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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 Holocaust Torah that survived a Mississippi synagogue fire was brought there by the state’s only survivor
When firefighters cleared Beth Israel Synagogue after an arson attack this month, the library floor was slick with water and ash. Prayer books lay swollen and blackened. Smoke clung to the sanctuary walls.
Two Torah scrolls burned. A third Torah did not.
That Torah, displayed for decades in a glass case near the front of the synagogue, survived unscathed. Its presence at Beth Israel was not incidental. It was brought to Mississippi by Gilbert Metz, the state’s only concentration camp survivor — a man who retrieved it from Europe and brought it to the American South. It, too, had survived the Nazis.
“The million dollar question is: How in the hell did he get to Mississippi?” his grandson, Joseph Metz, recalled in an interview on Tuesday.
From Auschwitz to Jackson
Gilbert Metz was born in 1929 in Alsace-Lorraine, France. At 13, the family was forced into hiding. When people fled Nazi Germany, they often gathered silver or jewelry. Gilbert’s mom packed her prayer books and Rashi commentary instead. She had taught her son Hebrew and Talmud, and she refused to leave those books behind.
They snuck back and forth to their summer home in northeastern France, but were eventually captured by the Nazis and sent to an internment camp. From there, a 14-year-old Metz and his family were sent to Auschwitz. His mother and 10-year-old sister were murdered in the gas chambers shortly after their arrival. His father later met the same fate.
Metz survived multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, and was liberated by American troops in April 1945. He was eventually bar mitzvahed after the Holocaust at 16, a delayed rite marking a childhood interrupted and then resumed.
Relatives who had settled in Mississippi sponsored Metz to come to the United States. He finished high school in Natchez, attended Tulane University, and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War — at one point having to reapply for citizenship after being deployed overseas.
He eventually moved to Jackson, where he raised a family and became a traveling salesman before co-founding Metz Industries, a wholesale lingerie business that sold brassieres, hosiery and feather boas to stores across the region — the work of an ordinary American life rebuilt mile by mile. He and his wife, Louise, were married for more than 50 years.
Bringing the Torah to Mississippi
In 1992, Robert Berman, a longtime congregant and former Beth Israel president, heard about an international effort to restore and redistribute scrolls damaged, desecrated or orphaned during the Holocaust. He and his sisters, Joan and Brenda, along with their families donated the funds to acquire one. Shul leaders decided there was only one person who should retrieve it.
Metz and his son, Lawson, traveled to London to bring the Torah back to Jackson. At a restoration warehouse, he was shown piles of scrolls — some burned, some torn, some riddled with bullet holes — many painstakingly pieced together from fragments. They chose a Torah rescued from Prague and took turns carrying it on their laps during the international flight.
Other Torahs rescued from the Holocaust made similar southern journeys, to congregations in Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Joseph Metz said his grandfather felt honored to be the one chosen from Beth Israel to collect the Torah, and that bringing it to Mississippi was closure for him — a full-circle moment.
A welcoming committee from the shul — including Berman, the rabbi and others — greeted the Metzs and the Torah at Jackson’s airport. “They sang prayers,” recalled Berman, now 94.
Beth Israel held a dedication ceremony at the synagogue and the Torah was installed in a glass case near the front doors, where it remained for decades. The words “Memory sustains humanity” is etched across the top of the case. Next to it hangs a photograph of Metz as an adult wearing the yellow star he was forced to wear under Nazi rule.
The scroll is displayed unfurled to a chapter in Exodus that comes after the Red Sea has closed behind the fleeing Israelites and before the Ten Commandments are given — a narrow span of time when survival has been achieved but meaning has not yet arrived. The scroll has remained that way for years, suspended between catastrophe and covenant.
“The congregation understood exactly whose story that Torah represented,” said Stuart Rockoff, a historian and longtime member of the 165-year-old Beth Israel. “This was a synagogue with one Holocaust survivor.”
Behind its building, Beth Israel also maintains a Holocaust memorial garden, dedicated to Metz and to Gus Waterman Herrman, a U.S. Army officer from Mississippi who fought in Europe during World War II and later became a philanthropist. The garden, which features stained-glass sculptures and is used for Yom HaShoah commemorations, was not damaged in the fire.
Berman’s daughter, Deborah Silver, had her bat mitzvah and wedding at the synagogue. She’s now a jazz singer, nominated for a Grammy this year, and plans to perform charity concerts in New York City and Jackson to benefit the shul. “We will be back,” she said, “and we will recover.”
