of grappling with the anti-Semitism they had witnessed at home and abroad. Norman Mailer, Ira Wolfert, Merle Miller, Stefan Heym, Leon Uris, even J.D. Salinger—all were creating war epics that pondered a war both justified and perplexing. Perplexing in that it saw these men as scapegoats of their own cause, harassed beforehand, demeaned during, and blamed afterward. It’s no surprise novels like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 run towards the sardonically absurd, and the whole system collapses under the weight of its nonsense.

Neither did these stories veer away from incrimination. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny has just reached the highest point of drama when its Jewish military lawyer drunkenly contemplates how the book’s anti-hero had saved his mother (but not his other relatives) from becoming soap. Irwin Shaw’s angry young men are constantly bruised by the world they can’t escape and ponder whether to takes arms against it. Martha Gellhorn’s Point of No Return does have its Jewish protagonists take up arms, and so plots a course for all future revenge fantasies.

The Twilight Zone exorcises these specific Jewish anxieties of Serling in different ways. Several Twilight Zone episodes confront the randomness of death: in “Nothing in the Dark,” for instance, Death in the guise of a young Robert Redford coaxes an old woman into leaving her home for the great beyond; in “One for the Angels,” a pitchman manages to trick Death into trading his soul for a little girl’s. This preoccupation with death stemmed from an incident while Serling was stationed in the Philippines and a fellow Jewish soldier was killed in a freak accident, a crate of food dropped by a plane flying overhead.

Furthermore, though Serling’s placement resulted in most of The Twilight Zone’s WWII episodes being set in the Pacific theater—“A Quality of Mercy,” in which an American soldier swaps places with a Japanese soldier; “The Purple Testament,” in which a young GI discovers he can read death on his friends’ faces—his guilt over having missed the war in Europe led to some of the crueler twists in the show, such as in “Judgment Night,” when a Nazi U-boat captain is trapped in a purgatory of his own making.

Nevertheless, Serling did go on to tackle the Holocaust, both in metaphor and blunt force. It’s often believed that the Holocaust was not broached in popular fiction until decades later, but in fact those Jewish vets were confronting and questioning the Holocaust, sneaking up the best seller lists. On the parabolic side, Serling would often deliver his message with a splash of alien life and sans delicacy. Threats, real or perceived, lead to neighbor turning against neighbor in episodes such as “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “The Shelter,” and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”. Authoritarian governments lurk in both the foreground (“The Obsolete Man”) and the background (“Eye of the Beholder”), and trumped-up strongmen are toppled on every extraterrestrial surface (“The Little People,” “On Thursday We Leave for Home”).

There were two episodes in The Twilight Zone’s run, however, the dealt with the Holocaust directly: one as judgement and one as warning. “Death’s-Head Revisited” is thirty minutes of cathartic rage: an old SS guard (“a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain”) returns to his stomping grounds at Dachau and is punished by the ghosts of the slain. (“This is not hatred,” says the spectral prisoner, Becker. “This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God.”) Serling’s narration, too, is pointed and desperate as it can be:

“There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”

The second episode to address the Holocaust head-on was “He’s Alive,” whose twist (the evil man in the shadows tempting Dennis Hopper is actually Hitler!) may lend itself to mockery, but Serling’s fear, only a decade or so after the Holocaust, that Nazi beliefs would thrive once more is palpable. (And, one may argue, predictive.)

So yes, The Twilight Zone may have been obvious. It may have been ludicrous or campy. But what is lost in the reduction of The Twilight Zone to its shocking moments is that it is the journal of a man scarred by island-hopping and the bomb and death camps rediscovering hope and re-pledging himself for life. And what, after all, could be more Jewish than that?

Image via Wikimedia

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Based on the short film of the same name, the new Freeform series Alone Together, created by and starring Jewish LA comedians Esther Povitsky (AKA Little Esther) and Benji Aflalo, doesn’t take itself too seriously. With Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone of The Lonely Island on the production team, madcap antics are to be expected.

