‘Sure,’ I responded, girding myself for something offensive or tone deaf. They looked up at me, trying to figure out how to phrase it. Finally, they let themself speak…

‘Can you explain to me where Jews come from?’ They stared at me expectantly as my mouth betrayed the barest hint of a smile. It’s a simple question, but one that belies a frighteningly common lack of basic understanding of Jewish history, identity, and culture.

Believe it or not, I am asked questions about my Jewishness far more often than I am asked questions about my transness. Perhaps it’s the circles I move in, as most of my friends are queer folks who are either trans themselves, or at least very trans-literate. I’m also a good person to ask. On top of, you know, being a Jew, I wrote my thesis paper, in part, on Jewish ethnogenesis and identity.

While I have of course experienced transphobia in my lifetime, including rather merciless bullying as a child as well as the expected slurs and verbal assaults, I have experienced more extreme and violent antisemitism in my life; bomb threats and suspected arson at local temples, swastika graffiti, being verbally accosted in a restaurant on Christmas, having strangers spot my Hamsa, or the Magen David that was passed down to me by my grandfather and take that as an opening to spew their hatred, and I could go on and on.

People tend to be quite surprised when I express this reality of my life. And I do recognize that I have privileges today that spare me from the worst of transphobic violence; I am often, though not always, white-assumed, and I am typically cis-assumed. These are realities of my life that protect me and cannot be ignored or unaddressed.

However, my larger point is that one of my identities is considered unequivocally marginalized, while many continue to brush over antisemitism as a non-issue despite its meteoric rise over the last decade in the U.S. As David Baddiel so clearly elucidated, it’s the ‘Jews don’t count’ of it all.

This point of view extends to the way we are portrayed in media.

Recently, it was announced that Kathryn Hahn would be playing Joan Rivers in an upcoming biographical series about her life. Quickly, Sarah Silverman waded into the argument over Hahn’s casting, rightly pointing out the clear double standard that in this era where there are greater and greater calls for authenticity, Jews don’t count. Soon after, it was announced that Claire Foy, another non-Jew best known for playing the Queen of England, would be playing Sheryl Sandberg in an upcoming film based on the book An Ugly Truth. 

Hahn and Foy join the ranks of Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, Michael Keaton as Ken Feinberg, Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn as Martha and Elizabeth Weiss, Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, and the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s almost become a rule that Jews are not played by Jewish actors, which compounds the misunderstanding of who we are.

In my work as a trans media consultant, we often talk about the small percentage of the U.S. population that is trans, and even more importantly, the percentages of cisgender people who personally know a trans person. The reason why these statistics are important to keep in mind is that when people don’t know a trans person personally, and then see inaccurate trans representation on screen, they have no real world baseline to compare it to. This exacerbates transphobia.

Approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population is Jewish. It’s ironic that oftentimes our population is vastly overestimated. I have my theories as to why. There is, of course, the reality of Jewish contribution to American culture. However, because of the adoption of Jewish texts in Christianity and the development of Islam being closely tied to the history of the Jewish diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula, Jews become narrative characters in two of the world’s largest universalist religions (as opposed to Judaism, a particularist spiritual movement that is only concerned with the Jewish people as an ethnic and national identity).

People are comfortable with Jews as a parable. I mean, a whole religion was developed on this foundation. Non-Jews enjoy when we are a mirror for society to hold itself up to, to understand and see its ills. Oftentimes, as Dara Horn pointed out in her book People Love Dead Jews, this functions best when we are dead; a relic. Because then we can be whoever the world wants us to be.

In fact, I see it all the time. Every Christmas season, I see a litany of posts saying ‘Jesus was…’ and nearly universally the words that complete this sentence are not, ‘a Jew’… the only ethnic identity that Jesus indisputably was. What I find interesting is that I often see it posted by the same people who are dead-set on the concept of universal Jewish whiteness. This in turn is often an argument only conveniently invoked by non-Jews when they want to argue that they don’t need to care about antisemitism. Ironically, it’s another role we get cast in to make non-Jews feel better about their own world-view: Jews as a mirror. And when the representation they see is Vanessa Kirby in a large manor house pretending to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, it’s no wonder people feel this way.

These are prime examples of this dynamic. And it creates a disconnection point in popular imagination between ‘the literary Jew,’ who teaches the world a lesson about themselves, and real live living Jews who are currently experiencing the highest levels of antisemitism in this country since the first half of the 20th century. And confronting this antisemitism in the here and now, which would need to start with a basic understanding of who we actually are, would upset the balance of whatever morality play we’ve been cast in by others. Then this silence helps perpetuate the hatred and allows it to flourish.

Add socially ingrained casual antisemitism into the mix, as opposed to overt antisemitism like the white-supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, and it’s a toxic stew. For example, a person I know well was sued by a man for ‘wrongful termination’ after he fired him for stealing a lot of money from his business. Of course, firing someone for stealing from you is hardly wrongful. This person I know counter-sued. After depositions were filed, it was decided that it would be a jury trial. This person was then advised by his lawyers to settle, because the man who stole from him was a white Christian, and the jury was ‘unlikely to trust the word of a Jewish doctor.’ No wonder we’re rarely trusted to tell our own story. 

But herein lies the problem. And it’s the same problem that I spoke of when it comes to trans representation. Because we are such a small percentage of the population, most people’s first encounters with us are either in biblical stories, or they are in media. Stories have a unique power, as does accurate representation. We’ve seen massive shifts in perceptions of LGBTQ people thanks to shifts in how we are portrayed in film and television. But when it comes to my other identity, we barely register in the discourse.

And so the problem that Sarah Silverman brought into the spotlight stretches beyond the disparity in opportunity, which is certainly a problem. When Jews are misrepresented in media by non-Jews doing their best caricatures of us, it enshrines us as a character in someone else’s passion play rather than human beings and a living culture that is still here. It perpetuates misunderstanding of who we are. And when our population is so small, it becomes impossible for many people to have real life living breathing Jews that they know to hold these representations against.

This isn’t just problematic. It helps to perpetuate antisemitism in all of its mutations.

So I sit across from my friend and I say, “Well, to answer that question, I need to go back to about 1600 B.C.” I watch as their mind explodes a little bit. 

I tell them about the various historically-based theories of our ethnogenesis. I explain the consolidation of Jewish national identity at the dawn of the 1000s B.C. I talk about the Romans, and Bar Kokhba. I talk about Beta Yisrael. I talk about Shammai and Hillel and the origins of rabbinical Judaism. I talk about The Crusades, The Inquisition, and Sephardi Pirates; Sabbatai, Chassidism, and Haskalah; Pogroms, the Dreyfuss Affair, and of course The Holocaust; Farhud, Operation Magic Carpet, and Operation Solomon. I talk about the diversity of the American Jewish experience, where intermixture with other ethnic groups has often strengthened our community and made it better. 

But most of all, I talk about Jewish pride and Jewish resilience, and the fact that while people still try to tell us who we are, we refuse to be defined by others.

Media matters. It especially matters for marginalized people. And we are marginalized people. One only needs to look at the last few years; we’ve had multiple deadly shootings, stabbings, arsons, physical assaults, car attacks, and murders motivated by antisemitism. The claim that we’ve assimilated to the point that hatred of our community is a non-issue falls apart with the barest interrogation. Jews deserve all of the same consideration and care that any other marginalized group does.

It is high time that we are allowed to wrestle ourselves out of someone else’s narrative, and instead, with clarity, honesty, and the lived experience that only Jewish artists can bring to our own stories, have the chance to tell our own. After all, our histories live in our blood, from generation to generation. 

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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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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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