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As ‘The Marvelous Mrs Maisel’ ends, will its Jewish legacy be more than a punchline?
(JTA) — After five seasons, 20 Emmy awards and plenty of Jewish jokes, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” airs its final episode on Friday.
The lauded Amazon Prime show from Amy Sherman-Palladino has enveloped viewers in a shimmering, candy-colored version of New York during the late 1950s and early 1960s — a world in which “humor” has meant Jewish humor and “culture” has meant Jewish culture.
But as it comes to an end, the show’s Jewish legacy is still up for debate: Did its representation of Jews on mainstream TV make it a pioneer of the 2010s? Or did it do more harm than good in the battle for better representation, by reinforcing decades-old comedic tropes about Jews?
The comedy-drama followed the vivacious Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) on a journey from prim Upper West Side housewife — left in the lurch after her husband has an affair with his secretary — to ambitious, foul-mouthed comic fighting her way through the male-dominated standup comedy industry. Her New York Jewishness colored her jokes, her accent, her mannerisms and much of her daily life.
That’s because the whole landscape of the show was Jewish, from the well-to-do, acculturated intelligentsia (such as Midge’s parents) to the self-made garment factory owners (such as her in-laws). Even the radical Jewish comic Lenny Bruce, a countercultural icon of the midcentury, appeared as a recurring character who propels Midge’s success.
Henry Bial, a professor specializing in performance theory and Jewish popular culture at the University of Kansas, said the emergence of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” in 2017 exemplified a shift to more overt portrayals of Jews on TV — especially on streaming services. Although Jewish characters featured in TV shows throughout the 20th century, such as “The Goldbergs” in the 1950s, “Rhoda” in the 1970s and “Seinfeld” in the 1990s, their Jewishness was often more coded than explicit. Network television, seeking to attract the majority of Americans coveted by advertisers, feared alienating audiences who couldn’t “relate” to ethnic and racial minorities.
“If there are only three things you can put on television at 8 o’clock on Tuesday night, then there’s a lot more incentive for networks and advertisers to stay close to the herd, because you’re competing for the same eyeballs,” said Bial. “But when people can watch whatever they want whenever they want, then it opens up for a much wider range of stories.”
Other shows such as “Transparent,” “Broad City” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which debuted in 2014 and 2015, are often cited alongside “Mrs. Maisel” as part of a new wave of Jewish representation.
Riv-Ellen Prell, a professor emerita of American studies at the University of Minnesota, argued that Midge subverts the stereotype of the “Jewish American princess.” At the start of the show, she appears to embrace that image: She is financially dependent on her father and husband and obsessive about her appearance, measuring her body every day to ensure that she doesn’t gain weight. Despite living with her husband for years, she always curls her hair, does her makeup and spritzes herself with perfume before he wakes up.
“She looks for all the world like the fantasy of a Jewish American princess,” said Prell. “And yet she is more ambitious than imaginable, she is a brilliant comic who draws on her own life. You have Amy Sherman-Palladino inventing the anti-Jewish princess.”
Bial said that Midge’s relationship with her Jewishness defies another stereotype: That identity is not a source of neurosis or self-loathing, as it often appears to be in the male archetypes of Woody Allen and Larry David, or in Rachel Bloom’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Through the spirited banter, the pointed exclamations of “oy,” the titillation over a rabbi coming for Yom Kippur break fast — Midge’s Jewishness is a source of comforting ritual, joy and celebration.
“She has anxieties and issues, but none of them are because she’s Jewish,” said Bial.
Some critics argue the show’s depiction of Jewish culture relies on shallow tropes. In a 2019 review, TV critic Paul Brownfield said “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” repurposed stereotypes to appear “retro chic.” He pointed to a consistent contrast between the Weissmans (the assimilated, cultured Jews of the Upper West Side) and the Maisels (the boorish, money-focused Jews of the Garment District), arguing that these superficial types replace an exploration of what the period was actually like for American Jews.
“However ‘Jewish’ Sherman-Palladino wants the show to be, ‘Maisel’ fails to grapple with the realities of the moment in Jewish American history it portrays,” Brownfield wrote. “Which is ultimately what leaves me queasy about its tone — the shtick, the stereotypes, the comforting self-parody.”
Meanwhile, Andy Samberg took a jab while co-hosting the 2019 Golden Globes with Sandra Oh. “It’s the show that makes audiences sit up and say, ‘Wait, is this antisemitic?’” he joked.
Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle, shown in a synagogue scene, are two of the show’s non-Jewish actors. (Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Studios)
Others have criticized the show’s casting: Its titular heroine, her parents Abe and Rose Weissman (Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle) and Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) are all played by non-Jews. A debate over the casting of non-Jewish actors in Jewish roles has heated up in recent years, taking aim not only at Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, but also at Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsberg in “On The Basis of Sex,” Helen Mirren as Golda Meir in “Golda” and Gaby Hoffmann and Jay Duplass as the Pfefferman siblings in “Transparent.” Comedian Sarah Silverman popularized the term “Jewface” to critique the trend.
“Watching a gentile actor portraying, like, a Jew-y Jew is just — agh — feels, like, embarrassing and cringey,” Silverman said on her podcast in 2021.
Midge’s rise as a comedian is interlocked with her ally and one-time fling, the fictionalized Lenny Bruce. His character has a softened glow in the show, but in reality, Bruce was branded a “sick comic” for his scathing satire that railed against conservatism, racism and moral hypocrisy. Between 1961 and 1964, he was charged with violating obscenity laws in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and he was deported from England. At his Los Angeles trial in 1963, Bruce was accused of using the Yiddish word “shmuck,” taken as an obscenity to mean “penis.” He incorporated the charge into his standup, explaining that the colloquial Jewish meaning of “schmuck” was “fool.”
Driven to pennilessness by relentless prosecution, police harassment and blacklisting from most clubs across the country, he died of a morphine overdose in 1966 at 40 years old. The real Lenny Bruce’s tragedy lends a shadow to the fictional Midge Maisel’s triumphs.
The United States that he struggled with until his death also looks comparatively rosy through the lens of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” whose protagonist battles misogyny but takes little interest in other societal evils — including still-rampant antisemitism. Some critics have noted that she is oblivious to segregated facilities when she tours with Black singer Shy Baldwin, then nearly outs him as gay during her set.
“‘Mrs. Maisel’ takes place in a supersaturated fantasy 1958 New York, one where antisemitism, racism, homophobia and even sexism are barely a whisper,” Rokhl Kafrissen wrote in 2018.
Reflecting on the criticism that had piled up by 2020, Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel Palladino, also an executive producer and a lead writer for the show, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that trying to appease every Jewish viewer was a futile exercise.
“We knew that if we show a Jewish family at temple — if we show them and talk about Yom Kippur and all those kinds of things — there are going to be people who are going to nitpick at specifics that maybe we didn’t get exactly right,” said Palladino, who is not Jewish. “But a lot of the feedback that we’ve gotten has been ‘Thank you. Thank you for leaning into it and showing Jews being Jewish, as opposed to just name checking them as Jewish.’”
Sherman-Palladino added: “[T]here are many different kinds of Jews! To say, ‘oh, Jewish stereotypes,’ well, what are you talking about? Because we have an educated Jew, we have a woman who was happy to be a mother, we have another woman striking out as a stand up comic, and, you know, Susie Myerson’s [Alex Borstein’s character] a Jew! We’ve got a broad range of Jews in there.”
However “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is assessed in the future, it will remain significant for thrusting a new kind of Jewish heroine into the mainstream consciousness, said Bial.
“Because of its popularity, its longevity and frankly its quality, it’s going to be the example,” Bial said. “In the history of Jews and TV, this is going to be the chapter for the late 2010s and early 2020s — you have to mention ‘Mrs. Maisel.’ It is very clearly a landmark in Jewish representation, particularly for Jewish women.”
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Opinion: Hate crime law a tentative step forward
Canada has taken a long overdue step in strengthening our ability to confront hate. The federal government’s new legislation not only creates a stand-alone hate crime offence, it also does something our courts have wrestled with for decades, it codifies a definition of “hatred” in the Criminal Code. That clarity matters, but let us be clear from the start, not all is perfect in this law.
Until now, judges and Crown Attorneys relied on Supreme Court decisions going back to Keegstra in 1990 and Whatcott in 2013 to determine what “hatred” meant in law. Those cases established that hatred was not about mere insults or offensive speech, but about “detestation” and “vilification,” the kind of speech that isolates a community, marks them as less than fully human, and places them in real danger. The new legislation takes those definitions out of the legal textbooks and places them clearly in the Criminal Code. That matters for police officers deciding whether to lay charges, for Crowns weighing evidence, and for communities who have too often felt that the law was uncertain, inconsistent, or too slow.
For Jewish Canadians, Indigenous peoples, Muslim communities, Black Canadians, LGBTQ+ people, and many others who have borne the brunt of hate crimes, the signal is welcome, Canada is saying hate is not just a social problem, it is a crime against us all.
