Features

Both sides

Introduction: We were sent this short story by John Ginsburg, who is a Winnipeg writer. Given the constant stream of stories about students and professors being intimidated by forces championing political correctness, especially when it comes to anything having to do with Israel, we thought it timely to publish the story here.
June 2021 Mackenzie King College Walking east, past the Theatre building, the view was genuinely inspiring, especially in the bright morning sunshine.

To the right, the contemplative, Ivy-covered Arts Building and the century-old chapel. Straight ahead, the gleaming river and the lush green landscape beyond. To the south, the arching Unity Bridge. But the route to the classroom for Media Studies 32.455, Professor Latchman’s course, was somewhat less scenic. One had to walk around to the opposite side of the Theatre building, in through the small service entrance, and then down concrete stairs to the basement, arriving at a low-ceilinged, damp and windowless room. Such were the current circumstances of the Department of Media Studies, pursuing the noble heights of academic inquiry from the gloomy depths of a former workshop. Its old haunts, on the opposite side of the university, were being renovated from top to bottom.

The condensed, two-and-a-half-month course was entering its final few weeks. With the resumption of in-person lectures, the bright, doubly-vaccinated students had initially been swept in by a wave of camaraderie and intellectual enthusiasm. Reality, however, had soon intervened, an unrelenting schedule of jam-packed three-hour lectures, demanding term papers and nerve-wracking oral presentations. The dim subterranean venue only added to the hard-pressed feeling among the students.
Latchman’s course was entitled Political Correctness and Cancel Culture in the Media and the Arts. It was a senior-level honours course, requiring three term papers and two in-class presentations of each of its twenty-five earnest young scholars. They were a diverse lot, of all kinds of ethnicities and backgrounds. There they sat, in their sculpted, multi-coloured hair, with their necks, arms and legs artistically muralled with tattoos; their noses, lips, eyebrows, ears and navels sporting gaudy piercings; their epigrammed apparel and trendy jewellery on full display. At the front of the class, standing at the lectern, their middle-aged, conservatively-dressed professor was unfazed. The individual expressions of diversity and identity neither made him feel old nor out of place. It was simply the times. One moment might call for ethnic, racial and sexual identities to be completely ignored, while the next moment called for them to be pushed loudly to the front, singled out and magnified. However, for Professor Howard Latchman, it wasn’t a particularly difficult academic world to navigate.

Latchman was a full professor at Mackenzie King College, accomplished in his field, enjoying his twenty-sixth year as a faculty member. He was of medium height and build, with thin, greying hair. He had a warm and friendly manner and had always been well-regarded by his students. His annual student evaluations highlighted his high academic standards, as well as his accessibility and fairness. On the negative side, students found him rather boring at times, and his methods somewhat plodding. His non-academic interests were completely unknown to his students and would have come as an amusing surprise. From his teenage years right up to the present, Latchman had been a drummer in a number of rock and roll bands, most recently with The Heads, playing sixties and seventies songs in nearby towns and bars. Not to mention his tennis playing; he was good enough to compete in senior-level tournaments, once reaching the provincial quarter-finals.
Latchman was Jewish, but entirely secular. This was a constant sore point with his two older siblings, alienating him from them more and more over the years. Brought up in the same conventional Jewish home, he’d been expected to tow the line. Fortunately they lived halfway across the country, so their meetings were infrequent.

He was divorced, with two children in their late twenties. His area of specialty was Journalism. From a doctoral thesis on corporate bias in the western news media, his work had naturally evolved. With social media now dominating the flow of information, his methods of study had radically changed. But the same issues remained at the core: misinformation and the control of information; by large corporations and by special interest groups.
For the June 14 class, student presentations were scheduled for the entire lecture time. Each student had twenty minutes to speak, on a recent case of cancel culture, followed by ten to fifteen minutes of questions and comments from the rest of the class.
With only a few weeks remaining in the spring-session course, Latchman knew most of the twenty-five students by name and by appearance. The first speaker of the day was a Black woman named Letanya Wynn. She was a prominent figure in the class, very bright and always highly engaged, taking every opportunity to aggressively speak out, offering her own point of view on whatever was being discussed. She was very slight in stature, with closely-cropped orange and yellow hair, wearing massive hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. Latchman took a quick glance at the text message she had sent him, containing the title and summary of her talk. ‘Good morning everyone’ he said. ‘Our first speaker is Letanya Wynn. She is going to be telling us about a cartoon that was recently published, in a Seattle online magazine. A textbook case of cancel culture. We will follow the same format as previous presentations. At the conclusion of the presentation, we will entertain comments and questions. Ms. Wynn!’

