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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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A radical idea to bridge Chicago’s Black and Jewish communities
I have strong Southern roots. Both sets of my grandparents, with the exception of my Philadelphia-born maternal grandmother, were descendants of enslaved people who later became sharecroppers. I visited the South often as a child, and being different in a place like that could be difficult. There was no Black Jewish community there at the time. I was usually its sole representative.
Or so I thought.
I was a teenager when I first learned about Julius Rosenwald‘s philanthropic efforts that helped build thousands of schools for Black children throughout the rural South, including many of the places I grew up visiting. After that, I began looking for Rosenwald schools whenever I traveled. I was always happy to find them. They were old and mostly dilapidated, but somehow still seemed to quietly defy time and the elements.
This was the first time I remember understanding how Black people and Jews could do meaningful work together. Those faded clapboard buildings, once whitewashed and full of possibility, had housed the education system that helped generations of Black children and laid part of the groundwork for the civil rights movement that would follow.
I was born in the late 1970s. I have no memory of the storied alliance between Blacks and Jews during the civil rights era. By the time I came along, much of that coalition had faded, and people were already asking how those bridges might be rebuilt.
I never experienced the Black-Jewish relationship that the teachers and staff at my Jewish day school recalled so fondly. But whenever I traveled through the South, I saw those schools. They stood as proof that the two communities I come from had once worked together to accomplish something extraordinary. They filled me with hope and pride, and with the certainty that if it happened once, it could happen again.
That is why, at a time when antisemitism and racism are once again on the rise, I find myself returning to the example set by earlier generations of Jewish philanthropists and community leaders. They understood that investing in Black communities was not simply an act of charity. It was an act of solidarity. They recognized that prejudice thrives when people remain strangers to one another, and that real change requires shared investment in a common future.
Today, we find ourselves confronting many of the same challenges. Distrust is growing. Division is growing. Fear is growing.
Which is why I want to build a Jewish Community Center on the south side of Chicago.
Not in a neighborhood where many Jews already live, but in a neighborhood where they can come to build new relationships, and new solidarity. A neighborhood where children from the two communities I hold in my heart can grow up seeing one another as neighbors instead of strangers.
The groundwork for this kind of bold community building is already in place. More than a decade ago, I started Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killing on the south side, as a response to violence, hopelessness and despair. From the beginning, that work was shaped by Jewish values, and Jews from across the Chicagoland area have stood alongside me in that work.
What began as an effort to keep children safe, based on the corner of 75th Street and Stewart Avenue, has evolved into an open air community center where children receive hot meals after school, where they can play safely throughout the summer, and where parents can find diapers, formula and other necessities for their families.
Our corner has also become a place where we can have open and sometimes difficult conversations about race, and life in America. Those conversations are often also about Judaism. We host Yom Kippur services, Passover seders, and an annual Christmahanukkwanzukah toy giveaway.
This corner has become an oasis that welcomes both Black people and Jews, and of course Black Jews, and invites them to spend time together.
I grew up watching my friends go to the JCC, even though my family could never afford it. It was important to me that my own children had that experience. At a JCC far from the neighborhood where we live, they deepened their Jewish identities, learned to get along with people different from themselves, got exercise, and made lifelong friends.
It’s time to bring that opportunity to the area where we live, and where MASK has already begun to serve some of the purposes that JCCs often fill — primarily that of giving children a safe place to learn and play.
It’s time to take things to the next level. We need a place where Black and Jewish families can gather with intention to build more communal services that help us all. Yes, we need bridges between our communities.But those bridges also need to lead somewhere. And I cannot think of a better destination than a place where Black and Jewish children can learn, grow, and build a future together.
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Fight wildfires and other climate crises with this spiritual guide to catastrophe
As smoke from Canadian wildfires blankets much of the Northeast and Midwest in a hazy fog, some Jews are observing this Tisha B’av by mourning a different kind of destruction: that of a planet in crisis.
Tisha B’av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples, deals with themes of grief and resilience relevant to today’s climate crisis, said Rabbi Laura Bellows, director of spiritual activism and education at Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action.
In advance of Tisha Ba’av, Dayenu this week released a spiritual guide for the aftermath of extreme weather — including floods, storms, heatwaves and fires. It was a grim coincidence, Bellows said, that the guide’s publication coincided with a time when those prayers would be of particular use.
“The grief is real,” Bellows said. “Jewish tradition is really good at encouraging us not to ignore it, but actually to make space and time to be with that grief.”
The guide includes an adapted version of Mi Shebeirach, the prayer for healing, written by Rabbi Daniel Scher at Kehillat Israel in the Palisades. Scher wrote the prayer for his congregation after wildfires caused significant smoke damage to the synagogue’s building, leading it to close for several months. Roughly 250 synagogue members — and all three clergy — lost their homes.
“The fire has seared through our homes and hopes, yet we stand together in our pain, trusting that new life can blossom in our midst,” the prayer reads.
Other texts in the guidebook offer hope for rebuilding. Rabbi Zoe Klein of Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles adapted the daily prayer, “May it be your will that the Temple be speedily rebuilt in our own time,” into a plea for wildfire survivors: “May it be Thy will that homes be rebuilt in our own time.”
Another ritual offers a hand-washing ceremony for survivors of water-related natural disasters. Participants wash their hands and recite the Birkat HaGomel, a prayer traditionally said after surviving a life-threatening event.
