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As ‘The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’ ends, will its Jewish legacy be more than a punchline?
(JTA) — After five seasons, 20 Emmy awards and plenty of Jewish jokes, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” airs its final episode on Friday.
The lauded Amazon Prime show from Amy Sherman-Palladino has enveloped viewers in a shimmering, candy-colored version of New York during the late 1950s and early 1960s — a world in which “humor” has meant Jewish humor and “culture” has meant Jewish culture.
But as it comes to an end, the show’s Jewish legacy is still up for debate: Did its representation of Jews on mainstream TV make it a pioneer of the 2010s? Or did it do more harm than good in the battle for better representation, by reinforcing decades-old comedic tropes about Jews?
The comedy-drama followed the vivacious Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) on a journey from prim Upper West Side housewife — left in the lurch after her husband has an affair with his secretary — to ambitious, foul-mouthed comic fighting her way through the male-dominated standup comedy industry. Her New York Jewishness colored her jokes, her accent, her mannerisms and much of her daily life.
That’s because the whole landscape of the show was Jewish, from the well-to-do, acculturated intelligentsia (such as Midge’s parents) to the self-made garment factory owners (such as her in-laws). Even the radical Jewish comic Lenny Bruce, a countercultural icon of the midcentury, appeared as a recurring character who propels Midge’s success.
Henry Bial, a professor specializing in performance theory and Jewish popular culture at the University of Kansas, said the emergence of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” in 2017 exemplified a shift to more overt portrayals of Jews on TV — especially on streaming services. Although Jewish characters featured in TV shows throughout the 20th century, such as “The Goldbergs” in the 1950s, “Rhoda” in the 1970s and “Seinfeld” in the 1990s, their Jewishness was often more coded than explicit. Network television, seeking to attract the majority of Americans coveted by advertisers, feared alienating audiences who couldn’t “relate” to ethnic and racial minorities.
“If there are only three things you can put on television at 8 o’clock on Tuesday night, then there’s a lot more incentive for networks and advertisers to stay close to the herd, because you’re competing for the same eyeballs,” said Bial. “But when people can watch whatever they want whenever they want, then it opens up for a much wider range of stories.”
Other shows such as “Transparent,” “Broad City” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which debuted in 2014 and 2015, are often cited alongside “Mrs. Maisel” as part of a new wave of Jewish representation.
Riv-Ellen Prell, a professor emerita of American studies at the University of Minnesota, argued that Midge subverts the stereotype of the “Jewish American princess.” At the start of the show, she appears to embrace that image: She is financially dependent on her father and husband and obsessive about her appearance, measuring her body every day to ensure that she doesn’t gain weight. Despite living with her husband for years, she always curls her hair, does her makeup and spritzes herself with perfume before he wakes up.
“She looks for all the world like the fantasy of a Jewish American princess,” said Prell. “And yet she is more ambitious than imaginable, she is a brilliant comic who draws on her own life. You have Amy Sherman-Palladino inventing the anti-Jewish princess.”
Bial said that Midge’s relationship with her Jewishness defies another stereotype: That identity is not a source of neurosis or self-loathing, as it often appears to be in the male archetypes of Woody Allen and Larry David, or in Rachel Bloom’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Through the spirited banter, the pointed exclamations of “oy,” the titillation over a rabbi coming for Yom Kippur break fast — Midge’s Jewishness is a source of comforting ritual, joy and celebration.
“She has anxieties and issues, but none of them are because she’s Jewish,” said Bial.
Some critics argue the show’s depiction of Jewish culture relies on shallow tropes. In a 2019 review, TV critic Paul Brownfield said “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” repurposed stereotypes to appear “retro chic.” He pointed to a consistent contrast between the Weissmans (the assimilated, cultured Jews of the Upper West Side) and the Maisels (the boorish, money-focused Jews of the Garment District), arguing that these superficial types replace an exploration of what the period was actually like for American Jews.
“However ‘Jewish’ Sherman-Palladino wants the show to be, ‘Maisel’ fails to grapple with the realities of the moment in Jewish American history it portrays,” Brownfield wrote. “Which is ultimately what leaves me queasy about its tone — the shtick, the stereotypes, the comforting self-parody.”