Surviving another act of antisemitism
Saturday’s fire at Beth Israel is being investigated by federal authorities as a possible hate crime. A local teen, Stephen Spencer Pittman, confessed to igniting the blaze.
The bulk of the damage was concentrated in the library and administrative offices, which are also home to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life. It’s the same part of the building targeted in a 1967 Ku Klux Klan bombing.
After the fire, the congregation moved the Torahs to the nearby Northminster Baptist Church, which offered its space. There, five Torah scrolls from the sanctuary were carefully unfurled and laid out across long tables, allowing soot and smoke to dissipate.
On the advice of a sofer, a ritual scribe, the Holocaust Torah was not unrolled.
“It’s extremely delicate,” said Sarah Thomas, Beth Israel’s vice president. She said it appeared to have no visible damage and is now wrapped and stored for safekeeping until the congregation is able to move back into the building.
The Torah’s survival can be explained without invoking a miracle: it was protected by its glass case and by where it stood. Still, for those who know its history, the moment carried weight.
What survives
Gilbert Metz spent decades speaking publicly about his Holocaust experience. His oral testimony is preserved in Holocaust archives, and his story has been taught in schools across Mississippi.
That inheritance was also ritual: For decades at Beth Israel, the shofar on the High Holidays was blown by Metz’s son, Lawson, and later by his grandson, Joseph.
Joseph Metz — now the president of the Jewish federation in Mobile, Alabama — has written a book about his grandfather’s survival, Behind the Silent Doors — a phrase Gilbert used to describe the gas chambers. Joseph regularly appears at Holocaust remembrance events and in classrooms. When he does, he pins his grandfather’s yellow star to his jacket before he speaks — the same object that once marked Gilbert for death now marking the story as one that refuses to disappear.
Metz, who died at 78 in 2007, bore the tattooed number the Nazis assigned him at Auschwitz for the rest of his life: 184203. Joseph and his sister, Caroline, each later chose to replicate the number on a tattoo of their own, as an inheritance. He said his grandfather survived so the story would not end with him, but be carried forward.
The Torah Metz carried across an ocean — and across a lifetime — remains.
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This California synagogue was just vandalized with anti-Zionist graffiti, one year after being destroyed by wildfire
(JTA) — The remains of a synagogue in southern California destroyed in last January’s Eaton wildfire were vandalized over the weekend with anti-Zionist messages.
The rabbi of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center and the Anti-Defamation League decried the vandalism as antisemitic.
“The vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center is antisemitism — full stop,” ADL Los Angeles senior regional director David Englin said in a statement. “This was a deliberate act of hate meant to intimidate a Jewish community already rebuilding after last year’s fire, and it comes at a time when antisemitism is already at unprecedented levels in California and nationwide. Targeting a synagogue is simply unacceptable and represents an attack on our entire community.”
Photographs of the graffiti showed that it was scrawled in black spray paint on an exterior wall fence and read “RIP Renee” followed by “F— Zionizm” [sic].
This is the remaining outside wall of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. The Temple burned down last year in the Eaton fire. Intersectionality in all its glory. pic.twitter.com/4Z3CbfdUVl
— Gregg Mashberg (@gregg_mashberg) January 12, 2026
The first words appeared to be a likely reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old unarmed Minneapolis resident shot whose killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is igniting a nationwide spate of anti-ICE activism.
Anti-Zionist graffiti has been painted on synagogues around the country over the last two years amid a spike in anti-Israel sentiment during the war in Gaza.
The vandalism came days after congregants from the Conservative synagogue gathered at the burnt site of their spiritual home to commemorate one year since the wildfire tore through their synagogue. Dozens of members also lost their homes or were forced to evacuate due to last year’s fire, which was the second-deadliest in the state’s history.
The vandalism also came a day after an arson attack at a Mississippi synagogue that had been bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in 1967 in retaliation for the rabbi’s involvement with civil rights activism. The man charged with the crime said he targeted that synagogue due to its “Jewish ties.”
No suspect has yet been named in the Pasadena vandalism, which the Altadena station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department first received a call about on Sunday at 9 a.m.
