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‘Fleishman is in Trouble’ hits FX Thursday. Just don’t call it a Jewish series, says its creator.
(JTA) — From Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s point of view, her best-selling 2019 novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” wasn’t all that Jewish. She’s a little perplexed by the deluge of press junket questions about its Jewish essence.
“It’s funny: I don’t think of it as a Jewish book. I know people do,” she said.
Brodesser-Akner, a journalist famous for her sharp celebrity profiles, is now the showrunner of the book’s star-studded TV adaptation, an 8-episode FX series that debuts on Hulu on Thursday. In the story, Toby Fleishman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is a 41-year-old Jewish hepatologist who has recently divorced Rachel (Claire Danes), his ambitious, icy, blonde theater agent wife. Early on in the story, Rachel disappears in the middle of the night, leaving Toby with their two children and a truckload of resentment. Toby, who had a nebbishy and romantically insecure youth before marrying Rachel, is now drowning in the sexual bounty of dating apps.
On Zoom, Brodesser-Akner was speaking a few days after the show’s blowout bash at Carnegie Hall and Tavern on the Green, an iconic Central Park restaurant. “I’ve never been to an event like that. It was 600 people,” she said. It sounded like a scene that could have been plucked right from “Fleishman,” which is set on the extremely wealthy Upper East Side, and in which the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood are at odds with the ambitions and personal longings of its middle-aged characters.
Brodesser-Akner, 47, who was both adrenalized and a little frazzled, had to balance the premiere with parenting duties — she’s a mother of two boys, ages 15 and 12. “I’m still picking sequins from my teeth.”
As a writer, Brodesser-Akner likes to play with the power of subjectivity, and she built “Fleishman” on it. Though the story begins as Toby’s, it eventually morphs into a “Rashomon”-esque take on the divorce and what really went wrong in the Fleishmans’ marriage. The story is narrated by Libby (Lizzy Caplan), Toby’s friend from their year abroad in Israel. A former men’s magazine writer, Libby is now a lost and frustrated stay-at-home mom in suburban New Jersey (and a stand-in for Brodesser-Akner). Adam Brody steals scenes as Seth, an immature finance bro and another year-in-Israel friend with whom Toby reconnects after the divorce. (His presence is a homecoming of sorts for those of us who spent our tween years watching him play a different Seth in “The O.C.”)
“I don’t think of it as a Jewish book,” says Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
Brodesser-Akner pieced together the story’s Jewish elements: a doctor named Fleishman, a bat mitzvah, Friday night dinners, a year abroad in Israel, a few jokes about Jews being bad at home repairs (which is the subject of a very funny scene in episode six between Toby and Seth). There are a few insidery details that she fails to mention, like a fake Jewish sleepaway camp called Camp Marah, which sounds like the real Camp Ramah but roughly translates to “Camp Bitter” in Hebrew. Does all this add up to a “Jewish” story?
“I read ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen, and it mentions Christmas I think 47 times. I read ‘Crossroads’ and it’s about the family of a youth minister. But neither of those is ever called a Christian book. This is called a Jewish book. I don’t object to it being called a Jewish book. But to me it’s mostly an American story. As a writer and as an observer of the culture, I think that calling this a Jewish book is proof of the answer to an old question: are Jews considered Americans? And the answer is no.” She threw in her characteristic meta analysis: “So now you have a very Jewish profile. How Jewish is that, Sarah?”
The self-aware comment is a good reminder that although her responses may be unguarded, she has not forgotten that she’s on the record. A name in New York media, Brodesser-Akner wrote for GQ and is now a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, having profiled Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke and Tom Hanks and written about the Joshua Cohen novel “The Netanyahus,” the television show “Thirtysomething” and much more. She inserts herself often into her writing, not to make it about herself, but to remind the reader that every profile is by nature filtered through the lens of the writer crafting it. Her writing is searing, self-deprecating — so raw it’s still bleeding and often quite funny.