Meanwhile, Andy Samberg took a jab while co-hosting the 2019 Golden Globes with Sandra Oh. “It’s the show that makes audiences sit up and say, ‘Wait, is this antisemitic?’” he joked.
Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle, shown in a synagogue scene, are two of the show’s non-Jewish actors. (Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Studios)
Others have criticized the show’s casting: Its titular heroine, her parents Abe and Rose Weissman (Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle) and Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) are all played by non-Jews. A debate over the casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles has heated up in recent years, taking aim not only at Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, but also at Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsberg in “On The Basis of Sex,” Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in “Golda” and Gaby Hoffmann and Jay Duplass as the Pfefferman siblings in “Transparent.” Comedian Sarah Silverman popularized the term “Jewface” to critique the trend.
“Watching a gentile actor portraying, like, a Jew-y Jew is just — agh — feels, like, embarrassing and cringey,” Silverman said on her podcast in 2021.
Midge’s rise as a comedian is interlocked with her ally and one-time fling, the fictionalized Lenny Bruce. His character has a softened glow in the show, but in reality, Bruce was branded a “sick comic” for his scathing satire that railed against conservatism, racism and moral hypocrisy. Between 1961 and 1964, he was charged with violating obscenity laws in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and he was deported from England. At his Los Angeles trial in 1963, Bruce was accused of using the Yiddish word “shmuck,” taken as an obscenity to mean “penis.” He incorporated the charge into his standup, explaining that the colloquial Jewish meaning of “schmuck” was “fool.”
Driven to pennilessness by relentless prosecution, police harassment and blacklisting from most clubs across the country, he died of a morphine overdose in 1966 at 40 years old. The real Lenny Bruce’s tragedy lends a shadow to the fictional Midge Maisel’s triumphs.
The United States that he struggled with until his death also looks comparatively rosy through the lens of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” whose protagonist battles misogyny but takes little interest in other societal evils — including still-rampant antisemitism. Some critics have noted that she is oblivious to segregated facilities when she tours with Black singer Shy Baldwin, then nearly outs him as gay during her set.
“‘Mrs. Maisel’ takes place in a supersaturated fantasy 1958 New York, one where antisemitism, racism, homophobia and even sexism are barely a whisper,” Rokhl Kafrissen wrote in 2018.
Reflecting on the criticism that had piled up by 2020, Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino, also an executive producer and a lead writer for the show, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that trying to appease every Jewish viewer was a futile exercise.
“We knew that if we show a Jewish family at temple — if we show them and talk about Yom Kippur and all those kinds of things — there are going to be people who are going to nitpick at specifics that maybe we didn’t get exactly right,” said Palladino, who is not Jewish. “But a lot of the feedback that we’ve gotten has been ‘Thank you. Thank you for leaning into it and showing Jews being Jewish, as opposed to just name checking them as Jewish.’”
Sherman-Palladino added: “[T]here are many different kinds of Jews! To say, ‘oh, Jewish stereotypes,’ well, what are you talking about? Because we have an educated Jew, we have a woman who was happy to be a mother, we have another woman striking out as a stand up comic, and, you know, Susie Myerson’s [Alex Borstein’s character] a Jew! We’ve got a broad range of Jews in there.”
However “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is assessed in the future, it will remain significant for thrusting a new kind of Jewish heroine into the mainstream consciousness, said Bial.
“Because of its popularity, its longevity and frankly its quality, it’s going to be the example,” Bial said. “In the history of Jews and TV, this is going to be the chapter for the late 2010s and early 2020s — you have to mention ‘Mrs. Maisel.’ It is very clearly a landmark in Jewish representation, particularly for Jewish women.”
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At Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Jews learned how to be American
Jewish resort culture in the Borscht Belt peaked in the mid-1950s when there were 538 hotels, 50,000 bungalows, and 1,000 boarding houses. Among the best known was Grossinger’s where Jewish singles mingled with the likes of Lucille Ball, Milton Berle and Elizabeth Taylor over the course of the resort’s more than seven-decade existence.
