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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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Behind Ronnie Eldridge’s sweet, motherly face, one of the toughest political minds in NYC
When news arrived that Ronnie Eldridge had passed away at the age of 95, I thought back to the mid-1980’s when I made a number of visits to the apartment on Central Park West that she shared with the legendary newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin and their blended family of six kids. At the time I was doing stories for NPR about Breslin and his passionated denunciation of municipal authorities for their neglect of city’s homeless. Sometimes I’d record Breslin at home.
I couldn’t help noticing that almost every time I was in that apartment, Eldridge was on the phone with an autistic Jewish man named Ralph. I tend to notice things like that because my brother Michael, olav ha sholom, was autistic.
According to Daniel Eldridge, the eldest of the three Eldridge “kids,” his mother met Ralph at a Robert F. Kennedy presidential campaign event in 1968. Apparently, a campaign volunteer who was manning the door was giving Ralph a hard time.
Ronnie Eldridge intervened and declared that Ralph, who she had never met before, was her friend and he was to be allowed in. Daniel Eldridge told me his mother spoke with Ralph nearly every day after that.
Because my conversation with Daniel Eldridge was conducted on speakerphone, Eldridge’s granddaughter, Sophie Silberman, piped up.
“She looked after everybody with kindness and devotion,” Silberman said. “She knew that she was significant to Ralph and it didn’t take much to keep that part of his life alive and it meant the world to Ralph.”
Big shoes to fill
That kindness and devotion echoed in several recollections of Eldridge’s public life today.
Ruth Messinger, a former city council member who went on to lead the American Jewish World Service, told me that Eldridge “was very savvy.”
“She was a no-nonsense person,” Messinger said. “If there was an issue, if there was a problem, she would take it on. She was a seriously progressive presence for many, many years. She pursued the issues and stood up for justice.”
“She was just an institution all by herself,” said her successor in the New York City Council, Gale Brewer.
Eldridge represented an Upper West Side district in the Council for 12 years before being term-limited out of office. “Her shoes were very big shoes to fill,” Brewer said.
Eldridge was one of the sponsors of a 1992 law that required cameras be placed in facilities that house automated teller machines. She was motivated to win passage, having been held up using an ATM in her neighborhood.
Brewer is one of many public officials and activists who are remembering Eldridge’s advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable members of society, including the LGBTQ community and women who have been abused by their spouses or boyfriends. She remembers Eldridge visiting incarcerated women who were doing time for crimes linked to their experience as battered women.
“She put that issue on the map,” Brewer told me.
The conscience of the Lindsay administration
Eldridge was one of the anti-war activists in the 1960’s who made mountains move on the national level. During the war in Vietnam she helped found the “Dump Johnson” movement, which in turn sparked President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to forego re-election in 1968. That prompted Robert F. Kennedy to enter the race. Eldridge was keen on RFK. She was a young mother in 1964 when she volunteered his campaign for the U.S. Senate.
During the ’68 presidential campaign, RFK said of Eldridge, “Behind that sweet, motherly face, Ronnie Eldridge has one of the toughest political minds in the city, if not the country.” She used the quote on a campaign poster for her unsuccessful bid to become Manhattan Borough President in 1977.
Eldridge’s activism also paid dividends on the local level. She served as the coordinator of Democrats for Lindsay and helped the Republican mayor win re-election in 1969 on the Liberal Party line. She was a political strategist for Lindsay and was known as the conscience of the Lindsay administration.
Around that time, she was part of a group that included the singer Harry Belafonte challenging the license of television station WPIX. The challenge dragged on for nine years but in 1978 an out of court settlement put about $10 million into the entity that challenged the license. I learned about all this when I asked Eldridge how she came to possess that very valuable Central Park West apartment.
A tabloid life
A number of Eldridge’s close friends have remarked that being married to Jimmy Breslin may’ve come with some perks, it must’ve been a challenge as well. For those of us who read Breslin religiously in the New York Daily News and New York Newsday, some of the gruff newspaper columnist’s more entertaining columns chronicled the foibles of the interfaith family’s Upper West Side life together.
This shtick inspired a pilot for a 1989 CBS sitcom about a NYC newspaper columnist and a mayoral aide. American Nuclear was co-written by Breslin but the network ultimately decided not to pick up the series.
In a 2004 for a radio documentary interview about her husband, I asked Ronnie Eldridge about having her domestic life portrayed in a tabloid
“The first time it happened everybody was hysterical,” she said. “I had a daughter in Paris. She called from Paris and was in tears. A daughter at college, she was also in tears. And my son in California said, ‘What’s going on?’ And then Jimmy’s family said, ‘Oh, just don’t pay any attention to it.’”
“When I was in the city council, I would just pretend that I didn’t read the paper. He would write articles. condemning and attacking colleagues of mine. I’d have to go into the city council and, see somebody that he’d just called unmentionable names. So, I just learned to leave it alone.”
A memorial service will be held for Ronnie Eldridge on Wednesday, March 11 at 4:30 p.m. at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan.
The post Behind Ronnie Eldridge’s sweet, motherly face, one of the toughest political minds in NYC appeared first on The Forward.
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New Analysis Questions Legality of Campus BDS Efforts Against Israel
Cornell’s divestment protests continued during the university’s commencement ceremony, May 25, 2024, during which students interrupted a speech by President Martha Pollack with chanting and canvas signs. Photo: Reuters Connect
A newly released research paper is raising fresh legal questions about the wave of campus and institutional campaigns calling for divestment from Israel, arguing that such efforts may violate anti-discrimination laws in the United States.