“I wrote the book the way I would write a profile, just like I always do. But this man doesn’t exist,” she said.
RELATED: 5 Jewish places that inspired Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’
We had tried to meet in person near her home on the Upper West Side, but by the time she was available, I was in Tel Aviv, placing us along the Israel-New York axis on which “Fleishman” is set. When Toby suddenly calls Libby to tell her he’s getting divorced, he catapults her into memories of their early twenties in Jerusalem. Those thoughts make Libby miss the possibilities of her youth, the ones time has ruthlessly and inevitably extinguished. Eventually her longing for her past becomes so overwhelming that it threatens her marriage to her menschy and patient husband, played by Josh Radnor. (For more longing-for-younger-days while in Israel content, Brodesser-Akner wrote a Saveur essay about vegetable soup in Jerusalem — her Proustian madeleine. Interviewing Brodesser-Akner from my friend’s apartment in Tel Aviv, a city where I lived in my twenties, I found the theme of longing for the past hit almost too close to home.)
Part of the reason Brodesser-Akner doesn’t think the “Fleishman” story is all that Jewish is that she doesn’t feel all that Jewish — at least not relative to her mother and sisters, who are aligned with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement and live within a few blocks of each other in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
“I don’t think any writer has ever gotten it right,” she says of her Jewish background. “They say I was raised Orthodox. It’s interesting because it always makes me look like the black sheep in my family, when really they are. I’m exactly how I was raised to be until I was 12.”
After her mother, a secular Israeli, and her father, a Conservative Long Islander, divorced, her mother put Brodesser-Akner and her sisters in Jewish school. Some Jewish observance trickled back to her mother, who ended up going the Chabad route.
“My mom had never been inside a synagogue until the day she married my father. Now that is what we call ironic,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Brodesser-Akner’s two sisters followed, and her mother eventually remarried and had another child, the only sibling born into a religious household.
“The thing that made me a journalist was being raised in a home where, at age 12, I was relegated to observer. I had to learn how to understand other people’s points of view. And now that’s what I do,” she said.
Despite their religious differences — Brodesser-Akner attends an Orthodox synagogue but sends her children to an unaffiliated Jewish school and says she wakes up “every morning with new ideas” — the author is very close with her family, and her sisters were at the “Fleishman” premiere.
“They were at the premiere of my perverted sex show,” she joked with a laugh referring to the Hulu series, which features some sexual content as Toby explores the post-divorce New York dating scene. “They show up for me and I show up for them. I have my challenges with it, but I think their challenges must be greater. They never say this to me, but they must think that my life is comparatively…” She looked away thoughtfully, trying to find the right words. “They must think my lifestyle is comparatively less worthwhile. But we really love each other.”
To Brodesser-Akner, the most Jewish show on television is “The Patient,” which she calls “the best show I have seen in 100 years.” And that’s not because it (like “Fleishman”) is on FX. “I’m not that kind of interview!” she said.
Lizzy Caplan plays Toby’s friend Libby. (FX Networks)
“It’s the most Jewish show in all of the Jewish ways. It grapples with a Jewish prisoner; with the difference between a Conservative Jewish female cantor whose son becomes ultra-Orthodox — I’d never seen that on screen. It was kind of the only relatable Jewish matter I’ve ever seen. People ask me if I’ve watched ‘Shtisel.’ And I always say, I’m in the 47th season of an ultra-Orthodox family drama myself and not really interested!” She laughed. “But also I think of the other Jewish matters on television, which are adapted memoirs of people who were ultra-Orthodox and now aren’t. It’s like no one can imagine religious people being happy in their lives. And that’s really shocking to me. My family is very happy.”
Brodesser-Akner wound up with her dream cast: she had a list of five actors — Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Josh Radnor and Adam Brody — and no backup plan. She noted the fact that viewers have seen them grow up on screen as one reason they were right for the roles. For many, watching Caplan, Eisenberg and Brody sit across from each other in a diner will feel like a camp reunion, the fulfillment of a Jewish television fantasy they never knew they had.