Letanya Wynn made her way, a little awkwardly, from the back of the class up to the sixty-inch monitor at the front, where she inserted the small USB drive she’d been carrying. She selected the only file on the drive, a jpg file. It was a copy of a cartoon, recently published in The North West Record, a Seattle-based publication. The cartoon shows two men having sex, one Black and the other white, with their naughty parts concealed behind a chair in the centre foreground. The Black man is positioned behind the white man, who is bent over. A shirt is draped over the chair, displaying a large BLM logo. In the background, a grim-faced, white uniformed cop has entered the room, standing in a doorway. He is pointing a gun at the two men, with a talking bubble that says ”You’re supposed to be two metres apart, not two feet.” The caption underneath the cartoon says ”Basic Length Measurements”. This satirical take on the coronavirus pandemic and the BlackLivesMatter movement had been greeted with an immediate social outcry online. Its creator, a Black male cartoonist, was fired as a result, by his publisher, who was also a Black male.
Letanya Wynn’s presentation was focused and articulate, extremely well done. Latchman wasn’t surprised that she strongly supported the cartoonist’s firing, arguing that the themes represented in the cartoon were demeaning to Black people and personally offensive to her. But he was surprised by the subdued class response. Maybe it was because it was so early in the morning, he thought. Maybe non-Black students felt they didn’t belong in the conversation. Whatever the reason, only two students commented on the presentation, both Black men. They both disagreed with Letanya Wynn, instead finding the cartoon to be a clever work of satire, and seeing the cartoonist’s firing as an extreme overreaction.
Thinking further about the minimal class reaction, Latchman wondered if, compared to other recent topics, the class didn’t find the cartoon to be especially shocking or controversial. In any case, he was very impressed by the presentation. Twenty out of twenty, he thought. A great presentation.
Latchman glanced at his phone and quickly re-read the details for the second talk of the morning. It would probably be less engaging than the first talk, he thought. Less contentious.

‘Class, I would next like to introduce Mark Mazur. He is going to talk about the recent Facebook controversy. I’m sure we’ve all heard about it. Certain posts were not published at first, but then appeared later, after a reaction against the company. Mr. Mazur!’
The second speaker was evidently Jewish, and religious, wearing a kipa. He was tall and very thin, with a neatly trimmed beard and a friendly face. After being introduced, he stood up from his chair near the front of the room and walked over to the lectern, where he placed his notes. He was soft-spoken, with an easy and confident manner. ‘Good morning’ he said to the class, with a smile. ‘When I read about this recent Facebook controversy, I naturally read some of the posts that had not appeared for so-called ”technical reasons”. They were published a few days later, after people had complained that Facebook had shown an anti-Palestinian bias, by deliberately blocking the posts. Of course, this is not the first time that Facebook has faced these kinds of accusations, sometimes because they do allow certain posts. For example, when they published all the lies and distortions from Trump’s supporters, during the election campaign and after.’
‘There are three main questions here. First of all, is it just a coincidence that many of those posts – I didn’t try to read more than ten or so – promoted a completely one-sided picture of the recent war between Israel and Hamas? Secondly, does Facebook have the legal right, and perhaps the moral responsibility, to not publish whatever it deems to be inappropriate? Are Palestinian-run websites held to the same moral standards? Do we insist they publish pro-Israeli posts, balancing these with opposite points of view? Or do we think they should be free to decide which posts to publish and in what numbers? Thirdly, and what is most relevant to this course, is why did Facebook backtrack? Why did the policy change, with the posts being published after all? Was it political correctness, catering to an offended group, rather than just sticking to an otherwise reasonable and clearly defensible editorial stance?’
‘I’m Jewish, so some people might try to diminish what I have to say because of a perceived bias. Of course, such an ad hominem assumption of bias could be made against detractors as well. In any event, let me first summarize what I consider to be a truthful, balanced view of the war. To begin, the loss of life and the destruction of property, the traumatization of people, especially children, on both sides, is absolutely horrible. These are the terrible costs and results of war. However we measure the consequences, it is obvious there cannot only be a picture from one side. Hamas sent literally thousands of missiles into Israel, killing people and destroying property. The effects were greatly reduced because the Israelis were able to shoot down most of those bombs before they landed. Hamas fired those missiles with the intention of killing whomever they happened to kill, destroying whatever property they happened to strike. They were aimed more or less randomly. Consequences in return, to the population of Gaza, were horrendous. There were – ‘

At that moment, one of the other students interrupted, a woman wearing a hijab, sitting near the front of the class. She stood up, looking directly at the speaker. Speaking with an Arabic accent, her tone was fierce and accusatory. She was essentially shouting. ‘You are killing children’ she said to the speaker. ‘You are destroying hospitals. You are killing innocent people.’
Professor Latchman was somewhat caught off guard, but he quickly moved to stop the woman’s outburst. Having spoken to the woman on a few previous occasions, he knew her name was Jamila Fayad, and that she was an immigrant from Syria, having settled in the area a few years before, with her parents and siblings. She was one of four religious Muslims in the class, three female and one male. The others were seated side-by-side in the row behind her. In a class that consisted mostly of people of color, they hadn’t particularly stood out during the previous weeks of the course. As occurred to Latchman in this moment, this was likely because the course topics had centred almost completely around anti-Black racism and issues involving sexual identity.

