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Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague
PRAGUE (JTA) — Not long after she puts away her silver Shabbat candlesticks and home-baked challah, Yael Schoultz walks through a cavernous hallway, and up a set of gray concrete stairs. Past a door, she finds a group of heavily made-up women in red and black G-strings and spike heels, listlessly beckoning men for sex in return for cash.
Schoultz, 43, spotted about 30 women at the Prague brothel floating from room to room in various states of undress — negligees, see-through bras — with accents as varied as their lipstick shades. Some are smiling, some appear bored as they play games on their phones, others are trying to woo potential clients with a simple, “Come have a good time, come to my room.”
It’s a typical Saturday night post-Shabbat routine for Schoultz, an Orthodox Jewish South African who recently launched L’Chaim, an organization dedicated to helping sex workers in the Czech Republic.
Schoultz and her colleagues engage the women with friendly banter about health and the weather, careful not to interrupt those with customers. The L’Chaim volunteers collectively carry a few hundred free condoms along with high-end soaps and hand-crafted bracelets.
“The girls always ask for extras for their friends,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz, who has been visiting Czech brothels since she moved to Prague in 2011, is not a mere purveyor of gifts. Her goal is to establish a rapport with the women she meets so that they can leave the business of sex work if they so wish. And her Jewish faith is a core driver of Schoultz’s quest to provide a better life for the sex workers.
“Some of the women have been trafficked,” she explained, referring to the term governments and human rights advocates use to describe a contemporary form of slavery. “There are girls who were tied up for days and raped, even by the police. Some might seem to be in the brothel voluntarily, but not really, because they owe a lot of money on a debt and feel sex work is only way they can pay it back.”
Dressed in black from head to toe, in what a fashion magazine might describe as modest goth, Schoultz is a veteran of global anti-trafficking efforts. A few decades ago, while teaching English in South Korea, Schoultz volunteered for an organization that was trying to stop the trafficking of North Korean women to China. At the same time, she was getting a master’s in theology and wanted to move to Europe to get her doctorate, which was possible at Prague’s Charles University.
“When I got to the Czech Republic, I started looking for people who were working on the trafficking issue and found three women: a Catholic nun and two Protestant missionaries. All of them were in their 60s,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz asked if she could join them in their visits to brothels.
“I just went in and started talking to women, about really anything. Language wasn’t a barrier because most sex workers speak English,” she recalled. “But it was a bit weird walking into these places with a nun in full habit.”
After a few months Schoultz began to feel uncomfortable — not with the sex workers, but with her philanthropic colleagues’ proselytizing and “religious agenda.”
“I wasn’t interested in giving out Virgin Mary medallions,” she said.
Schoultz, who teaches English at an international school in Prague, started her own informal volunteer group to help sex workers in 2012, while also embarking on a deeply personal Jewish journey.
Although she believes her father has “Jewish ancestry,” Schoultz was brought up in a Protestant home. Still, she long maintained a deep interest and connection to Judaism which intensified when she pursued her studies in theology. For several years, she regularly attended Orthodox services at 13th-century Old New Synagogue and volunteered for the Prague Jewish Community’s social services department before completing an Orthodox conversion in 2020 with Israeli rabbi David Bohbot. She has now begun her master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the Ashkenazium in Budapest, a division of the secular Milton Friedman University operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
“From the beginning when I knew I wanted to make the conversion, Orthodox Judaism was something I agreed with theologically, it is where I felt most comfortable,” said Shoultz, who describes herself as Modern Orthodox.
Rabbi Dohbot praised Schoultz’s dedication. “This work she does is noble, and isn’t that what most big religions are based on? Showing love and respect for others?” he said.
Schoultz completed an Orthodox conversion to Judaism in 2020. (Courtesy of Schoultz)
Last year, Schoultz achieved another transitional milestone: obtaining Czech government recognition of L’Chaim as a registered nonprofit.
Although L’Chaim is a secular organization, Schoultz sees her work through the lens of tikkun olam, the rabbinical command to repair the world.
