"Michael" lashes out when he finds out about the "gay divorce": When I agreed to be the baby's father, it was because I knew she would be raised in a home with two loving parents, not in some sort of time-share arrangement with complimentary sniping. You can make all the excuses you want, but if this is how you plan on raising our daughter, we should never have had her in the first place. "Mel" lawyerly points out that their arrangement never included his "physical custody". She then goes from offering time of "none" to, in the second episode, a vague promise of maybe some time "when she's 4 or 5." "Michael" resorts to legal action "to protect what's best for my daughter and my rights" and "Mel" snaps back, as written by producer Del Shores, to her old self: You go ahead to try [to get joint custody]. But let me tell you. You're not only up against one angry mother and lesbian. You're up against one pissed off lawyer. Meanwhile only "Michael"s gentile mom has been involved in regular grandparenting, speaking up in defense of single motherhood like her own experience in an unusually sympathetic speech for a woman in this series; we haven't seen the Jewish set since soon after the birth. (updated 10/18/2006)

In the next episode, in a teleplay by executive story editor Brad Fraser, "Mel" tensely insists to "Lindsay" that she wants the custody battle kept between the birth mother and the birth father. "Lindsay" points out: But we were life partners for ten years. "Mel" somewhat lamely insists: You just have to trust me. Which of course sends "Lindsay" straight to "Brian's" expensive lawyer, as "Brian" wryly notes: The queers are about to learn what the breeders knew all along - when it comes to divorce, no one stays clean. At the custody negotiations, "Mel" rants about "Lindsay's" infidelity and "Lindsay's" shark responds about her past. But that was before we got married. The shark continues: Ms. Marcus on more than one occasion has endangered the life of her unborn child, refusing to listen to her own doctor's orders, working to the point of exhaustion. "Mel" furiously protests: That's a goddamn exaggeration! I was fine. (Well, actually, she did have a hard time doing mandated bed rest.) The shark continues: Which hardly qualifies as a better mother than 'Ms. Petersen', biological or otherwise. With some nasty back and forth about experienced mothers vs. first-timers [I was glad to hear some sanity about real people briefly break out here], the negotiators have to agree that "Jenny Rebecca" has three parents, but at the price of much resentment. Even "Gus" now becomes a battleground as over "Lindsay's" angry anti-sugar disapproval, "Mel" ups the ante about mothering, feeding him home-baked brownies - uh, since when did she get all Mrs. Homemaker? -- Unless you plan to tell your lawyer I'm abusing him by giving him a brownie. . . You got what you wanted by discrediting me. By making it seem as if I was a lousy mother. "Lindsay" turns it into a metaphor about their relationship: I was damned if I was gong to lose 'Jenny Rebecca' because I didn't stand up for myself.

In a teleplay written by co-producer Michael MacLennan, "Mel" is preparing the three-way custody transfer to "Michael", as she bitterly complains to "Lindsay": She should be with me instead of being tossed around like a fucking football. If you'd listened to me we wouldn't be playing this game of baby, baby who's got the baby! Lindsay turns this out of the maternal realm and back to the image of "Mel" we had pre-motherhood: Is that's what's killing you? It's not about the baby is it? It's about you! It has to do with Mel Marcus not getting her way and not giving up complete control over everything. Well, tough shit. You don't. So get used to it. "Mel" does look truly miserable and forlorn alone after she brings the baby over to the biological father (though she had called him "a stranger" and "Lindsay" had offered to let "Gus" stay over).

In the next episode, in a teleplay by producer Shawn Postoff, "Lindsay" (All you care about is who has ownership!) and "Michael" (She's a fucking control freak!) cave about the custody arrangement after the baby comes down with a fever while being left with a babysitter, and "Mel" trumps that what matters is what's best for the baby - to be with her mother.

Postoff suddenly stuck Jewish frames of references in "Mel"'s mouth a few episodes on. When her ex describes her parents' latest pressures on her, she replies: "I smell goyim." She uses a Holocaust analogy in seething against proposed local legislation restricting gay rights: The last time people said don't overreact, the next thing they knew they were shipped off to the camps. At a protest meeting, the congresswoman speaks against threats to "our rights as full and equal citizens of the United States" is named the Jewish-sounding Beth Edelstein. Pittsburgh has a lesbian Representative?

Two episodes later, in another teleplay by Fraser, "Mel" continues to reveal her Jewishness. As the campaign over a Proposition 14 to restrict gay rights heats up, she protests: I feel like I'm living in Nazi Germany and we're the new Jews. . .Listen, my zaydie, my grandfather, used to tell me everybody thought he was nuts for leaving Germany. (She affects a Yiddish accent for the first time in the series.) 'Oy, you're making too much of it. It'll pass. That'll never happen.' He lived to the age of 87. The rest of his family died in the camps. However, that doesn't stop her from spouting annoying stereotypes when she suggests that her lonely accountant friend seek out a Jewish man: If you really want to get hitched, what you need is a Jewish guy. They make the best marriage material, provided you can get past the incestuous relationship they have with their mothers that lasts beyond the grave. So he finds a doctor at a temple's professionals mixer - but this guy, unlike "Mel" in her choice of marriage partner, spurns him when he sees his uncircumcised cock - I want a Jewish husband. I want to settle down, carry on traditions, heritage. . .You're a nice guy, Ted. You're just not a nice Jewish guy. As "Ted" describes his effort to meet a mensch and settle down. . . I didn't make the cut.

In the third to last episode, by Fraser, "Mel" looks positively Jewish mother domestic - she's feeding her baby when she hears the preliminary news that their friend is recovering from the nightclub bombing - but then she spits right and left, explaining I don't want to put a kennehora on it. . .I always expect the worst anyway. I've never heard anyone in my family use that expression like that, but I guess the producers felt it had to be used in a context that non-Jews would understand. And then she goes on darkly about her grandfather - and decides that she and her reunited partner and their kids should flee to Canada.

In the second to last episode, by MacLennan, "Mel" is sleepless after her partner's son's gay biological father refuses to let him go to Canada and she pulls out a letter my grandfather wrote me when I got into law school. 'My dearest Rachele' - that's Yiddish for Rachel, he liked my middle name (more likely it was her Jewish name) 'You have no idea how proud I am to think that one day my granddaughter will be the first Jewish woman Supreme Court Justice' -- Zaydie always dreamed big -- (and either this was before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed or the writers are really misinformed) 'I hope you know how lucky you are to live in a country where everyone has the same right to live his life free of intolerance and oppression. That's why I cam here so many years ago. Be grateful you are an American.' -- I wonder what he'd say if he knew what was going on now?

In the finale, by the executive producers Lipman and Cowen, "Mel" and "Lindsay" pack up with the kids to move for political freedom. Their young friend teases that as immigrants to a new country You'll start speaking English with a Yiddish accent. "Mel" jokes: This is Toronto not the Lower East Side!, though she teases her self-effacing partner dithering amongst their possessions: You're such a schicksa! Why don't you just say you want the table!. (updated 8/15/2005)

The L Word - Jenny Schecter in the 2nd Season (on Showtime repeats and On Demand, and repeats on Logo Channel. 2 soundtracks out. This season out on DVD. 2nd season to be rerun, edited for basic cable, on Logo.)) In the season 2 opener, "Life, Loss, Leaving" by executive producer Ilene Chaiken, "Jenny Schecter" is still clueless about the impact her sexual confusion has on men. "Gene" is fed up with her eyeing every lesbian couple and woman on the block and in exasperation tells her: You're a full-on, girl-loving lesbian. Deal with it. Her hunky ex packs up for Ohio, after one last quickie schtupp, which makes her whispered Don't leave not make a lot of sense.

In "Loneliest Number" by Lara Spotts and "Lynch Pin" by Chaiken "Jenny" is still feeling very much bisexual amongst her lesbian friends. When they play a game of what would you do with a penis, she notes, to their scorn, I like men with small dicks because they really try hard to please. In response to another game of self-perception, she concedes that If I were a guy I would ask myself out. But as a woman, no fucking way. She tells her hunky new guy roommate "Mark" that she doesn't know if she's gay, and he explains that her friends cavorting naked in the pool next door "exude" gay-ness, probably something in their hair cuts. So in the middle of the night she asks her promiscuously lesbian hairdresser roommate "Shane" to cut her hair- I feel like I need to change. At least she's finally trying to improve her sophomoric writing, as inspired by a tough writing teacher played by Sandra Bernhard, who decried her stories as a journal, not fiction. By "Loyal" by A. M. Homes, she's pro-actively identifying herself as gay, even at a job interview to be the ghostwriter for a macho (and of course closeted gay) TV star's memoirs.