In a very quotable pilot, we meet Povitsky’s and Aflalo’s fictional counterparts, also named Esther and Benji, as they are discussing the morality of one-night stands. “I’ll have you know that the walk of shame is an anti-feminist construct,” Esther tells Benji, who has just picked her up at her date’s house, to which he replies, “You’re just too lazy to walk.”

Throughout the episode, Esther and Benji find themselves in a variety of humorously uncomfortable situations, from being insulted by a green juice-slinging goddess at a trendy juicery (“I’m only a lesbian to guys under 5’10,” she tells Benji as Esther stockpiles spirulina chips) to joining an escort service to get paid to eat mac and cheese at an upscale restaurant in sweatpants (watching Povitsky act opposite Parks and Rec’s Jim O’Heir, who plays her date for the evening, is a hoot).

But those looking for the SoCal millennial equivalent of the Golden Globe Award-winning Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will have to look elsewhere. On screen, Povitsky — who you might recognize as Maya from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — deals in pathos rather than moxie. And, as her scene partner and platonic life partner, so does Aflalo. Think of Esther, the character, as Midge Maisel’s antithesis (Midge’s drunken debut at the Gaslight notwithstanding): unpolished in style and bearing, quick to make a self-deprecating remark about her appearance, and all too eager to have one-night stands with chubby guys to raise her self-esteem.

We’re meant to sympathize with the show’s pretty-darn-Jewish-looking heroes, short, brown-haired, and blessed with assets other than conventional Hollywood looks, but there’s nothing clever or innovative about body-shaming. Even if Esther calls herself a feminist and defends Benji at that elitist juice spot (“Shaming a guy ’cause he’s short is like shaming a girl ’cause she’s overweight”), she feels highly insecure.

“The name Esther isn’t like really for a hot girl, so I feel like I’m Esther pretty because that’s as pretty as you can be with the name Esther,” Esther tells O’Heir’s character when he asks her to tell a joke. At a pool party his sister throws, Benji offhandedly mentions Esther’s stomach flab. “We call it her equator,” he jibes.

Still, as a character study of two neurotic outsiders trying to find their place — platonically, of course because, as Esther phrases it, “Just because we’re both small and undesirable doesn’t mean we should date” — the show succeeds. The repeated put-downs may be tough to chew, but you’re ultimately glad that Esther and Benji have each other to binge-watch Daria together while noshing on nachos. They can’t seem to assimilate to the superficial reality of LA, a world peopled by shiksa goddesses and svelte clothing designers (among them Benji’s sister, played by Ginger Gongzaga, whose comparative height and flawless complexion are a genetic mystery).

There is, if you look closely, power even in our most pathetic foibles. With the bar set so low, Esther and Benji are bound to succeed in life eventually, one poor decision at a time. Who needs spirulina chips or a juice cleanse to achieve that “hot girl” glow when a healthy dose of schadenfreude will do the job?

Alone Together airs Wednesday nights at 8:30.

Image via Freeform

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Like the humble bagel, Kevin (Probably) Saves The World has wandered far from its Jewish roots. Based on the Talmudic concept of tzadikim nistarim, the series stars Jason Ritter as one of the 36 Righteous, whose presence on earth prevents the apocalypse. However, ABC’s version replaces any hint of mystical Judaism with goyish feel-good, pioneering what the A.V. Club calls a “religious hugging dramedy.” In fact, the show is so bereft of Jews that one reviewer claimed that it was a post-Trump “attempt to reach the Christian aspect of middle America.”

Set in Taylor, Texas, the pilot follows Kevin’s less-than-triumphant return to his hometown after a failed suicide. Single, unemployed, and perpetually dazed, he’s a decidedly ‘meh’ antihero. Although he struggles to relate to his widowed sister Amy and teenage niece Reese, he’s too passive to merit their increasing outrage over his behavior. Instead, their anguished interactions suggest that Kevin was originally written as the estranged dad: Reese (Chloe East) accuses him of trying to “come into our lives and fix everything,” while Amy (JoAnna Garcia Swisher) insists that she “can’t be the only person who cares about this relationship anymore.” Rarely does the deadbeat uncle inspire such drama, nor receive so many pitying looks over a perfectly Hollywood appearance.

