Semi Anti-semitic

I find it interesting that in the most anti-semitic times since WWII, during which Israel was shipped dead babies by our enemies as part of a recently terminated “ceasefire” while the rest of us have to put up with the vile hate speech foisted upon us by those imbedded in government/educational/labor institutions we, with some irony, find our entertainment channels stuffed with high profile Jewish-themed films, books and TV series…

The recent Academy Awards were frothy with Jewish content and contribution. The frontrunner for Best Picture was The Brutalist, featuring Adrien Brody as a Holocaust surviving Bauhaus architect suffering mightily for his art and his existence in the immediate years after the war. It lost to Anora, a scrappy dramedy about a New York stripper/prostitute played by the Jewish Mikey Madison who also won Best Actress. Brody won Best Actor, as he should have, and came out with a measured acceptance speech condemning anti-semitism and was summarily taken to task by the social media mob. Meanwhile his co-star Guy Pearce showed up with some Pro-Palestinian lapelwear. Kieran Culkin won Best Supporting Actor for playing a Jew on a Holocaust history trip through Poland with his cousin, played by Jesse Eisenberg who was also nominated for scripting  A Real Pain. Thankfully nobody accused Culkin of ‘Jewface’. 

And the Oscar for best documentary went to No Other Land, a collaboration between Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, a film that has no distribution in North America because it has managed to piss off both sides of the Green Line. Said Israeli director Yuval Abraham in his acceptance speech. “We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together, our voices are stronger. We see each other. The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people must end. The Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of Oct. 7, which must be freed.”

As a distributor myself, I know why this film has no takers but what is more curious is why the Academy actually voted for it. Well not so curious. Any film that creates a narrative for the Palestinian cause no matter how much it is ‘balanced’ by the Israeli perspective and, in this case, it was a pretty lefty view, diminishes the base truth here and therefore puts the Jews on the defensive. A film like this wouldn’t make a dent on the somewhat vital Jewish film festival circuit and would be a hot potato for those theatre operators and programmers across North America. The O Cinema in Miami’s South Beach was threatened with eviction for running it while the Palestinian director was beaten and arrested in the West Bank. The other nominees were safer but No Other Land allowed the new woke membership of the Academy to make a statement. And that statement was at the very least semi-antisemitic.

Yes, showing the Jews in a negative light through ‘entertainment’ is my thesis here. That how we are being portrayed on the screen and elsewhere weakens our collective image against those manning the barricades and makes a good case for the secular Jew to affect a complete assimilation into the goyishe world. 

As for The Brutalist, I believe that it didn’t win because it so accurately captured Brody’s soul crushing hazing that it was impossible not to feel for him and those close to him, including his wife, played brilliantly by Felicity Jones, herself also nominated. The conservative commentator and filmmaker Matt Walsh went out of his way to criticize the film but, as a gentile, he is excused for not ‘getting it’ through its three hour plus running time. Worse, he seems to think Hollywood is still about entertainment. No, that ship sailed a long time ago.

Although I am going against the grain here, I had some problems with A Real Pain. Eisenberg takes great pains to distance himself, Culkin and the rest of the cast from the Holocaust, none of whom had any family impacted by it, Quite frankly, the whole junket just seems like another vacation with zero emotion save for the issues between the two leads. The only mention of any kind of observance comes from the African on the trip who tells Eisenberg that he observes the Sabbath because of the horrors he observed in Rwanda or something like that. Eisenberg’s character, apropos of nothing, counters the whole idea of Sabbath observance as “too mechanical’. This film, however well acted, does not take a strong enough position, or any position at all, for its place in the current dialogues.

There is a film opening up across North America courtesy of my friend Neil Friedman, called Bad Shabbos, a non-com with a premise built around second degree manslaughter at an Upper West Side Shabbat table. David Paymer and Kyra Sedgwick head a dysfunctional family of entitled Manhattan narcissists who find themselves with a dead body during dinner. Hilarity ensues. I walked out during a packed screening at the Miami Jewish Film Festival. The director engaged the critics on Facebook with the defense that audiences are comparing the film to My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Uh, no.

