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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 Sundance, the AIDS crisis through the eyes of a bar mitzvah boy
If you were swept up by Aftersun when it debuted on the festival circuit three years ago, Israeli director Moshe Rosenthal’s new film Tell Me Everything may hit you immediately with a sense of deja vu.
It opens on thrashing bodies moving in slow motion in a dark club. Slowly, the strobe lights reveal a figure: a vision of a lost father, just out of reach to his adult child. The scene recalls, and could even be read as a quotation of Charlotte Wells’ semi-autobiographical portrait of a daughter and her tortured father on vacation at a Turkish resort in the 1990s.
While that sequence is very after Aftersun, Rosenthal’s film, in competition at Sundance, has its own merits and its own unwelcome glut of cliches. Tell Me Everything concerns the relationship of a son and a father, and where the source of the anguish of the father in Wells’ is never stated outright, here it’s made explicit.
A memory film split between the 1980s and 1990s, Rosenthal’s drama is told almost exclusively through the perspective of Boaz (Yair Mazor), introduced in the 1980s as a self-conscious soon-to-be bar mitzvah boy. One day, amid the confusion of the early AIDS crisis, Boaz sees his father Meir (Assi Cohen) with another man behind a stall at the pool showers.
Keeping the secret, Boaz grows paranoid about illness and insecure about his own masculinity. Where before he danced to Ilana Avital, voguing with the encouragement of his older sisters, he soon pivots to the edgier pop-rock of the Israeli band Mashina, punching the air with his sister’s mini weights. (He wraps the weights in black tape, he tells Meir, pointedly, using a slur for gay men, because they were pink.)
Teased in school for being small and coddled by the women in his family, not least his beautician mother Bella (Karen Tzur), when Boaz learns of Meir’s sexuality it awakens him to the ways he may fall short of the stereotypical Israeli swagger.
Rosenthal, who broke out four years ago with his debut feature Karaoke, has a deft touch for the period. Shooting in soft focus and working with a pastel palette, he evokes the haziness of the remembered past, half-understood even in the moment.
Tell Me Everything captures how kids process — in overheard snippets, glimpsed scenes — the adult world and the tactics of older siblings shielding a younger one from parental fights. (This family plays Scattergories when voices are raised in the hall.) It also gets at, a bit too strongly, the surrogate husband role often forced on a son by an unsatisfied and possessive mother.
Rosenthal sometimes overdoes it. He shows Boaz in bed, reading sensationalist newspaper headlines about AIDS by flashlight. His growing awareness of his father’s sexuality — and predicament — are shot like a horror film, a sarcoma lensed like a zombie bite. A later montage, showing the redesign of the home after Meir’s exit, is so on-the-nose it belongs in a different kind of ‘80s movie (one from the actual 1980s).
A cut to the late ‘90s, where Boaz (now played by Ido Tako) works at a gas station and nurses an ill-defined homophobia, brings a contrived closure that leaves an earlier plot point dangling.
But when the film works, as in a notable sequence set to Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” — Boaz and his sisters scramble to tape it off the car radio — it can be moving.
It won’t do for that song what Aftersun, a far quieter film, did for “Under Pressure” in the one moment it got loud, but the drama works as a time capsule. While today Israel is heralded as a gay mecca in the Middle East, the stigma the film hints at still exists with its own strain of toxic masculinity and machismo. (That Boaz’s army service doesn’t feature is notable, and could have made the film a richer text.)
Rosenthal has made a sensitive, if at times excessive, portrait of family life grounded in an uncertain past. That its story speaks to today is to be expected; that it might, at times, seem quaint or nostalgic is a sad truth of history.
Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything debuts Jan. 25 at the Sundance Film Festival. More information can be found here.
The post At Sundance, the AIDS crisis through the eyes of a bar mitzvah boy appeared first on The Forward.
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I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends
On Friday, hours before Shabbat began, I was arrested with 96 other multifaith clergy members and Faith in Minnesota leaders while protesting ICE in Minneapolis.
“Who could have imagined such times as these?” we sang, in the words of local songmaker Sarina Partridge. “We will grieve through these times, and soon enough we’ll be grieving on the other side.”
We cannot keep on with business as usual when our federal government is engaged in escalating state terror right here, right now. To grieve through these times is not enough; we must also act.
In the bitter cold, thousands of Minnesotans gathered at that airport. Tens of thousands more marched downtown, and others simply stayed home in the largest work stoppage in this country in many decades, the Day of Truth and Freedom. Nearly one thousand interfaith clergy answered the call to come to Minnesota — as they did for the Civil Rights Movement call to march in Selma in 1965 — to join us in the fight.