If Kevin seems harshly judged, it’s because the show is intent on comparing him to his angelic sidekick, Yvette (Kimberly Hébert Gregory). A self-described “warrior for God,” she appears after a local meteor shower and introduces Kevin to a life of “spiritual value.” Her plan for world salvation is founded on hugs, or “anointed embraces,” but as the token Magical Negro/Angry Black Woman, she also runs over his car with a tractor and slaps him upside the head.

Had the series acknowledged its Jewish premise, it might have achieved more than sitcom televangelism. Unfortunately, like Kevin himself, it’s merely “not terrible,” and ultimately unworthy of a post-Chanukah binge.

Photo credit Ryan Green/ABC

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A superhero in Biblical rags. A comedienne rubbing shoulders with Lenny Bruce in 1950s New York. Ben Feldman’s hair on Superstore. You didn’t have to search very hard to find Jews making a splash in television this year. Even Stranger Things got in on the action, introducing a pinch of Yiddishkeit into white bread Hawkins, Indiana. (Okay, they didn’t explicitly spell out that the ambiguous but the ultimately good-intentioned Dr. Owens was a card-carrying Member of the Tribe— why else would you cast Paul Reiser?)

Stranger Things was far from the only genre show to tap a Jewish inspiration this year. Comic book shows across networks honored their creators with both Jewish characters (Gert Yorkes on Hulu’s Runaways) and Jewish metaphors (Supergirl’s ongoing debates of cultural displacement, lost history, and feeling trapped between two worlds). And though DCTV shed a few of its Jewish characters this past year, each got to go out with a bang. Martin Stein, played by the always charming Victor Garber, took his final bow in the Crisis on Earth X crossover, saving both the life of his partner and worlds entire with his actions. Still, the character popped up an episode later in a flashback, sporting a Chanukah sweater to die for and contesting for Furby-wannabe in a department store as a roided-up version of “Chanukah, Oh Chanukah” accompanies.

But the year’s standout moment belonged to Ragman, the gematria-identifying, schnapps-brewing, ancient rag-possessing superhero on Arrow. As his final act of heroism on the show, he wraps a detonating nuclear bomb in his rags and recites the Shema yes, this aired on the CW. When he survives, another character surveys the scene with an “Oh my god!,” to which Ragman groans in reply, “How come He always get the credit?”

Ragman wasn’t alone in exploring the spiritual aspects of Judaism on the small screen this year. To nearly everyone’s surprise, ABC’s new dramedy Kevin (Probably) Saves the World actually features as its underlying plot a mission to track down the Lamedvavniks who are lost this generation. Meanwhile, as Tom Hardy was reprising his role as real-life London gangster Alfie Solomons on Peaky Blinders across the pond, closer to home, Fargo embarked on its most divinely influenced season yet.

Fargo has always been a morality tale—there are shades of gray, sure, but ostensibly it is a story of good people striving to do good and bad people striving to do bad. The good people struggle but are ultimately vindicated; the bad people thrive but ultimately fail. The first season borrowed the movie’s essential conceit and expanded upon it—as Fargo the movie mused on the incomprehensibility of everyday evil by everyday people, Fargo the TV show enacts the debate on a Biblical scale.

The show has always been littered with Jewish allusion (parables of the Chofetz Chaim, a Chabad Rabbi and his Mrs. Robinson of a wife, repeated uses of 613, a plague of fish), but this season embraced a plot that barely papers over current events in order to craft a nesting doll of Russo-Jewish history in these American wastes. You have small-time crook Yuri, obsessed with identifying as a Cossack, shedding blood and spreading violence (and casual anti-Semitism), but go up the chain of command and you have his boss Varga, with his consumption and waste, and his false words, and his little portrait of Stalin (and more casual anti-Semitism). No wonder Michael Stuhlbarg’s Sy has such a rough go. But then we meet God in a bowling alley, and the world of Fargo is turned on its head— Rebbe Nachman and the slain people of Uman reemerge from their graves to enact eye-for-an-eye (or, an ear-for-an-ear, as it were) justice on Cossack Yuri. (This is the most Jewish scene on television this year, by the way.)