“I feel like as a Jewish person, you’re supposed to bring light to the world,” said Schoultz. “And the sex industry is very dark, because even if you choose to be a sex worker, it’s not a job that anybody really enjoys as the customers are often drunk or abusive.”
“It might sound strange, but I feel very connected to Hashem when I am in the brothel, because he is there for me, and for these women too,” she added, using the preferred Orthodox Hebrew term for god.
Schoultz’s co-volunteers, who are mostly not Jewish, are aware of her commitment to the faith.
“After Yael started getting serious about Judaism, she found her path, she was more complete and found her purpose,” said Natalia Synelnykova, who worked with Schoultz to launch L’Chaim. “Everyone would say that their friends are unique, but I have rarely met someone who is so human-centered as Yael, and that is definitely linked to how she sees Judaism.”
Schoultz named her new organization L’Chaim — to life, in Hebrew — as a message to those she seeks to help.
“We want the women in the brothels to have a life because a lot of them feel like they don’t have any life, like they’re barely making it,” she said.
There are about 100 brothels in Prague, according to media reports, and roughly 13,0000 sex workers in the Czech Republic, of which about half are thought to be single mothers. Although sex work is legal, pimping is not, so the brothels operate in a murky legal area that legislators have been trying to address for decades.
Once a hotspot for human trafficking, today the Czech Republic has a relatively low rate of human sex slavery according to government statistics. But Schoultz said the numbers are misleading.
“No one really knows how many trafficked women there are in the country,” she said.
A U.S. State Department report praised the Czech Republic’s efforts to limit trafficking but also noted that the country is more focused on prosecutions of criminals rather than on helping victims. Their stories stay with Schoultz.
“I meet many Nigerian women who may not be locked up in a room, but they are locked up by Juju,” she said, referring to a form of “black magic” that some Nigerian traffickers reportedly use to scare women into prostitution.
She also counsels “Romanian girls who are initially romanced by men that turn out to be traffickers.” A man will have many women he calls “wives,” and each one has a baby with him, “The women give him all their money to support the baby who he keeps as a form of collateral in Romania,” Schoultz said.
(Shoultz turned down JTA’s request for contacts of sex workers she has helped, noting that this would violate L’Chaim’s promise of confidentiality).
The Czech Republic’s leading anti-trafficking organization, La Strada, takes a different orientation towards sex work than L’Chaim, focusing on it more as a legitimate profession that should be organized and regulated.
“We believe women are fully able to decide for themselves if they want to be sex workers and our goal is to provide safety for those who do so, to help them organize, fight stigma and have the rights of all other workers,” said Marketa Hronkova, La Strada’s director. La Strada defines trafficking strictly as those who are physically coerced or blackmailed into providing labor.
Hronkova said there are many sex workers who choose their profession willingly and that it is patronizing and often damaging when those who say they want to help focus exclusively on “pushing women to exit a path they have chosen, as if they have no minds of their own.”
The alternative to sex work, for a single mother, can often put her in an even worse financial situation, she noted. “Our goal is to make sex work safe, not to get women to stop doing it,” said Hromkova.
Concerning L’Chaim, she said as long as its aim was listening to women, and not making them feel ashamed, it could be helpful. La Strada already cooperates with another Czech organization, Pleasure Without Risk, which maintains a neutral stance towards sex work and provides women with access to testing for sexually transmitted diseases as well as counseling.
L’Chaim’s goal, Schoultz explained, is to identify who might be trafficked and provide them with the confidence and practical resources to rebuild their lives. But since getting access to the women requires earning the trust of brothel owners and managers, L’Chaim doesn’t advertise itself as an anti-trafficking group.
“We show up as providing support to women in prostitution, that gets us in the door,” she reflected. L’Chaim has about a dozen volunteers.
It can take Schoultz six months of relationship building before she finds out what brought the client into sex work.
