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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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On PBS’ ‘Finding Your Roots,’ Jewish actor Lizzy Caplan discovers her family’s unknown Holocaust story
(JTA) — Actor Lizzy Caplan always thought it was unusual she didn’t know of any relatives who were victims of the Holocaust.
In Tuesday’s episode of the PBS celebrity genealogy series “Finding Your Roots,” Caplan learns that one of her ancestors survived four camps — and that his wife and baby were murdered.
“It was my friends whose grandparents had survived the Holocaust, and we were very aware of who those grandparents were, and my grandparents were not in that group,” Caplan says. “So this is news to me.”
In Tuesday’s episode, historian and “Finding Your Roots” host Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents Caplan, 43, with genealogical information about her mother Barbara’s ancestors. Barbara died of cancer when Caplan was 13.
The episode, titled “The Road We Took,” also explores the family history of Pakistani-American comedian Hasan Minhaj.
In an exclusive clip shared with JTA, Caplan learns that her great-grand-uncle Wolf Miodownik survived three concentration camps and one transit camp before remaking his life in the United States. His wife Liba, however, and their 6-month-old infant, were killed upon their arrival at Auschwitz. When the camps were liberated, Wolf moved to Belgium, remarried and, eventually, immigrated to the United States.
More than 1 million people died at Auschwitz, primarily in the gas chambers or of starvation or disease.
In previous episodes of “Finding Your Roots,” Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin and writer and actor Lena Dunham also learned they had relatives who perished in the Holocaust. A later episode this season will explore the family history of IAC chair and FOX co-founder, the billionaire Barry Diller.
Caplan grew up in Los Angeles in a Reform Jewish household, had a bat mitzvah ceremony, and attended a Jewish summer camp.
She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her role in the 2022 miniseries “Fleishman is in Trouble,” based on the book of the same name. Caplan is also known for her roles in the 2004 comedy film “Mean Girls,” and the television shows “Freaks and Geeks” and “Masters of Sex.”
In November, Netflix announced that Caplan would have a role in “The Boys from Brazil,” a five-part miniseries based on the 1976 novel about Jewish Nazi hunters in pursuit of 94 clones of Adolf Hitler. The miniseries, which does not have a release date, will also star Israeli actor Shira Haas.
This episode of “Finding Your Roots” airs on PBS on Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET.
The post On PBS’ ‘Finding Your Roots,’ Jewish actor Lizzy Caplan discovers her family’s unknown Holocaust story appeared first on The Forward.
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Australian Police Arrest Teens for Antisemitic Harassment of Jewish Schoolboys
Illustrative: Government workers cleaning antisemitic graffiti in Sydney, Australia in February 2025. Photo: AAPIMAGE via Reuters Connect
Australian police have arrested two teenagers suspected of chasing Jewish schoolboys in a stolen car while shouting Nazi slogans in Melbourne last week.
The suspects, one of whom already has a criminal history at age 16, were taking a joyride in the vehicle in the St. Kilda East section of the city when they spotted the Jewish boys walking home, according to Australian media. After initially passing by them, the driver reportedly executed a U-turn and gave chase, nearly striking one of the fleeing boys as he tried to escape what appeared to be an imminent threat to his life.
“Parents said the boys were badly shaken and reluctant to return to school, struggling to understand why they had been targeted,” the outlet J-Wire reported. “One father said the use of Nazi gestures was particularly distressing for families in a community where many are descendants of Holocaust survivors.”
Police confirmed on Friday night that they arrested the 16-year-old boy, who has been charged with aggravated burglary, theft of a motor vehicle, and numerous driving offences.
The announcement from law enforcement came after a 15-year-old was arrested for the incident and charged with theft of a motor vehicle.
The younger boy has been bailed ahead of his court appearance next month, Australian media reported. However, the 16-year-old has been remanded in custody and is set to appear in court on Tuesday.
Australian lawmakers have sought to confront antisemitism in recent weeks with new legislation, following a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the country.
The wave of antisemitism culminated last month at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, where gunmen, allegedly inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group, opened fire on a Jewish gathering celebrating the start of Hanukkah, killing 15 people and wounding dozens of others.
On Tuesday, the Australian Federal Parliament passed the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate, and Extremism Act, increasing penalties imposed on hate crime perpetrators and creating new ones against “preachers and leaders” who promote hatred. Other provisions of the law, passed as separate acts, impose new gun restrictions and strengthen and aim to strengthen the immigrations system’s threat detection capabilities.
These measures passed as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese apologized for his government not doing enough to combat antisemitism.
A year before the incident, the Executive Council on Australian Jewry (EJAC) reported a 316 percent increase in antisemitic incidents between 2023 and 2024, a figure which included a surge in physical assaults and “graffiti calling to kill Jews as a direct imperative.”
“In the past such deal calls were in the form of the ‘Death to the Jews’ — expressing a sentiment rather than an act,” the group said in its 2025 report. “The same theme has also occurred in hate emails, phone calls, and other messages — calling for the mass death of Jews. The expression of such sentiments has become much more common, adding to the sense of social license for acts of severe physical violence against Australian Jews.”
In other incidents, someone graffitied the home of Lesli Berger, former president of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies; a Jewish man was assaulted by an anti-Israel mob because he took down an advertisement of a pro-Palestinian rally; and, in one notorious episode in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, hundreds of pro-Hamas protesters gathered outside the Sydney Opera House chanting “gas the Jews,” “f—k the Jews,” and other epithets.