“One thing that we were trying to get across is ‘how could it be that I am this old when I was once this young?’ And the fact that you have a memory of Claire from ‘My So-Called Life,’ or Jesse from ‘The Squid and the Whale’ — that does so much of the work of the show without writing a word,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Besides Danes (who plays the only main character with a non-Jewish parent, whom the book makes clear she resembles) the lead actors are all Jewish — a notable fact in a time when Jewish representation on screen, and who should be allowed to play Jewish characters, is the subject of continued debate.
Last month, New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who is Jewish, tweeted, “There is a simple solution to the question of whether various non-Jewish actors are allowed to play Jews & that is to ask me.” Brodesser-Akner responded to the tweet, writing “[Non-Jew] Oscar Isaac in Scenes from a Marriage is the best ex-ortho I ever saw on screen!”
About casting Jewish actors, Brodesser-Akner noted a legal issue rarely mentioned in the representation debate: one can cast based on looks, but it’s illegal in the United States to cast based on religion. She took this very seriously.
“I spoke to [‘The Plot Against America’ director] David Simon about it and he said, ‘They’re actors. You let them act.’ And I agree with that. The question that I asked myself was who was perfect for it?” she said.
Even if Brodesser-Akner rejects the claim that “Fleishman” is a definitively Jewish story, wasn’t she consciously playing with some Philip Roth-inspired Jewish archetypes? Toby the nice Jewish doctor, the devoted, idealistic dad who’s also self-righteous, horny and insecure.
No, she insists she wasn’t. But also Philip Roth is so ingrained in her that who’s to say? And isn’t the question flawed in the first place?
“All I can say is that I am made out of Philip Roth. I’m so formed by his books. I actually would say that you have a bias in the asking of your question, in that you’re Jewish too. And you also are made out of Philip Roth books since you’re a writer. Again, that goes back to the same question as ‘are we American?’ To me, Toby is not ‘a Jewish guy.’ He’s just a guy! He’s the kind of guy I know! I was just trying to be myself.”
“Fleishman is in Trouble” premieres its first two episodes on Hulu on Nov. 17. It will release each of its six remaining episodes weekly on Thursdays.
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The post ‘Fleishman is in Trouble’ hits FX Thursday. Just don’t call it a Jewish series, says its creator. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jews cared more about Israel and antisemitism this election – but it didn’t change their votes much, exit poll shows
Jewish voters overwhelmingly backed Democrats in Tuesday’s midterm elections, even as concerns about Israel and antisemitism played a growing role in their political decisions, according to a new exit poll published on Thursday.
The GBAO Strategies survey of 800 Jewish voters found that 72% of Jewish respondents supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 24% who voted Republican. The poll, sponsored by J Street, a progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group, was conducted via text message from Oct. 28 to Nov. 3 and had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
The Democratic share was slightly lower than in previous midterm elections, when Democrats received 74% of the Jewish vote in 2022 and 76% in 2018. In the 2020 presidential election, 77% of Jewish voters backed Joe Biden, according to GBAO’s polling. These findings differ from a national NBC News exit poll, which found that 68% of Jewish voters supported Democrats this year and 31% backed Republicans, compared with 78% who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. (The national surveys used different methods, making it harder to say how preferences actually changed.)
Jim Gerstein, GBAO’s pollster and a Democratic campaign consultant, cautioned against reading too much into the change over time. “You’d have to squint really hard to try and see that that is a shift or anything really meaningful,” Gerstein told the Forward during a press briefing. He noted that Republican support also fell, from 25% in the 2022 midterms to 24% this year. Gerstein suggested that strong opposition to President Donald Trump during his first term, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, may help explain the higher Democratic numbers in 2018 and 2020.
He also noted that campaigns and outside groups have spent significantly more money targeting Jewish voters in the past two election cycles. “These are really negligible, and we don’t look at this as much shifting,” he said.