“We start by talking about her kids, talking about her dogs,” said Schoultz “and eventually their stories come out, many involving abuse, trauma and mental health problems.”
She estimated that at the 13 or so brothels she regularly visits in Prague and Brno, at least half the sex workers were not there on a fully voluntary basis.
In the future, Schoultz hopes to create trafficking awareness campaigns and help the customers of sex workers recognize the signs that a woman is working against her will.
The brothel owners are not always pleasant to deal with, Scholtz acknowledged.
“At one place an owner came behind me and kissed my neck on the back of my neck. It was really creepy,” she said.
And despite her modest dress, or tznius, in keeping with her Orthodox values, she said she was pursued by a brothel customer to participate in “group sex.” She fended him off calmly by explaining that she “offered services, but not those kinds of services.”
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At Dartmouth, Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies refuse to stay apart
Immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks and the start of the Israel-Gaza War, Dartmouth College student Jackson Weinstein was “extremely outspoken” on campus about his support for Israel.
But by his sophomore year, he had largely withdrawn from discussing the conflict with other students.
“It felt like I was losing friends and just making things harder for myself,” said Weinstein, now a senior at the Ivy League university in New Hampshire.
This past school year, he enrolled in a new course, Difficult Conversations on the Middle East, developed by the college in response to debates over Israel and Gaza that have divided campuses across the country.
For the first several weeks, the class, jointly offered by Dartmouth’s Middle East and Jewish Studies departments, avoided delving into the conflict. Instead, students started by studying topics like groupthink, mindfulness, emotional regulation and academic freedom.
Only by the fifth week did they plunge into subjects like Palestinian armed resistance, women’s rights in the Middle East, the accusation of genocide in Gaza and the role of colonialism in the region.
“In the first class, students come in with this idea of, ‘How do I win the debate? How do I show that I’m right?’’” said Jonathan Smolin, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies. “That’s categorically not what we’re doing in the class.”
Smolin teaches the course alongside Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who spent five years posted in Israel.
The hope is that students learn to take an argument seriously enough to understand it before deciding whether they reject it.
The unusual course, offered again this school year, is the product of an experiment Dartmouth began long before Oct. 7. For roughly a decade, its Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies programs have deliberately intertwined themselves: professors co-teach and cross-list courses, serve on each other’s steering committees, co-sponsor visiting professors and even occupy neighboring offices in the same building. It’s just as much for the faculty as it is for the students.
“I want to understand why some people hold positions that I may find horrific,” said Susannah Heschel, chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth. “I’m not here to just condemn something; I want to understand the complexity of it.”
An unusual partnership
For Darcy Rochkind, a Middle Eastern Studies major modifying her degree to include Jewish Studies, the partnership is what drew her to Dartmouth.
Rochkind was applying to college in the fall of 2023, as campuses across the country were convulsed by protests and arguments over universities’ responses to Oct. 7. Her dream school was Columbia, but after watching congressional hearings on antisemitism in person and videos her mom sent her of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies professors discussing the conflict side by side, she changed her plans and enrolled at Dartmouth.
“You’d have a very hard time being a Middle Eastern Studies or Jewish Studies major without taking a class from the opposite department,” she said.
The experiment also extends beyond the classroom. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, Heschel and her colleagues in Middle Eastern Studies organized two public forums to discuss what had happened and opened it to students. The room was so packed that Dartmouth needed an overflow space, and Heschel said another 1,600 people watched via livestream.
After those initial forums, Dartmouth launched Middle East Dialogues, a series of events organized by faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies to explore challenging topics related to the region. Rather than foster safe spaces, Dartmouth leaders aspired to create what they call “brave spaces,” where students are encouraged to actively engage with disagreement.
To make it work, Smolin, who has organized many of the program’s events, deliberately avoids inviting speakers who are political activists on either side.
“We’re not interested in people declaring who’s right and who’s wrong,” he said. “That’s not what we do in higher education.”
Instead, they have hosted Israeli and Palestinian political commentators, think tank experts, and public-opinion researchers.