But in the middle of the season Chaiken started confusingly playing "Jenny's" Jewish card (and I think I have the order of events correct below). "Mark's" admission that he has been videotaping his roommates 24/7 triggers her repressed memories and she starts lashing out at herself, her lesbian lover and him (though he actually did it not really for the porno producer who was paying him or for his own arty documentary but as an act of unrequited longing for "Shane" though I cannot figure out why everyone is so attracted to her). In "Land Ahoy" by Chaiken and directed by producer Rose Troche, "Jenny" confronts him by stripping stark naked with "is this what U want?" marked on her chest. He demurs that she has the wrong idea about what he did. She announces I'm going to use [your camera] now and goes into a feminist screed: You have violated us. You have crossed every line of trust. And don't you dare tell me this was for the sake of art. She turns the camera on him:Do you have any sisters? He uncomfortably admits to having two younger ones. She ratchets up her venom: I want you to ask them a question, and the most important thing is that you really listen to their answer. I want you to ask your sisters about the very first time they were intruded upon by some man. He protests What makes you think my sisters have been intruded upon? She spits out: Because there isn't a single girl or woman in this world who hasn't been intruded upon, at times it's relatively benign and sometimes it's painful. But you have no idea what this feels like. Next we see "Jenny" she is working on a new "project about my family", with klezmer clarinet music in the background, which will continue to be a leit motif about her memories of abuse, for some reason. She appropriates "Mark's" camera: Hi Mom. As you can see I have all our family pictures here. I am videotaping this because I have a couple of questions for you about zayda. I would like to know if zayda lost his mind when he began to transcribe the Torah by hand. Or did that cause him to lose his mind? Do you remember the day they took him away? I wanted to ask you about Grandma. And Grandma, if you're watching this, I wanted to ask you about your experiences at Auschwitz. I wanted to know if when you arrived at Auschwitz did they separate you from your daughter and I wanted to know if you remember the name of the [SS guy] who took your arm and branded you with that tattoo. Do you remember his eyes? Do you know if he used a steel plate or did he use a needle? Then she goes on a cruise with her friends.

In "Loud and Proud" by producer Elizabeth Hunter, "Jenny" takes a photograph of herself as a child and puts it into a drawing of a mouth of a hideous clown and then puts photos of her parents or possibly grandparents around a Shabbat table and she recites a bracha. Then she takes the child photo and puts it into the middle of a maelstrom and cries. "Shane" comes in and asks her what she's doing: I keep on having these nightmares and I'm just trying to work it all out. "Mark" interrupts her and tries to make amends by mouthing feminist truisms. She just gets more venomous: Fuck off Mark. It's not my job to make you a better man and I don't give a shit if I've made you a better man. It's not a fucking woman's job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so some fucking man can evolve. . . Why should I forgive you? He imitates her by stripping naked - though with his hands carefully placed. She spurns his effort: What I want is for you to write "Fuck me" on your chest. Write it! Do it! I want you to walk out that door and I want you to walk down the street. And anybody that wants to fuck you say, "Sure, sure, no problem." And when they do you have to say "Thank you very, very much" and make sure that you have a smile on your face. And then you can be stupid fucking aware what it feels like to be a woman. He's moving out and we hear her klezmer abuse flashback music. While she's eating Life cereal in the kitchen he again tries to apologize but she's too upset: Like you can buy me off with money and good deeds like some kind of whore? [Interesting that she uses part of the pleading wording from the Rosh ha Shanah incantation.] You opened up a Pandora's box and now you're just running away. So I dare you to stay here and deal with this, but we're not friends. We hear dissonant klezmerish violins as she goes to a S & M club (a club that her friends will visit out of curiosity as part of "celebrating diversity" for Gay Pride but find too disturbing). She gets clamped down as she experiences more childhood flashbacks. Now we can see that she remembers being gang raped by teen age boys with either masks or tattoos in what looks like a barn. Her disheveled child self comes out to stare at what appears to be Hassidic men singing in a Succoth tent that has a carnival atmosphere.

In "L'Chaim" by Chaiken and directed by John Curran "Jenny" goes to a bar called "Howling Coyote" that advertises "topless boxing" as klezmer music plays in her head. The proprietor is skeptical of hiring her, but his assistant, who I think had been her enabler at the S & M club smirks: Trust me. She's a very sick girl. She is then sketching a nightmare montage of images with her family photographs while she keeps repeating the Hebrew blessing for Shabbat, with a klezmer clarinet again in the background. She's haunted by the tattoo image from her rape as she sketches a man with a distorted, angry face yelling at a scared little girl. This morphs into a sketch of anti-Nazi demonstrators in Skokie, Illinois. This angry crowd morphs into a shouting crowd at a boxing match. She invites her friends to the strip club, despite their discomfort at being there; they push men away and yell at them to get their hands off - I feel like I'm in hell. The MC announces "Miss Yeshiva Girl", again with klezmer accompaniment. "Jenny" throws out her shoes then comes out, frozen in the stage lights, to jeers as at first she does nothing. But she gradually seems to treat this as some sort of masochistic performance piece, as the Hebrew blessings continue in her head, and she takes off her clothes to complete frontal nudity, though the stripper before her had kept pasties on. The male audience cheers and her friends are horrified. This seems to be cathartic for her as the next morning she cheerfully accepts breakfast from "Mark."

It was very disappointing in "The Return of the Nana" by Schwartz, shown on May 5, 2004, that Linda Lavin's strong Jewish mother "The Nana," returning by popular demand with her cancer in remission from last season, was turned into an oblivious wimp such that she'd fall for a gigolo (even if he was played by Tony Denison who will always have a place in my guilty pleasures for his role in the cable movie Sex, Lies and Cold Hard Cash). Such that she needed to be rescued by son "Sandy" who is the one who had actually purchased her Miami Beach "million dollar condo" for her with his WASP wife's money that served as the questionable source of the temptation.

We've also gotten brief glimpses into "Seth Cohen"'s relationships with Jewish females. In "The New Era" by J.J. Philbin we learned of his thing for "Tiffany Rosenberg": Third grade. Class field trip to Sea World. I tried to sort of talk to the dolphins. She overheard. There was taunting. It was really bad. So I guess that was it for the rest of his life to not date Jewish girls. In "The Chrismukkah That Almost Wasn't" creator Josh Schwartz wryly notes the absence of Jewish girls on the show when "Seth" directs "Ryan" to Do some Jew-recruitment. Round up some Hebrews, my Aryan friend. When "Ryan" instead invites his gentile date he laments It would be better if you were Jewish. There's that ratio issue. At least Schwartz did a mea culpa from last year's association of Moses with the holiday, admitting it should be the Maccabees. There's only one token Hanukkah song on the show's holiday soundtrack - Ben Kweller's "Rock of Ages" despite this interview comment from Schwartz: "What Jewish boy or girl growing up doesn't feel a little jealous?" he ponders. "They get all the good songs. They get the tree. They have all the characters -- Frosty and Rudolph. We've got dreidels. It's not really the same." Gee, Josh, all the more reason for you to provide something for them! In "Family Ties" by Schwartz and producer Drew Z. Greenberg "Seth" twice despairs of projecting himself as a bad boy, that instead he becomes like a Jewish grandmother [variously transcribed on the Web as he just said Sylvia]. . . I am so screwed. Bruce Banner gets mad, he turns into the Hulk. I get mad, I turn into a 75-year-old yenta.(updated 1/24/2005)

Everwood (3rd season. Whole series rerunning from the beginning on ABC Family weeknights on 6 pm.) "Delia" suddenly re-discovered her Jewish identity in "Need to Know" by Bruce Miller and directed by producer David Petrarca. She objects to the school's euphemistically named "holiday pageant" because I'm an angel and there's no angels in the Hanukkah story. There's no angels in the Kwanzaa story. Her brother "Ephram" points out that she doesn't know the Kwanzaa story and that she is half Christian anyway. She retorts: But what about Mom's half? He shoots back: You could be like Elijah and not show up which just confuses her: That's a joke that's over my head so we know she doesn't know about the Passover seder ritual. We see the family post-pageant, with "Delia" removing her beard and sword as her dad notes proudly You were the only Maccabee in the manger. How could I miss you? You stole the show. "Ephram"'s girlfriend invites him to her family's tree trimming with egg nog and they have an odd banter as he calls those "pagan rituals." She lightly says: When are you going to accept My Lord? and he flirts back: When you stop persecuting my people. When he goes home, the camera focuses on the lit menorah in the window, though the timing of the first night while they are on school vacation is completely out of sync with 2004 and continues the usual conflation of Hanukkah with Christmas.