We Met at Grossinger’s, a documentary directed by Paula Eiselt (Under G-d, 93 Queen), explains how Grossinger’s became so successful despite the fact that its founder had only a sixth grade education. In 1900, at the age of 8, Jennie Grossinger immigrated with her family from Galicia, Austria to New York. She dropped out of school and began working as a buttonhole maker to help support her family, until her father became sick and they moved to the Catskills. Her father hoped to start a farm, but the family found the rocky land was better suited for a boarding house than crops. Jennie managed the inn while her mother oversaw the kitchen, and she eventually made enough money to purchase a larger building down the road.
The documentary features a range of interviewees, including Grossinger’s descendants, historians, and celebrities, such as Jackie Hoffman and Joel Grey, who frequented the resort. With its snappy editing and in-depth approach to the history of the culture, the film brings the past back to life and captures how the resort became ingrained in people’s personal lives.
Grossinger’s grandson Mitchell Etess estimates that thousands of couples met there. Hoffman says it’s where she had her first makeout session with a boy. Former employees say Grossinger’s elite guests motivated them to pursue better education and careers. Multiple interviewees say the resort was a home away from home.
Archival footage of people dancing, swimming, dining, and being entertained takes viewers back to the glitz and glamor of the Catskills in its heyday. Although Jewish resorts were founded in response to antisemitic exclusion at other places, the joy Jews were able to create for themselves diminishes the darkness of this bigotry.
The resorts gave Jews a place to escape antisemitism and be among people with a shared culture. For Holocaust survivors it provided the opportunity to connect with others who could understand their trauma. Jewish athletes like boxer Barney Ross (born David Rosofsky) relied on Grossinger’s as a place where they could train and get kosher food. Jews also got a crash course on assimilation, learning how to engage in American social activities like golfing and playing tennis without fear of judgment.
It wasn’t just Jews that fled to the Catskills. Bard College professor Myra Armstead’s grandparents moved there during the Great Migration and opened the Gratney M. Smith, a boarding house for Black workers and vacationers. Jackie Robinson was an invited guest at Grossinger’s and became friends with Jennie. The Jewish Vacation Guide, which pointed Jews to safe housing and dining in the area and around the country, inspired the Green Book, which provided the same functions for Black people.
But in the 1970s, when it became easier for Jews to vacation with non-Jews, the resorts became less of a necessity. Buildings in the city now had air conditioning, so people didn’t have to escape to the mountains for cooler weather. Teenagers and young adults began to prefer to spend their vacations with friends or doing activities that didn’t involve being attached at the hip to their parents or grandparents.
In 1987, a year after Grossinger’s closed, the lost culture it had once embodied was given renewed attention in Dirty Dancing. Although the film avoided explicit mentions of Judaism, the fictional Kellerman’s was based on Grossinger’s and the script was written by resort regular Eleanor Bergstein.
Now, younger generations are starting to take an interest in the Borscht Belt culture. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has exposed new audiences to this old form of Jewish vacation culture. Photographers Marisa Scheinfeld and Isaac Jeffreys have created photography collections of abandoned Catskill resorts. The Borscht Belt Museum teaches visitors about this bygone period.
But unlike fictional media and photos of the past, We Met at Grossinger’s offers firsthand accounts of life in the Catskills from those who lived it, adding a personal dimension to this new wave of Jewish nostalgia.
We Met at Grossinger’s will have its world premiere at DOC NYC on November 13, with subsequent screenings on November 16 and 19.
The post At Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Jews learned how to be American appeared first on The Forward.
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Why won’t pro-Palestinian protesters turn their attention to Darfur?
Here’s a stark fact: More people may have been killed in Sudan in just the past week than in Gaza in the past two years.
“They’re killing everyone that moves,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, in a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan. Raymond’s lab has tracked the carnage via satellite imagery, witnessing the slaughter of innocent civilians in real time.
And the main source for the weapons destroying the Black, non-Arab population in Darfur is the United Arab Emirates, one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East.
So where are the American protesters?
A major reason American protesters have relentlessly focused their time and energy on Israel, they say, is that the U.S. is Israel’s most significant ally, as well as an arms supplier to the IDF. There are real actions the U.S. could take to sway the course of events in Israel, so protesters aim to influence the U.S. government to do so.