The influence of the past and the relationship between generations was a popular theme this year, whether it was Steven Spielberg’s joyous narration of director William Wyler in the Netflix war propaganda documentary, Five Came Back, or in the many different faces of Jewish family presented on screen. On Transparent, for instance, the Pfeffermans’ first bus ride to Jerusalem on their pilgrimage to Israel is immediately dragged into a familiar argument on Middle East relations. On The Goldbergs’ recent Chanukah special, Beverly Goldberg, “smother” extraordinaire, wearing another Chanukah sweater to die for, schemes to ensure her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend will choose her house for all future holidays. And on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, another mother-daughter relationship leads to a staggering moment of defeat and redemption when Rebecca reaches out for help through the screaming wash of her depression on an ill-fated plane ride.

And then of course, there’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a miraculous and mellifluous mile-a-minute gabber from Gilmore Girls genius, Amy Sherman-Palladino. From the first scene, where newlywed Midge Maisel finishes her toast by confessing that they served shrimp at the reception, the show is a veritable smorgasbord of Jewish comedy (my favorite: “You’re jealous of the rabbi? He was in Buchenwald, throw him a bone.”) and Jewish experience, whether it’s the sister-in-law who returns from Israel with larger and larger mezuzahs to prove her conversion, or the father-in-law who won’t stop telling stories about how he rescued Jews from Europe during the war. And in a year when Curb Your Enthusiasm returned, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel outdid Larry David by featuring Lenny Bruce as Midge’s disheveled sage. Yet no one shone brighter than Midge herself, who was vivacious and hilarious, introspective and yearning, vulgar and well-spoken, a baker of briskets and a breaker of convention. Season 2 can’t come soon enough.

Image by Sarah Shatz/Amazon Video

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The CW is up to four shows that simultaneously take place in the DC comic book universe— that’s The Flash, Supergirl, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow. Tonight will begin their annual crossover, “Crisis on Earth X” as all four shows briefly share the same plot-line, full of wedding veils, one-liners, cheap leather and… alternate universe supervillain Nazis?

To no one’s surprise, the idea of our beloved heroes masquerading under swastika hoods has raised pulses online, although, naturally, one can predict that our beloved heroes will no doubt triumph in the end, pausing along the way to throw a few right crosses into a few Nazi faces. There are several reasons for the skepticism: some are simply tired of Nazis as plot devices; others find it disrespectful to portray Jewish-created icons as their fascist nemeses. Really, it boils down to an ongoing question over how to represent the Holocaust in fiction: is it sacred or is it profane?

This has been an artistic debate since the limping aftermath of World War II, when Crossfire, a deep-in-the-shadows film noir, and Gentlemen’s Agreement, a Very Important Picture, both tackling the specter of anti-Semitism, battled for top prize at the 1947 Academy Awards. (Spoiler: Gentleman’s Agreement won out.) If you ask the Academy voters, year after year, it seems the only way to score points is with Oscar bait—Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, The Reader, etc., etc. It would be cruel to lump them all in the same boat (I will, after all, never doubt the sincerity of Spielberg), but, after a while, you begin to grow cold in the sight of new and shamelessly manipulative emotional Holocaust porn. The same images, gray, ground-up, replayed until rote. The same heartstrings plucked like an out-of-tune fiddle. The same. The same. “Good” German as hero, Jew as object, maybe pummeled, maybe tortured, but always saved, and if not, well, haven’t we learned a lesson about humanity? The same.