To "Joan's" surprise, "Grace's" mitzvah, as "Joan" insists on calling it, happens in "The Book of Questions" episode by consulting producer Ellie Herman, but then "Joan" oddly spends much of the episode assuring God that I'm not really the point person for Jewish amid other denials of being Jewish and researches the ritual as if she's just discovered what "Grace" has been studying for months. She discusses with God that she sees this as different ways to share the same truth. To the writer's credit, she didn't wallow in the usual "now you are an adult" cliché, but instead emphasized coming of age for moral responsibility and the mystery of it all. "Grace's" synagogue speech, after a mostly accurate representation of a service with singing and standing, starts a bit oddly but actually concludes with an unusual theological angle for TV. She noted that she and her dad had been in conflict about this since I hit the double digits. It was a political thing and a daughter of the rabbi thing. I indulged them on one last empty ritual and then I'm out of here. Then, when you handed me the Torah, it hit me. This is a genius way of attacking adulthood, this religion. There's no easy answers here. It's basically a book of questions. It's a way for us to keep searching to make sense of this mess and dealing with a lot of questions takes guts and when there's no guarantee there will be answers. And I hope I'm up for it. And she even tells her parents that she loves them, as we finally meet "Grace's" shaky mother "Sarah Polonsky" (played by blonde Mary Mara) who we also witness drunk in front of a shocked "Joan" though she manages to stay sober through the service and party. "Dive" by David Grae oddly links "Grace"'s bat mitzvah to her mother's alcoholism: So we came home from the bat mitzvah and she pulls out the family albums and she gets totally hammered while going through the whole family history. The theme of the episode is finding the strength to do something you are afraid to do and she tells her boyfriend that she got the courage to talk to her mother about her drinking.( updated 10/18/2006)

Pilot Season (on the little seen Trio channel) A satirical mockumentary in the style of The Office, this mini-series featured comedienne Sarah Silverman as "Sarah Underman" in a follow-up to a 1997 mockumentary Who's the Caboose? as an actress manipulatively trying to get ahead in Hollywood, without her clingy and competitive ex-boyfriend. In the episode "Come Back Kid" she explodes at her agent on the phone with a round of profanities that she's sick of only getting sent out to read for the bitch parts and screams that it's because she's Jewish and brunette (her management angrily drops her when she refuses to dye her hair blonde for a role). I thought it was a funny take on the legacy of the "Lilith" character from Cheers and Frasier.(10/30/2004)

2003/4 Season

While I don't usually bother monitoring "procedurals" for Jewish female content (and there's been plenty of ethnically colorful murdering Jewish matriarchs on the various Law and Orders over the years who get seen over and over on cable), CSI in October 2003's "Feeling the Heat" by producer Anthony E. Zuiker and Eli Talbert had an odd homicide investigation when it turned out that guest stars Arye Gross (as "Paul Winston") and Stacy Edwards (as "Vicki Winston") were Jewish parents at the end of their rope in caring for a second Tay-Sachs child. From their names on, their characterizations, back story, and actions made little sense. In November's "A Murderer Among Us" episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent by executive story editor Diana Son does a twist on the post-Inquisition Spanish hidden Jew phenomenon by having an Argentine immigrant (played by Maria Thayer), whose Spanish is laced with Ladino, kill herself to expose her husband's murderous anti-Semitism. What was with Judging Amy's May 2004 "Predictive Neglect" episode by Rob Fresco naming Sharon Lawrence's insensitive, nanny-employing superstar lawyer "Andrea Adelstein" though there were no particular other indications that she was Jewish. Why not pick a more ethnically neutral name?(updated 2/25/2005)

Mrs. Grubman was a recurring character on three episodes on the first season on Nip/Tuck (On FX. Out on DVD.), but got her own eponymous episode in the second season, by writer/co-producer Jennifer Salt. For a scabrously satirical series that is intentionally outrageous about plastic surgeons in Miami, executive producer Ryan Murphy has actually been pretty restrained in his portrayals of Jewish matrons, and there isn't Yiddish or other cultural references inserted for ethnic identification when character's names imply that they may be Jewish. "Mrs. Grubman" (played by Ruth Williamson) was practically a plastic surgery addict in the first season, sexually blackmailing "Dr. Christian Troy" to do continual age-defying work on her for free. This season we actually got some sympathetic background on her family life and her misguided motivations, though her conclusion was ironically punishing as yet another surgery brought on a stroke, leaving her and her family even worse off. (updated 10/17/2006)

Fran Felstein on The Sopranos (on HBO and DVD.) - In this fifth season's "In Camelot" by executive producer Terence Winter, Polly Bergen played the first Jewish woman in the series, the longtime mistress of "Tony"s late father, who won her heart over love-struck "Uncle Junior." In an episode filled with ripostes at television writers, as personified by Tim Daly, "Fran Felstein" is consistently described by her past and present admirers has "having class." As "Tony" steams over her son's photo with the dog his mother banished from her house, "Fran" explains that Bruce married an Israeli girl. He's a food service manager for El Al, and that when he moved she finally had to put the dog to sleep. Filled with creepy nostalgia for her Judith Campbell Exner-like past, the highlight of her life was a one-night stand with JFK, preserved with a handkerchief memento, culminating in an age-inappropriate flirty re-enactment for "Tony" of Marilyn Monroe's "Happy Birthday Mr. President" song. (updated 10/18/2006)

Rocked With Gina Gershon (repeated on Independent Film Channel various nights. Out on DVD.) Gershon opens this 6 episode documentary/reality series with the line: "What's a Nice Jewish Girl doing in a spiritual huddle backstage at the House of Blues?" Turning lemons into lemonade, Gershon produced this documentary of her promotional tour for her co-produced, poorly-distributed film Prey for Rock 'n' Roll. The film is based on the experiences and music of punk rocker Cheri Lovedog and the distributor would only open the indie movie where Gershon would promote it [I missed it the week it played in NYC], so, with two weeks notice, she promoted it like a reel actress playing the part of a punk rocker in real life, or as she summarized at the close of the series: Nothing ever goes as planned. I went on a rock 'n' roll tour to promote a movie about a real rock 'n' roller and in the end became a rock 'n' roller without a movie to promote. She took on respected alternative rockers Girls Against Boys as her backing band (selected she notes not only for their musicianship but "I picked the cutest" and also notes that "I met them only once and became really great friends" as she blows off more exhaustingly useless PR to spend her last day on tour partying with them) and wrote tunes of her own, as well as adding covers (such as "These Boots Were Made for Walking") and does a quite beautiful rendition of a ballad in the last episode. While actors in rock bands automatically generate derision, she, like Russell Crowe in his band Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts, has tremendous charisma to pull it off. I grew up obsessed with rock 'n' roll, she admits right away. At the end of the first episode, she was most upset at the fucking mess. As if I wasn't nervous enough that the unexpected crowd in L.A. at her debut kept her family and friends from getting in. While the series makes frequent bemused mention of her lesbian fans, who became loyal to her due to Bound, her arrival in New York City gets her contemplating the image compromises she's willing to make to promote the film as for a photo shoot she picks an outfit that is not what I would wear to my nephew's bar mitzvah. She also shyly queries her old high school friend Lenny "Leonard" Kravitz her trepidation about appearing in shorter leather in NYC than her usual T-shirt and jeans, but it's not over the line for rock 'n' roll and she protests to him that I'm just a nice Jewish girl from L.A. Though she closed the series with a very funny take on them playing at a bar mitzvah, including using coffee filters as yarmulkes, she's now getting paying gigs so has continued on tour.(updated 10/17/2006)

Wonderfalls (cancelled from Fox, but all the episodes are on the DVD and are being repeated on the Logo channel.) The pilot episode, "Wax Lion" by executive producers Todd Holland and Bryan Fuller, set up the wacky premise and characters including an obnoxious old high schoolmate who lords her financial success over slacker lead character "Jaye Tyler" by updating her that she's converted for love and is now "Gretchen Speck-Horowitz," getting the response: So you don't really believe in it? The dig at Sex and the City's "Charlotte" continued in the "Pink Flamingoes" episode by producers/writing partners Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts as "Gretchen," who greets everyone with "Shalom!" and has her cell phone ringing Havah Nagilah with her cell ID as "Princess," explained while organizing their 6 1/2 year high school reunion that she was really a Christmas and Easter kind of Jew though her husband was much more Jewish than I am because he was born that way, then cries out as she realizes her marriage is all status and no love: I've done everything he wanted. I even changed religions. Now I'm not even going to heaven. What more does "Robert" want? I converted for him. That’s lot of work. There's tests and stuff. I never considered if I loved him. Through "Jaye"s magic she decides: I'm losin' the hyphen and keepin' the ring! In the odd way that fate wins for everyone who listens to "Jaye" as she acts on the urgings of maniacal talking plastic animals, "Robert" instantly meets a woman who looks stereotypically Jewish (curly brown hair surrounding a Roman nose) and we see a long, happy, traditional future of marriage, children, and Jewish holidays with family. (updated 7/25/2005)

