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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It’s a joyous day for Adam Brody and Leighton Meester—the television heartthrobs brought to you by Josh Schwartz are engaged! Now, while it’s exciting and beautiful and lovely that the couple found each other, it’s also, embarrassingly, a bit sad to see Brody off the market.

If you came up loving Seth Cohen, Brody’s character on The O.C., you probably feel similarly. Cohen was the show’s obvious star. While Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) was meant to be the strong, hunky male lead, it was Cohen who stole our hearts with his comic book collecting and his Death Cab For Cutie posters. He was emotional, charming, and, if the show had any semblance of real life, he’d likely have been “popular” in high school—looks run that world, and Cohen had the goods.

But, it’s not healthy or sane to long for heartthrobs past. Mazel tov, you guys! May your children too be blessed with onscreen facial symmetry.

And, let’s hope the proposal was as cute as this:

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Seth Cohen was one of the first times I noticed “indie” being represented in the mainstream. Get in line Zooey Deschanel, because Seth invented adorkable, and the idea of taking something that seemed cool in its own right and packaging it for the masses. I guess if the show had stayed good past the first couple of seasons, and Adam Brody had gone on to bigger and better things, this wouldn’t seem so bad, but given how things turned out, I feel weird about it. I felt weird rewatching the pilot and realizing that Seth, who present-day me would place on the autism spectrum, was so specifically engineered to appeal to teenage me. But that’s Gen Y for you. Before the recession sidelined our economic prospects, we were the first tweens, a new market research category identified for the spending power we wielded. It was nice to matter.

So in the boom days of 2003, here was this 90210-esque redux designed to appeal to teenagers and their lowest-common-denominator taste, and yet like a Trojan horse Josh Schwartz snuck in Seth, talking about graphic novels and Magic: The Gathering and Death Cab for Cutie. The people who beat up Seth shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister, but someone like Seth got his clothes at PacSun (being as he was alternative, but not so alternative that he would have worn Hot Topic gothwear). That they were all stores found in every American mall escaped our notice.

A key aspect of Seth’s alternativeness was that, unlike his water polo-playing, debutante ball-curtseying classmates, he was Jewish. Even though, strictly speaking, he so wasn’t. His father Sandy (Peter Gallagher) was a member of the tribe, but his mother Kirsten (Kelly Rowan) was a WASP, and it’s the mother’s religion that determines the child’s. However, Seth did occasionally refer to his bar mitzvah, so until Talmudic scholars pass down a verdict, we’ll have to consider Seth one of those territorial half-Jews who not only sees himself as an heir to the Jewish comedic tradition of wise-cracking, but also wants it to be known that there are core differences between him and Mischa Barton’s Marissa Cooper. The Jewish dad factor was convenient in that it allowed other characters (namely, shiksa goddess Summer, played by Rachel Bilson) to refer to Seth by his last name, Cohen, a little reminder every time they spoke to him that he was a Jewy Jewersonfeld.

On TV when we have a half-Jew, we round up. We focus on the –ukkuh part of Chrismukkah, the hybrid holiday that Seth popularized (as Kirsten said, “We didn’t really know how to raise Seth”), and ignore the fact that Seth thought Moses was the hero of it. Whenever his adopted brother Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) does something particularly at odds with his punch-first, ask-questions-later Chino roots, we smile at Seth’s implication that Ryan’s embracing a kinder, gentler, Jewish-er way: “You just got your butt kicked and you didn’t even fight back. Dude, you really are a Cohen.”

Of course, it’s only through teen soap opera magic, and forcing him to stand next to people like Chris Carmack, that Adam Brody would pass for a skinny, nebbishy geek (this same magic allowed textbook Black Irish Peter Gallagher to stand in for an all-purpose ethnic). Seth may have lacked the muscles that accessorized Ryan’s wife-beaters, but scrawny he wasn’t. The “Jewfro” he rocked was hardly as unruly as Timberlake’s in its prime. He was cute, undeniably so, and he got all the best lines on the show. Were teenage girls suddenly interested in the video games and indie bands Seth Cohen espoused? Sometimes, but mostly they were interested in Adam Brody. What if getting us all to fall in love with Seth was a subliminal message from B’nai B’rith International, a way to get a generation of Jewish girls to give their male Hebrew school classmates another look? It would have been a pretty successful campaign. Even girls who skipped Birthright still hold out the hope of finding their Seth Cohen.

Previously on Network Jews:

Hesh Rabkin, Jewish Loan Shark on The Sopranos

Eli Gold, The Good Wife’s Political Operator

Howard Wolowitz, the nerdy, sex-obsessed engineer on The Big Bang Theory

Heather Schwedel is a writer and editor who is still waiting for her super sweet bat mitzvah.

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