Does Television have a Jew Problem?

The alarming spike in anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence over the past couple years is both shocking and familiar to many American Jews: shocking in that it is taking place in the United States, which has been perhaps the most hospitable host government to Jews in their entire history, and familiar in that this rhetoric and violence, expressing itself in a variety of strains, are mostly regurgitations of ancient tropes which were first iterated with striking clarity over 2,000 years ago and perniciously continue to resurface. The political orientations of those who target Jews as their object of ire, and the Jews whom they target, span the political gamut. The abstraction of the Feared Jew takes two distinct shapes. The first is the Jew who threatens his society by disappearing into it, patiently but persistently rising in the ranks of government, media, and finance in order to bend society toward his own dominion. This Jew, whose devious personality is at once horrifying, strange, and yet built on the half-truths of Jewish cultural achievement and financial success, is mentioned in acceptable mainstream discourse, such as in passing comments made by Democratic politicians about Jews who control the weather, and by Republican pundits about the financial stranglehold wielded by powerful Rothschilds. Taken to the extreme, this Jew wields on absurdly farcical power, such as in The Elders of the Protocols of Zion, a century-old document which has recently enjoyed a revival in popularity.

Then there is the other kind of Jew, the insular, anti-social Jew, the Jew who doesn’t play nicely, who is misanthropic (a word deriving from the Greek, misanthropia, a term which Greeks lobbed against Jews to claim that they were “anti-people”), and superstitious (from the Latin word, superstitio, a word which Romans lobbed against Jews to claim that they threatened the standard “religio”). This is the Jew whose body is dressed in Hasidic garb, and who clutches bags of money with rats on his shoulders at public parades, and whose intention is to milk his host government of its resources, and destabilize society in the process.

The common denominator of these two prototypes is that due to their inherent deviousness, Jews cannot be trusted. For many white supremacists, these prototypes are actually just one: Jews are shape-shifters who take on whatever personae happen to be most advantageous to them. In turn, Jews today sense that they are facing a lose-lose scenario when it comes to their standing in American society: whether Jews are observant or assimilated, they will be condemned and dissociated from conservative and liberal movements. One strain of this phenomenon is already playing out, as liberal groups accuse Jews of white privilege, and right-wing nationalist groups racially categorize Jews as non-white. Adherents to the idea that either (or both) of these Jew-types are poisoning Western society from the inside might agree that Jewish stereotypes are fear-mongering and absurd — if the Jews did not readily admit their offenses themselves in their own ancient scriptures and modern media.

Is the Bible Just Another Self-Hating Jew?

The question of whether Jew hatred is distinct from other forms of hatred is a live one among intellectuals and historians, but one aspect of anti-Judaism which sets it apart from other hatreds is that Jew-haters tend to cite Jews who legitimize their accusations by concurring with them. In the case of theological anti-Semitism, these citations are biblical, since Christian theological anti-Semitism views the Old Testament as inferior to the New Testament in that it prioritizes ritual legalism. The Hebrew scriptures do indeed provide ample basis for ultra-nationalism, exclusivity, particularity, and exceptionalism, as well as evidence for the Israelites’ disregard of ethical concern for others in favor of ritualized but empty God-worship. The authors of the Hebrew Bible critique these very characteristics, condemning the Judeans and the Israelites for behaving unethically, for not giving charity, for not taking care of their own, and for not taking care of others. The first chapter of the book of Isaiah concisely lays this disparity out:

Bringing offerings is futile;incense is an abomination to me….learn to do good;seek justice,rescue the oppressed,defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:13, 17).

One of the reasons why I find the Hebrew Bible to be an extraordinary set of documents is that its authors make themselves and their communities vulnerable by self-critiquing the community for not following in the ways of God. But 2,500 years later, 19thcentury German Protestants would make a disastrous mistake by using the self-criticism of biblical prophetic literature as damning evidence of a seismic clash between prophets and priests. According to this reading of biblical history, the Judean prophets of the late First Temple and early Second Temple period were rejected by the people, lived on the margins of society, and were rejected, reviled, and mocked, even as they begged the people to remember and mimic God’s ethical justice. Their combatants for power, the priests and administrators of the Jerusalem Temple, clung to their empty particularist, legalist, and rituals by shunning the prophets. This false binary created irresponsible circular readings of scriptural texts which suggested that ethical passages preserved in prophetic literature were written by prophets and their supporters, and in turn that ritual-focused passages were written by priests and their supporters.

Creating this false binary was convenient, since it suggested that the ethical components of Judaism were rejected by most of the population, and that by the first century CE, Judaism was a shell of itself: the prophets had been outcast, the corrupt priests remained in positions of power, and all that remained of the old Israelite society was Pharisaic legalism, shards of the rich tradition that once was. By the time Jesus arrived on the scene in early first century, the Jews of Judea were in desperate need of his teachings.