“Acts of antisemitism and hate have no place in our diverse communities,” Altadena Station Captain Ethan Marquez said in a statement. “Crimes motivated by bias impact far more than a single victim, they harm the sense of safety and unity of our entire community. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department takes all hate-motivated incidents seriously and is committed to thoroughly investigating these acts and holding individuals accountable. The community of Altadena has endured significant hardship over the past year and acts of hateful vandalism will not be tolerated.”
Detectives with the department’s Major Crimes Bureau will be taking over the investigation, the Altadena station said in a statement.
During the fire recovery process, PJTC, a century-old congregation, welcomed a new senior rabbi, Joshua Ratner, a former lawyer who became the synagogue’s permanent religious leader in August.
A representative from the synagogue did not respond to a request for comment. But in an email to congregants, Ratner described the vandalism as “hateful and antisemitic.”
“It was devastating in many ways,” Ratner said about the graffiti to The New York Times. He also told the newspaper that in his prayer for the dead over the weekend’s services, he had included Renee Good’s name.
Local political figures joined in condemning the vandalism.
“I am horrified by the vandalism of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center, especially coming just days after we marked the one-year anniversary of the Eaton Fire that tragically destroyed its entire campus,” Rep. Judy Chu, a Democrat who represents the district in Congress, shared on X. “For over a century, the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center has been a beloved community institution and safe haven for our Jewish neighbors and loved ones. I stand with the congregation and the Jewish community as we await the results of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s investigation. Hate has no place in the San Gabriel Valley.”
The Jan. 5 commemoration was the first time most congregants had been back to their synagogue building since last the fire. For the past year, services have been held in a neighboring church; Hebrew school services have also been held offsite. PJTC is home to about 450 member families, mostly from Pasadena and neighboring Altadena.
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Australian writers’ festival collapses — and apologizes — after boycott over disinvited Palestinian activist
(JTA) — The organizers of an Australian literary festival pulled the plug on this year’s event on Tuesday, after nearly 200 authors said they would boycott over the disinvitation of a Palestinian-Australian author and activist who has justified “armed struggle.”
The board of the Adelaide Writers’ Week announced last week that they had disinvited Randa Abdel-Fattah, saying they felt her presence “would not be culturally sensitive” in the wake of the Bondi massacre, where 15 people were killed by two gunmen at a Hanukkah event.
Following the board’s announcement, roughly 180 of 240 writers slated to appear at the festival announced they were boycotting it over the decision, including British author Zadie Smith and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
On Tuesday, the festival’s board put out another statement, apologizing to Abdel-Fattah, announcing that all but one of its members had resigned and canceling the writers’ week altogether.
“We also apologise to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah for how the decision was represented and reiterate this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history,” the statement said.
Abdel-Fattah rejected the apology in a statement on X.
“I refuse and reject the Board’s apology. It is disingenuous. It adds insult to injury,” she said. “The Board again reiterates the link to a terror attack I had nothing to do with, nor did any Palestinian. The Bondi shooting does not mean I or anyone else has to stop advocating for an end to the illegal occupation and systemic extermination of my people — that is an obscene and absurd demand.”
While the board did not cite specific statements by Abdel-Fattah in its initial decision, Australian Jewish groups have called for her exclusion from public appearances in the past, citing a March 2024 post on X where she wrote that “armed struggle is a moral and legal right of the colonised and brutalised.”
Jewish Community Council of South Australia public and government liaison Norman Schueler, who called for Abdel-Fattah’s removal in a letter to the festival’s organizers, condemned those that boycotted the festival.
“I think for everyone who has dropped out that it’s rather pathetic because that means they agree with what Dr Fattah is on about… Namely, that Israel should not exist,” Schueler told The Adelaide Advertiser.
The dustup comes as Australia’s parliament prepares to consider harsher speech laws devised in the wake of the Bondi massacre.
Louis Adler, a Jewish Australian and the director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, announced her resignation in an op-ed in The Guardian where she said the disinvitation of Abdel-Fattah “weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation.”
“I cannot be party to silencing writers so, with a heavy heart, I am resigning from my role as the director of the AWW. Writers and writing matters, even when they are presenting ideas that discomfort and challenge us,” wrote Adler.
Another Jewish board member, Tony Berg, had announced his resignation in October, appearing to cite Abdel-Fattah’s invitation.
“I cannot serve on a board which employs a Director of Adelaide Writers’ Week who continues to deal with the board inappropriately and who programs writers who have a vendetta against Israel and Zionism,” wrote Berg, according to the Australian outlet InDaily.
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