Professors have also facilitated meetings between students to expose them to different viewpoints. Weinstein and several other Jewish students went to dinner with a group of Muslim students, including two Palestinians and a student who had grown up in Gaza. His professor, Fishere, facilitated the gathering.
The students sat together at Pine, a Dartmouth restaurant, and talked for hours about the war, the accusation of genocide in Gaza and the experiences of Gazan civilians.
Weinstein had never before met someone who had spent his entire life in Gaza. He described the dinner as “one of the most human experiences I’ve had at Dartmouth.”
A national flashpoint
Dartmouth’s approach has become increasingly distinctive as Middle East studies programs have become flashpoints in campus battles over Israel, antisemitism and academic freedom.
Since Oct. 7, critics — including Jewish students, alumni, and watchdogs — have accused some Middle East studies programs across the country of teaching about Israel through a hostile ideological lens and creating an inhospitable environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students.
Some professors in the field, meanwhile, have argued that accusations of antisemitism in higher education are being used to police scholarship that could be critical of Israel.
By 2025, the federal government got involved. The Trump administration subjected multiple universities to sweeping demands aimed at addressing allegations of antisemitism by taking away federal funding. Columbia responded by promising to conduct a review of Middle East course offerings to ensure they are balanced.
Under similar pressure, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies removed the center’s director and associate director from their leadership posts, though they kept their jobs. The Trump administration later demanded that the school’s Middle East Studies Department, among others, be audited by a third party to ensure a diversity of viewpoints.
The interventions prompted outrage from professors, students, and academic-freedom advocates arguing that the government was seeking to exert control over how universities teach about Israel and the Middle East.
According to Heschel, the climate has contributed to driving a wedge between Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies departments on some college campuses.
“I know that at some universities, faculty in Middle East and Jewish Studies don’t even talk to each other; they don’t respond to each other’s emails, for example,” she said. “That I find appalling. That’s unacceptable.”
Not everything is about conflict
For Heschel, the intellectual case for faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies to collaborate goes beyond teaching students how to talk about the current conflict.
“We want our students to know not just about the conflict that they read about in the newspapers today,” Heschel said. “We want them to know about a period where there was religious tolerance and respect for one another, to see that it’s possible we don’t have to live in a condition of anger and enmity.”
She co-teaches a course with a Middle East Studies professor examining how Jews in Europe and Arabs in the Middle East responded to modernity during the 19th century.
In one lesson, students learn about the Lebanese intellectual Butrus al-Bustani, who founded a school in Beirut in 1863 for Christian, Muslim and Jewish boys — and hired a cook to prepare kosher food for his Jewish students.
Engineering major Oguz Kurt, a rising junior who was born and raised in Turkey, took the course last semester.
“Building trust week over week” with classmates and professors, he said, brings people like him into the room who might otherwise be “intimidated” by the prospect of tense encounters in a class focused explicitly on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
Kurt wants to be there, which points to one obvious limitation to Dartmouth’s experiment: Students have to want to participate.
A 2025 survey of graduating seniors by the university’s campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, found that nearly 70% described themselves as liberal or very liberal, compared with roughly 12% who identified as conservative or very conservative. More than 70% said most of their closest friends shared their political beliefs.
Additionally, a 2025 Gallup poll conducted on the Dartmouth student body in 2025, found only 38% reported feeling comfortable sharing unorthodox ideas in class.
Weinstein wonders whether this degree of homogeneity is why courses like Difficult Conversations succeed – the people least willing to engage with opposing points of view don’t take the class.
“Everyone was there to learn. Everyone could be persuaded,” he said. “In some ways that’s a problem,” adding that the class might benefit from “a wider range of ideologues.”
“Not all of Dartmouth is like this,” Smolin acknowledged. “No doubt there are professors in other units that think it’s up to faculty to lead liberation and that this approach is stifling.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Heschel said some right-wing Jewish faculty members outside the Jewish Studies program have criticized the approach she and her colleagues take.