The reality, however, is that Israelite and Judean prophets were speaking from within the community, not finger pointing against others, but looking inward representatives of the people. Many prophets were court prophets who worked not against the priests, but with them. The sins of the people were real, but the self-reflection and the self-accounting which enabled the people to take account of their actions and call for improvement would later lead to severe criticism, shunning, and rejection of the Jews based on their own scriptures.

Unlike the New Testament and the Quran, the Hebrew Bible opens up a gash within itself, the writers admit that a reckoning — a deeply personal, often self-sacrificing self-reckoning — is necessary in order to repair its mistakes. This communal reckoning gives texture to Jewish communal national memories of events which most generations of Jews did not themselves experience. These communally-fashioned-memories, if you will, helped to make the Jewish community of Judea cohesive, and ever-mindful of the need to evolve. The self-critiquing Jew who delivered or heard the prophetic words of the Hebrew Bible in the early decades of the Second Temple period was a far cry from the self-hating Jew of Theodor Lessing’s 1930’s work, Der Jüdische Selbsthass(Jewish Self-Hatred). To critique the self, to interrogate it, to study it, to change it, lies at the heart of early Jewish identity. It was not a garment to be donned or doffed. It lay at the very heart of Jewish existence.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Hate the Jews

Today, cultural and religious messages are transmitted not through the prophetic word, but through technology and media. Television in particular, which only twenty years ago was considered to be a medium for low-cultural expression rather than an art form, has now become extraordinarily sophisticated. New TV shows which measure and project the American political mood at the same time act as boundary-pushers of social discourse. More and more shows are featuring women and minorities, and are constructing story-lines regarding sexual harassment, racial injustice, and the dangers of extreme nationalism. Like the prophets of old, the writers of these shows are communicating to broad audiences progressive notions of positive social change. And yet, these shows are also mud-slinging hateful rhetoric about the Jews.

Television is thus accurately mirroring what we are seeing more broadly in American society today. In addition to finding themselves in the position of the societal bogeyman for both the progressive left and the far right, Jews, who comprise just over one percent of the United States’ population, are being represented on television in increasing disproportion, and are increasingly becoming the target of its societal discontent.

Not all television shows which feature Jews are anti-Semitic, of course. And many depict contemporary Jewish life in all of its variety and complexity. The Israeli shows Shtisel and Srugim portray various strains of Israeli religious life and have become hits far outside out the communities which they portray. American shows, such as the campy and sometimes painfully one-dimensional The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the darkly nostalgic Transparent, the delightfully irreverent Broad City, and the psychodramatic Russian Doll all artfully explore the complexities of American Jewish identity and have been showered with critical praise. The most extraordinary aspect of all of these shows is their vulnerability: neither glamorizing nor idealizing the contemporary Jewish experience, these shows, with the exception of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, explore Judaism’s edges and cracks, the places where it falters, fails, and sometimes breaks.

Other shows make Jewish vulnerability the butt of its mockery and righteous anger. The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a sharply written comedy about a thirty-something woman who has to readjust to the modern world after spending her formative years as a captive sex slave, offers one such example. Ebullient and naïve, the show’s protagonist lives in New York City as a perpetual teenager, innocent of how the world has changed during her captivity. Finding her kindred spirits in three other social misfits, Jaqueline White, an indigent and privileged socialite, Titus Andromedon, a black gay man who is unlucky in both love and his musical aspirations, and Lilian Kaushtupper, her ex-hippie landlord who opposes the gentrification of the local neighborhood, Kimmy Schmidtrepeatedly props up Jews and Judaism as a foil to Kimmy’s healthy progress. Anti-Jewish tropes pepper the script, particularly in the most recent season, Season 4, when Kimmy is stalked by an ex-Mossad agent who speaks in Hebrew, Titus drops throwaway lines such as “That white nonsense is either Judaism or Scrabble”when he sees people playing Quidditch in a park, and Jacqueline pines for a man whom she is told is a real estate developer and happily exclaims, “and a non-Jewish one!” (Season 4, Episodes 6 and 9).

The question of whether Kimmy Schmidt has a “Jewish Problem” has been addressed before, but has not garnered serious attention. In fact, almost as soon as one writer suggested that the show employs a double standard by targeting Jews in ways that it would never consider applying to other minorities, other Jewish writers jumped to the show’s defense. It is unclear whether this conversation, or others like it, reached the writer’s room, but my guess is that it did not.