The theme of the self-hating Jewish creative type extends to the book business. There was a streaming series a couple of years ago titled Fleishman Is In Trouble starring the aforementioned Eisenberg and Claire Danes as his messed up Waspy wife who ends their marriage and then goes sideways, leaving him, a busy hospital internist, with custody of two kids in his crappy apartment. For reprieve he has his Jewish summer camp/high school friends Lizzy Caplan and Adam Brody to lean on, themselves aging children with no ‘direction home’ to quote Bobby D. However random the situation is, Eisenberg held it together as the spinning head of this tiny patriarchy. The reason I mention this is that the series is based on a work of fiction by the New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner who has written a second novel titled Long Island Compromise which I picked up a while back because I still held hope for American fiction. Note the past tense. This book, selling well BTW, is a colossal piece of Jew-hating shite. Built around the entitled antics of the third generation of the Fletcher family of a toney Long Island town, Akner has created some of the most alienating characters in modern prose. Don’t know what Jewish name was truncated to Fletcher but the story is built around a polystyrene fortune created by the grandfather who escaped from Holocaust Poland, with a slightly pilfered formula for packing popcorn in, wait for it, 1942. Just seemed to catch a boat out of Gdansk while the rest of the Jews were being herded into the Warsaw Ghetto or worse. Makes a ton of sense, more so when he hits the states and quickly “clears customs” as if all he has to declare is a box of stogies he picked up at Heathrow. Apparently this one factory is so successful that decades after his death each grandchild is getting a million and change every quarter until, spoiler alert, they don’t. None of them have amounted to shit despite being born on third base and apparently are loathed by the good townsfolk. Me too. I say this because I am simultaneously continuing my journey through Philip Roth’s backlist. Let me say that Akner’s scribbling is finger painting next to the Rembrandts that Roth created when it comes to the Jewish experience in North America. Roth was never especially kind to his Jewish heroes and losers but it was never because of their being of the tribe. Akner’s Jew is a feckless fuckup who deserves some old fashioned antisemitism. Despite the peripheral presence of rabbis, there is nothing even remotely spiritual about the Fletchers, nothing even in the past, not a perch in the old country from which they might have fallen. No, just more depths of selfishness and greed to plumb. I can’t get my money back on this one, the title of which is, as I learned, as obscene as its characters.

I’m going to close with the biggest offender, Netflix’s much heralded denominational sitcom, the aptly titled Nobody Wants This. Netflix has a history off soft anti-semitism going back to My Unorthodox Life which was a false flag fantasy in which Julia Hart is followed around in a Bentley trashing her former life in the Monsey shtetl while scamming audiences into believing she was running a huge modelling agency that was owned by her Italian magnate husband. On the payroll were a trio of useless kids while a fourth, a studious teen, stayed behind in Monsey with his dad because, wait for it, he had held on to his beliefs. Well Hart’s marriage fell apart as did the paper thin premise and the kid in Monsey doesn’t have to worry, unlike the others, about being a reality TV has been.

Following that Netflix allowed the producers of the successful Indian matchmaking show to create The Jewish Matchmaker featuring a real life ‘shachtin’ and a raft of single undateable losers of little faith outside of a couple of token orthodox characters. Everybody was talking of what they want as opposed to what they have to offer. Nobody clicked and neither did the audience although the one cast member in Miami has parlayed the experience in a vibrant Jewish singles event club. Last year’s Adam Sandler home movie starring his wife and kids – You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah – was a cringy mess full of spoiled Jewish teens slightly saved by SNL’s Sarah Sherman’s in a truly brilliant performance as the new agey Rabbi with her heart in the right place. To be culturally correct they had to force fit a 68-year old Luis Guzman as the father of a 12 year-old. Yecch.

But back to Nobody Wants This, created by David Foster’s daughter Erin based on her experiences, as a shiksa, dating a Jewish guy. I will use the somewhat derogatory word throughout this essay because that was the original title of the ten-episode first season and it is a license I feel that I can take under the circumstances.

Kristen Bell plays the aforementioned shiksa, living the dream life of a high body count single L.A. woman (pushing 40 mind you) who has parlayed it all into a dating podcast cohosted by her slightly more skanky sister played by Justine Lupe, last seen in Succession. Foster plus a long list of non-Jewish, mostly female, producers have amped up the stakes by making her Jewish paramour a rabbi played by the forever typecast Brody, the hot cleric so to speak who shows up just as his engagement to one Rebecca has gone bad for engaging in dealbreaker behaviour that doesn’t do Jewish women any favors. Bitchy is the tone given to every Jewish princess in the show, each more grasping, cold and controlling than the next from bat mitzvah age on up. The so-called men in the cast, including Timothy Simons, brilliant in Veep, are pussywhipped beyond recognition. That includes ‘mamas boy’ Brody but this is not my biggest beef. 