But the U.S. has ties to conflicts all over the world, especially in Sudan, where a major American ally is helping supply the weapons of slaughter. The idea that its ability to pressure Israel is unique, and therefore worthy of unique focus, is misguided.
“Only American pressure can stop the killing in Sudan,” wrote Alex De Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, in Foreign Affairs. So why aren’t American activists, well, active?
A genocide to rival Rwanda
The UAE has $29 billion in active defense contracts with the U.S. It is also host to — and protected by — the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing and Jebel Ali Port, the U.S. Navy’s largest port of call in the Middle East.
And while UAE officials have denied that they are arming the Arab militia, known as the Rapid Support Forces, responsible for the genocide, diplomats, humanitarian groups and journalists have confirmed the link. Three of the same organizations that pro-Palestinian activists regularly cite in their brief against Israel — the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — have established the UAE’s complicity.
Every crime American protesters accuse Israel of — killing civilians among military targets, rape, starvation as a weapon, destroying hospitals and killing patients in their beds — is happening now, at a far greater scale, in Darfur.
“Rebels hurl racial insults at fleeing women and children,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Black women with long hair are systematically separated and raped.”
Humanitarian groups say the ongoing slaughter is likely to rival that of Rwanda genocide, and of the genocide that took place in the same Darfur region 30 years ago. That atrocity, led by a predecessor to the RSF, claimed 200,000 lives.
Why would the UAE supply weapons to be used in such a context? Perhaps because it uses Sudan’s mines to supply gold and other resources, and wants to stay on the good side of a group primed to exercise control over ongoing access.
“The war would be over if not for the UAE,” Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to successive U.S. presidential special envoys for Sudan, told the Wall Street Journal. “The only thing that is keeping them in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support that they’re receiving from the UAE.”
In the U.S., silence
So where are the protesters shouting at their representatives in town halls to suspend the recent $2 trillion investment agreement between the U.S. and UAE? Pushing sanctions against the UAE? Or demanding New York University shutter its Abu Dhabi campus?
Where are the movie stars and director refusing to engage with the UAE, which according to Variety is the “prime Middle East hub” for Hollywood production? Javier Bardem, who recently said he will no longer work with the Israeli film industry, filmed part of his last movie, F1, in Abu Dhabi last year. What if he said no more?
Imagine the impact if, instead of unveiling her new fragrance, Orebella, at a splashed-out event last week in Abu Dhabi, supermodel Bella Hadid announced that just as she calls relentlessly for the world to boycott Israel, she will no longer visit the Emirates until it ends funding for the genocide in Darfur?
This is not an argument for whataboutism, and none of this is to deflect attention from the injustices and suffering happening in the West Bank and Gaza. Everyone has a right to choose their battles. I don’t ask the Save the Whales people, “But what about the rainforest?”
But if someone is actively bombing the rainforest, today, as you read this — and your country is in bed with the bomb suppliers — then claiming to care about the planet and doing nothing is inexcusable.
“This is not only a crisis of violence but also a crisis of indifference,” wrote Reena Ghelani, CEO of Plan International in Al Jazeera. “Each day the world looks away.”
And the go-to excuse, that Americans lack leverage and influence over the slaughter, is utter BS.
The post Why won’t pro-Palestinian protesters turn their attention to Darfur? appeared first on The Forward.
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Toronto’s Mayor Encourages Antisemitic and Anti-Israel Harassment — as She Struggles to Govern the City
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks to reporters in Toronto, March 8, 2025. Photo: Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press via ZUMA Press via Reuters Connect
A ceasefire is holding in Gaza. In places like Ypsilanti, Michigan, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the mayor’s tenure was interrupted by a seven-year prison stint, local governments will have to drop their calls to end the war and get back to the boring business of running their cities.
Beleaguered Jewish residents across North America, who have gritted their teeth through an unprecedented spike in antisemitic attacks, are surely breathing a sigh of relief.
Earlier this month, however, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow decided to dust off the Israel punching bag for one last go.
Speaking at a fundraiser for The National Council of Canadian Muslims in Brampton — Canada 7th largest city — Chow claimed, “the genocide in Gaza impact [sic] us all.”
Encouraged by the audience’s applause, she then got personal: Chow told the audience that when her mother was 13, Chow’s grandmother died of dysentery as a result of Imperial Japan’s invasion of China during World War II, leaving Chow’s mother alone to care for her siblings.