Latchman, seated at the front of the room right beside the speaker, stood up and made a restraining gesture to the woman with his right hand. It was abundantly clear to him that the situation could easily escalate if he didn’t quickly take control. ‘Please. I must ask you to stop, Ms. Fayad. Please sit down’ he said, in a firm, resolute tone, addressing the woman as he did all of his students, using her last name. ‘You will have an opportunity to comment once the speaker has finished. Please allow the speaker to make his presentation. We have all agreed that there will be no comments until these presentations have been completed. And please, remember not to attack people personally. We can strongly disagree with what someone says, but let us challenge what has been said. No personal attacks or insinuations. That is very important. Okay. Mr. Mazur, please continue.’
‘Thank you, Professor Latchman’ said the young speaker, apparently unrattled by the outburst. ‘Justifying war and conflict and killing might be called a fool’s job’ he continued. ‘Yet, if people are not provided with an accurate historical picture of conflict, it can make the situation worse and lead to further violence and injustice. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Our country and other western countries have declared this to be the case. Their only goal in relation to Israel is quote, to drive the Jews into the sea. The idea of a peace treaty or peaceful co-existence is not even a possibility. The claims made about land can – ‘
Again Jamila Fayad stood up, confronting the speaker in the same defiant, angry way. ‘You must end the occupation’ she said. ‘You must give back our land. You are killing our people. We have the right to fight for the liberation.

Anticipating this second outburst, Latchman had already decided on his response, and he acted swiftly. He stood up and again addressed the woman. ‘That is enough’ he said, speaking somewhat forcefully while trying to retain his composure. ‘This presentation is over for now. Thank you, Mr. Mazur. I am sorry for the interruption. Class, we are going to take a fifteen minute break now, before the next talk. Would everyone please leave the room, except for Ms. Fayad. If you wouldn’t mind, Ms. Fayad, I would like to have a word with you before we continue.’
In his head, Latchman was rapidly composing a short speech he would deliver to Jamila Fayad, some careful form of admonishment. How she had attacked the speaker personally. How she hadn’t let him speak. How she had been rude and disrespectful. How she had denied him the same basic freedom of speech she would want for herself. But he never had the opportunity, as Jamila Fayad filed out of the room along with everyone else. For fifteen minutes, Latchman stood waiting for her to return, but she never did. When the students returned fifteen minutes later, she was not among them.

This was certainly not the first time a student had filed a formal complaint about some aspect of Media Studies 32.455. One of Latchman’s colleagues had faced a similar situation a few years before, when a Black student had objected to a class discussion on rap music. The professor had played a selection of songs in class, all laced with profanity and the N-word, which the student had found humiliating and demeaning. The professor had to appear before the Academic Standards Committee to answer for the material. He volunteered to meet with the student-complainant, and successfully diffused the matter. Most student-complaints never reached that stage. Though they were always taken seriously, such complaints were usually answered by no more than a polite note from the Dean’s office, thanking the student for the submission and emphasizing that it had been taken very seriously. The university was always striving to improve in its awareness of and sensitivity to student concerns, et cetera. It was virtually unheard of for any remedial or punitive action to result from such a complaint. So, when Howard Latchman was asked to meet with the Dean of Arts the following week, after a formal complaint had been filed by Jamila Fayad, he wasn’t particularly troubled by the matter.
On the day of his meeting with the Dean of Arts, Latchman came prepared, bearing a printed copy of the course outline for 32.455, as well as a detailed summary of the incident surrounding Mark Mazur’s presentation the previous week.

Like many faculty members at Mackenzie King College, Howard Latchman was mostly oblivious to administrative matters. He tried to have as little to do with meetings and committees and procedures as he could possibly get away with. For most of his years on the faculty, he would not even have been able to name the President of the university, or any of its senior administration. His focus was his teaching and his other academic work. As a full professor in his late fifties, he’d paid his dues, and he now purposefully managed his time with a minimum of aggravation and a minimum of futility. When he was escorted into his meeting with the Dean of Arts, by the administrative assistant, he was meeting the Dean for the first time.
Walking into the Dean’s inner office, carrying his documents, he was greeted by an exuberant, friendly-looking woman. ‘Hello, Professor Latchman’ she said. ‘I’m Amira Zuhar.’
Latchman only vaguely remembered the Dean’s recent hiring. People who had paid more attention would have remembered that she’d been highly touted at the time. She was a devout Muslim and well-known social activist. She’d been hired directly from the faculty ranks at the University of Toronto, with an impressive publication record in Political Studies, and with absolutely no prior administrative experience. Forty years of age, she was a shining example of Mackenzie King College’s commitment to diversity and inclusiveness at every level.
Dean Zuhar was wearing a beige hijab. She had a dazzling smile, immediately disarming Latchman. She motioned for him to sit down on one of the black leather chairs beside her oak desk, offering him water or coffee or tea, all of which he politely refused.
All of a sudden, Latchman’s situation seemed much more perilous. A hijab-wearing Dean was to pronounce on the complaint; on the confrontation between a hijab-wearing student and a male, Jewish student; a confrontation in which he, Latchman, himself Jewish, was deemed by the female student to be at fault. This might not go so well, Latchman thought to himself, nervously glancing around the spacious, well-appointed office. He decided he would wait for a moment before offering his documents to the Dean.