Even as Democrats regained control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans did appear to make gains among Jewish voters in some closely watched races amid a divide over U.S. support for Israel. Several outspoken critics of Israel won seats in the House, including five members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine, two new senators who made criticism of Israel a major part of their campaigns, also won highly contested races.
The exit poll suggests that disagreements over Israel have not fundamentally changed how American Jews vote.
The future of American democracy remained the top concern for Jewish voters, with 44% naming it as one of the two most important issues influencing their vote, followed by 34% who said the cost of living was among their leading concerns. But Israel and antisemitism became more important than in previous elections. Twenty-one percent named antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel ranked sixth, cited by 14% of voters, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Compared to previous elections, Israel and antisemitism moved up the list of priorities — 21% identified antisemitism as one of their top two issues, up from 11% in 2024. Israel was ranked six with 14%, compared with just 4% in 2022.
Gerstein argued that rising antisemitism and the debates over support for Israel serve as a basic test for candidates rather than the deciding factor in most elections. “I think we see candidates in both parties passing that threshold quite easily,” Gerstein said.
Asked which positions expressed by candidates during the campaign they agreed with most, 30% chose unconditional support for Israel, while 39% favored support tied to Israel’s compliance with American interests and values. Another 31%, including 60% of voters between the ages of 18 and 34, agreed with the statement that Israel has committed genocide and should no longer receive U.S. aid.
Orthodox voters, representing 9% of the sample, voted Republican by a 63-34 margin.
A Jewish split on Israel
The survey also found a Jewish electorate that itself is becoming more divided over Israel.
Thirty-nine percent said their sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were primarily with Israelis, compared with 23% who sided with Palestinians. Another 38% sided with both. Among younger Jews, 49% said they sympathized more with Palestinians, compared with 20% who sided with Israelis.
A majority — 51% — said it supported continuing $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military assistance to Israel, while 49% opposed it. However, 44% also said arms sales should be conditioned on compliance with U.S. law.
Jewish voters showed greater agreement on how criticism of Israel should be treated and whether Israel’s policies directly impact them.
Sixty percent said Jewish organizations that label harsh criticism of Israel as antisemitic are using concerns about antisemitism to defend unpopular Israeli policies. About two-thirds said AIPAC’s spending against candidates critical of Israel increases antisemitism in the United States, while 80% said Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank contribute to antisemitism. An overwhelming majority of 76% support sanctions against violent Israeli settlers.
The survey also found that 39% of Jewish voters, including 63% of those under 35, said that spending by AIPAC to defeat Israel critics this election cycle made them less likely to support candidates backed by the pro-Israel group.
Mamdani scores high
One of the more striking findings was that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was more popular among Jewish voters nationwide than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his criticism of Israel and strained relationship with some Jewish organizations.
The poll found that 49% of respondents viewed Mamdani favorably, compared with 43% who viewed him unfavorably. Netanyahu received a favorable rating of just 20%, while 72% viewed him unfavorably. That marks a 12% decline in two years for the Israeli leader, who is struggling to form a government after the last Israeli election ended in deadlock.
In an interview with CNN Wednesday night, Mamdani pointed to his approach to governing as an example of how elected officials can represent Jewish voters even when they disagree with them on Israel.
“I represent the most Jewish city in the United States of America, and I know that there are some Jewish New Yorkers, for example, that may have a different set of opinions on Israel and Palestine as I do, and that doesn’t mean that I work any less hard to deliver for them across the board,” Mamdani said. “I think that’s the same truth for anyone who was elected last night.”
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Now that the election is over, can we stop dismissing everyone we disagree with by calling them ‘wrong’ or a ‘liar?’
I was walking to get a coffee on Election Day when a man screamed at me as he nearly ran me over with his bicycle. “Democratic Socialists aren’t Democrats!” he yelled.
After I regained my balance, I looked up. He turned back and called out to me a second time.
“It’s true, you know!” he said.
I scurried away. But his words — “true” and the assured “you know” — made me think about how language around American politics has come down to “truth” or “lies,” which leaves out a lot.