But there has always been an alternative—alternate histories. Time and time again, artists have cracked at the skeleton of history to see if they could reset it on a different path. Jews are an introspective lot, so it follows they’ve tried their hands at similar diagnoses: what if Charles Lindbergh and his America Firsters had defeated FDR (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America)? What if a Khazar army had existed in the corner of Hitler’s Europe (Emily Barton’s The Book of Esther)? What if Kafka had been saved by a golem hiding in Prague’s Old-New Synagogue (Curt Leviant’s Kafka’s Son)?

Some of these questions have happy answers, as in Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller-cum-spaghetti western Inglourious Basterds, which features (spoilers for many of these) Hitler and his cronies gun-blasted in the head. But Jews are a pessimistic lot, too, so often we’re left more uncertain than before (as when the Frozen Chosen of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union find themselves once more homeless and booted from their Alaskan refuge). This may be because these grimmer alternate histories are not really asking what if the Nazis won or lost—that’s a decided point. Instead, the familiarity with the subject allows them a canvas on which to explore wider thoughts.

The Plot Against America, for instance, has renewed life in a world that may not have remembered America First is a tried and true (and failed) phrase. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Simone Zelitch’s more recent Judenstaat both grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by transplanting it to different places and times—the first to an Alaskan territory full of black hatters and the second to a Cold War-inflected Germany, awarded to the survivors after the end of the war.

Both of these novels follow in Crossfire’s tonal footsteps of sculpting their alternative histories in a hardboiled Chandleresque mold (to suggest, perhaps, that you can create as many worlds as you want, but corruption is universal). This structure allows information to be doled out piecemeal and the façade of improvement exposed as just that—a façade. Perhaps the prime example of this sub-genre is Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming, which takes both the World War II alternate history and crime fiction ideas to their electric conclusion by making his protagonist a London-based private eye named Wolf hired by a Jewish femme fatale to find her sister, only to reveal that Wolf is in fact Adolf Hitler in hiding, the German communists having won the election in this version of history. The premise seems preposterous and almost offensive, until Tidhar throws another wrench in the gears and introduces a second perspective—that of a former Yiddish pulp writer, Shomer, who is imprisoned in Auschwitz and dreaming of this whole other reality as an escape. Indeed, in the end, it seems what Tidhar is really exploring is not what ifs, but hows: how do we talk about the Holocaust?

Director Laszlo Nemes, discussing why he felt compelled to shoot Son of Saul in such an immediate style, said, “the Holocaust is becoming a sort of myth… some kind of fantasy world.” Son of Saul of course takes place in our world, but wholly and unabashedly rejects the period piece ghettoization of Holocaust films and turns it into a thriller. A way, Nemes feels, to keep the memory alive. The same could be said of these excursions to actual fantasy worlds.

Before World War II, Jewish comics creators were the first line of defense against American complacency. Supermen in spangled tights ‘kapowed’ and ‘bammed’ their way through failed diplomacy. The sacred meeting the profane. Now, again, when this generation is cottoning on to the underbelly of neo-Nazi movements in this country and elsewhere, it seems these icons are leading the fight. After all, how could Supergirl and the Flash ignore a world succumbed to evil, even if they were ignorant until now, even if it is not their own?

You can’t let the Holocaust grow stale. You can’t let it become period piece and period piece alone. The past has to stay present or else we’ve already damned the future. It won’t rest easy on some stomachs, but when is genocide supposed to?

Photo: Melissa Benoist as Overgirl. By Jack Rowand/The CW

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There have always been cool Jews: Judah Maccabee, Bugsy Siegel, Lou Reed. But for one brief shining moment in the early Noughts, a curly-haired, comics-collecting, indie-listening ball of neuroses was the face postered on bedroom walls.

For fans of Marvel’s latest small screen offering, Runaways, it must have seemed like Chrismukkah came early when it was announced that showrunner Josh Schwartz would be one of the brains behind its leap from the comic pages. After all, who better to breathe life into smart, sarcastic, Jewish Gert (and her dinosaur sidekick, Old Lace) than the guy who created her spiritual ancestor Seth Cohen (and his toy horse sidekick, Captain Oats).