“I understand the anxiety that Jews feel today about university campuses, but I think they’re underestimating their own students,” she said. “Kids will encounter viewpoints that they will find disturbing and offensive, not just about Israel… they need to learn how to handle such a situation, how to respond.”
Heschel said faculty and administrators at other universities have approached Dartmouth to ask how to replicate what they did.
“I was surprised that we received so many requests from deans and presidents of colleges and universities to come and talk about what we had done,” she said.
From Dartmouth to Damascus
One of the people thinking about what could be replicated outside Hanover comes from much farther away.
Before flying to New Hampshire this May, Ibrahim Imre El-Khalid Bethlen asked ChatGPT a question he had never needed answered before: What is proper Shabbat etiquette?
Bethlen, a Syrian political scientist who teaches at Damascus University, met Heschel when she traveled to Damascus with a delegation of Jewish Americans in December 2025. She invited him to come to Dartmouth for 10 days and packed his schedule with jointly taught courses like Difficult Conversations, and a seminar about Jews in Algeria. Bethlen also lectured about the current political situation in Syria and attended his first ever Shabbat at the campus’ Chabad.
Just as new to him was seeing Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies professors teaching together.
“With every professor we had some brainstorming about how we could bring the people closer,” he said. “How could we demystify” Jews to Syrians. Most of them have never met a Jewish person since the millennia-old Syrian Jewish community left en masse in the mid-20th Century.
Now, Bethlen hopes to connect faculty at Damascus University to their counterparts at Dartmouth. He is realistic about political sensitivities. Bringing an Israeli or Jewish Studies professor into a Syrian classroom to discuss the contemporary conflict, he says, could be a nonstarter. But having an Arab professor in the classroom as well could help.
“We don’t want to jump too high,” he said.
He imagines beginning somewhere Dartmouth itself often begins: with classes focused on shared history and culture rather than contemporary politics. Perhaps a jointly taught course that introduces students to the literature and poetry of Jews and Arabs once shared across the Middle East. Classes like Difficult Conversations can come later.
As a part of that Dartmouth class’s final assignment, students are asked to have a conversation with someone on campus they disagree with about the region, applying what they have learned.
Weinstein chose a friend and fraternity brother whose views on Israel differed sharply from his own. They talked for several hours.
“I ended by congratulating Eli on being ‘the only close friend I’ve ever had that wasn’t pro-Israel,’” Weinstein wrote in his reflection afterward. “I sure hope he isn’t the last.”
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‘We’re saying ‘no’ to Mamdani’: Orthodox teens demonstrate outside Gracie Mansion
In a sea of kippot and black skirts, more than 200 Orthodox middle school and high school students gathered outside Gracie Mansion on Friday, conducting morning prayers and giving speeches.
“I like protesting against Mamdani,” Rami Fishman, a 16-year-old student, told the Forward. “He’s not a great guy. I’ll take an opportunity to speak out against him.”
Prominent Modern Orthodox preparatory schools Ramaz and SAR organized the gathering with Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, the synagogue that sponsors the institutions. Organizers said that comments Mayor Zohran Mamdani made over the summer attacking AIPAC and Israel drove their efforts. Rabbi Bini Kraus, principal of SAR, said the experience was also intended to teach students about “their civic responsibilities.”
“It’s fun,” Fishman said. “We’re praying and we’re saying ‘no’ to Mamdani.”
Fishman, a junior at SAR, said he liked waking up late and he was enjoying meeting students from another school. Kraus told the Forward students were missing three periods by participating, but noted prayer is part of the school’s curriculum and the gathering wasn’t taking away from their studies.
Students and parents could opt out, with Kraus noting some declined to participate. Nearly 400 alumni and members of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun signed a petition against the gathering.
In their speeches, students touched on fears of antisemitism, being proud Jews and supporting Israel openly. One 8th grader called on Mamdani to prioritize the safety of the Jewish community.
