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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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The post As ‘The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’ ends, will its Jewish legacy be more than a punchline? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America
On the National Mall Sunday, Christian worship music boomed from giant speakers as “Adonai” and other names of God flashed across jumbo screens behind a praise band. Pastors invoked America’s biblical destiny. Sadie Robertson, the Christian social media personality and granddaughter of Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson, preached from both the Old and New Testaments.
And then Rabbi Meir Soloveichik — the lone Jewish speaker at the planned nine-hour “Rededicate 250” rally called by President Donald Trump, billed as a national “jubilee of prayer, praise and thanksgiving” — stepped to the podium and began talking about Irving Berlin.
Soloveichik, 48, a scion of one of modern Orthodoxy’s most revered rabbinic families and a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, used his remarks to offer a Jewish case for American exceptionalism, a contrast to the explicitly Christian vision of the nation’s founding that defined the day.
Recalling how Berlin wrote “God Bless America” as fascism spread across Europe and antisemitism consumed the continent, Soloveichik described the song as both a patriotic anthem and a prayer of gratitude from a Jewish immigrant who found refuge in the United States. The hymn, he said, represented “a plaintive prayer to God that America continue to be blessed.”
The four-minute speech fit squarely within Soloveichik’s broader worldview. A senior scholar at the conservative Tikvah Fund and rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, he has long argued that America’s civic ideals are aligned with traditional Judaism and biblical morality. His 2024 book, Providence and Power: Ten Portraits in Jewish Statesmanship, examines Jewish political leadership through the lens of faith and moral responsibility.
For Soloveichik, the connection between Judaism and American identity culminated in the Second World War. He noted that “God Bless America” was first broadcast publicly the day after Kristallnacht, when Nazis destroyed Jewish homes and synagogues across Germany. “At the very moment when darkness deepened,” Soloveichik said, “America raised its voice united in the song that Irving Berlin wrote.”
He added that “in the years that followed 1938, the prayer that is ‘God Bless America’ was carried by American soldiers who defeated evil, liberating Europe and the world.”
Then came the line that drew some of the loudest applause of his remarks: “It is a reminder, as hatred of Jews makes itself manifest again, that antisemitism is utterly un-American.”
Separation of church and state
The moment captured the complicated role Jews increasingly occupy within the Trump-era religious right: embraced as part of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage, even as critics warn that the broader movement surrounding events like Rededicate 250 blurs the line between religious pluralism and Christian nationalism.
Rachel Laser, the Jewish CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, denounced the rally before the event. “If President Trump and his allies truly cared about America’s legacy of religious freedom, they would be celebrating church-state separation as the unique American invention that has allowed religious diversity to flourish in our country,” she said in a statement. “Instead, they continue to threaten this foundational principle by advancing a Christian Nationalist crusade to impose one narrow version of Christianity on all Americans.”
Sunday’s event — part revival meeting, part patriotic pageant — was the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s religious programming tied to this year’s 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and House Speaker Mike Johnson were slated to appear alongside evangelical pastors, worship leaders and conservative Christian influencers. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance were scheduled to address the crowd by video, while Trump himself spent the weekend golfing after returning from an overseas trip to China.
“This is a recognition of the deeply embedded history and religious and moral tradition of the country,” Johnson said Sunday on Fox News, dismissing criticism that the rally blurred the separation of church and state. Those objecting to the event, he added, “want to erase the history of America.”
No Muslim speakers appeared on the lineup. Organizers promoted Trump’s declaration of a national “Shabbat 250” observance the day prior as evidence of interfaith inclusion.
One of the Sunday event’s chief promoters, Trump spiritual adviser Pastor Paula White-Cain, had reassured supporters beforehand that the gathering would celebrate America’s Christian foundations without “praying to all these different Gods.”
Soloveichik did not address those tensions. Instead, he closed by returning to the image of America as a nation uniquely capable, in his telling, of transforming a Jewish refugee into the composer of one of the country’s most enduring patriotic hymns.
“To sing this song,” he said, “is to be reminded that America’s story is unique.”