Charlotte Goldenblatt on Sex and the City (all out on DVD) -- In the series finale, by executive producer Michael Patrick King, "Charlotte" found comfort in her conversion to Judaism as she kept struggling to find a baby to adopt: We're Jews. We've been through worse than this. Then got word they would get a baby girl from China. (2/23/2004)

The L Word (on Showtime. Soundtrack out -- but not with the actual songs used in the episodes - what's with that? This season out on DVD. 1st season to be rerun, edited for basic cable on Logo.) Gee, I knew that of course the channel's distaff version of Queer as Folk would have to have a Jewish lesbian, par for the course on television. We had a hint in the pilot that writer "Jenny Schecter" (played by Mia Kirshner) is Jewish, as she wears a chai necklace while making love to her hunky, supportive, athletic boyfriend of four years. The actress is Jewishly out in interviews: (in The New York Times, "'L Word' Star Basks in an Erotic Mystery by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa on 4/5/2004): "Ms. Kirshner is a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her father, a journalist who works for The Canadian Jewish News, was born in a displaced persons' camp in Germany in 1946. He met her mother, Etti, a Bulgarian, in Israel. 'The only books in my house when I was growing up were about the Holocaust,' she said. 'That's all I read as a child. But I never knew about my family's experience.' It was not talked about in her home, but 'I think it shaped who I am.' Isolated and timid, she went to a school where most people were blond and rich, she said, and there she was, wearing second-hand clothes, dark-haired and Jewish."

In the second episode, "Let's Do It" by Susan Miller, her lesbian temptations come out through a fantasy of making out at an Orthodox Jewish funeral with her blankly exotically Continental temptress "Marina," who quickly becomes her lover. Is she gay? Is she bi? Is it a temporary try-out?

In "Lies, Lies, Lies" by Josh Senter we learn her past affair with a male writing professor has evolved into a "passionately intellectual relationship" and she's now fantasizing about "Marina" while getting "the coach" sweatily horizontal on the floor (no mean feat to get a rise out of him off the couch from ESPN!). In "Lawfully" by producer Rose Troche, her fiancé at first seems more upset that she's cheating on him when he comes upon the two together than that she's with a woman -- but why can't she talk to him about her confusion about being bi or gay instead of rejecting "Marina" in front of him? Let alone insisting on plunging into a quickie Las Vegas wedding that he has the sense to abandon? And does she then have a mental breakdown on the way home from Vegas in the next episode because of the strain of not coming out or, as her neighbor says, to have experiences as a writer?

In "L'ennui" by creator Ilene Chaiken she grovels to "Marina" after "Tim" kicks her out by admitting "I'm just a coward, a liar, and a cheat," and luxuriates with her in the lezzie life at a party and in bed (no sign of the chai necklace this time). She declares she wants to move in, but is shocked to discover her new lover actually has a regular girlfriend (a deliciously dominating Lolita Davidowich) who just travels a lot, while "Marina" justifies that I've opened up your world. You'll find your world is full of possibilities. So she crawls back to "Tim" as Lucinda Williams's "Nothing's been the same since Those Three Days. . ." plays on the soundtrack (from World Without Tears). Is it because "Listen Up" was written by a man (Mark Zakarin) that she could finally admit, to her old college roommate, I never said I was a lesbian. I think I'm bi-sexual. Chaiken in The New York Times piece "said she would keep the audience guessing about Jenny's sexuality. 'I think that sexuality is fluid,' she said. 'Jenny's sexuality definitely exists on the edge of fluidity. She will be mostly with women, but with some men, too.'"

In "Luck, Next Time" by Troche she first declares her love for "Marina," gets kicked out by Davidowich, promptly identically declares her love for "Tim," and hysterically aggressively gets him naked and pumping again. Will the series paint him as homophobic because he gets fed up with her whining to him about how her lesbian lover is playing games with her? Wouldn't that be a problem in a relationship regardless of gender and orientation? The problem with the triangle for a viewer is it's unequal and uninteresting: with him, a person we have gotten to know as a human being, she's sympathetic, seductive, and alluring as she builds on their past relationship; with "Marina," who we know very little about other than as a temptress with several women, she's a wide-eyed little girl who can barely talk so there's only sexual attraction between them as bland partners and zero else. It reminds me of the central entertainment problem with the supposedly groundbreaking movie Sunday Bloody Sunday where Peter Finch as the gay lover and Glenda Jackson as the straight lover were just ever so much more fascinating than the blah boy toy between them.

In the penultimate episode of the season, "Locked Up" by Chaiken, "Jenny" passionately kisses a new lesbian date in front of her husband and his friends, right after flirting with a handsome marine biologist whose pick-up line is: I didn't know that nice Jewish girls work in grocery stores. She teases back: How do you know I'm a nice girl? After his riposte of Are you implying you're not? she agrees to a dinner date. And she still doesn't explain her bi-sexuality or whatever to poor "Tim," even though he woefully asks her if he was inadequate.

The season finale, "Limb from Limb" by Chaiken, was a Jewish bi-sexual's fantasy. The marine biologist turns out to be Jewish, "Gene Feinberg" (played by adorable Canadian rocker Tygh Runyan), and thinks his marriage broke up because his ex wasn't. "Jenny" demurs that it isn't important, but he responds, No, it's just an added bonus as why he wants to date her. So on their first date, she strips him and pretty much sexually attacks him standing up in his office, then dissolves into hysterical tears. When we next see them, in the shed her still-husband has grudgingly loaned to her, she evidently has confessed her whole recent tale of sexual discovery and he's very understanding about being the first guy she's been with since setting sail. She brings him up-to-date: I still like guys. I like you. She later turns to writing to figure herself out and makes a point of exploring her full name of "Jennifer Diane Schecter" and then "Sarah Schecter" - her Hebrew name? her mother's name? While on her second date with "Gene," to her neighbor's art gallery, "Tim" confronts them: Did she tell you she's a dyke? "Gene" laughingly responds: You didn't tell me you were a dyke. You told me you were in love with one woman and were sleeping with another. And then, gosh, in walks "Marina" with "Jenny"'s new lover "Robin" (played by Anne Ramsey). Back at the shed, "Robin" comes in on them and apologizes for being with "Marina" and then "Marina" calls on the answering machine, declaring her love for "Jenny." And then just as you think this is a set-up for a frisky ménage a trois, they play a rousing game of Monopoly and fall platonically asleep on separate couches (it's a very roomy shed). This after director Tony Goldwyn has shown us pretty much every other character in the ensemble in the most explicit lesbian couplings of the series. So I guess this is the closest we'll get this season to an attractive Jewish couple on TV.(updated 1/14/2008)

Line of Fire (was on ABC, and they still have 2 un-broadcast episodes in the can that we'll doubtless have to wait for the DVD to see. Not sure if they're all on the released video version.) We found out from one of the mobsters in the pilot episode, written and directed by creator Rod Lurie, that the merciless, chain-smoking, drink-guzzling Special Agent in Charge "Lisa Cohen" (played by Leslie Hope) is Jewish: They have a Jew lady runs a Federal satellite office. Replies the undercover officer she hired: You don't see that very often. The thug concurs: No, not a bad-looking broad. Tell you what I'd like to do. Like to take her out, wine, dining and take her back to her place and give her a good banging. And then when we were done, I'd like to slice her head off and send it to [the head of the head of the crime organization]. That way everyone ends up with a smile on their face. She was more complicated than the usual Tough Lawyer-type Jewish Broad we've seen before. In "Undercover Angel" also written and directed by Lurie, she sure exchanged long, meaningful glances with a woman at the bar. But at the bar two episodes on in "Boom Swagger Boom" by producer Chris Mundy and directed by Elodie Keene, she picks up a guy for steamy S & M sex -- and tells the married Chief of Police she's doing it Because I miss you -- and ends up back in bed with him two episodes later after protecting him from an assassination. In "The Best Laid Plans" by producer Wendy West we learn that she has an ex-husband and son, who she's only driven to call in the tragic aftermath of a mysteriously absent father's kidnapping of his child. Meantime, I mostly watched for Anson Mount, the hunk from Tully, who went on to become one of the WB Boys on Mountain.(updated 10/26/2004)

Paris Geller in Gilmore Girls has even less Jewish identity in the fourth season. Maybe it has something to do with now attending Yale. More likely its Syndication Deracination Syndrome -- I've noticed that as a show is more successful and the producers smell syndication profits they wash out the Jewish identity of characters, as instead of appealing to a few network executives in L.A. and NYC for renewals they'll now be looking to market the show to TV stations all over the country for reruns. She dumped her age-appropriate Princeton boyfriend and is having a passionate not-so-secret affair with a professor who was Grandpa Gilmore's classmate. The next season, after he dropped dead, she complained: You sleep with one old guy and suddenly you're Catherine Zeta Jones. when she thinks all the older male professors are now hitting on her. (11/15/2004)

Ironically, this interview from the New York Times 1/23/2005 reveals how the creator of the show has kept her own Jewish background out of the show:
"Virginia Heffernan: The central characters on Gilmore Girls are Connecticut WASP's from an old American Revolution family. But that's not your background. You're a Jewish woman from Los Angeles. How did you end up in this terrain?”