It’s not the first year rabbis have linked the climate crisis to Tisha Ba’av. More than a decade ago, Rabbi Tamara Cohen, chief of program and strategy at the Jewish youth group Moving Traditions, co-wrote “Eikha for the Earth,” which adapts the Book of Lamentations traditionally read on Tisha Ba’av as a “lament for the Earth.”
“Checkerspot butterflies flee their homes; polar bears can find no rest. Because our greed has heated Earth,” the text reads.
The adapted text aims to “welcome in Jews who are not so connected to the idea of mourning for the ancient temple, which doesn’t necessarily move lots of people today,” Cohen told the Forward.
But the timing of this year’s Tisha B’av makes the text feel eerily relevant, she said, pointing to the line “forest fires reach down and spread like fury.”
Jakir Manela, CEO of the nonprofit Adamah, which leads immersive Jewish experiences grounded in nature, said he’s also feeling particular grief for the earth this Tisha B’av. Manela lives in Baltimore, where he and his kids have been unable to go outside due to the unhealthy air.
“This is destruction in front of our very eyes, and affecting the largest population centers on the planet,” Manela said. “If folks have trouble connecting with Tisha B’av and the grief and mourning that it calls us to do, maybe this year is the time when it will hit home.”
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Why am I the only one troubled by an Anne Frank House shot glass?
Readers, how many of you have ever looked at the Anne Frank House and thought: “Wow, I wish I had a miniature version I could drink alcohol from” ?
Probably very few of you. And yet a ceramic replica of the historic house filled with approximately 1.7ozs of Bols Dutch gin is available from KLM Dutch Airways as part of a gift series for business class passengers on international flights.
The airline first launched the Delft Blue miniature house line in 1952 as gifts for business class passengers on intercontinental flights. I first discovered them last month, when I was flying with my dad to Maputo, Mozambique, to cover the centenary celebration of a local synagogue. My dad and I initially thought these would make good Christmas gifts for my cousin’s kids until we heard the liquid sloshing inside. We ended up keeping these recreations — which included the house of aviator Anthony Fokker and one of the last wooden houses left in Amsterdam — for ourselves.
While researching these unique souvenirs, I quickly discovered that one of the historic recreations is the Anne Frank House, aka “KLM miniature number 47,” which the Dutch airline added to the collection in 1975. My initial reaction was shock: How could the airline take a place that represents such a tremendous tragedy and turn it into a shot glass?
I reached out to KLM and asked if they had ever received a complaint about the item. A representative wrote back to say that, from what he knew, there had only ever been one critical Instagram comment: that KLM tried to make money off of everything. Collectors shared the souvenir online, but nobody I could find on the internet expressed the surprise and revulsion I felt.
My request to chat on the phone for further comments on why KLM included the Anne Frank House in their collection didn’t garner the response I expected. The representative responded via email that the house is historic and if I wanted to know more about it, I could just Google it. The subtext of my question — that it feels like a strange and possibly inappropriate choice to turn a solemn landmark into a cutesy flask — didn’t seem obvious to him.
So why did it feel so obvious to me?
For so many, Anne Frank is the symbol of how horrendous the Holocaust was. The fact that she is an innocent child exposes the depraved nature of the Nazis. Most Americans are first introduced to the Holocaust through the story of her confinement in that house in Amsterdam.
Even though it is not where Frank died (that was Bergen-Belsen, at the age of 16), it feels like the place where her fate was sealed. It is not just a landmark included in a famous book; it was her prison and the last stop on the way to her death. Although some may associate it with Frank’s enduring spirit of hope, filling it with alcohol still feels obscene.
Frank’s image has been co-opted over and over again. Two years ago, a Norwegian artist used an image of Frank in a keffiyeh to bring attention to children being killed in Gaza. More recently, Frank has become a symbol for anti-ICE protesters of the dangers of letting law enforcement target people based on their ethnic background. Then there’s the viral satirical comedy musical Slam Frank, which reimagines Anne Frank as a queer Latinx girl with a Black mom and gay, neurodivergent dad in order to poke fun at woke culture.The KLM house feels like a less charged appropriation of Anne Frank’s legacy; it’s not pushing any sort of political agenda.
The ceramic house is also part of a larger kitsch culture that blurs the fine line between commemoration and trivialization. So many tragedies have been commodified in this way that there’s a term for it: “dark tourism.” There are plenty of 9/11 related objects out there — a Twin Towers Christmas tree ornament, stuffed search and rescue dogs — that feel like they border on exploitation.
But what makes the KLM Anne Frank house stand out is its contents. To use a house of such suffering as the container for gin feels minimizing. (It is worth mentioning that a New York winery did at one point produce a 9/11 commemorative wine, although some of the proceeds were donated to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.) Once the Anne Frank flask is emptied of its contents, it will just be a ceramic trinket that could help keep the memory of the landmark alive. Does the fact that it was originally made to carry alcohol negate that power?
I asked a similar question nearly one year ago in my very first Looking Forward column when I wrote about a recording of Nazi marching songs and speeches made by a Jewish producer. Since that piece was published, I haven’t found a satisfying answer to when memorialization becomes inappropriate, but I have become more comfortable acknowledging how complex this issue is.
This will be my last Looking Forward, as my last day as an employee of the Forward (at least for now, as I embark on a new pursuit) will be July 31. It feels fitting that my time with this newsletter will end similarly to the way in which it started: scratching my head about Holocaust kitsch. But having to grapple with such a topic in my writing is just another day at the Forward.
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