The bill also removes one of the most frustrating procedural roadblocks, the need to secure the personal consent of the provincial Attorney General before charges could be laid in hate propaganda cases. In practice, this meant that police and Crowns, even when they had strong evidence, could be stalled at the starting line because approval from the Attorney General was rarely granted. By removing this requirement, the new law allows police and Crown attorneys to proceed more swiftly and with more confidence. For communities long told to “just report it,” this change could finally build trust that the justice system is not only listening but ready to act.
Another important element is the protection of spaces where communities gather. The law makes it a crime to intimidate or obstruct people entering synagogues, schools, community centres, or other places primarily used by identifiable groups. That means no more hiding behind masks to frighten congregants on their way to worship or children on their way to school. These protections may seem obvious, but for too long communities at risk have faced such harassment without adequate recourse.
Just as important, the government has committed $12.9 million over six years, with nearly a million annually ongoing, to support new anti-hate projects. This includes funding to improve the collection and availability of hate crime data and to expand services for victims and survivors. These investments will help communities not only seek justice but also begin healing.
So yes, this is progress.
But progress does not equal victory.
The legislation’s definition of hatred, detestation and vilification not mere offence or hurt feelings, is both precise and cautious. It tries to balance freedom of expression with the need to protect communities from real harm. That balance is crucial. Nobody wants to see a law that punishes criticism or satire, even if it makes us uncomfortable. At the same time, communities need protection from the toxic brew of rhetoric that we know can escalate into violence.
And here lies the problem, this law looks only at the traditional sphere of hate crimes and hate propaganda. What it does not yet confront is the digital ecosystem where hatred thrives, multiplies, and metastasizes.
We live in a world where conspiracy theories that once stayed in dimly lit basements now reach millions with a single click. Holocaust denial, racist caricatures, misogynist rants, antisemitic tropes, they all travel faster and hit harder online. A Facebook post, a TikTok video, or a Telegram channel can stoke the same kind of detestation and vilification the Criminal Code now defines, but at a speed and scale our laws are still catching up to.
Without integrating online harms into this new framework, Canada risks winning a legal battle while losing the societal war. A Pyrrhic victory, if you will.
Hate groups adapt quickly. They couch their language in irony or “just joking.” They migrate to platforms beyond the reach of Canadian courts. They recruit vulnerable young people not with burning crosses but with memes and livestreams. If our laws remain focused only on in-person hate crimes or printed pamphlets, we will forever be chasing yesterday’s problem.
The government has promised separate legislation on online harms. Communities targeted by hate cannot afford to wait much longer. Every month of delay is another month when young Canadians are radicalized in their bedrooms, another month when harassment campaigns go unchecked, another month when hatred festers behind a screen only to erupt into real world violence.
This new hate-crime law deserves praise. It is careful, measured, and long needed. But from the very beginning we should be honest, it is not perfect. Unless it is paired with a robust strategy for confronting online hate, one that forces platforms to act responsibly and gives law enforcement real tools to respond, it risks being remembered as a noble but incomplete gesture.
History will not judge us on the elegance of our legal definitions. It will judge us on whether we made our communities safer, whether we stood up for those targeted by hate, and whether we matched words with action.
Canada has given itself sharper legal tools. Now we must decide, will we use them to carve out a safer, more inclusive future, or will we leave them on the shelf while hate keeps spreading in the digital shadows? Because if we settle for half-measures, we may find that what looks like victory today is nothing more than defeat in slow motion.
Bernie M. Farber is the former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress and founding chair emeritus of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
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Austria may withdraw from hosting Eurovision 2026 if Israel is excluded
The chancellor of Austria is pressuring its public broadcaster and the city of Vienna not to host next year’s Eurovision Song Contest if Israel is excluded.
The potential withdrawal from hosting the competition comes as several countries, including Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Iceland, have announced they will not participate in next year’s competition if Israel is included due to the war in Gaza.
Unlike those countries, Austria has a right-wing government. “It’s unacceptable that we, of all people, should prohibit a Jewish artist from coming to Vienna,” a top representative of the Austrian People’s Party told Austrian news outlet oe24.
The party’s leader, Chancellor Christian Stocker, and State Secretary Alexander Pröll are urging the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation and Vienna to cancel hosting if the boycott goes ahead.
The mayor of Vienna, Michael Ludwig, told oe24 that excluding Israel would be “a serious mistake,” but no formal plans to withdraw from hosting the competition have been announced. If the city does pull out of hosting, ORF would potentially owe the new host country up to 40 million euros, or roughly $46 million.