A Los Angeles Times article on 3/21/2004 ("He's O.C.'s fresh breeze: Infusing it with sly wit and detail, creator Josh Schwartz has raised the Fox drama above its prime-time soap trappings" by John Horn) suggests the usual reason of Jewish writers having TV reflect their own lives of avoiding relationships with Jewish women: "People ask me, 'Do you write your own life into the show?' Schwartz says a few minutes later, down on the The O.C.'s soundstage. 'And I say, 'Of course. What else would I write about?' . . .The Cohens are loosely based on his parents (except Schwartz's mom can cook, he notes), and Seth shares much of Schwartz's wit and erudition. 'The Seth and Sandy relationship is very similar to the relationship I have with my dad,' Schwartz says. "It's very loving, but we very rarely are overt with our emotions. Instead, we give each other a lot of [grief].'" A New York Times piece on the same day supports that explanation as well: ("'The O.C.' Rewrites the Rules of TV Writing", by Ari Posner, ) "[Allan] Heinberg, the hyper-articulate story maven, has run the writers' room, developing stories and character arcs, and pumping out drafts with a small staff. And Schwartz is free to participate in casting, editing, post-production — but most of all he's free to write, write, write. Mr. Schwartz maintains control of all story matters; he's written about 16 of the show's drafts outright and written or rewritten parts of the others. 'When he has to, he can bang out a script in two days,' Mr. Heinberg marveled. Fox's Marcy Ross said: 'It's a love fest over there. But it's all to service Josh's vision. This show is his baby.' Schwartz's baby speaks with many voices, but perhaps the most winning is that of Seth Cohen, Sandy's gawky son, played by the dazzling Adam Brody. Together, Schwartz and Mr. Brody have conjured something highly personal and refreshingly new: the nerd-as-hipster comedian. Indeed, the show has gradually tilted from Ryan, the newcomer to the O.C., toward Seth, the audience favorite — who also happens to be the character most closely based on Mr. Schwartz. Sitting in Mr. Brody's dressing room, the actor and writer try to sort out the delicate business of where Josh ends and Seth/Adam begins. The two men have become fast friends, and they kibitzed as if they go back all the way to high school — which, in a sense, they do. 'I don't feel like I have to be him,' Mr. Brody said. 'I don't feel any pressure. I'm not saying to myself, `I wonder how Josh would do this.' " Mr. Schwartz cut in: "Well, there was a time I'd find Adam trying to imitate my walk.' Mr. Brody: 'I'm really hard-core method.' Mr. Schwartz (who calls himself '100 percent Jew'): 'He actually converted.' Mr. Brody: 'Yeah, I used to be Christian.' They cracked up."

On the second season promotional special "Welcome to The. O.C.: A Day in the Life," Schwartz, acknowledging that "many in our audience are really young" and how much of the series is based on his shock at coming as a Jewish guy from Providence, RI to be faced with water polo jocks at USC: "All the bar mitzvah boys out there need Jewish role models, like girls who will dress up like Wonder Woman for them." Too bad he doesn't see that Jewish girls need role models, too.

We did meet a Jewish woman in the first season in "The Nana" by Heinberg; Linda Lavin humanized "Sophie Cohen" even though she was the kind of tough broad that TV shows regularly associate with a working Jewish woman. As "Sethela" says (as she calls him) I love when The Nana comes and Dad gets all Jewish again. But she's there to run their first seder at home and what Jewish means to him is that his Bronx social worker mother is judgmental and political. Whatever extra money she has she sends to the ACLU and the woman's shelter. She's coming here to stage an intervention to put me back on the road to righteousness. Or, in her case, self-righteousness. That woman's scary. She's nuts -- that's part of her charm. Dad is holding a huge grudge that she wasn't a stay-at-home Mom after the divorce and forces her to stop the Jewish Mary Poppins act to admit that she does want him to feel guilty --about his rich, non-Jewish wife-- You married a woman whose father represents everything I fought against my whole life-- about leaving public interest law, and living in California, with a very funny rant against living there that recalled Woody Allen's famous plaint, ending with a screed against sunshine and Governor Schwarzenegger. With the amusing and sweet side story of "Summer" studying the Haggadah and challenging "Seth" that I'm going to out-Jew you by doing the 4 Questions, the conclusion with the opening blessings of the seder was satisfyingly warm as all made peace. On the summer TV Critics Tour Schwartz said of Lavin. "She was great. The Nana really popped for people. And so, therefore, I think it's safe to say the chemo is working."(updated 11/15/2004)

Anna on Curb Your Enthusiasm was in the penultimate episode of the fourth season (repeated frequently on HBO and out on DVD) in the body of Gina Gershon as the sexiest Hasidic woman, let alone dry cleaner, ever on TV, who save for a fire alarm would have given Larry David his very special tenth wedding anniversary present, as blessed by his rabbi's likening it to Sarah permitting Abraham to take up with Hagar. (updated 10/18/2006)

Joan of Arcadia (was on CBS, this season out on DVD) Mid-season, "The Devil Made Me Do It" by producer Hart Hanson, suddenly created a complicated Jewish back story for "Joan's" androgynous friend "Grace Polk" in order to have her father, played by Paul Sand, be "Rabbi Polansky" to give advice on the Devil's temptation methodology; at least it was theologically correct. This sudden Jewishness reappeared in "Requiem for a Third Grade Ashtray" by Joy Gregory. We learn from the rabbi that "Grace" "managed to put off her bat mitzvah for three years." While we're also supposed to believe that neither "Joan" nor her friends know what a bat mitzvah is (except for the Jewish geek guy who is also surprised-- Goin' for the full Jew, huh? as he brags about his gift haul), "Joan" asks her: I take it you're not going to Hebrew class by choice? "Grace" angrily replies: I refused for three years. Now my dad's using my sick grandmother to guilt me out to do it. Rabbis are really good at the guilt thing. I thought I'd stick up for a Palestinian homeland just to piss off the teacher. But my father loved it. He says it's in the Talmudic tradition. This story line is just an excuse for laying the groundwork for a discussion of taking on adult responsibilities. (updated 10/18/2006)

Miss Match (was on NBC, unseen episodes could yet be shown) Of course, the first homosexual couple Alicia Silverstone as "Kate Fox" fixes up are lesbian Jews, in the same "The Love Bandit" episode by Jed Seidel that for the first time confirmed that the Foxes are not Jewish. One could watch television fiction and think that the majority of lesbians are Jewish. Ironically, Silverstone in Real Life is Jewish, here dating "Michael Mendelsohn" (played by David Conrad), so once again we miss the opportunity for a cute Jewish heterosexual couple.(4/21/2004)

Skin (cancelled from Fox, but is being repeated, including un-broadcast episodes, on the Soap Network) The only (by some definitions) Jewish woman lead character in a network TV series this season briefly was "Jewel Goldman" (played by Olivia Wilde) in the Juliet role of the daughter of the porn film mogul (Ron Silver) in love with an Irish/Latino Romeo son of the crusading D.A. She was cast for her chemistry with him, not by any stretch of imagination any Jewishness, because once again a TV woman is Jewish only because a male relative is played by a strong ethnic actor, as the mother (played by Pamela Gidley) is clearly a blonde schicksa, even while she tries to use philanthropy to gain respectability for the family name. But, refreshingly, "Jewel" explains in the pilot by executive producer Jim Leonard: We're not Jews; we're Jew-ish. Why else would her grandfather be named "Lawrence Goldman Senior"? While she complains that My family is more like 'The Osbournes' than 'Ozzie and Harriet,' in fact, her charitable parents are close, loving, trusting, and proud of their "great kid," in contrast to her lover's stiff family, and she sticks up for her dad in court, while "Adam Roam" hides his famous father. She complains that the kids at school all assume she's a slut due to daddy's business and admits she's a virgin -- but just until the end of the first episode, with his cross dangling over her breasts. So where could they go from there? Nowhere!(updated 5/23/2005)

Rachel Goldstein on Street Time -- In the second and last season on Showtime, "Rachel Goldstein", who was always a passionate and fiercely loyal lover, has undergone even more of a personality conversion as she becomes an avenging angel for her murdered brother "Goldie" to take over the family business. In "High Holy Roller," written by story editor Paul Eckstein, she pronounces to her untrustworthy brother-in-law, "I'm taking my brother's share. What are you going to do about it? You gonna kill me?" while her husband is negotiating immunity for her and her drug-dealing father. In "Gone," by Tony Puryear, she literally and forcefully strikes back at her violent brother-in-law -- You should see the other guy she ruefully notes to her husband's nemesis parole officer, just before she collapses in his arms. She even becomes his Lady MacBeth, as in "Hostage," by Tim Metcalfe she warns her husband: Don't underestimate me. . . I should have killed your piece of shit brother when I had the chance. She certainly inspired her lover to accomplish her goal.(updated 10/30/2003)