‘Professor Latchman’ the Dean began, flashing a quick smile, a smile Latchman was suddenly rather wary of. ‘Thank you for dropping by today. Jamila Fayad’s complaint… I’ve sent you a copy of what she’s written. I have spoken at some length with her.’ The Dean spoke evenly and quietly, maintaining direct eye-contact with Latchman. ‘Jamila says you silenced her. You stopped her from talking, from countering the pro-Israeli statements. She says you took the side of the Jewish student. Because you are Jewish. She says she can’t return to your class anymore, because you don’t give the same freedoms to all of your students.’
Latchman shuffled in his seat uneasily before offering a response. ‘Ms. Fayad stood up and interrupted the class presentation’ he said to the Dean. ‘She accused the speaker of killing children, of destroying homes. Accused him. He was not involved in the war. He’s not an Israeli; he’s a Canadian. She kept accusing him. It was horrible. She said things like ”You are killing children”; targeting her accusations directly at him. I politely asked her to stop, but she wouldn’t. She continued her personal attack. I had to stop the presentation entirely. It was embarrassing to expose my entire class to that kind of thing. I’ve prepared a detailed summary of the – ‘
The Dean cut Latchman off in mid-sentence. ‘As to the interruption and as to her point of view, she is obviously a passionate defender of the Palestinian cause. And she felt it was necessary to counter a one-sided justification of the actions of the Israelis. Her use of the personal pronoun ”you” probably has as much to do with second-language issues as anything else.’

Latchman was incensed at the Dean’s complete misreading of the incident. He struggled to remain composed. ‘No’ he said, his voice rising. ‘Her usage of ”you” cannot in any way be attributed to second-language issues. She very deliberately pointed to him, and targeted the accusations at him. There was no doubt about it at all. She is a bright student. She obviously knows the difference between ”you” and ”the Israeli army”. There were twenty-four witnesses to the incident, other than me. How many of them have you bothered to interview?’ His tone had quickly progressed to one of anger and impatience. ‘I’m guessing very few, if any. I guess I should have expected you to take her side, but what you are saying is patently ridiculous and simply wrong. All of those statements about the way things proceeded, and the accusations made about my reaction, they are all false. In fact, they’re libelous. She should examine her own behaviour. The ”Jewish student”, as she calls him, did everything he could to be even-handed, respectful and non-accusatory. The whole point was to address the political correctness involved in the matter. In Facebook’s reversing its decision to not allow certain posts that were clearly pro-Palestinian. Was it political correctness that pressured the company to reverse its position? The presenting student was admirably respectful and sensitive to the Gaza side of the conflict. He didn’t even get to fully express his thoughts on the matter. She jumped on him and fired off some very hostile, personal accusations at him.’
Dean Zuhar responded in a much sterner tone than before. ‘Professor Latchman’ she said, ‘I am very much disturbed by your implying my taking sides here. That is certainly not the case. I understand and I very much appreciate the sensitive nature of this classroom topic. Especially for both Jewish and Muslim students. But Professor Latchman, we can’t have students accusing our faculty of silencing their views. We can’t have our students saying it is impossible for them to continue their attendance in class; impossible because of their humiliation and their perceived mistreatment at the hands of their professors. This goes well beyond reasonable classroom behaviour and course management. I’m afraid I’m going to have to suspend you from any further involvement in this course. Your department chair, Professor Guilfoyle, will appoint a replacement to finish the remaining few weeks of lectures. I have spoken to him this morning. For the present, there are no further consequences to you with respect to this incident. However, there will be a full internal inquiry into the matter. I have asked Professor Nkosa, the chair of the Academic Standards Committee, to conduct a thorough review of the matter, including your role. Thank you for coming in this morning.’ Saying this, Dean Zuhar stood up to see Latchman out.

Latchman was stunned. It took him a moment to begin breathing evenly again. Getting to his feet, he was fuming mad. ‘Are you serious?’ he said to the Dean. ‘This is a travesty. There were twenty-four witnesses to the event. Did you talk to them? Does the truth matter? Do you -‘
Dean Zuhar cut him short. ‘Professor Latchman’ she said, firmly. ‘I’m very sorry. I have to interrupt you. I know you must find this very upsetting. I’m going to wish you a good day. This is a most unfortunate incident. Again, thanks for coming in.’
It was all Latchman could do, to simply walk out of the room, without lashing out at the Dean of Arts. He stormed out of the office, out of the building and onto the nearly empty quad outside, shaking his head in disbelief.
THE END

Post Views: 702

Features

Is Netflix’s new show the most Jewish cartoon ever?

The Schwooper family — including everyone’s spouses — over a tense dinner. Photo by Netflix

Nearly every episode in ‘Long Story Short,’ from the creator of ‘BoJack Horseman,’ revolves around a very Jewish moment

By Mira Fox, PJ Grisar, Olivia Haynie and Nora Berman August 22, 2025

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

The following contains light spoilers for the Netflix show Long Story Short.

The Schwooper family, the central figures in the new animated Netflix series Long Story Short, are diverse and unique — religious and atheist, gay and straight, farmers and businesswomen. Simultaneously, they are basically like every Jewish family you’ve ever met.