Seth Cohen was a different breed of teen idol, no less a romantic lead because he wasn’t muscled or athletic— or the fact that his childhood trauma stemmed from a friendless Bar Mitzvah party. But, of course, that was why The O.C. caught fire. Dipping into a genre that trends whitebread, Schwartz replaced the John Hughesian model of interchangeable suburbia and overspilling earnestness with his self-aware, highly located, unmistakably ethnic teen drama. The place, California’s wealthy and WASPy Newport Beach, would reign omnipresent and the people would be defined in relation to it. At the center of this world was a family who just didn’t quite fit in, the Cohens: exiled Bronx crusader Sandy and his blonde, blue-eyed wife Kirsten, their oddball son Seth (played, of course, by Adam Brody), and their adopted delinquent Ryan.

From the start, the Cohens’ difference to their neighbors was a source of comedic tension, and one of those many differences was that the Cohens were very, very Jewish. The show never tried to hide it and instead reveled in it as one of The O.C.’s trademarks. The first season introduced the concept of Chrismukkah, Seth’s attempt to wrangle nine nights of presents out of his blended family, to the show and to world at large, and each season would repeat the festival, escalating the drama exponentially— one Chrismukkah featured the invention of the “yamaclause”; another centered around Ryan learning a Torah portion for his Bar Mitzvah.

Unlike many Jewish characters, the Cohens didn’t simply become Jews on Christmas. Instead, their Jewishness saturated the show to the point of familiarity. One episode focuses on the visit of Sandy’s domineering matriarch, the Nana, as the Cohens scramble to put together a seder and Summer, Seth’s girlfriend, valiantly learns the Four Questions to impress his grandmother. A later storyline has Seth and Summer in a standoff over their engagement—Summer pursues conversion by grappling with a Torah scroll and learning to cook a brisket. And at a funeral, Seth, searching for the missing Summer, cracks “is she smoking the salmon herself?”

Of course, culturally, the Cohens were not the first gefilte fish out of water in the Golden State. Mark Harris, in his study of changing Hollywood in the 1960s, Pictures at a Revolution, highlights an epiphany reached by director Mike Nichols in the decades after he developed The Graduate. In Charles Webb’s book, Benjamin Braddock is another tall tanned sunburst of California WASP society.  The movie version?  Not quite.  Says Nichols:

“It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along — that I had been turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn’t get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?’ And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious: Who was the Jew among the goyim? And who was forever a visitor in a strange land?”

The casting, unconscious or not, strengthens the tone of discomfort of the movie, as Ben is paraded, handled, and manipulated like a curiosity by his family and friends. In revisiting the scenario forty years later, The O.C. flips the script—the Cohens still can’t quite assimilate in their coastal California town, but this time, their neighbors are the outsiders, and the Cohens, with the audience in tow, become insiders. For instance, in one episode, Summer starts dating another boy to make Seth jealous. The boy, Danny, is constantly cracking jokes that send everyone into exaggerated hysterics. Seth, and later Sandy, are the only characters left stone-faced. (Sandy: “Gentiles. I love your mother more than words, but – not funny.”) And because the Cohens aren’t laughing, neither are we. By attuning the Cohens’ brand of wit as the show’s usual humor, the audience sides with the Jews on this one.  

What the Cohens found cool, we found cool, and so The O.C. not only fashioned statements out of Seth’s love for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or Death Cab for Cutie, but also made the unglamorous—shuffleboard, bagels, showtunes, meatloaf—seem desirable. A Chrismukkah miracle, indeed.

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You may have stopped watching Arthur (about the shenanigans of an anthropomorphized aardvark and his friends,) on PBS ten or fifteen years ago, but the show is still chugging along, with new episodes. Earlier this week, this year’s Halloween special, “Arthur and the Haunted Treehouse” debuted.