Reasonable people can disagree about the proportionality of Israel’s response to the barbarity of Hamas and fellow terror groups’ attack on October 7, 2023. But to compare it to a war whose explicit goal was conquest — and which resulted in an estimated 20 million Chinese deaths — is more of an apples to elephants comparison than apples to oranges.
More troubling was Mayor Chow’s glib use of the phrase “genocide.”
A sculptor by training — who spent her professional career in mostly local politics, with a stint as a member of parliament for Canada’s perennial also-ran socialist party — Chow is not well qualified to be making legal conclusions.
The timing was particularly ham-fisted, given the fact that only days earlier, reports had surfaced of a massacre in Sudan, one in which the blood of more than 2,000 unarmed civilians ran so deep that it could be seen in satellite images.
In Israel, the country’s roughly 6,600 Sudanese refugees see little daylight between the murderers of Darfur and Hamas.
But for devout leftists, when an Arab-supremacist Muslim paramilitary murders African Muslims, the Intersectional Bingo scorecard gets to be a confusing place.
Nevertheless, if one is looking to lob the “genocide” grenade or to find modern comparisons to the Rape of Nanjing, Sudan would be the most intellectually honest place to start. One suspects the applause from the Brampton crowd would have been somewhat thin if Chow had gone there.
Ultimately, Chow was hoping to score political points to salvage a re-election campaign that seemed assured months ago and is suddenly sagging.
Her predecessor, John Tory, beat her soundly in 2014, but after winning 62% of the vote and a third term in 2022, he abruptly resigned less than four months later after it emerged that he had a consensual extramarital affair with a staffer.
Chow won a snap election in which she was the sole candidate on the left, and was buoyed by the support of an outfit called Progress Toronto. With an election scheduled for next October, she suddenly finds herself governing a city that has woken up to its many problems, including public safety, a crumbling public transit system, and a lack of affordable housing.
More alarming for the mayor, Torontonians seem to have reached the audacious conclusion that the problems might have something to do with her leadership.
With talk of a Tory comeback, and centrist Councillor Brad Bradford openly campaigning, the road suddenly looks a lot bumpier for Chow.
It would appear that Toronto’s Jewish community has also had enough. After two years of harassment, intimidation, vandalism, and arson, Toronto’s Jewish community might have naively believed the Gaza ceasefire would bring it peace.
At my own synagogue, which is one of the city’s oldest and has been in operation since 1914, High Holiday services are usually held in the main synagogue building, with overflow at the nearby Jewish Community Centre. This year, there was no service in the main building, presumably to focus the large security presence at a single location.
In addition to being warned of “heightened security,” congregants were told that there would be no Yom Kippur food drive to support a local charity this year, and that they should instead donate cash. Think about that for a moment: when Toronto Jews want to commemorate their holiest day of the year by donating non-perishable goods to a non-Jewish charity, they now have to consider the possibility of being blown up in a terror attack.
The week after Chow made her comments was a busy one for the city’s antisemites and Israel haters. On Tuesday, a Toronto synagogue was vandalized for the 10th time in 18 months.
The following day, a group at Toronto Metropolitan University called Students Supporting Israel held an event at which speakers from the IDF came to share their stories. The organizers had been refused a permit on campus, so they held the event off-campus and took steps to keep the location secret.
Nevertheless, they were hunted down by protestors organized by Students for Justice in Palestine, some of whom stormed the building, broke a glass door, and caused minor injuries to one of the IDF vets.
Five arrests were made, and the university offered a milquetoast statement. Given the light touch approach Canadian authorities tend to apply in such cases, it seems unlikely the perpetrators will face any consequences.
Welcome to Canada in 2025.
Advocacy group B’nai Brith has circulated a petition to the city’s integrity commissioner alleging that the mayor’s comments violated the city’s code of conduct for members of council. It remains to be seen whether that allegation will hold up. But hopefully the message will be received regardless: while Toronto has no foreign policy, it does have many serious problems, including rampant intimidation of the Jewish community. If the current mayor isn’t up to fixing these problems, voters should find someone else who will.
Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.