My Happiest Moment as a Fannish Jew (Jewish Fan?)

[lomedet]

My squee for this was more intense than my squee for just about anything ever, and I wasn't even properly in fandom yet.

When it aired, the Sports Night episode April Is The Cruelest Month made my heart absolutely explode with joy, for the following reasons

Comments

[dafnagreer]

I love that SN ep as well, but my happiest fannish Jewish moment was years earlier, watching "Northern Exposure" and specifically the "Kaddish for Uncle Manny" episode in which Joel's friends are trying to round up Jews for him in Alaska. Joel is portrayed as a very typical New York Jew, the kind who doesn't think Judaism exists west of Pennsylvania, and so he skeptically asks this total big burly Alaskan logger type to say the Shema. And the logger guy does.

It made me happy both as a not-from-NY Jew myself, but also just because of the universality of it. Joel is not particularly observant, but he knows enough to ask the guy to say the Shema. And of course the guy knows it. It just felt very very right.

[mamadeb]

I seem to remember Joel rejecting the minyan his friends so laboriously found for him, saying it was the friends who counted.

[dafnagreer]

Yes, well, I'm not always a fan of how those plots turned out, but I'll cling to all the representations of American Jews living outside of the Northeast that I can get. :)

(Other than the folks in that episode and Willow, I can only think of Dharma and the Jewish family in "Relativity" but I'm sure there are others.)

[mamadeb]

Oh, absolutely - it was wonderful. Not only did they find these widely disparate Jews in unlikely situations - funny and true - but ALL of them were more than willing to stop what they were doing to do a mitzvah for a total stranger. :) I can't say enough for the people of Cicely or the men they found.

[cinderlily]

I watch every single year "April is the Cruelest Month" during Passover and every year I love it. It is my favorite thing ever. I love the entire series of Sports Nights because it portrays Judaism as a diverse group of people who exist not just the stereotypical "Neurotic Jew with problems" like a lot of other series.

[lomedet]

It's a great episode to watch during Passover - maybe I'll adopt your practice! And my favorite thing about the Jews on Sports Night is how unremarkable they are - they really are people-for-whom-Judaism-is-a-part-of-their-lives, kind of like the rest of us, and not, as you say, the common stereotypes.

[mofic]

That sounds just wonderful! My favorite fannish Jewish moment goes way back to my childhood - when Jews on TV were rare and Jewish religious practice rarer. It was an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show in which Rob and Sally think that Buddy is having an affair, because he's clearly hiding something, but what he's really hiding is that he is studying to have an adult bar mitzvah.

[nyssa23]

Wow! I love that show too; wish I'd seen that episode (I just had my adult bat mitzvah last week.) :D

[shayheyred]

Mazel tov!

[nyssa23]

Aw, thanks. ^_^ It was two years of pretty intense study; I am proud to have finally reached this milestone! I guess now I'm finally a woman at age 33. LOL

[nyssa23]

This is going to sound weird but I think some of my happiest fannish Jewish moments date from before I was Jewish! I used to watch "Welcome Back, Kotter" reruns as a kid (Gabe Kaplan was my first TV crush) and the character of Juan Epstein actually gave me hope; here was my first clue that Jewish Latinos did, in fact, exist. (Okay, Juan wasn't a convert, but I took my hope where I could find it.) ^_^

Also during my childhood, when I first read--I think it was a TV Guide article--that Leonard Nimoy was Jewish and that the "live long and prosper" hand gesture also had Jewish origins, that made me squeeful as well. I know I was always looking for Jewishness on TV as a kid (along with all of you, I guess!), much to the bafflement of my Catholic mother & Baptist father.

And "Don't Ever Change," the House episode = SO MUCH YES. They did it right. *is still heartwarmed by House wishing Wilson "Shabbat Shalom"*

[lomedet]

Oh, Gabe Kaplan - how my teeny tiny fangirl self did love thee. And I don't think I ever actually noticed that Juan Epstein was a Latino Jew (I was a very tiny fangirl) but that's pretty nifty indeed.

[jonbaker]

And you've got to figure that both his parents were Jewish, because if he was Jewish, it came from his mother (this was years before Reform started to accept patrilineal descent), and his father's name presumably was Epstein.

[nyssa23]

Exactly! Amazing, isn't it? Especially since Latin Jews/other Sephardim are *extremely* rare on TV even these days. ^_^ Ah, Juan...you were enjoyed.

[eotu]

Y'all have mentioned many many great Jewish moments, but one of the funniest I've seen is in The (animated) Tick episode "The Tick vs. Dot and Dinosaur Neil's Wedding." Tick is going around saying "Shalom, shalom" (stretching out the "oh" sound), and Arthur asks him why. The Tick says "Because we're Jewish." and Arthur says, "No, I'm Jewish. You're ... Bluish." heh heh heh.

[nyssa23]

Ooh, I'd forgotten that one! *makes a note for this year's daysofawesome*