Everwood (2nd season. Whole series rerunning from the beginning on ABC Family weeknights at 6 pm.) This season is continuing its confused ambiguity about Jewish identity in a mixed marriage. The dad for some reason bought presents a month in advance while celebrating Thanksgiving in the "Unhappy Holidays" episode by story editor John E. Pogue, crowing Who finds Hanukkah wrapping paper in Everwood? I do! and takes his daughter Christmas tree shopping because Delia identifies with being Jewish until it's time to pick the tallest tree in the lot. (updated 10/17/2006)

2002/3 Season

The most intriguing Jewish women characters this season are on cable:

Charlotte York on Sex and the City -- In the first half of the last season we have the odd spectacle of "Charlotte", "the Episcopalian Princess," converting to Judaism because the love of her life -- her earthy Jewish divorce lawyer "Harry Goldenblatt"-- says he'll only marry a Jew. Although he claims to be a Conservative Jew --I don't keep kosher and I eat pork, he points out as a matter of practice rather than theology-- the conversion was at the Upper East Side's prestigious Temple Emmanuel, stronghold of the Reform Establishment of NYC.

In sweet episodes, written atypically by the women producers/story editors Jenny Bicks and Cindy Chulack rather than its usual gay men producers, Charlotte enthusiastically dives into conversion classes and graduates to submersion in a mikveh, which might be the first time such rites have been shown on TV. In her ever-quest to do the right thing, she says farewell to Christmas in the "Perfect Present" episode, even though her lover shrugs that "many Jews have Christmas trees."

"Pick A Little, Talk A Little," by co-producers Julie Rottenberg and Elisa Zuritsky, has "Charlotte" as "Martha Jew-art"-- putting up a mezuzah at her front door, cooking Shabbos dinner, and doing the brucha over the candles. But resentment immediately erupts: I gave up Christ for you. Can't you give up [watching] the Mets for me? . . What have you done for me? And "Harry" walks out rather than having to hear that taunt the rest of his life, as "Carrie" narrates: Just what New York needs -- another single Jewish girl.

In "Hop, Skip, and A Week," by new writer Amy B. Harris, we see "Charlotte" "guilted into joining her synagogue's sisterhood society" [sic], and "bubba'd into blind dating" their sons of various dubious suitabilities and going to the temple's "Single and Mingle Night." Where, "out of all the synagogues in all the cities, you had to walk into mine," apologizes "Harry," falling to bended knee.

"Charlotte's" Jewish wedding in "The Catch," by Cindy Chulack, is just an excuse for a string of word play and easy jokes on Yiddish/Hebrew words as "Carrie" intones: "The wedding had gone from Jewish law to Murphy's Law." "Charlotte" is warned about the chair carrying tradition: "Falling off the chair would be the hora, the hora." The wedding planner demands lilies on the chuppah: "The theme is yentl-chic." A nasty best man's drunken toast is described as a "mazel tov cocktail." Carrie's one-night fling with him is ridiculed as "They all think you are a big hora." That was the Klezmatics playing at the wedding; it was their fiddle player's Lisa Gutkin who had been accompanying the courtship.

How fitting in "The One", the summer season finale by producer Michael Patrick King, that "Charlotte" gets inspired to get on with her life after a depressing miscarriage by the E! biography of another calamitous celebrity convert, Elizabeth Taylor.( updated 9/14/2003)

Street Time - Rachel Goldstein

Rhonda Pearlman on The Wire

But elsewhere on the remote there's more stereotypes:

Curb Your Enthusiasm - This third season on HBO (and out on DVD) the misanthropic "Larry David" character began to be more aware of his Jewish identity in contrast to his gentile wife. David provides a frank insight into intermarriage communication issues that is both brutally honest and excruciatingly funny. His steady relationship with her is compared to the rocky marriage of his manager and friend "Jeff" with his demanding and foul-mouthed Jewish wife "Susie Greene" (played by Susie Essman). While she admirably sees through the two guys' schemes and lies with laser-like insight, her loudness and constant anger are all at a shrieking one-note. Culminating, though, in a very funny season finale that shows her right at home in a spontaneous Tourette's-syndrome-support epiphany. Another Jewish woman is noteworthy for her absence; his mother's dying wish is that he not be told about her death so that he shouldn't be bothered to interrupt a trip to NYC to attend her funeral. (updated 10/18/2006)

Breaking News was cancelled by TNT before it ever got on the air for the '01/'02 season and was picked up by Bravo for the summer of '02 (sometimes rerun at various times). The character "Rachel Glass" (played by Lisa Ann Walter) is the usual hard-driving Jewish woman professional on TV, here the producer, with no personal life and a "mother who has given up on lobbying for grandchildren." Bravo's descriptions of the character and the actress (no longer available online) reinforced the stereotype. At least she gets to flirt with a hunky union cameraman. (updated 6/29/2003)

Everwood (1st season out on DVD. Whole series from, the beginning rerunning on ABC Family weeknights at 6 pm.) has a Jewish twist on the Dead Mother Syndrome. The hunky, rebellious, mourning teenage son "Ephram Brown" is toying with paying tribute to his (of course) tragically killed mom by exploring her Jewish heritage; one of the first questions he asks the impossibly gorgeous gentile girl who guides him around his new town is Where's the synagogue? Is his dad's ridiculous flight to Colorado a rejection of Jewish New York?

Were those packages on the table at the "Thanksgiving Tale" episode supposed to imply how Hanukkah fell on Thanksgiving weekend this year, because there was no reference to the holiday amidst an hour of heavy mother-tradition reenactments.

Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online; my recent reviews are now counted in The TomatoMeter at . Earlier of my full film reviews are at IMDb's comments, where full credits are available, and click through if you find them helpful. I sort movies that include any inter-ethnic/race/religion/class romantic relationships.

27 Dresses (As it’s set in NYC, at least one of her friends had to be Jewish, but “Shari Rabinowitz”s wedding is an intermarriage, presumably for extra humor, with a Jewish-Hindu ceremony for which the bridesmaid’s dress is a sari.) (1/21/2008)

51 Birch Street (10/18/2006) (emendations coming after 4/18/2007)

Adam Resurrected (While director Paul Schrader draws on techniques he used in Mishima to faithfully adapt, and even clarify, Yoram Kaniuk's novel of post-Holocaust mental breakdowns, the most prominent Jewish woman is even more quizzical on the screen than in the book. Ayelet Zurer's "Jenny Grey" seems to be more of a sex-starved "Nurse Ratchett" than a sabra who only loves "Adam" when he's a crazy victim. The elderly landlady and women patients brandishing their tattoos are portrayed just as in the book, though missing is the delightfully satirical portrait of the inspired businesswoman/philanthropist who uses her late husband's money to set up in the holy desert the psychiatric clinic for survivors.) (1/6/2009)

Adventureland (review forthcoming) (It may be that Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist proved that yet another nostalgic male coming-of-age movie works better outside the Apatow imprimatur when there's a strong female character – who just happens to be Jewish with cool taste in music (the song selections are terrific). Set in the summer of 1987 in Pittsburgh (though based on writer/director Greg Mottola's memories of Long Island, NY, and I grew up near the very similar Palisades Park), his alter ego is played by Jesse Eisenberg, though "James Brennan" isn't specified as Jewish. But the girl is, and this is one of the few films where the Jewish girl, "Em Lewin" (the very appealing Kristen Stewart just off the virginal vampire hit Twilight), attracts and is having sex with the older, married bad boy (Ryan Reynolds), even if she is an NYU student. Her acting out is explained by the strains with her father the lawyer (Josh Pais) and her new stepmom "Francy" (Mary Birdsong), who, oddly, is bald from a nervous breakdown. The script goes to abrasive lengths to target her grief and anger at anything Jewish because it was at temple where her dad, "he's never been serious about his faith" but seeking solace from her mother's painful last illness me her and her friends who come visit, including "Mrs. Frigo" (Janine Viola) and "Mrs. Ostrow" (Amy Landis). The latter makes faux pas conversation about the house: I love what you did to the place., then realizes that reflects badly on "Em"s mom, as the girl explodes to her father, setting off the stepmom. While the sweet ending seems a bit too fantasy, "Em" and "James"s growing relationship - You were the only good thing that happened to me this summer.-- from friendship to more is very realistically tender and romantic. (4/13/2009)

Almost Peaceful (Un monde presque paisible) (French Jewish women's role in contributing to a return in normality post-war is largely procreative, but having children is seen as a statement against anti-Semitism and the joy that children bring the survivors is palpable.)