Standing there among them, on erev shabbes in the cold, I thought about the Torah portion we would read the next morning in shul: parashat Bo, from the Book of Exodus.
In it, the darkness of the ninth plague that befell the Egyptians is described as something that the oppressors — the mitzrim, which I’ll translate as “the ones of narrowed sight” — could actually touch. It was so thick that it kept them isolated from each other, unable to move.
In contrast, the dwellings of those seeking liberation were full of light.
I imagined that palpable darkness not as a punishment, but as a reflection of reality. The oppressors were unwilling to see the humanity of their neighbors. But if they had been, they too could have found themselves in dwellings full of light, able to clearly perceive the richness and possibility of living in a multiethnic community.
So too with the federal oppressors here in Minnesota, and those who collude with them. They are so welcome to join us in the light of that recognition. We were there at the airport to invite them in.
Instead, they arrested nearly 100 of us, while we sang and prayed for the protection of our people in the languages of our diverse traditions. Doing this work in coalition builds the power we need to break through the oppression: Our differences make us stronger.
As a minister next to me chanted the Lord’s Prayer, and a clergy member close by meditated with closed eyes, I chimed in with “Ana Bekoach,” a kabbalistic prayer that is part of Friday night services, envisioning divine protection holding close all the people of this place.
At our airport, Signature Aviation is facilitating the internment of our fellow Minnesotans every day, adults and children alike, flying them to detention centers where they suffer in conditions that deny their humanity. ICE is even disappearing workers at that airport from the jobs they work every day, keeping all of us safe and supported as we travel.
The airport is supposed to encourage connection. Come join us in our city, it is supposed to say; come see the beauty of our communities. Come, with your eyes open, to join a dwelling of light. Instead, it has turned into a hub of darkness, and separation.
As Jews, so many aspects of our history are particularly resonant in this moment.
As ICE has engaged in a campaign of terror in our city since the start of the year, I have heard Jews in my community reflecting on their families’ experiences with state terror in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and under dictatorships in Latin America. We join neighbors, refugees and immigrants from around the world, who never thought those feelings of suffocating fear would again define their lives here in the United States.
Now that they are, our obligation is to resist.
I was moved to tears during a march last week, when I saw families in hiding peeking out from behind their attic blinds as we sang of our love for our immigrant neighbors. It reminded me of Jewish families reduced to hiding in Nazi Germany, and of those brave souls who tried to protect them.
When I was arrested, I felt my heart open to the clergy standing and kneeling together with me, and all those in our state who have stood up with courage and generosity throughout these weeks and months. I hoped that all those who would see or hear of our arrest would be motivated to join this work.
The safety of all marginalized communities in this country, our Jewish community included, depends on our efforts to protect our democratic practices, and one another. You can join us, in Minnesota, or wherever you are.
Call for ICE to get out of Minnesota. Their presence is endangering us all. Just yesterday, Alex Jeffrey Pretti — an ICU nurse, mountain bike enthusiast, dog lover and beloved community member — was shot and killed by federal agents while attempting to aid a fellow protester. Our government, rather than accept responsibility for the injustice of his death, and that of Renée Nicole Good, is already lying about who these upstanding Minnesotans were and what those agents did.
Learn from us and protect each other in your home communities. You can stand with Minnesota; we’ll stand with you too. Call your senators to demand that they deny ICE funding in an upcoming vote this week. Push for prosecution of ICE agents who kill our civilians. Together we will fight the plague of narrow sight, instead creating dwellings of warm light where we hold and honor the fullness of humanity of each and every one of us.
On Saturday night, Minnesotans gathered in candlelight vigils on street corners in our neighborhoods to mourn and remember Pretti. I was with hundreds of my students on campus. We imagined, together, all the vigil-goers, holding candles to decry Pretti’s death and honor his memory, as points of light, linked across Minnesota and the country, and around the world.
The stars came out just then, as if the universe was joining us in a vast web of care and light. We sang a song from Heidi Wilson: “Hold on, hold on, my dear ones, here comes the dawn.”
The post I’m a rabbi arrested for protesting ICE in Minneapolis. The Book of Exodus shows us how this ends appeared first on The Forward.