Neturei Karta, a Haredi group that opposes Zionism, protested against the student group by waving Palestinian flags, chanting and holding signs in support of Mamdani. The NK group chanted “Antizionism is not antisemitism,” and called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested during his visit to New York next week. Mamdani, who campaigned on arresting Netanyahu, recently acknowledged he does not have the authority to do so.
Michael Rapaport, an actor and staunch supporter of Israel, came to support the students saying it was “moving,” and “not a political statement.”
“These are kids,” Rapaport told the Forward, “they can’t even vote. This is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful prideful thing.”
Vigil? Demonstration? Protest?
Organizers did not describe the gathering as a form of protest, instead referring to it as a vigil or communal prayer. However, the event involved classic hallmarks of a protest. A handful of participants waved or wore Israeli flags, and organizers acquired a permit for noise amplification.
“Our students have been going out for decades, really, when things matter,” Kraus said.
He noted he demonstrated for Soviet Jewry when he was a student at the school.
A reporter asked Mamdani about the demonstration at a press conference Wednesday.
“I welcome them,” he said. “They can have a vigil, or I’ve heard some describe it even as a ‘protest.’ Whatever it is intended to be, they have the room and space to do so outside of Gracie Mansion. I think that at the time that they are there, I will probably be somewhere else across the city.”
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, senior rabbi at Kehilath Jeshurun, said Thursday, “That’s the right response.”
Kraus, however, said he hoped the mayor would change his mind and attend. If he did, he would hear singing, praying and concerns “expressed respectfully.”
“Maybe that will move him,” Kraus said.
Some alumni and parents opposed the demonstration
The petition against the demonstration stated, “This gathering needlessly inflames tensions between the mayor and the Modern Orthodox Jewish community, as opposed to inviting him into conversation as a potential ally working for the shared safety of all New Yorkers.”
Much of the signatures are anonymous, with only school and class year listed.
The petition also said the schools risked portraying the Modern Orthodox community “as a political monolith opposed to the mayor.”
“They don’t want it to look like the Modern Orthodox community is a monolith, but the Modern Orthodox community really is a monolith on this,” Steinmetz said. “The Modern Orthodox community is, by and large, quite Zionist and really takes the security and safety of the state of Israel very seriously.”
A 2024 poll conducted by Nishma Research found 94% of the Modern Orthodox community identifies as Zionist, compared to 51% of Haredi Jews.
Halachic Left, an observant organization that says its members have “deep connections” to institutions in the Modern Orthodox community, helped circulate the petition. In a statement to the Forward, the organization insisted there is a “full range of views in the Modern Orthodox community on Israel, Zionism, and Mayor Mamdani.”
“The mayor has shown a willingness to respect and speak with our community,” read the statement. “We should be partnering with and engaging the mayor rather than castigating or insulting him.”
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I love ‘Seinfeld’ — why doesn’t the rest of my generation?
Seinfeld had a mythic presence in my childhood. The show went off the air three years before I was born, but that didn’t stop it from permeating my psyche.
When I was little, growing up in Bethesda, Md., my parents would regale me with summaries of their favorite family-friendly episodes. There’s the one where George quits his job in a huff, then shows up the next day and simply pretends he never quit. Or when Elaine runs out of toilet paper, only to have the woman in the next stall refuse to “spare a square” — a scene that prompted my mom to start carrying tissue paper in her purse.
Around middle school, I finally became old enough to watch Seinfeld myself. I recorded the reruns that aired on TBS on our DVR and set out to watch every episode, eager to see the stories that had become a part of my family lore.
Suddenly, all the times my dad warned me against the perils of “double dipping” made more sense. (See: Season 4, Episode 19, “The Implant,” when George gets into a fight at a funeral reception for putting a half-eaten chip back into the communal dip).
I had never felt quite so represented by a piece of media: the dry humor, the cynical outlook, the blunt banter, the overbearing parents. It all felt like home.