My problem is that Noah is written as the most weightless, dispassionate and downright indifferent rabbi in filmed entertainment history. Makes Gene Wilder in The Frisco Kid look like Charleton Heston in The Ten Commandments in terms of spiritual presence. His biggest commitment is to his pickup basketball team and he has to be told by the head rabbi that he can’t become the head rabbi if he’s with a shiksa, a fact which would be imparted on his first day at the Rabbinical College. The head rabbi is played by the great Stephen Tobolowsky who gives the most credible performance in the series.

Resurrecting Tovah Feldshuh as Noah’s mother with an old country, or some country accent, is a push. She’s no Molly Picon and, sadly, the Molly Picons of Hollywood and in life are long gone. Had they made Noah’s mother just another Valley queen bee whose son happens to be a rabbi, the conflict with her and the determined Bell wouldn’t have any real friction. But they had to amp up the stakes, ergo Feldshuh’s cartoony bubbe who keeps kosher but devours a trayf charcuterie board when no one is looking. We love looking hypocritical. For no reason. 

I am ahead of myself. Noah meets Bell at a dinner party because he and Bell share a somewhat foul minded Asian friend and after an awkward start, well, it just gets more awkward until they start piling into the sack in a romance that has more blind spots than Stevie Wonder. 

Kristen Bell is way better at being the shiksa than Noah is at being the rabbi. Like Brody, her character seems to have the emotional maturity of a college sophomore which is more than vaguely unattractive after a certain age. A self-proclaimed atheist, she knows nothing about Judaism which is a little uncool given that she lives in LA. Sure, I am more than casually familiar with the concept of the ‘Shiksa Goddess’ and sometimes the convert, or gare as they say in Hebrew, is a better Jew than those born into it. But there is no reason for this relationship other than the fact that Noah is rebounding, a little too fast. At the end of the season Noah has to make a choice, in this case one that devalues the whole religion, between a promotion and Bell. If you haven’t seen the show I won’t ruin other than to say a Season Two is coming, perhaps for High Holiday Season. 

And here’s one last note. Yes, if you have any level of observance the show is offensive but what adds to the embarrassment is that it was shot after the atrocities of October 7, 2023, and all the hate crimes/speak that ensued. There isn’t a rabbi whose job description was not fundamentally changed by that event, expanding his or her role to grief counsellor, security export and geopolitical commentator. There is no way that Noah could drift into one of the many chic dinner parties he attends and not have “a situation” at the diverse tables he frequents. Especially in a Temple blocks away from the UCLA campus, site of some of the worst anti-semitic sieges. But let’s keep playing basketball.

I could go on but I close with a couple of caveats. Clearly, I’m not the right person to be analyzing this dreck. The show appeals to women vibing on the hot rabbi and maybe things will turn around in Season Two. Second, I have to couch my remarks with the knowledge that a long tenured rabbi working at a prominent Reform ‘shul’ in Toronto is now, post-divorce, living with a gentile. Not that this hasn’t caused some tumult amongst the congregants but I guess these things happen.

Better to pick on us than the Muslim.. You won’t see Netflix producing any shows where the local Islamic Mullah falls for an Orthodox Jewish woman. Great title though – Challah or Allah?

Save for The Brutalist, there is nothing in the above offerings that speak to Jewish pride in any what shape or form. We look like ignorant fools throughout and therefore not worth defending. We need more programming that shines a light on our strengths as a community and as people. Not exceptionalism per se but that we are part of a whole and the whole has to be protected. But don’t count on Hollywood to save us. They aren’t making any more Fiddler On The Roofs.

I will close with two suggestions. My company is helping out with a new documentary titled October 8 which chronicles the shocking rise of anti-semitism on American college campuses after October 7. It will open in a limited Canadian release later this week with select promo screenings around the country. I might be speaking to the choir here – have a listen to Dan Senor’s podcast on it – but if you can take someone who might not be on our team, perhaps you can turn a head. Similarly, the Nova Project is coming to Toronto later this spring. It is a techno Yad Vashem and is similarly moving as a testament to the lives lost at the Nova music festival on October 7. Take someone who is dancing to a different beat. See if you can get them in step with us.

THIS IS MY FINAL INSTALLMENT ON THIS BLOG. I SAID EARLIER THAT I HAVE AGED MYSELF OUT OF THE SPACE BUT WILL RESUME REPORTS FROM THE DOWNSIDE AT NINEISTHENEWMIDNIGHT.COM. I WANT TO THANK ALL OF YOU WHO READ MY MISSIVES THESE PAST TEN YEARS OS SO, ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO THREW IN A FEW COMMENTS. HOPEFULLY YOU WILL FOLLOW ME TO THE NEW ADDRESS. HOPEFULLY.

MUCH LOVE