Naomi (Lisa Edelstein), the family’s domineering matriarch, is constantly nagging her kids to do better — her youngest son Yoshi (Max Greenfield) should be more professional; Shira (Abbi Jacobson), the middle child, should wear more dresses; her oldest, Avi (Ben Feldman) should be more observant. Her kids are constantly rolling their eyes and responding with sarcastic jabs. You’ve certainly seen this family. Maybe you’ve lived it.

The show, from animated hit BoJack Horseman’s creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg, isn’t linear; it jumps across the decades to show us snapshots of the young Schwoopers circa day school as well as their own parenting during the COVID pandemic and its aftermath. (Season 1 ends in 2022.)

Though the Schwoopers face crises that could befall any family — like Yoshi signing up for a multi-level marketing scheme involving spring-loaded mattresses — many of the show’s plotlines grapple deeply with Jewish identity.

Avi wonders if being Jewish simply means staying insular, eating fish that looks like a brain and being constantly afraid; Yoshi has a bar mitzvah crisis, struggling with what the rite means if you don’t believe in God; Shira is desperate to get her kids into day school, and is convinced it is only through making her mother’s knishes that she can win the administration’s approval.

The show takes a thoughtful, specific approach to Jewishness. But it also feels no pressure to explain itself, leaving plenty of Jewish moments that might not land, or even make sense, if they don’t reflect your experience.

Which left the Forward’s culture team with a lot to chew on. Who is Long Story Short for, and what is it saying? Read on for our discussion.

Jewish representation and Jewish clichés

Mira: I really liked that this show was not heavy-handed with its depictions of actual Jewish practice and identity. And I loved that we had a lot of really realistic different depictions. We have the oldest brother, Avi, who has sort of rejected Judaism, and resents it; he married a non-Jew and isn’t raising his daughter Jewish. Then there’s Shira, the middle child, who is gay — but even though her family looks different, she has pretty much stayed true to the Conservative Judaism she was raised with, and is sending her kids to Jewish day school. And then there’s Yoshi, the youngest, who ends up forging a totally different Judaism from his family, after a winding and experimental journey. I know lots of Yoshis and Avis and at least a few Shiras.

That being said, some characters’ sort of Jewy affect did rankle me a little. My mom and particularly my maternal grandmother absolutely do fit the show’s depiction of an overbearing Jewish mom. But as accurate as that feels to me, it also feels a little overdone; haven’t we told the jokes about the nagging Jewish mother enough times? It felt like a little bit of a cop-out because it’s such a trope. It’s an easy way to make a show feel really Jewish, but not an interesting one.

Nora: At first, I felt like the show was building up to be a deeper revelation about who Naomi was. There’s a really moving moment in an episode that flashes back to when she was a kid, and she cuts herself with a brooch to get her chaotic family’s attention. I thought, OK, we’re finally getting into it, this will be the episode where we learn who Naomi is. But it didn’t get explored.

Similarly, with Avi, I wanted to know what the roots of his Jewish disaffection were. He just comes off as a grump that Shira makes fun of for being a self-hating Jew. There were moments where I thought we’d get a deeper character study, and it didn’t fulfill that promise.

PJ: I think part of what it’s trying to do, with this fractured storytelling, is reflect the flow of when you’re with family and you’re remembering things. The conversation is discursive, it goes back and forth in time. We don’t talk about these things in a linear way.

The show feels like a blank check for Raphael Bob-Waksberg to make whatever he wanted after this huge success with BoJack Horseman, which was a weird and funky show, basically about Scott Baio as a horse (and a Democrat). What is interesting about Long Story Short was that it is living in this real place of specificity and isn’t afraid to do that.

Based on my conversation with Bob-Waksberg, he didn’t want to be boxed in. So it’s a Jewish show that’s not about antisemitism. And it doesn’t want to touch Israel because it’s just not interested in that. These people have rich Jewish lives and through these three siblings we have this dialectic with different ways to engage with being Jewish. I found it refreshing.

On the show’s approach to diversity

PJ: I want to talk more about the Nicole Byer character, Shira’s wife, Kendra. When we first meet her, it is clear she’s Jewish. And I think we were all hoping that it wouldn’t be explained, because why would we have to; Black Jews exist. But then it’s revealed that she’s a convert, and we have this moment with her in the Vidui prayer on Yom Kippur. And the story we’re given about how she ends up finding Judaism feels a little contrived.

Olivia: That’s something I thought a lot about. Black Jews are still treated as an anomaly, as something that needs explaining. When they meet at the grocery store while shopping for Rosh Hashanah dinner, the show seems to make fun of Shira for being so presumptuous when she tells Kendra that it’s nice she got invited to a Rosh Hashanah dinner. Kendra asks, “Why are you assuming, how do you know I’m not hosting?”

But then in the next episode, it sort of seems like she was right to assume that. We find out that Kendra became interested in Judaism as a way to explain a sudden absence from work without getting in trouble. It was very Black Cindy from Orange is the New Black — she’s converting to get something out of it. They turn it into a genuine moment, but why did she need to be swindling her way out of something?

I also think the show oversimplified how accepting Naomi would be of a Black daughter-in-law. She can’t stand Avi’s “shiksa” girlfriend, but Kendra is perfect? From what I know about interracial relationships, I wouldn’t say that is likely.