The report, published by Northwestern Law School professor Max M. Schanzenbach and Harvard Law School professor Robert H. Sitkoff, examines the growing push by activists affiliated with the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), which urges governments, universities, and companies to cut economic ties with Israel in the first step to the Jewish state’s eradication.
According to the paper, divestment campaigns that single out Israeli institutions or businesses could potentially run afoul of state and federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on national origin.
BDS advocates argue that their campaign is a form of political protest designed to pressure Israel to change its policies. The movement, formally launched by anti-Israel activists in the mid-2000s, has called for boycotts of Israeli goods, divestment from companies linked to Israel, and government sanctions.
But the new analysis contends that when governments or public institutions adopt such policies, the underlying legality could be questionable. The authors argue that targeting Israel specifically for economic exclusion could conflict with existing anti-discrimination statutes or state laws aimed at preventing boycotts of Israel.
More than half of US states have enacted legislation limiting participation in BDS-related boycotts or requiring government contractors to certify that they are not boycotting Israel. In some states, including California, laws restrict the awarding of public contracts or funding to organizations that participate in boycotts targeting the country.
The paper also challenges the argument frequently made by BDS supporters that such boycotts are protected under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. While individuals may advocate for boycotts as political speech, the authors argue that institutional policies, particularly those adopted by government bodies or public universities, could still violate anti-discrimination or procurement laws depending on how they are implemented.
The paper raises potential anti-discrimination concerns surrounding divestment campaigns that target Israeli companies. The authors argue that some boycott or divestment proposals could expose universities or public institutions to legal vulnerability if investment decisions are based primarily on a company’s Israeli national origin rather than specific conduct. Under certain US civil rights laws and state policies governing public institutions, actions that single out individuals or entities because of national origin may trigger discrimination claims. The paper suggests that if divestment policies are framed broadly against Israeli businesses as a category, rather than tied to particular corporate activities, institutions implementing them could face legal challenges alleging unequal treatment.
The analysis argues that modern divestment campaigns targeting Israel differ significantly from the anti-apartheid divestment movement against South Africa. The paper contends that while many universities in the 1980s adopted selective restrictions on companies directly tied to South Africa’s apartheid system, often aligned with international sanctions and corporate conduct codes, the current iteration of the BDS campaign against Israel frequently calls for broader exclusions based on a company’s ties to Israel itself, potentially creating legal risks such as national-origin discrimination issues.
Divestment campaigns have become especially prominent in recent years on US college campuses, where student groups have pushed universities to withdraw endowment investments from companies tied to Israel or its military. Critics, however, argue the campaigns unfairly single out the world’s only Jewish state and risk creating discriminatory policies against Israeli businesses or academics.
In the two years following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages throughout southern Israel, campus activists have intensified efforts to implement divestment policies on university campuses. While universities have mostly resisted these efforts, federal lawmakers have advanced legislation to truncate divestment initiatives before they gain traction. For instance, in 2024, Congress introduced “The Protect Economic Freedom Act,” which would render universities that participate in the BDS movement against Israel ineligible for federal funding under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, prohibiting them from receiving federal student aid. The bill would also mandate that colleges and universities submit evidence that they are not participating in commercial boycotts against the Jewish state.
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UK Holds Four Men on Suspicion of Iranian Spying on Jewish Sites
Director General of MI5 Ken McCallum delivers the annual Director General’s Speech at Thames House, the headquarters of the UK’s Security Service, in London, Britain, Oct. 16, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Brady/Pool via REUTERS
British police arrested four men on Friday on suspicion of helping Iran’s intelligence services carry out surveillance of people and locations linked to the Jewish community in London.
Detectives said one of the men was Iranian, while three had dual British-Iranian nationality. The arrests were part of a “long-running investigation,” police added, indicating the men‘s alleged activities pre-dated the US and Israeli bombardment of Iran, which started last Saturday.
British lawmakers and the domestic spy agency MI5 have long warned of threats posed to Britain by Iran. Three Iranians were charged with offenses under Britain’s National Security Act relating to assisting a foreign intelligence service last May.
In a separate investigation last year, police arrested five men, four of them Iranian, over a suspected plot to target specific premises, which British media said was the Israeli embassy. They were later released without charge.
“The Jewish community and the wider public will understandably be concerned by today’s arrests. We continue to monitor the situation closely,” interior minister Shabana Mahmood said on X.
Police said the four detained men were aged between 22 and 55. Six others were also arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender, and police said searches were ongoing.
Speaking about the current Iranian conflict on Thursday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that people would use it to divide the country.
“The government is reaching out to communities across the United Kingdom – Jewish and Muslim alike – making sure communities and places of worship have appropriate, protective security in place,” he told a press conference.
Illustrating the threat from Iran, Britain’s MI5 spy boss said that over two years from 2022-2024, his service and British police had responded to 20 Iran-backed plots to kidnap or kill British nationals or individuals based in Britain who were regarded by Tehran as a threat.
Britain also recorded a 4% rise in antisemitic incidents in 2025, making it the second-worst year on record, a charity said. Two men were killed last October during an attack on a synagogue in the northern English city of Manchester.