David Herman: Our guilty TV secrets
Shows such as Shtisel, Fauda and Mrs Maisel are our guilty secret — and we relish them
MY LITTLE Jewish corner of Twitter is buzzing about Shtisel. Is Series 3 the best yet? What is the significance of Shulem Shtisel’s love of cheesecake? Why did Ruchami call Anna Karenina ‘Hannah’ when she read it to her little brothers? Shtisel feels like a shared secret, a guilty pleasure. But why is it only the Jews I follow on social media who are so fascinated by the Israeli series and why are their tweets so, well, Talmudic?
Shtisel is just the latest in a wave of Jewish TV series that Jews love. When I was growing up there were no Jewish TV series. Of course, there were two generations of TV actors, comedians and entertainers: Mike and Bernie Winters, Warren Mitchell, Alfie Bass and Lionel Blair. And there were the great TV dramas of Jack Rosenthal, especially The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy and there was the Holocaust episode of The World at War. The biggest Jewish stars, of course, were from America. But the most popular TV shows didn’t feature that many Jews: Rhoda (played by Valerie Harper), which started as a spin-off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Ed Asner, who played Lou Grant, was born Yitzhak Edward Asner and there was Maxwell Klinger in MASH (except he wasn’t Jewish — despite the Ashkenazi-sounding name, Klinger is an Arab-American of Lebanese descent from Ohio, as is Jamie Far who played him).
The real golden age of Jewish TV came in the 1990s with Friends (1994-2004) and Seinfeld. Friends had Ross and Monica Geller, Rachel Green (who nearly married suburban dentist Barry Farber), with Ron Leibman playing her father, Dr. Leonard Green, and the show’s creators, David Crane and Marta Kauffman, met at Brandeis. But as Crane pointed, out it’s more complicated than it seems. According to Lilith. org (seriously) he once said, “In our minds, the back story is that Ross is half-Jewish because Elliott Gould (as Ross’s father) is, and Christina Pickles (as Ross’s mother) sure isn’t. So he and Monica are half-Jewish. And I suppose Rachel is Jewish, though that’s not an aspect we’ve done much with. Now her mom’s Maria Thomas.”
Then there’s the most Jewish American sitcom of all time: Seinfeld (1989-98). It was set in New York, the most famous episode ever took place in a Chinese restaurant, it was full of “Yiddishisms” (“Yada, Yada”, “schmuck”), and in the episode called The Bris, Jerry and Elaine are asked to be godparents of a child and Elaine is in charge of hiring a mohel. This was a TV revolution. Jews were out of the closet. There weren’t any mohels on Bonanza.
But, above all, it was the talking and the sheer aggression that made it so Jewish. That’s why it became our first guilty secret TV show. It wasn’t just that the characters seemed Jewish, it was the whole tone of the show that was Jewish — but not always in a nice way. If Philip Roth was a sitcom
This was a TV revolution. There weren’t any mohels on Bonanza’
he would have been Seinfeld. Or Curb (2000-) where Larry David finally cut loose. Curb is Seinfeld’s nasty brother. Jews everywhere argue which was better, Seinfeld or Curb? It’s like a Rorschach test. It will tell you everything you need to know about your personality.
The next big Jewish TV revolution came with Netflix and Amazon. Crucially, it brought us Israel TV shows such as Fauda (2015-), The Spy (2019) and, of course, the most Jewish show of all, Shtisel (2013-). And, on Amazon Prime, there is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-).
They are our guilty secret. Look on Twitter or in the papers. No gentiles are talking about these shows. If you want to know whether someone’s Jewish, you used to ask where was their favourite bagel bakery. Now just quiz them about Susie Myerson or Lippe Weiss. If they know whether Rachel Brosnahan is Jewish or not, they’re Jewish. If they say, “Rachel who?” they’re not.
Shtisel probably wins the prize for the most Jewish TV show ever. As Sir Simon Schama tweeted the other day, “It’s like The Sopranos … with soup.” It’s the only TV show about Charedim which has been reviewed in the New Yorker. The review by Alexandra Schwartz begins, “Of all the unlikely runaway hits in the history of television, Shtisel must be bear the top of the list.” It is the ultimate niche show for Jews, a series about Jews who speak a mix of Yiddish and Yiddish-inflected-Hebrew, who are the last characters on TV who smoke and drink soda and the first characters on a hugely popular TV show who eat cholent.