The Jewishness of Seinfeld was undoubtedly part of the appeal. It wasn’t just that Jerry was Jewish; it was the sensibility — the neuroses, the kvetching, finding the comedy in life’s everyday absurdities. The characters felt like caricatured versions of my craziest relatives.
My affection for the show was strong enough that I skipped a classmate’s bar mitzvah party to see Jerry Seinfeld perform stand-up live at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I don’t remember any specific jokes he told that night, just how wowed I was that Seinfeld was just as funny in person as on TV.
But explaining my newfound obsession to my peers, I was often met with blank stares. Few of my friends had watched Seinfeld at all. Those who tried an episode on my advice reported back that they found the show dated. Yet the lack of interest could not be explained by a lack of nostalgia for ’90s TV; those same friends came to love Friends and Sex and the City.
This Gen Z disinterest in Seinfeld seems to extend beyond my inner circle: A 2022 YouGov survey of 1,000 adults found a generational divide in the Seinfeld fandom: 14% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they loved the show, versus 22% of those 30 to 44, 27% of those 45 to 64 and 32% of those 65 and older.
To be sure, Seinfeld still has its young fans, as evidenced by the show’s continued life in memes and modern riffs on the plots. But that enthusiasm seems to stop short of the broad, mainstream appeal the show once commanded. Today, shows like The Office or Parks and Recreation seem like the cultural touchstones that Seinfeld once was.
So why hasn’t Seinfeld caught on more with my generation? I have a few theories.
For one, much of the humor in Seinfeld revolves around awkward situations: a date gone wrong, an annoying friend you can’t get rid of, a social obligation you can’t escape. Whether trapped in conversation with a “close talker” or endlessly waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant, the characters are constantly stuck in situations they’d rather avoid.
But modern technology has made it increasingly possible to live a frictionless existence. Awkwardness has become less relatable and more readily labeled “cringe.” Instead of asking someone on a date in person, just use the apps. Instead of breaking up, ghost. Want to avoid the Soup Nazi’s wrath? Just order Uber Eats.
Indeed, Kramer’s entire character is more difficult to imagine today. He’s constantly barging into Jerry’s apartment unannounced, eating out of his fridge and answering his landline phone. But Americans have grown less connected to their neighbors over time; only a quarter of young adults regularly interact with those who live around them — a sharp drop from 51% of young adults in 2012.
Another reason may have to do with how my generation watches television. Today, the entire series is on Netflix, alongside thousands of other shows competing for our attention. Contrast that with my parents, who watched Seinfeld one episode at a time as it aired, every Thursday night over Chinese takeout.
Famously dubbed the “show about nothing,” Seinfeld isn’t especially suited to binge-watching. There’s no need to watch the episodes in order. There are no major cliffhangers, and any romance is fodder for jokes rather than character development.
Some of the disconnect may also be cultural. When Seinfeld first aired, NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff — a New York Jew himself — famously worried that the show was “too New York, too Jewish” to connect with a wider American audience.
“Who will want to see Jews wandering around New York acting neurotic?” he asked.
Evidently, many people did. But amid rising antisemitism, I wonder whether Jewishness has lost some of its cultural cachet.
These days, it seems increasingly difficult to enjoy a Jewish artist’s work without being asked to account for that artist’s views on Israel. Seinfeld’s outspoken support for Israel after Oct. 7, along with his inflammatory comments comparing the pro-Palestinian movement to the Ku Klux Klan, have prompted calls to boycott his acts. Ironically, the exception to this rule seems to be the invincible Larry David, who has managed to escape cancellation perhaps because his comedic persona is built around being the butt of every joke.
Of course, it’s also possible that Seinfeld is just old. The laugh track is annoying. The production quality looks unmistakably ’90s. Its references are dated.
But I’d hate for a new generation to write off Seinfeld. So if you’re under 30 and not already a fan, watch a few episodes. You can start with my favorite: “The Marine Biologist.” Once you get to the punchline, maybe you’ll see some of what I see in the show.
Or, maybe, I’m just an old soul. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
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