Anvil! The Story Of Anvil (With the Iraqis in Heavy Metal in Baghdad saying the authorities there were suspicious that head-bangers looked to be davening, praying like Orthodox Jews, one wonders if there's a PhD thesis there about heavy metal's connection to Holocaust victims, as opposed to the stereotyped connections with misappropriation of swastikas. But I have to love a movie where the heroine is a Jewish woman – here "Lips"' older sister Rhonda Kudlow. Not only is it her money that saves the day so they can record an album in England, but clearly her and their siblings' love, loyalty and support to invest in him has grounded the musician, regardless of how totally conventional they look compared to him.) (4/10/2009)

Antarctica (In what the director terms a tribute to John Waters and Divine but comes across more like a thwarted transgender character, the gay siblings’ mother is played by drag artist Noam Huberman who performs as Miss Laila Carry. Perhaps that was supposed to make more humorous an extended scene at a hair salon that is full of exaggerated stereotyped exchanges between Jewish mothers trying to match up their gay children in hopes of bringing forth grandchildren.)

Arranged (12/14/2007) (emendations coming after 6/14/2008) (I do get annoyed at semi-autobiographical indie movies about Orthodox women that posit their choices as being between, here, Ditmas Park and Sodom & Gomorrah. There is a whole world out there from modern-Orthodox to Reformed that could offer them warmth and family etc. etc. within a moral, supportive, Jewish environment.)

Ask the Dust (The Jewish woman here just comes across as bizarre rather than enhancing the theme about the toll of accepting one's ethnicity within the California Dream. Or something like that.)

Assisted Living (All the reviewers have identified the lead woman character "Mrs. Pearlman" as being Jewish, though she is played by Maggie Riley. Doubtless this is because of the character's name and that the writer/director is Elliot Greenebaum. However, it was filmed at a Masonic rather than a Jewish facility (in Kentucky) and the religious services and chaplain are clearly Christian, and there are no Yiddishisms or any other Jewish references in the script.)

Autism: The Musical (Missed when it was the talk of Tribeca Film Festival, so I caught it on HBO) (The dynamic centerpiece is Elaine Hall, or "Coach E," the founder of The Miracle Project, mother of Neal, adopted from Russia to connect to her ethnic heritage. Like most of the mothers of the autistic children featured, she becomes more than a bit monomaniacal and single, but unexpectedly finds a man willing to take both of them on, and she remarries. The film spotlights how she draws her son into the Jewish holidays, particularly Hanukkah and Passover, even over the discomfort of her new in-laws. My admiration for our cousin’s strenuous educational efforts with her autistic son many years ago before programs like these were available was reinforced. The deleted scenes available On Demand, and presumably on the DVD, include Shira, another single Jewish mother of an autistic daughter, with more kids and more Jewish observance.) (3/29/2008)

The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) (12/7/2007) (emendations coming after 2/7/2008)

Bee Season

Being Jewish in France (Comme un Juif en France) (reviewed at The 18th Annual New York Jewish Film at Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (The most interesting women's perspectives are from the new, Sephardic communities --and they are as enthusiastic about coucous as the Muslim immigrants in The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet) scroll down for my capsule review-- who even though clearly more observant are leading schools and community organizations.) (1/18/2009)

Black Book (Zwartboek) (Some of the most outrageous situations, especially about the Jewish Mata Hari at the center who may be the sexiest Jewish woman portrayed in cinema, is not the director being his usual violent, extreme self, but he insists are based on true incidents (several supported in the book memoir of Steal A Pencil For Me, and as in – spoiler alert-- this interview . Now if only Verhoeven would adapt the Megillah!)

Black On White: The Idan Raichel Project (Review forthcoming, as seen at the 12th Annual NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival, but not only is this the one-hour documentary counterpart to Live And Become (Va, Vis Et Deviens), but the Ethiopian Jewish woman’s viewpoint missing from that film is heard loud and clear here!) (2/18/2008)

Blessed Is The Match: The Life And Death Of Hannah Senesh (1/29/2009) Marilyn Hertz, a member of my synagogue, immediately commented on my review (quoted with permission): "You[r] assessment of this being like a young adult book is correct. I saw the premier[e] last night & was invited to the Q&A with the producer. She wanted this to be shown in schools, and wanted it to be a mother/daughter relationship story. I thought it was quite good & worth seeing."

The Bubble (Ha- Buah) (Yeah, it’s offensive and completely un-PC to say this, but the brassy Jewish woman here is a fag hag, and it makes no sense that she gets seduced by a breeder geek professing that he wants her to have his children.) (9/16/2007)

Boynton Beach Club (Though only the men and dead wives are explicitly Jewish, not the widows or daughters.)

Broken Wings (Knafayim Shvurot)

Brother’s Shadow (review forthcoming from viewing at the Tribeca Film Festival)

La Buche

Campfire (Medurat Hashevet)

Camp Girls (reviewed at The 18th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (The press screener included an essential interview with photographer Gay Block that explained the background to her initial photographic project and this follow-up documentary, recalling both Jean Bach's A Great Day in Harlem that decades later interviewed subjects of Art Kane's classic jazz photo and Michael Apted's 7 Up etc. longitudinal documentation.) (1/18/2009)

Children of the Sun (review forthcoming) (seen at 2008 Israel Film Festival) (In interviews with the founding generation of kibbutzim and their children, there is a focus on the pro’s and con’s for mothers and offspring to communal child raising, with a gamut of reflections. There was no questioning of the continuance of other more conventional gender roles within kibbutz responsibilities. While the children say that they considered those they grew up so intimately with as siblings, it wasn’t made clear that they met dating partners/future spouses within the movement at joint events or high schools with other kibbutzim, my in-laws who I watched the film with added that information from their friends in the movement.) (11/28/2008)

A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël) (review forthcoming) (Arnaud Desplechin has a signature element in each of his films of including a Jewish character, and here “Faunia” (played by Emmanuelle Devos) may be his first Jewish woman since Esther Kahn. While the matriarch of her lover’s family confusingly teases him for being Jewish, maybe because he might be the only son she had circumcised or because it’s a French slang/idiom poorly translated as I also heard it in Love Songs (Les Chansons D’amour), “Faunia” finally makes clear that she’s had enough of Christmas and happily leaves to celebrate a non-holiday with her saner family.) (11/28/2008)

Close To Home (Karov La Bayit (I saw it originally at Tribeca Film Festival with a Q & A by the directors.) (See with its non-fiction counterpart To See If I’m Smiling (Lir’ot Im Ani Mehayechet), seen at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival at Lincoln Center)

Comme ton père (review forthcoming from viewing in 2009 at the 13th Annual NY Sephardic Jewish Film Festival) (While of course debut writer/director Marco Carmel suffuses the film with nostalgia for gorwing up in a Tunisian Jewish family in France and Israel, the lovely Yaël Abécassis as the mother "Mireille" is a three-dimensional woman who is tender and strong, and much in love with her waywardly entrepreneurial husband.) (2/21/2009)

Crazy Love (6/1/2007) (emendations coming after 11/1/2007) (Oy, he’s gleeful that they met on Rosh ha Shanah.)

Dancing Alfonso (review forthcoming) (seen at 2008 Israel Film Festival) (11/9/2008)

David & Fatima (review forthcoming) (There are only two Jewish women in what is one of the most puerile and amateurish Romeo & Juliet-in-Israel movies. [Far superior is Strangers that I saw at Tribeca Film Festival), albeit it has no Jewish women in it.] From the simultaneous birth labor on, the Israeli mother is fairly bland, as she pleads with her husband to back off from confronting his Palestinian counterpart, even when the Arab oddly throws Jewish mother stereotypes at him to insult his manhood. “David”s sister is apparently one of the few women career soldiers in the IDF, due to her stringent right-wing, Arab--phobic views.) (9/28/2008)

David and Layla (Review forthcoming) (The crudely biased and ignorant Jewish mother, as well as the ex-girlfriend, played by Callie Thorne like her sexually aggressive recurring characters on E.R. and Rescue Me, are particularly tasteless and not credible in their wide-eyed acting when compared to the long-suffering Kurdish family of the love of his life.) (2/23/2008)

Defiance (The complexity of romantic relationships is overly simplified for sentimentality and almost too discreet -- Alexa Davalos is Tuvia's tolerant forest wife Lilka, Iben Hjejle is Zus's fellow feisty fighter Bella, and Mia Wasikowska is Asael's sweet crush. There actually was more sex going on amongst these young people who thought they'd die at any moment, with willing women who figured they'd bargain for protection, and yet these marriages of crisis lasted for decades after.) (12/31/2008)