Mira: I think the smoothing of how diversity is received in general was interesting. Not just with Kendra’s conversion moment, but also with her and Shira being queer. It’s not really touched on if that would be an issue for them at all in the synagogue or day school or with any of the family, and I think it almost certainly would be, at some point.

The audience for the show

Mira: I wonder what the sell for this show is. I know that I am overwhelmed every time I open a streaming app by the sheer volume of new shows I’ve never heard of. And if there’s not some big monocultural show like Succession that everyone is watching, or nothing that I go in searching for, I have trouble choosing. While “cartoon about Jewish family” obviously will appeal to a certain set of Jewish families, who else is going to watch that? I’m sure some BoJack fans will watch, of course, but I wonder if they will stay.

Nora: What is Raphael Bob-Waksberg saying about Judaism? We think he got a blank check to make this show, and he does present this diversity of American Judaism. But I’m still curious about which parts he chooses to tease out more and which he doesn’t and why.

Olivia: It feels like the show is really for Jews. I really couldn’t imagine non-Jews watching this. I was thinking it will be a word-of-mouth show, like they read about it in the Forward or hear about it from their kids.

I think there’s things you just can’t understand if they’re not explained to you. Like when Naomi explains their observance level.

PJ: The way Naomi describes their practice is “progressive, Conservative, ritual over faith and blind practice. That’s literally the only way it makes sense.”

Olivia: That makes perfect sense to me because it’s like my grandparents. My grandmother would cook bacon, and they didn’t believe in God, but it was super important to them that their grandkids were raised Jewish in a synagogue. But when my mom stopped eating shellfish and pork, her parents never knew because they’d make fun of her — that’s too observant. Even though they were huge members of their congregation.

That said, I did think that some of the references that would have been inside jokes will make sense because of how much Jewish organizations have been in the news, like a bit about a bar mitzvah check that’s a donation to the ADL.

Mira: I agree that a lot of stuff is going to fly over some non-Jews’ heads, or even some Jews’ heads. But I also think that is what makes this show good, and not annoying or didactic. I’ve written so many reviews of Hallmark Hanukkah movies complaining about how they feel the need to put in these awkward, forced explanations. A character will say something like: “Hey, do you want to come spin the dreidel? It’s my favorite traditional Hanukkah game! Gee, I just love those chocolate gelt coins.”

If I don’t want a show to explain every little Jewish thing, I think it looks like Long Story Short. Maybe not everyone gets every joke. But that means it is going to be a richer text for Jews. Even in places where I maybe wanted more development, I didn’t need it. I know so many people who have, for example, converted or are in an interfaith relationship, so I have a depth of references that I extrapolate from to enhance or enrich my understanding of the characters.

What does the show say to Jews?

PJ: I think that it’s not meant to be prescriptive or say anything definitive. When I spoke to him, he said he had a lot of ideas and he didn’t feel the need to decide anything. He could just let the characters talk through things. Which I think is not a cop-out, actually, it’s a very Jewish approach.

Nora: It’s refreshing that it’s not about what it’s like to be a Jew after Oct. 7. It’s not that it doesn’t deal with deep themes, but it’s just a family of Jews existing, and we don’t need to explain anything about it. They deal with maybe internalized antisemitism, or grief, or wrestling with how they want to be Jewish in the world. But it’s not so angsty.

Mira: Because Abbi Jacobson from Broad City plays Shira, I was thinking a lot about Broad City while I watched, and where Long Story Short fits into the canon of Jewish media.

I felt like Broad City offered a new model of Judaism for our generation, where some of these old tropes about nagging Jewish mothers or Jewish American Princesses or Jewish guilt were present, but the characters didn’t feel weighed down by them. The show offered this very empowered version of Jewish femininity that wasn’t about competing against shiksas or being scolds. Abbi and Ilana got to be fun and irreverent in their Jewishness, like when they made a huge deal about fasting for Yom Kippur and then broke it with bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches and didn’t feel bad about it at all.

I think Long Story Short is very much about the younger generation trying to figure out their relationship with Judaism, but it doesn’t offer as clear of an idea of how they do so as Broad City did. But it’s clear that all the children feel some need to reinvent their Jewishness.

Olivia: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one of the shows that comes to mind for me, and the mother in that has so few redeeming qualities. There’s that whole song, “Remember How We Suffered,” that’s talking about how the only thing Jews do is talk about the Holocaust. There’s really no representation of Judaism outside of it being a chore. And Broad City was refreshing in that way — the mother in it was a stereotype, but she and her daughter have a great relationship.

I think Long Story Short was refreshing in the sense that Judaism isn’t only a burden, there’s a value and a richness to it.

PJ: I think this show is continuing in a longer tradition, maybe starting with Philip Roth and Portnoy’s Complaint, of Jews writing without their own institutional PR in mind. Not to make us look noble or good, but to present us as openly flawed. That continues on through the Coen brothers and A Serious Man, where it’s incredibly Jewish but not particularly flattering. Now we’re at this point where we don’t have to care so much about making a political statement or to dig so hard to critique our own community. It’s more tender, it’s coming from less of an angry place, but it still feels part of that tradition. We can approach with love but with an awareness that some stereotypes exist for a reason.