Maybe the simplicity of that thinking helped create a landslide.
Once it became clear that Democrats had triumphed, opinion writers frequently relied on the word “lie” to explain voters’ sudden seismic shift.
“Trump claims he kept more promises to American voters than he made. Like so many things he has said, that’s a lie, and voters punished him and his party for it,” Josh Barro wrote in The New York Times.
The problem with the theory that voters punished Trump for lying is that the man has been lying for decades, most famously about winning the 2020 election — which, of course, he lost.
He entered politics by lying about Barack Obama. So the real question is why Trump’s lies bothered people now.
Maybe a clue was in the language during the leadup to this election, and how it changed as the watershed results came in.
I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t help noticing that Israel was a hot topic that somehow disappeared on election night as journalists marveled that Mississippi was in play for a Senate seat while every kind of Democrat won — moderate, far-left, young, old.
But it didn’t seem that would happen a mere five days ago, in that other lifetime when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, during a discussion with podcaster Donny Deutsch, categorized debate over Israel as a fight between ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
Back then, Michigan felt crucial, not one in a pile of Democratic wins. It was news that the elegant former speaker used the word ‘wrong.’
“When you say Israel doesn’t have the right to be a Jewish state, that’s antisemitic as far as I’m concerned,” Deutsch said, in reference to statements made by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and then-Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“It’s more than concerning,” Pelosi responded. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And it isn’t a reflection of the Democrats in the Congress of the United States.”
I flashed back to that one-syllable word — “wrong” — early Wednesday morning when, with El-Sayed’s victory, it seemed that, contrary to what Pelosi said, objecting to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was apparently no longer viewed as categorically “wrong.”
Wrong vs. right
If objecting to Israel’s existence was “wrong,” then what was “right”?
Some Jewish politicians — like Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel — told Jews to put their own concerns aside for the “needs of the world.”
“We have a moral imperative to place the needs of the world above even our own self-interest and, yes, even our own survival,” Nessel said, acknowledging that Jews faced a “stark choice” due to some of the comments made by Democrats.
After the election, anti-Israel commentators mocked Jewish politicians — and journalists.
Mehdi Hassan, founder of media company Zeteo, taunted Representatives Josh Gottheimer and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, along with CNN anchor Dana Bash, all Jewish. “He won,” Hasan said, calling El-Sayed a “left-wing Muslim anti-Zionist.”
“And so for all of you, I have two words — two words — cry more.”
The dismissiveness is the point
What got me about Hasan’s comments wasn’t just the hatred; it was the dismissiveness — as if all the existential worry within the Jewish community didn’t matter at all.
As if Nessel, who tried to find the “right” thing to do in a time when lies from the leader of the free world — not to mention violence against immigrants, humiliating comments toward and threats against brave Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and fleecing the United States in one of the biggest cons in history — meant asking her fellow Jewish Democrats who worried about Israel and attacks on their own local synagogues to ignore their own inner voice.
In its post-midterms statement, the Anti-Defamation League used the word “dismissed” with regard to Jewish Americans’ concerns — on a night when some candidates proved that ignoring Jews’ worries is not a barrier to electoral victory.
“Antisemitic rhetoric and scapegoating fuels hatred and can lead to harassment, threats and violence. In too many places, Jewish Americans’ concerns about this were overshadowed by competing priorities or dismissed outright,” the statement read.
Hmmm, I thought thinking about what that bicyclist had yelled at me: “You know it’s true.”
But I can’t help thinking that I don’t know what’s true; none of us know yet why so many voters finally dumped Trump.
I do, however, think that the framing given by the bicyclist, so convinced he knew what was and wasn’t true, and the dismissiveness problem, are related. That’s because the easiest way to dismiss another person’s thought process is to say “that’s a lie.”
I don’t know what’s worse — to be called a liar, or to be ignored — but amid all the celebration, I fear many in the Jewish community may soon find out.