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US-Brokered Peace Talks Break Off Without Deal After Overnight Russian Bombardment of Ukraine
Some windows glow in a residential building left without heating and facing long power cuts after critical civil infrastructure was hit by recent Russian missile and drone strikes, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, January 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Alina Smutko
Ukraine and Russia ended a second day of US-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi on Saturday without a deal but with more talks expected next weekend, even as overnight Russian airstrikes knocked out power for over a million Ukrainians amid subzero winter cold.
Statements after the conclusion of the talks did not indicate that any agreements had been reached, but Moscow and Kyiv both said they were open to further dialogue.
“The central focus of the discussions was the possible parameters for ending the war,” President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X after the meeting.
More discussions were expected next Sunday in Abu Dhabi, said a US official who spoke to reporters immediately after the talks.
“We saw a lot of respect in the room between the parties because they were really looking to find solutions,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We got to real granular detail and (we feel) that next Sunday will be, God willing, another meeting where we push this deal towards its final culmination.”
A UAE government spokesperson said there was face-to-face engagement between Ukraine and Russia — rare in the almost four-year-old war triggered by a full-scale Russian invasion — and negotiators tackled “outstanding elements” of Washington’s peace framework.
Looking beyond next week’s negotiations in Abu Dhabi, the US official voiced hopes for further talks, possibly in Moscow or Kyiv.
“Those sorts of meetings have to happen, in our view, before we get a bilateral between (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and Zelensky, or a trilateral with Putin, Zelensky and President Trump. But I don’t think we’re so far away from that,” the official said.
BOMBARDMENT OF UKRAINE BEFORE SECOND DAY OF TALKS
The bombardment of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and its second-largest city Kharkiv by hundreds of Russian drones and missiles prompted Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha – who was not at the talks – to accuse Putin of acting “cynically.”
“This barbaric attack once again proves that Putin’s place is not at (US President Donald Trump’s) Board of Peace, but in the dock of the special tribunal,” Sybiha wrote on X.
“His missiles hit not only our people, but also the negotiation table.”
Saturday was scheduled to be the final day of the talks, billed by Zelensky as the first trilateral meeting under the US-mediated peace process.
The UAE statement said the talks were conducted in a “constructive and positive atmosphere” and included discussions about confidence-building measures.
Kyiv is under mounting Trump administration pressure to make concessions to reach a deal to end Europe’s deadliest and most destructive conflict since World War Two.
US peace envoy Steve Witkoff said at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos this week that a lot of progress had been made in the talks and only one sticking point remained. However, Russian officials have sounded more skeptical.
RUSSIA WANTS ALL OF DONBAS
After Saturday’s talks, Zelensky said the US delegation had raised the issue of “potential formats for formalizing the parameters for ending the war, as well as the security conditions required to achieve this”.
The US official said the proposed security protocols were widely seen as “very, very strong.”
“The Ukrainians and many of the national security advisors of all the European countries have reviewed these security protocols. And to a person, and this includes NATO, including (NATO Secretary General) Mark Rutte, they have expressed the fact that they’ve never seen security protocols this robust,” the official said.
Ahead of the discussions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday Russia had not dropped its insistence on Ukraine yielding all of its eastern area of Donbas, the industrial heartland grouping the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Putin’s demand that Ukraine surrender the 20 percent it still holds of Donetsk – about 5,000 sq km (1,900 sq miles) – has proven a major stumbling block to any deal. Most countries recognize Donetsk as part of Ukraine. Putin says Donetsk is part of Russia’s “historical lands.”
Zelensky has ruled out giving up territory that Russia has not been able to capture in four years of grinding, attritional warfare against a much smaller foe. Polls show little appetite among Ukrainians for any territorial concessions.
Russia says it wants a diplomatic solution but will keep working to achieve its goals by military means as long as a negotiated solution remains elusive.
Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said late on Friday that the first day of talks had addressed parameters for ending the war and the “further logic of the negotiation process.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine came under renewed Russian bombardment.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia had launched 375 drones and 21 missiles in the overnight salvo, which once again targeted energy infrastructure, knocking out power and heat for large parts of Kyiv, the capital. At least one person was killed and over 30 injured.
Before Saturday’s bombardment, Kyiv had already endured two mass overnight attacks since the New Year that cut electricity and heating to hundreds of residential buildings. Ukraine’s deputy prime minister said on Saturday that 800,000 people in Kyiv – where temperatures were around -10 degrees Celsius – had been left without power after the latest Russian assault.
Zelensky said on Saturday Russia’s heavy overnight strikes showed that agreements on further air defense support made with Trump in Davos this week must be “fully implemented.”