Members of the European Broadcasting Union are set to vote in November on whether the Israeli public broadcaster, KAN, will be allowed to participate in next year’s competition. They have previously rebuffed entreaties to exclude Israel, but pressure is higher this year.
Talks of Austria canceling its 2026 Eurovision hosting come after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Sunday that Germany would skip the contest if Israel is boycotted.
“I consider it a scandal that this is even being discussed. Israel is part of it,” Merz told German talk show host Caren Miosga, according to German news outlet Der Spiegel. He added that he would “support” Germany voluntarily withdrawing from the competition if the boycott takes effect.
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László Krasznahorkai, whose family hid Jewish roots during Holocaust, wins literature Nobel
For decades, Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has written sentences that seem to stretch to the end of time — long, feverish, unpunctuated meditations on chaos, faith, and collapse. Now, the writer once dubbed “the contemporary master of apocalypse” has received the world’s highest literary honor. On Thursday, the Swedish Academy awarded Krasznahorkai, 71, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in 1954 in the small Hungarian town of Gyula to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust and concealed its identity, Krasznahorkai has spent decades chronicling moral disintegration and spiritual endurance.
If you don’t read Hungarian, you might know Krasznahorkai through film: his longtime collaborator Béla Tarr turned several of his novels into movies — Sátántangó (a seven-hour black-and-white epic), Werckmeister Harmonies, and The Turin Horse — all staples of international art-house cinema.
Who is László Krasznahorkai?
A cult figure in world literature, Krasznahorkai is known for sprawling, hypnotic prose and bleak humor. He first drew attention in 1985 with Sátántangó, a novel about life in a decaying Hungarian village.
He has since written a series of darkly comic epics, including The Melancholy of Resistance and Seiobo There Below — each circling questions of despair and transcendence.
Some of his later novels, including Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming and Herscht 07769, feature neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists. The latter contains only a single period in 400 pages. The rest is one relentless cascade of clauses — a symbol of his determination to hold chaos together by grammar alone.
He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015.
How does his Jewish background fit into his work?
Krasznahorkai rarely writes explicitly about Judaism, but the sense of exile, concealment, and moral reckoning runs through his fiction. As antisemitism intensified in the 1930s, his grandfather changed the family name to the more Hungarian-sounding Krasznahorkai. “Our original name was Korin, a Jewish name. With this name, he would never have survived,” the writer told an interviewer in 2018. “My grandfather was very wise.”
Decades later, Krasznahorkai gave the name Korin to the doomed archivist who narrates his 1999 novel War and War — turning family history into fiction. Krasznahorkai didn’t learn about his Jewish ancestry until he was 11, when his father finally told him. “In the socialist era, it was forbidden to mention it,” he recalled.
That buried history gives his novels their haunted tone. In a way, his work continues a Jewish literary tradition: bearing witness in extremity, searching for meaning in ruin.
In that 2018 interview, Krasznahorkai described himself as “half Jewish,” then added darkly: “If things carry on in Hungary as they seem likely to do, I’ll soon be entirely Jewish.”
Do Jews disproportionally win Nobels?
Jews make up about 0.2 percent of the world’s population but have received roughly 20 percent of Nobel Prizes across all categories — a record that spans science, peace, and the arts. That lineage stretches from Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman in physics to Rita Levi-Montalcini and Gertrude Elion in medicine, Milton Friedman and Daniel Kahneman in economics, and Henry Kissinger and Elie Wiesel in peace.
Krasznahorkai now joins that global pantheon — one that also includes Isaac Bashevis Singer, a longtime Forward staff writer, whose Yiddish storytelling won him the 1978 Nobel in Literature.
Who are some other Jewish Nobel laureates in literature?
Louise Glück (2020): The American poet mined family grief and faith, blending autobiography and myth to confront the quiet devastations of ordinary life.
Bob Dylan (2016): The folk legend was honored “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” His Jewish heritage and biblical imagery made his win both celebrated and debated.
Imre Kertész (2002): A Holocaust survivor who was honored in 2002 for Fatelessness, a semi-autobiographical work about a boy in Nazi concentration camps.
Elias Canetti (1981): Born to a Sephardic family in Bulgaria and raised in Vienna, he spent much of his life in exile from fascism. His noted work of nonfiction, Crowds and Power, dissects how mobs become monsters — and how leaders learn to feed them.
Saul Bellow (1976): The Canadian-born American novelist who captured the restless intellect and moral hunger of postwar Jewish life. His novels, including Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March, turned immigrant striving and urban alienation into high art.
JTA contributed to this report.
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