Anti-Israel sentiment in Australia has also led to vandalism. In June 2024, the US consulate in Sydney was vandalized and defaced by a man carrying a sledgehammer who smashed the windows and graffitied inverted red triangles on the building. The inverted red triangle has become a common symbol at pro-Hamas rallies. The Palestinian terrorist group, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, has used inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “the red triangle is now used to represent Hamas itself and glorify its use of violence.”
“We are now at a stage where anti-Jewish racism has left the fringes of society, where it is normalized and allowed to fester and spread, gaining ground at universities, in arts and culture spaces, in the health sector, in the workplace and elsewhere,” EJAC president Daniel Aghion said in a statement on the day the group released its 2025 report. “In such an environment, Jews have legitimate concerns for their physical safety and social well-being in Australia. Together, we must do all we can to combat this scourge.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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What an antisemitic conspiracy theory and the Alex Pretti killing have in common
The night after Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, as federal officials continued to spread lies about what happened, a friend asked me for advice on another disturbing instance of misinformation. What she should say, she asked, to a colleague who is posting antisemitic conspiracy theories about last month’s wildfires in Argentina.
That conundrum was related to the horror of our government trying to blame an innocent man for his own murder, I told her. And democracy, our very society, depends on figuring what to do about both.
In both cases, there’s a stubborn refusal to admit reality. Blinded by hate, suspicion or party loyalty, and locked in hermetically sealed media silos, people blame phantoms — in the case of Argentina — or the actual victims — as in Minneapolis — for the ills of our world.
And with each rejection, each accusation, society bends a bit more toward breaking.
In Argentina, after fires ravaged some 3,000 acres earlier this month, retired military general César Milani and others blamed the blazes on Israel.
My friend’s colleague was one of the many thousands of social media posters who spread those accusations, convinced that Israelis in Patagonia deliberately started the fires in order to clear the way for Zionist settlement.
Nothing my friend could say — that authorities had not determined the cause, that the Argentine government itself said the “Zionist fire” accusations were baseless — could convince her colleague otherwise.
“She would just tell me, ‘That’s what they want you to believe,’” my friend said. “What could I say to that?”
I wish I knew. Because all weekend I despaired seeing the same dynamic at work in the United States, in even more tragic circumstances.
Video footage, eyewitnesses and expert analysis show that Border Police shot Pretti multiple times, after they threw him to the ground and removed a holstered firearm he was legally carrying. Videos show that Pretti, who had been using his iPhone to film Border Police and ICE agents, had run to help a woman whom the federal agents had shoved down.
Anyone who takes the time to look and listen to the evidence can agree on what happened. Or so you would think.
Yet many federal officials, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, suggested that the real victims were the agents who killed Pretti.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior aide, called Pretti “a domestic terrorist.” Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Border Patrol operations, said Pretti sought to “massacre law enforcement.” (Federal officials used very similar language to describe Renée Good, an unarmed mother whom ICE agents shot and killed earlier this month, after her death.)
Pretti “allegedly tried to pull out a firearm,” reported the resolutely pro-Trump OneAmerica News — ignoring the fact, clear in videos of the incident, that it was agents who removed his firearm from his holster, and agents who shot him after.
As with the Argentine fires, these were the accusations that ricocheted across social media, where posters accused Pretti — with zero evidence — of being an agitator paid for by Jewish Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros.
“Pretti was unalived” — online slang for “killed” — “by federal law enforcement officers who were defending themselves from being murdered by a deranged, Soros-paid terrorist,” was one of the typical, depressing posts to pop up in my feed this weekend.
At least in Argentina the government issued a statement debunking the Zionist arson claim, after an investigation found it was baseless.
In the U.S., a full, fair inquiry into Pretti’s death may shed more light on why the killing occurred. But despite some Republican lawmaker’s calls for a joint federal and state investigation, the federal government is so far doing what it did after the Good’s killing: shutting state authorities out and focusing on the actions of the victims, not the shooter. Three days ago an FBI agent assigned to investigate Good’s death resigned after the Department of Justice pressured her to drop her investigation into the agent behind the shooting.
And so a senseless death that could provide a moment of national reckoning, even reconciliation, will be mourned by many Americans in justifiable outrage. But for others, nothing will penetrate their conviction that Alex Pretti was guilty of provoking his own murder.
The historical record provides little hope that people so locked into a point of view shaped by misinformation can ever change their minds.
I always assumed that the public understanding of the Kent State University shootings, on May 4, 1970, was a matter of settled history: Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on peaceful protesting college students, killing four, and we all knew it was an unjustifiable massacre.
But revisiting that history in the wake of Pretti’s death, I discovered that was far from the truth.
“There was still that sentiment out there that they should have shot more students,” Dean Kahler, a former Kent State protester permanently paralyzed after a National Guardsman’s bullet severed his lower spine, told NPR in 2020, “that they should’ve killed more people.”
And long before Kent State, there was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish officer accused of treason in 1894 and later fully exonerated, in a case that divided France to the brink of civil war.
Ever since, a succession of right-wing elements in France have stuck to their belief in Dreyfus’ guilt. In 2021, the French lawyer Germain Latour said French antisemites suffered from an “epidemic of mental cholera” that prevented them from accepting the truth.
I wish I hadn’t had to tell my friend that it’s hard, if not impossible, to crack open every closed mind. But I did. My friend’s colleague will likely never stop believing Israel burned Argentina. Pretti’s killers will continue to have millions of defenders who will never see what to most of us is obvious.
Both stories follow the same script: reality conflicts with ideology, so reality gets discarded.
What matters more is that the people who care about finding and defending the facts push their institutions — courts, media, academia, clergy — to do the same. It is, to borrow a recent movie title, one battle after another. But for Alex Pretti’s sake, we cannot quit.
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