“GOD BLESS AMERICA IS NOT JUST A SONG. IT’S A PRAYER.” 🇺🇸🙏
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik delivers a powerful reminder that America’s love of liberty has always been tied to faith — tracing its story and why anti-Semitism is fundamentally un-American. pic.twitter.com/aKMg42nS2I
— Real America’s Voice (RAV) (@RealAmVoice) May 17, 2026
The post At Trump’s Christian revival on the National Mall, one rabbi made a Jewish case for America appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel to Establish Defense Offices in Former UNRWA Compound
A man handles fallen cables at the Jerusalem headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as the headquarters is dismantled by Israeli forces, in East Jerusalem, January 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Israel’s cabinet on Sunday approved a plan to build a defense compound on the site of the recently demolished premises of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in East Jerusalem.
Israel in January demolished structures inside the UN Palestinian refugee agency’s East Jerusalem compound after seizing the site last year, in an act condemned by the agency as a violation of international law.
In a joint statement, the Defense Ministry and Jerusalem Municipality said the new compound would include the establishment of a military museum, a recruitment office and a defense minister’s office.
Defense Minister Israel Katz called the decision one of “sovereignty, Zionism, and security.”
UNRWA, which Israeli authorities accuse of bias, had not used the building since the start of last year after Israel ordered it to vacate all its premises and cease its operations.
A UNRWA spokesperson declined to comment on the Israeli plan.
The agency operates in East Jerusalem, which the U.N. and most countries consider territory occupied by Israel as it was captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel considers all Jerusalem to be its indivisible capital.
UNRWA also operates in Gaza, the West Bank and elsewhere in the Middle East, providing schooling, healthcare, social services and shelter to millions of Palestinians.
“There is nothing more symbolic or justified than establishing the new IDF recruitment office and defense establishment institutions precisely on the ruins of the former UNRWA compound — an organization whose employees took part in the massacres, murders, and atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on October 7,” Katz said.
Israel has alleged that some UNRWA staff were members of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and took part in the attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 Israelis and led to Israel’s war against Hamas.
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Palestinian Leader’s Son Wins Role in Abbas’ Party, Official Says
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, accompanied by his son Yasser, leaves a hospital in Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, May 28, 2018. REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
The millionaire businessman son of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has won a steering role in his father’s political party Fatah, a party official said on Sunday, as a succession fight looms for control of the embattled Palestinian Authority (PA).
Yasser Abbas won a seat in elections for the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body, at its first general conference in almost a decade. Mahmoud Abbas, 90, will remain chairman, it decided.
The PA was set up as an interim administration under the 1990s Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group still internationally recognized as the representative of the Palestinian people. The powerful Fatah party dominates both the PA and the PLO.
Abbas’ son’s foray into politics has fueled speculation that the president may be seeking to position Yasser, 64, to succeed him as head of Fatah.
That has drawn criticism from some Fatah officials, who say Yasser would be unable to unify Palestinians or help them chart a new political future after years without national elections or tangible steps toward statehood.
In the more than two decades since Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Fatah founder Yasser Arafat, Palestinians have come to view the PA as ineffective and corrupt, something denied by Abbas, who has ruled by decree since his mandate expired in 2009.
In 2007, Abbas’ Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip were overpowered by Hamas militants who seized control of the enclave, a year after Hamas swept the Palestinian parliamentary elections.
Peace talks with Israel meant to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem collapsed in 2014, with expanding Israeli settlements since carving up areas slated for Palestinian statehood. The PA is also grappling with a financial crisis.
Yasser Abbas, who has never held an official role within Fatah or the PA, runs tobacco and contracting firms in the parts of the West Bank where the PA exercises limited self rule. Critics have long alleged that he and his brother Tarek have used public funds to help their businesses, allegations both men reject.
Among others to have won seats on the Central Committee are Majed Faraj, head of the General Intelligence Agency, and former militant group leader Zakaria Zubeidi, released in a Hamas-Israel prisoner-hostage exchange as part of a 2025 Gaza ceasefire.