Two ways to tell a Jewish story on TV
RECENTLY, I aced two online quizzes. One of them was called something like “How much of a true New Yorker are you?” and the other was similar: “How Jewish are you?”
I grew up in the American heartland, aka the Bible Belt, where I never once received an invite to a bar mitzvah (because there were practically no bar mitzvahs to attend) or saw New York with my own eyes until I was in my 20s. And yet, because we had a television and a Fiddler on the Roof soundtrack, my brain somehow got what it needed to know. By osmosis, then, I became one of those gentile TV viewers who is faintly Jewish-ish.
Beneath the pernicious hostility of a statement such as “Hollywood is controlled by Jews” , there is always the happy truth that the reach of popular culture can enlighten any open-minded kid on ways of life besides his own.
What set of stereotypes, after all, is more firmly intact on today’s TV than that of the American Jewish experience? Non-Jews everywhere, raised on a steady supply of Seinfeld reruns can, by instinct, pick up on what a show is telling them about its characters.
Which is one way of approaching 9JKL, a mediocre and egregiously trite sitcom premiering yesterday on CBS. In an undeclared but exceedingly Jewish-ish style, it’s about a man in his mid-40s named Josh who leaves LA and comes home to New York after the bad Transparent.
TV show in which he starred is cancelled and his wife has taken “everything” in a divorce.
Josh moves – temporarily, he hopes – into Apartment 9K of a Manhattan building. The apartment is owned by his parents, Harry and Judy (Elliott Gould and Linda Lavin), who live next door in Apartment 9J. They also own Apartment 9L, where Josh’s younger brother, Andrew (David Walton), his wife, Eve (Liza Lapira), and their infant son are living while their townhouse gets renovated.
On his first morning home, Josh wakes to find his parents beaming down at him with unrelenting pride and affection. “I just want to eat him and squeeze him and chew on his squishy little tushy,” Judy coos.
Nearly every joke in the 9JKL
pilot is about the claustrophobic lack of privacy in this family arrangement, where “Joshie’s” parents feel free to let themselves into Apartment 9K at all hours, so they can loudly pressure their son about his career and potential love life.
Judy bribes the doofus doorman (Matt Murray) into alerting her anytime Joshie comes home and is headed for the elevator, so that she can drag him into her apartment, ply him with his favourite foods (i.e., bakery-fresh black-and-white cookies) and debrief him on the day’s gossip she’s gleaned from her friends about their own children’s success and the possible availability of their single daughters.
9JKL leaves it to the viewer to assume that this family is Jew- ish, because it never comes up in the pilot’s 22 minutes. Their last name is decidedly neutral: Roberts. Yet, in a long-held prime-time tradition, they read as Jews; if they’re not meant to, then why lean so heavily on the overbearing-parent stereotypes? Why saturate the show in potentially contemptible upper-class cues and easy signifiers of coastal elitism?
Feuerstein, who is also one of the show’s six executive producers, based 9JKL on his own recent experience of moving back in with his parents. While giving journalists a tour of the show’s set this summer, a reporter asked if there was a reason that the characters’ Jewishness goes unmentioned – was there some desire to downplay it, in a current climate of anger and hate? If a show seems in every way about Jews but also seems to assiduously avoid saying so, what is the non-Jewish viewer supposed to think – that it’s too hot to bring up in the touchy, divisive America of 2017?
According to a transcript of the set visit, Feuerstein said he expected 9JKL to be more direct about the Roberts family’s faith in later episodes. “I am very proud to be a Jew,” he said. “I’m very happy to say to you that, yes, this family is Jewish. And we will take our time with how we treat those issues.”
To drop Jill Soloway’s Emmywinning, consistently superb Amazon dramedy Transparent into a discussion of 9JKL seems rather unfair.
Yet here they are, the success of one surprisingly relevant to the failure of the other, with Transparent furthering its proud and frank exploration of how being transgender might closely and eerily mirror the outsider experience of being an American Jew.
In season 4, now streaming, Maura Pfefferman ( Jeffrey Tambor) is invited to speak at a gender conference in Tel Aviv; her youngest daughter, Ali (Gaby Hoffman), decides to tag along at the last minute. On the way to catch their flight at LAX, Maura softly sings a calming line from Everything’s Alright, a Mary Magdalene number from the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, an album Ali subconsciously recalls hearing from as far back as the womb. “Oh my God,” she says, recognising the tune. “You guys were obsessed with that.”
After nibbling one of Ali’s pot candies to relax herself, Maura has a humiliating experience in airport security, set to the raucous section of Superstar in which Jesus confronts the money-changers at the Temple of Jerusalem; Maura hallucinates an image of Ali sailing through TSA on the arms of men in Orthodox dress. The scene is at once hilarious, disturbing and sublime – and among Transparent’s finest.
In Israel, Maura and Ali make a startling family discovery that lures the rest of the Pfefferman clan to join them – daughter Sarah (Amy Landecker) and her husband Len (Rob Huebel); son Josh ( Jay Duplass); Maura’s ex-wife Shelly ( Judith Light) and Maura’s sister Bryna ( Jenny O’Hara). On a bus tour that includes the Wailing Wall and the Dead Sea, the family experiences another series of selfrealisations, while snippets of the Superstar soundtrack rattle around in their heads. Ali, who continuously opens new doors to her own sense of identity, parts ways with her family to visit Palestinian friends, with eye-opening results.
Though the episodes in this season are short, a viewer can sense that Transparent is nearing a conclusion – if not literally, then at least thematically, as far as its Jewish/trans dialogue goes. The Pfeffermans will continue to have their hang-ups and assorted issues, but what’s striking now is the way Maura has become a peaceful, gravitational centre in the lives of her family and friends. She has made it home in every sense of the word, and everything’s all right.