Too Jewish?

[eveningblue]

Something that has always interested me (and that came up in this discussion of Jewish characters played by non-Jewish seeming actors) is this notion of a tv show seeming "too Jewish" by Hollywood standards. rydra_wrong explains this phenomenon here:

Neal Gabler's An Empire Of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood argues that this is precisely why

Comments

[emily_shore]

I said a little about this in the other thread, but I'll repeat myself

[batdina]

I seem to be following you around. Sorry. With the movie, I think my interest in Mulder is reawakening. Anyway, I have a half finished story about how Mulder's Jewish self was derailed because he was studying for his Bar Mitzvah when his sister was abducted and for obvious reasons, that got lost in the shuffle afterwards. Maybe I'll see about finishing that story some time, because I still like the concept a lot.

[emily_shore]

With the movie, I think my interest in Mulder is reawakening.

Along with many other people! It can only be a good thing. :)

Anyway, I have a half finished story about how Mulder's Jewish self was derailed because he was studying for his Bar Mitzvah when his sister was abducted and for obvious reasons, that got lost in the shuffle afterwards.

That sounds absolutely fascinating. I would love to read it.

[batshua]

That sounds absolutely fascinating. I would love to read it.

Seconded!

[emily_shore]

George Costanza (Not Jewish! Italian!)

Not that these are mutually exclusive, of course... :)

[eveningblue]

Of course! *g*

[herself_nyc]

I never really watched Seinfeld more than a half dozen times, but I always assumed Costanza was to be taken as a Sephardic Jewish name ... the character came across as so CLEARLY Jewish to me, as did, in fact, all four of the main characters. Is it canon that he's supposed to be Italian?

[emily_shore]

I don't know, really. I always assumed he was both.

[mofic]

What does it even mean to "seem Jewish"?

Well, one thing it doesn't mean in mainstream media is to have religious practices (with the exception of Hanukah, inevitably portrayed as the Jewish Christmas). I think "seeming Jewish" is tricky because Judaism is a lot of different things - religion, ethnicity, tribal identification. But it's pretty remarkable to me how characters that are clearly marked as Jewish almost never seem to have any Jewish religious practice. And maybe that reflects a lack of religious education in the writers, producers, etc.

[mofic]

Just an anecdote on "New York Jewish" -

I'm an Ashkenazic Jew and I grew up in North Dakota and Connecticut, lived in Montreal as a young adult and moved to NYC (for work) in 1980. Shortly after I started work (as a librarian in a Computer Sciences Library) a colleague who was a non-Jew from the mid-west asked me to teach her Yiddish. I explained that I don't speak Yiddish, that my parents did but they always used it for when they didn't want kids to understand so neither I nor any of my siblings speak Yiddish. She clarified that she only wanted to know the Yiddish terms that people use in general conversation in NYC. So I said I'd try.

Every day after lunch I'd give her a 3x5 index card with a Yiddish word or phrase, a definition, and a couple of sample uses. We worked together for a year and I didn't run out of words. I never would have thought I *knew* that much Yiddish.

[eveningblue]

Ha! That's great.

One of my favorite things about NYC is that people use Yiddish terms all the time and just expect you to understand them. When I came back from a run the other day, one of the guys in my apartment building commented--"you finished your run? you're not even shvitzing!" And I said, "I am too shvitzing!" It's just part of the language here and you don't have to be Jewish to speak it.

[skywaterblue]

Josh Lyman from the West Wing is a Jewish character played by a WASP. On the other hand, Toby Ziegler is a Jewish character played by a Jew, and one of the frissons of their relationship is that they stick up for each other in the White House (as Jews), but Toby himself is fairly condescending to Josh because he's 'not Jewish enough' for Toby's standards.

Really though, everything Aaron Sorkin's ever written qualifies as this.

[eveningblue]

Great example. I love Toby so much because he is Jewish enough to go to temple and yet his Jewishness does not become the main focus of the show. And I like how he kids Josh for being a "Connecticut Jew." Some of the complexities of Jewishness are actually explored and displayed, which is rare for a tv show.

[npkedit]

As an Orthodox Jew I wouldn't have classified Toby as all that Jewish. The one thing I've always remembered about Toby was that awful flashback ep, where his dad was supposed to part of the Jewish mafia (a lot of them went to Yeshiva after all), but their Yiddish was so awful my mom and I were laughing. All we could think was, they couldn't get better speakers than this?

I don't know if it is just me

[cinderlily]

But in How I Met Your Mother I think Ted Moseby is coded as Jewish, rather Jewish. The actors who play his, Josh Radnor and Bob Saget are both Jewish and I had always thought he was assumed to be and then out of no where they have him talk about how Christmas is his favorite holiday? WHAT? I just don't get it.

Re: I don't know if it is just me

[redthroatedloon]

Jewish characters on TV have always had a strange relationship to Christmas (which could actually be a separate topic of conversation).

One of the times this really irritated me was back in the days of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the offshoot series Rhoda, which was explicitly about a Jewish woman and her non-Jewish husband. I'm not sure anymore in which series this happened -- I'm pretty sure it's Rhoda, but I'm not positive -- but there was an episode in which Rhoda's Jewish mother comes to visit her and brings her a Christmas present. Which brought a very definite "HUH?" from yours truly.

Re: I don't know if it is just me

[eveningblue]

Jewish characters on TV have always had a strange relationship to Christmas (which could actually be a separate topic of conversation).

It definitely could!

I've never seen that episode of Rhoda, but it's always a bit disappointing to see a Jewish character celebrate Christmas on tv. Of course in real life many Jews do celebrate Christmas. Still, it's disappointing. this is where some depth of characterization would be nice--at least show the ambivalence, the conflict within a person who decides to celebrate a holiday outside his or her faith.

I really liked the Chanukah Armadillo episode of Friends for this reason. It showed just how difficult it is to be Jewish and to have to "compete" with Christmas.

Re: I don't know if it is just me

[mamadeb]

There was also an episode of Rhoda where the two daughters of Ida Morgenstern discuss what to get their mother, who keeps kosher, for Christmas.

Rhoda's non-Jewish husband was, btw, played by the late David Groh, who was, indeed, Jewish. So here we have a a Jewish woman played by a non-Jew married to a non-Jewish man played by a Jew. And I will say that both Valerie Harper and Nancy Walker were very convincing in their roles.

(He died just this past February. I just found that out from the wiki article.)