Like there’s this shyster-y lawyer character, the uncle, played by Danny Burstein. We go back and we see the family has a running joke about him. It is acknowledging that this uncle guy is a type of person who exists, but it’s also the type of person we make fun of — they’re a source of humor. We’re all in on the joke.

Nora: I kept thinking about the show Transparent; I think it is just sort of nice to see a family with a lot of tenderness going through these evolutions and challenges without having to justify it. It doesn’t shy away from stereotypes, but lovingly engages with them.

I also really appreciated the way it was talking about what it’s like to be marginalized as a Jew in America without it being didactic or political. I’m thinking of the episode where they go to school for a Christmas show, and the songs — one of them has the lyrics “Hanukkah, Ramadan, Kwanzaa too — we tolerate them all, but there’s nothing like Christmas!” That is exactly what it’s like to be a Jew in America at Christmas, where everyone is goading you to just participate because everyone loves Christmas. It’s just such a specific experience that I’d never seen represented.

Mira: Long Story Short might not give a lot of factual information about what it means to keep kosher or anything like that, but I think it does a good job at presenting Jews of all levels of observance as normal people who are also a relatable American family.

What do we want to see in the second season?

Mira: I’d love to see Shira’s coming out, and the first time she brought Kendra home, to know how her family came around to loving her wife so easily. I also want to see more of Yoshi’s Jewish journey, which is clearly winding; I feel like he definitely took a Buddhism pit stop at some point, maybe while he worked on the goat farm and smoked a lot of weed.

And I think I want to see the grandparents’ generation, and with it, more about how Naomi and Elliot — but particularly Naomi — grew up. I want to see a bit more of her tenderness; we get glimpses, but that’s it.

Nora: I want to see how Naomi and Elliot met. I also would love a bris episode for Shira’s kids, Walter and Benjamin — I think that would be hilarious. I also want to know what happened with Avi and his ex-wife’s marriage; I have the impression it has something to do with his relationship with Judaism.

Olivia: There’s a scene in the opening episode where Avi makes a joke in the car and it relieves some tension and he and Naomi make eye contact in the rearview mirror and smile. It shows they have this deep, sweet, special relationship that kind of falls apart by the time he’s an adult. I want to know more about him.

I’d be curious to know more about Kendra’s family; we get a bit of them in that one episode on her conversion, but I’d love to see where her family is now after she has converted. I’d like to know more about ָָAvi’s teenage daughter and how she sees her family. And maybe more about their lives outside the family, like with friends — I have no idea what Shira does for work.

PJ: I imagine Shira is an academic who wrote her dissertation on Walter Benjamin, and that’s why her two kids are named Walter and Benjamin.

Mira Fox is a reporter at the Forward. Get in touch at fox@forward.com or on Twitter @miraefox.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at grisar@forward.com and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

Olivia Haynie is an editorial fellow at the Forward.

olivia@forward.com

Post Views: 59

Features

New biography of Carole King explores the musical genius of America’s most successful female singer-songwriter

Reviewed by BERNIE BELLAN

Carole King (born Carol Klein in 1941) is arguably the most successful female singer-songwriter of all time. With over 75 million record albums sold and with 118 songs that she either wrote or co-wrote, King’s prolific and fabulously successful career has been the subject of several books and numerous articles, including her own memoir, published in 2012, which was titled “Carole King: A Memoir.”

Now, in a soon-to-be-released book, titled “Carole King: She Made the Earth Move,” journalist Jane Eisner takes a fresh look at King’s life, including her two most recent marriages (which King tends to gloss over in her own memoir, according to Eisner) to two men who were abusive to King, both physically and mentally.

Eisner herself has had a very successful career, having worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years in various positions, including as a reporter, editor, and executive. Later, she spent 10 years as editor of The Forward, a leading American Jewish newspaper (which has now transitioned to an online version only and can be read for free at forward.com.)

The book is the latest addition to a series of books produced by Yale University Press titled “Jewish Lives.” According to the Jewish Lives website, “Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity.
“Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences.
“Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present.”