Another example of negative representation of Jews appears briefly in the most recent season of the Showtime hit Shameless, a show about a poor white family in South Chicago who navigate separate paths as they enter into adulthood, no thanks to their racist and deadbeat father, Frank. In one of this season’s early episodes, Ian, one of Frank’s sons, embarks on a spiritual journal in search of Shim (Ian’s gender-neutral pronoun for God). Dissatisfied with young Christians who are worshipfully valorizing him into a “Gay Jesus,” Ian walks into a synagogue and asks the rabbi questions about her faith:

IAN: Does God speak to you?

RABBI: I pray to God, yeah, but in the Jewish faith, we believe that the five books of the Torah are the word of God.

IAN: Kind of like the Bible.

RABBI: Mm, just the first part.

IAN: So God did speak to someone?

RABBI: To Moses, and Moses wrote it down.

IAN: But he spoke to him, with words?

RABBI: Mm-hm, but only to Moses.

IAN: No one else, ever?

RABBI: Not with words. He did set a bush on fire once.

(Season 9, Episode 3)

In this short exchange, the show manages to depict Judaism as superstitious, exceptionalist, and insular, and incorrectly indicates that Jews believe that outside of Moses, God has not, and does not, communicate with humankind. It happens to be that the show’s main character is played by actress Emmy Rossum, who is half Jewish, and one of Shameless’s most popular writers, Alex Borstein, is also Jewish (although the writer of this episode was Joe Lawson). I only learned that Shameless’s Executive Producer John Wells is half Jewish because I read the comments section of a feature article in Varietymagazine, which quoted Wells as saying, “I have very liberal tendencies, but the one thing you can say about what is happening is it’s started a conversation. There is a conversation in America about ‘Who are we? Who do we want to be? How did we get so separate?” One of the comments on this articleread, “Shameless Season 8 has gone totally racist. John Wells may think the word coon is funny, or KKK headgear is funny, but as a 4th generation African American I have heard oral history passed down from my ancestors about how they were terrorized by the Klan even fleeing their homes with threats to their life. But what can you expect from an old half Jew from Virginia (Virginia seceded from the Union). Old white men die and may your racism die with you.” This disturbing comment fails to take into account which character spews racist ideas and supposedly reflects the show producer’s racism: It is the antagonist, Frank, who is drunken and abhorrible racist, while the sympathetic Ian is the one who encounters Judaism as an elitist and bizarre religion.

Researching the Jewish background of Shameless led me down a disturbing rabbit hole of anti-Semitic internet vitriol. Perhaps the most intriguing and upsetting comes from a Twitter handle named @cursedsalad, who offers a 39-tweet manifesto on the show, condemning its communist and anti-Christian propaganda. Cursedsalad’s closing tweet: 39. Did you really think John Wells, the promulgator of such degeneracy as “Shameless” would turn out to be a goy? Nope. He is Jewish and so is the show’s main writer, Etan Frankel. Every. Single. Time. For this gentleman, the enemy Jew is the commie, liberal Jew”. And so it goes. Sadly, that one Tweet got 199 loves and 43 shares. His profile has over 37,000 followers.

Most problematic of all is the hilariously satirical Veep, whose Jewish producer is David Mandel, and which features a Jewish actress, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, as the narcissistic and sometimes sociopathic Presidential hopeful Selina Meyers. Meyers, who surrounds herself with a motley crew of miserable, ambitious, and often immoral lackeys, partners with a financial backer named Sherman Tanz, a wealthy businessman whom Meyers mocks by calling him “Typhoid Moishe” and “Shylock Tanz.” In one episode, Jonah’s uncle Jeff, played by Peter MacNicol, refers to Tanz in a conversation with Tanz’s daughter Shawnee (who happens to be the Jonah’s fiancée), declaring, “Sorry that you’re even related to that human melted candle who puts the ‘Jew’ in ‘Why people hate Jews.’ Tell me this, did he sell your training bras as cum rags to the sex offenders in his prisons?” (Season 6, Episode 9)

A Times of Israel pieceon the character of Sherman Tanz also notes the fine line between Semitic caricature and anti-Zionism, citing Tanz’s line, “Richard Nixon, such a terrible anti-Semite. Great friend of Israel, though.”Veep became increasingly bold as it approached its recent series finale at the end of its seventh season, which saw the moronic and xenophobic Presidential hopeful Jonah Ryan gaining support on an anti-vaccination platform, only to get the measles himself, and to give it to his father, who dies from the disease. In one scene, a staffer informs Jonah that he is garnering unexpected attention from fringe voters:

AMY: I mean, Jonah, your anti-vaccination message is bringing together an unheard-of mix of Orthodox Jews, uneducated fringe conspiracists, and Kombucha-douching private school moms.

JONAH: That’s the real America!

(Season 7, Episode 6)

This line may be funny, but it’s also incredibly dangerous. What other minority group in the United States would be lauded by a horrible villain? The implication of this scene is that, if Jonah thinks that Orthodox Jews represent the “real America,” then they definitely don’t. The spread of measles, has, unsurprisingly, given rise to anti-Semitic claims that most Jews do not vaccinate, and that they are diseased and dirty.