In the months ahead, I’ll be listening for dismissiveness. I’ll be watching the distance between truth, lies, right, wrong, and “cry more.”
And I’ll notice when anyone — whether they’re a screaming bicyclist, journalist, or a politician — tells me I should already know what the truth is.
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I’m glad El-Sayed won – but I wish he’d lost
The election of Abdul El-Sayed is my least favorite dream to come true.
I’m glad he won the race for senator because, along with a clear majority of Americans, I believed it was time to elect a Congress and Senate that would serve as a check on the presidency and put forth policies to repair our struggling country.
If I lived in Michigan, I would have voted for him for that reason. But as Election Night wore on and it became clear Democrats and independents had won a comfortable majority in the Senate, I hoped El-Sayed would lose.
Judging by the post-election surveys, I’m not the only Jew who felt this way. El-Sayed won about 60% of the Jewish vote. But he ran about 20 points behind Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic candidate for governor, with those same voters.
They didn’t flee the Democratic party, but they did show less enthusiasm for El-Sayed. In my case it had nothing to do with the fearmongering over his religion or family. (The Republican Jewish Coalition called El-Sayed, “the most antisemitic U.S. Senate candidate in America.”).
My problem was that El-Sayed too often mirrored the toxic politics of his opponents. He aligned himself with Hasan Piker then offered tepid, tardy disavowals of the popular streamer’s extremism. I criticized President Donald Trump for doing the same with the Proud Boys, David Duke, QAnon and the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
And, like Trump, El-Sayed lied, constantly telling Michiganders that their schools and hospitals were underfunded because the government sent the money to Israel instead. He’s a smart man who knows that aid money amounts to .05% of the federal budget, is mostly spent in America and is hardly the reason for underfunded education.
But he repeated the lie in his victory speech Tuesday night. “We want our taxes spent here,” he said, “for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here. We don’t want our money sent to do apartheid, or genocide, or war.”
Sound familiar? “This tsunami of Illegals has destroyed Americans’ Public Schools, Hospitals, Parks, Community Resources, and Living Conditions,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last year.
How is a Democratic candidate who scapegoats the Jewish state for the ills of Flint any different than a Republican who blames crime on Haitians, fraud on Somalis and bad schools on Mexican immigrants? Both invite hate and divert attention from real solutions. When El-Sayed points at Israel as the cause of Michigan’s problems, the blame falls on American Jews, Haile Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, pointed out during the race.
The least surprising twist in the dramatic campaign was when Tucker Carlson endorsed El-Sayed — both men push a simple theory of who’s to blame for America’s ills.
But as much as I would have preferred to win without El-Sayed, his election is far from the nightmare many American Jews fear.
He is one senator out of 100, and one Democratic senator out of 54, or 56, depending on the Mississippi and Alaska races.
El-Sayed will soon learn that accomplishing the things that are most important to Democratic voters — universal health care, campaign finance reform and affordability — has nothing to do with Israel.
Trump, on Election Day morning, helped politicians in both parties by announcing an end to U.S. aid to Israel. It’s unclear how that putative end will look in fact, but what’s certain is that as the U.S. and Israel redefine their relationship, El-Sayed and others in both parties who have been fervent critics of that aid will have to say what they’re for, not just what they oppose.
In a pre-election interview with the New Yorker, and elsewhere since his victory, El-Sayed said he wants a process that offers peace and self-determination to Palestinians and the “Jewish Israeli people.”
That’s a promise that the 40% of Jewish voters who didn’t back him — and the majority who did — should hold him to, and work beside him to help make happen. The Jews who stuck with El-Sayed have especially earned that right.
“Political coalitions that grow and endure can only be built when we join with those with whom we have real – even profound – disagreements,” wrote Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, following the election.
On the campaign trail, El-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric clearly resonated with some core constituencies. Inside the Senate, where moderate Democrats are a majority, El-Sayed will find a constituency for pragmatic steps to moving Israelis and Palestinians in that direction.
And that would indeed be a dream come true.
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