In Carole King’s case, however, King has given very few interviews over the years and Eisner was not able to speak to King directly. In explaining how she approached this book, Eisner writes: ” I’ve taken on the challenge to write an interpretive biography of a musical icon who is brilliant, accomplished, and complicated.
“This book was quite a journey. Though I’ve admired her music since Tapestry was released, I wanted to understand it from the inside out. To do that, I studied piano for two years, which enabled me to dissect her musicality and describe what musicians call the ‘Carole King chord.’
“Carole King was her own kind of trailblazer — she often led recording sessions in a studio full of men as she defied expectations of what a woman can and should do. I can relate. Often being the only woman in the room deeply shaped my outlook, too. It made me aware of the stories we weren’t telling and the perspectives that escaped our attention; it also made me try hard to pay it forward, and to help younger women achieve their own professional dreams.
“Ambition and anxiety, accomplishment and regret – all those conflicting emotions have laced through my personal and professional lives. That’s one reason I was drawn to write about Carole King. She faced that juggling act from the highest levels in her field. ‘My baby’s in one hand, I’ve a pen in the other,’ as she memorably wrote.”
I hadn’t realized that Eisner did not have a background in music until after I finished reading her biography of King. That makes what she has produced all the more admirable, as a great many parts of the book dissect the song writing experience in great detail. In fact, if you don’t know how to read music (which, I admit, I myself don’t), you will probably be at a loss trying to understand many parts of this book. Eisner aims to do her best to explain the genius that lay behind KIng’s best works – and how incredibly varied her style was.
Anyone who has seen the Broadway musical about King, titled “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” would have an appreciation for just how gifted King was. As Eisner explains, King’s musical talent was on clear display from a very early age. Her mother, Eugenia (née Cammer) discovered that young Carol (who added an “e” to her name when she left home when she only 17 to try to forge a career in songwriting, and changed her name from Klein to King) was very gifted musically already by the age three. Eugenia taught Carol piano herself, including music notation and proper note timing.
In Eisner’s account of King’s childhood, her early years come across as very happy. The book’s introductory chapter delves into both Carole’s mother’s and father’s family histories, going all the way back to Europe in the 1800s. King’s father, Sidney, was a firefighter in Brooklyn, where the family lived but, along with several other Jewish firefighters, Sidney purchased land on a lake in Connecticut called Lake Waubeeka. Young Carol loved her summers spent in what were very rustic conditions – and Eisner suggests that early childhood experience played a pivotal role later in King’s life when, after having achieved fabulous success – beginning with the release of her seminal album, Tapestry, in 1971 – soon to be followed by a prodigious number of other albums, King threw it all away and went to live in the Idaho wilderness – with two different husbands in succession, as mentioned, who both treated her cruelly.
Since King has remained largely silent about what led her to take such a major shift in her life – when she was still only in her 30s, moving away from the vibrant music scene of Los Angeles, where King had produced her greatest work, only to virtually cut herself (and three of her four children) from the world, Eisner uses her reportorial skills to pore through previous accounts of King’s life (including, of course, King’s own memoir), along with first hand interviews of many of the individuals who played key roles in King’s life, to try to understand how King could have changed gears so dramatically.
Eisner also refers to King’s younger brother, Richard, who was intellectually disabled and shunted off to live in an institution when he was only three. Since King rarely referred to him, Eisner speculates that King was somewhat traumatized by that experience – and that it might have played a role in the trauma that surfaced later in her life when she entered into marriages to two different – and abusive men – along with the trauma she endured when she found out her first husband, Gerry Goffin, had been unfaithful to her.
Since this book is part of a series called “Jewish Lives,” Eisner spends a fair bit of time examining how much being Jewish meant to Carole King – when, in her early years, for instance, she met Gerry Goffin, who was her first husband and first songwriting partner – and whom she married in a typically Jewish ceremony. After she was finally able to put the disastrous marriages to her last two husbands behind her, King once again returned to her Jewish roots, albeit in a spiritual form, but not with any particular involvement in the Jewish community, per se.

As Eisner writes toward the end of her book, “Throughout her very long career, King has displayed an anguished and conflicted attitude toward the public celebrity expected of her as an iconic musician. The yearning for privacy and the consequent fear of exposure, gripped her early on. Even though she had performed as a child, and sought the spotlight as a teenager, she often recoiled from it as an adult, especially as a mother. She complained about being so far away from her family when she was touring – indeed, wrote the definite song about just that experience – and yet grew to relish live performance with the same zeal and affection as she did when recording in a closed studio.”
The Broadway musical about King ends with the dissolution of her marriage to Goffin. Anyone who would have seen that show and might have been curious about what happened next in King’s life would find the answers in “Carole King: She Made the Earth Move.” Eisner notes that King’s second husband, Charles Larkey, was also Jewish and, like Goffin, was introduced to King through music, as Larkey was an accomplished musician who collaborated with King on many of her albums. But Larkey was five years younger than King, and Eisner speculates that the age difference played a major factor in their growing apart.
As talented as King was, she was also very much a devoted mother who was determined to stay at home with her children – two born while she was with Goffin, and two with Larkey. Eisner describes King’s initial reticence about playing her music in public – and the gradual ease she felt playing in front of larger and larger crowds, culminating in a concert in Central Park in 1973 with over 100,000 people in attendance.

“Carole King: She Made the Earth Move” is not meant to be an exposé of any sort. It’s written in a very professional, reportorial style. Eisner’s years of newspaper experience shine through, as she tells a very compelling story of genius punctuated by frequent heartbreak. Of course, anyone who has listened to Tapestry or some other of King’s albums of that era would be well aware that she fully used music to express her emotion. But Eisner also analyzes some of King and Goffin’s early – and greatest songs, such as “Up on the Roof,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman, ” to show that King was a musical genius from the very beginning – and that she knew exactly how to elicit an emotional response to her most heartfelt songs.
“Carole King: She Made the Earth Move” is set to be released September 16, according to information available online, but you can pre-order the book from a number of different sources.

“Carole King: She Made the Earth Move”
By Jane Eisner
Yale University Press
Set to be released Sept. 16, 2025

Post Views: 120