By having a villainous character mock Orthodox Jews, the show signals the message that anyone who is rationally and morally minded wouldreject Orthodox Jews. In her final scene on the series, we find Meyers in the Oval Office, fielding a call from the Israeli prime minister:

MICHELLE: And we’re expecting a call from the Israeli prime minister about the Palestinian food riots.

SELINA: That reminds me, I’m starving. Gary! Oh.

KEITHL Ma’am, Gary doesn’t work here.

SELINA: I know. Why are you telling me things that I already know?

KEITH: Sorry. But I would be more than happy to get you something to eat. What would you like?

SELINA: You figure that out.

KEITH: OK.

SELINA: Why am I coming up with solutions for you? That’s your job, right? That’s not my job.

KEITH and MICHELLE: Sorry, ma’am.

SELINA: The level of incompetence in this office is just —

SUE: Ma’am, the Israeli prime minister is on line three.

SELINA: David? Shalom. So, what did the Palestinians do this time? David, I have to tell you, my daughter Catherine was exactly the same way A whiner.

(Season 7, Episode 8)

As others have pointed out, the show, and others like it, feature one-liners which mock Christians, Blacks, immigrants, and other minorities. But almost without exception, the Jew-baiting in these shows are distinct from these other lines, because lines favoring the Jews are usually uttered by these shows’ antagonists, and lines mocking the Jews are usually uttered by their protagonists. Selina’s final scene has her placating the Israeli prime minister, rather than attending to the organizers of “Palestinian food riots.” Of course, many viewers may not know that Palestinian riots do not protest the lack of food, but the existence of the State of Israel itself.

One of the biggest lines of defense when the anti-Semitic question comes up is that a Jew was involved on the “anti-Semitic” end. How could our stereotyping of Jews as liars and cheats on our TV show be anti-Semitic, when we have Jewish actors and Jewish writers on staff? How could our demonization of Israel really be anti-Semitic, when we had a Jew supporting or even guiding our project? Not only are the Jews insular, misanthropic, and particularist, this thinking goes, but the Jews have said it about themselves first, both in the writer’s room, and in the prophetic ages of old. How can we not blame the Jews, when their own leaders, or their own scriptures, tells us that they’re sinful? The answer is that since the time of the prophets, Jewish self-criticism has been inherent to internal communal discourse. Such discourse is now being exploited and manipulated to spread damaging false tropes about the Jewish people.

Many might argue that I am being unnecessarily alarmist by worrying about how Jews are portrayed in sitcom television with the portrayal of Jews in contemporary political discourse. My response to such an argument is that as a medium which reaches all people through an easily accessible screen, the portrayal of Jews on television may be even more culturally influential than political discourse. There is a fine line between art and reality, and sometimes there is no line. If there was a line, my students would not quote to me lines from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Veniceto explain how they know that Jews are miserly. They would not assume that Jews are often funny, short-statured, and successful. There is no line between stories told on television and discourse which plays out on social media, and for many, there is no line between discourse which plays out on social media and the discourse which played out between Jesus and his interlocutors in the first century. Whether communicated as jokes or as solemn declarations, Jew-hatred resonates, and it unites a society against unseen and uncontrollable forces which sow societal discord.

Perhaps the most high-profile debate concerning the portrayal of Jews on television occurred in recent weeks in response to Netflix’s new show, Historical Roasts, which features Hitler, played by Gilbert Gottfried, roasting Anne Frank, played by Rachel Feinstein. Surprisingly, most of my Jewish friends and colleagues defended the roast, while only a few lambasted it as being unacceptably offensive. “It was done as tastefully as it could have been,” one friend pointed out to me. “I mean, they didn’t exactly try to make Hitler look good.” Another friend commented that the actress who played Anne and the actor who played Hitler are both Jewish: how bad could it be? The truth is, however, that the fact that global entertainment featuring Jews lambasting the darkest moments of their own history is not evidence for cultural sensitivity, but embodies the problem itself.

While it is one thing for Jews to be a kind of people who face their wrongdoings, who create their own vulnerabilities, and who admit and face their wrongdoings, it is another for outsiders to exploit these vulnerabilities for their own entertainment, or to use them to bolster their already existent antagonism. That the Jews embrace their own history of suffering, and have at times even taken personal responsibility for their own suffering, is a distinctive element of religious identity which requires Jews to remain inward-looking, but invites outsiders to use these very vulnerabilities to marginalize, demonize, and seek to eliminate. By denigrating the Jewish people, whose tradition interrogates itself in its journey towards redemption, television producers and writers are making the Jewish people even more vulnerable and endangered than they have already made themselves.