Any fan of Arthur, old or new, will tell you that Arthur’s friend Francine Frensky (some kind of a monkey, in theory, but she looks more like a hippo, TBH) is Jewish, so she brings us a very Jewish spooky story this episode. Of course, that story is the Golem. The dybbuk might be a bit much for kids.

Francine is trick-or-treating in her apartment building, when she knocks on the door of an elderly woman with a vague European accent who invites her inside.

Two things to spot:

1. This woman has a Menorah prominently on display. How else will we know she’s Jewish?
2. This Jewish woman appears to be a goat-person, which means that she has horns. Didn’t really think that one through, did you, animation team?

Anyway, the woman shows Francine a photo of a golem she says she took herself, and begins to tell her the story of how she came upon it, back in her childhood home of Mindelplotz (near Prague, apparently).

The story that follows, is sadly divorced from Jewishness, more a Frankenstein’s monster sort of scenario. In the tale, a violinist who is bitter after breaking his hands studies “magic,” which apparently includes looking at a book with pictures of ankhs and a kabbalistic Tree of Life. He constructs a golem (that has adorable bunny ears!!), and then activates it by sticking in a shard of his violin. The golem goes on a rampage and terrorizes the town! It turns out that the old lady telling Francine the story is the ghost of the long-lost sister of the actual apartment resident (Mr. Saperstein, also a goat-person), and a victim of the Golem!

OoooOOOohhh!!!

Anyway, it’s not the most faithful telling of a golem narrative, and nowhere does anyone even say the word “Jewish,” but points for Halloween diversity!

And, yes, you can watch this on YouTube. The whole segment is less than ten minutes:

https://youtu.be/xxPyqE-NF6Y?t=9m43s

Image via YouTube.

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This year’s season of Difficult People is ending on Tuesday just in time for us all to reflect on our garbage person ways Pre-Yom Kippur. To quote Billy’s character, “we did the wrong thing and we still got nothing!”

Dear Billy Eichner and Julie Klausner,

Thank you for letting it be okay to be a dirt person. I constantly struggle to stay away from my garbage person impulses, but Difficult People really leans into the dirt person lifestyle. It is a celebration of all of the worst traits a person can have.    

I would like you both to know that I am not planning to become an all out horrible monster, but just a person who occasionally thinks about herself before others. I really view what your characters do on the show as a form of self-care, because let’s be honest— they only really do care about themselves. It’s cathartic to watch you guys do the things I only dream of doing.

I appreciate your characters’ infusion of Judaism in their everyday activities. It’s not like we often see them doing Jewish rituals or celebrating holidays (though there are occasional examples— shout out to this season’s plot line where Billy’s Orthodox sister became convinced she had a Golem). Still, in the proud history of TV, their background, and sense of humor, infuses every part of their hilarious existence.

I also appreciate Jews mocking other Jews— it just feels right (you know you do it). You crafted characters whose Judaism is expressed through their love of pop culture, for example. Your characters watch The Real Housewives with the same fervor some people bring to Shabbat. They may not live Jewish lives in a traditional religious sense, but they still live Jewishly.  The way they perform a Jewish life may feel wrong to some because it isn’t this idealized version of what we “should” be, but that makes it feel all the more real.

As the Day of Atonement nears, I think of when Billy tells his frum brother on Yom Kippur: “Here’s the thing. You know what the holiest day of the year for me is? The Golden Globes.” His niece exclaims in response: “That’s the most Jewish thing I have ever heard.”

As we move into Rosh Hashanah this evening we are told to be self-reflective and contrite. Difficult People has helped me do both. I am thinking more about how I interact with the world so that I can be less of a garbage person. In this reflection I am realizing all the ways I can be better in the New Year. I will apologize to those I have dirt-personed-to and hopefully be just a bit less like your characters in the horribleness in the New Year.

Difficult People asserts that we as Jewish people will always be the Other in society, and it’s better to just embrace rather than hiding from it. What I love about your show is that Julie and Billy are unapologetically themselves, dirt person ways and all.

Stay Jewish!

-Alex

Image via Hulu

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