Disengagement (Désengagement) (Review forthcoming) (previewed at the Israel at 60 series at Lincoln Center) (Amos Gitai has to s-t-r-e-t-c-h his tri-partite story-line a lot to try and make the two Jewish women make any sense as he looks at American/European/Israeli attitudes. Juliette Binoche, in possibly her first role as a Jew, is “Ana”, a sensual secularist faced with the reappearance of her hunky Israeli step-brother as she deals with the death of her American ex-pat father, a prominent Zionist and philanthropist in France, who requires in his will that she reunite with the daughter she gave up at birth on a kibbutz, “Dana” (Dana Ivgy), who somehow became Orthodox, now living in a Gaza settlement being removed by the government. The visuals and acting make more beautiful sense than any of the quizzical dialogue.) (6/13/2008)

Driving Men (reviewed at The 18th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Like the video artist/director of Flying: Confessions Of A Free Woman, Susan Mogul is determined to edit her apparently continual self portraits into an autobiography, at least in terms of her relationships to men. There's amusing and touching moments, but her exhibitionism overwhelms all else.) (1/18/2009)

Emotional Arithmetic (reviewed at The 18th Annual New York Jewish Film Festival of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (I haven't read Matt Cohen's novel yet for comparison, but there's a very complicated set of circumstances these folks have to work through in eastern Quebec, despite explanations at the end of what Drancy) was: an American Jewish girl (now Susan Sarandon shaking off her "crazy pills") was there with an Irish boy (now Gabriel Byrne) and a Russian man (now Max Von Sydow) who then ends up in a Soviet prison and psychiatric hospital that she all these years later saves him from through her work with Amnesty International? And Christopher Plummer is her much older husband? The cast infuses this quizzical plot with life, but I kept getting distracted by the sight of La Femme Nikita's Roy Dupuis as her son, so much that I even in a weak moment bought a DVD of a Canadian film he was in so I could qualify for free shipping of the novel.) (1/18/2009)

Empty Nest (El nido vacío) (previewed at 18th New York Jewish Film Festival of Film Society of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (This is unusual for Daniel Burman's work for having such vibrant and independent Jewish women – in contrast to the disgruntled father/husband: the wife/mother "Martha" (a terrifically lively Cecilia Roth) who enthusiastically moves on from maternal responsibilities to explore her talents and interests, and her only daughter Julia (Inés Efron) who is very comfortable with her decision to have made aliyah with an Israeli husband.) (1/18/2009)

Every Mother Should Know (Teda Kol Em Ivriya) (reviewed at The 18th Annual New York Jewish Film of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (Only a couple of women are seen, a sister and a wife, who are atypically brought into their men's confidence as they explore their feelings about their military experiences. Both have to resort to written histories to supplement what they can pull out about what happened to them.) (1/18/2009)

Everything Is Illuminated (The Jewish women in the film are mostly plot-movers as keepers of secrets, an extension of what Lewis Mumford anthropologically considered women's "container function." They incidentally save the men in their lives as this is much more about men.) (10/7/2005)

Fateless (Sorstalanság) (The glimpses we get of Jewish women are problematical: a highly compromised step-mother, an inconsistently affectionate mother, a teen girl overwrought about the wrong things at the wrong time, but welcoming grandmother replacements.) (2/19/2006))

The First Time I Turned 20 (La Première fois que j'ai eu 20 ans) (Review forthcoming from viewing at the 16th Annual NY Jewish Film Festival in 2007 of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum)

Forgotten Transports: To Estonia (Zapomenuté transporty: Do Estonska) (reviewed at The 18th Annual New York Jewish Film of Lincoln Center/The Jewish Museum) (It's unusual enough to have testimony from women survivors of Nazi labor and concentration camps, so not only is this unique in that all the witnesses are women, even within this series, but they always emphasize distinctly women's experiences, of yearning for their mothers, of those who foolishly fell in love with fellow workers or jailers, of clothes, bodies and survival decisions, and female insights on kindness and cruelties.) (1/18/2009)

For Your Consideration (review forthcoming)

Free Zone (review forthcoming)

Friends With Money (There's an odd implication that heiress Joan Cusack's "Franny" is Jewish, as a girl friend derides the "Shabbat Shalom" school her kids go to, let alone that she wants to donate $2 million dollars there -- was that a reference to my cousin's Shalom Alecheim school? We see her and husband "Matt" (played by Greg German) buy a huge amount of toys for their two kids, but don't see any Christmas tree in their house that the other friends have in theirs. Is it bad that while she's the richest she also seems to be the most well-adjusted of the friends, with the most stable marriage, though others make snide comments that she's not really a stay at home mom because she has full time household help.) (4/13/2006)

Fugitive Pieces (emendations coming after 11/2/2008) (The predominant Jewish women, both in the film and the original book, are both idealized victims, while the romantic interests are non-Jewish, even though the much younger love-of-his-life is played by the gorgeous Israeli actress who was the model for the sexy Laura in Be’ Tipul, the Israeli original of In Treatment. But at least in the film the younger Jew, “Ben”, stays faithful to the lovely, lullaby-collecting “Naomi” (played by curly-haired auburn Rachelle Lefevre), who gently sings the redolent anti-Nazi anthem “Peat Bog Soldiers”.) (5/2/2008)

The Galilee Eskimos (Eskimosim ba Galil) (review forthcoming) (seen at 2008 Israel Film Festival) (An absolutely delightful look at the founding generation of kibbutzim, as in this fictional fable they get abandoned in old age to capitalism and gradually recreate their youthful zeal and idealism (including one woman who remembers all the old uplifting songs). But now the women are more aware of the gender conventions they took for granted then, as they muse that all their children have left them, whether now gay, secular or orthodox.) (11/28/2008)

Garden State is notable for yet another Dead Jewish Mother who is once again the only Jewish woman present, in her guilt-inducing absence, in the life of a male lead character very specifically identified as Jewish, here "Andrew Largeman" as a once a year Jew at Yom Kippur. It is her funeral that starts the film's trajectory. Ironically, his explicitly non-Jewish romantic interest, whose family leaves their Christmas tree up year-round and is unfamiliar with Jewish religious practices, is played by Natalie Portman, the Israeli-born actress who is one of the most prominent, and attractive, young Jewish actresses in films today. (8/8/2004)

The Girl on the Train (La Fille du RER) (review forthcoming) (previewed at 14th Rendez-Vous with French Film at Film Society of Lincoln Center) (Ronit Elkabetz has an atypical role (let alone in French) as the daughter of a prominent Jewish lawyer who has spoken out against anti-Semitic violence. While she gives the viewpoint of the harm that a false accusation can make on the community, as a wife with a troubled marriage and a rebellious teenage son, she is not a one-note activist, but sympathetic to the very human pressures that can lead a girl to make a mistake.) (3/9/2009)

Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (review forthcoming) (previewed at DocuWeek) (Was it because director Scott Hicks is Australian or was it in order to stress, over and over, Philip’s pan-religious spirituality that he avoided identifying his Baltimore family in any way as Jewish, particularly his older sister Sheppie who is extensively interviewed, even as she recalls the influence of their mother in encouraging a bright child? Certainly, most viewers seeing her very Jewish sounding married name and hearing her manner of speaking will perceive her as Jewish.) (8/16/2008)

Go for Zucker! (Alles auf Zucker!)

Goodbye Momo (A Dios Momo) (4/20/2007) (emendations coming after 10/20/2007) (Refreshingly not stereotyped that the best friend’s Jewish mother is so warm to the Afro-Uruguayan boy, and that both families are struggling with poverty.)

Le Grand Rôle is an amusing updated French Jewish take on O. Henry's "The Last Leaf." Based on a book by Daniel Goldenberg that doesn't appear to be available in English, it gently pokes fun at just about everything it touches, including actors, theaters, directors, and religious, ethnic and generational divisions within the Jewish community.

I went to church [shule] last Sunday [Shabbat]/Just to sing and pray

These two poems well get across the modern notion of Lilith and are from a recent anthology of Jewish women's poetry Dybbuk of Delight(phrase taken from one of these poems): edited by Sonja Lyndon and Sylvia Paskin. Fine Leaves Publications, P.O. Box 81, Nottingham UK NG5 4ER, 49.99 pounds plus 1 pound postage. The only two words some of you might not know are golem (sort of an avenging messenger spirit) and dybbuk (sort of an evil spirit that possesses someone's body and seeks their soul) but those are my inferential definitions from other stories. It's traditional to cover mirrors when mourning a death in the family for seven days.
Both poems are by Michelene Wandor.

EVE TO LILITH

don't get me wrong -
I have nothing against
first wives

ok, so you laid him
first; that's merely
a fact of life
so you got to know
all his little habits, like
picking his nose
when he reads in bed

but he didn't do that with you?
I see

I'm not jealous. I don't
believe in jealousy, and what I don't believe in
doesn't hurt me. But tell me
honestly, what did you do to the poor man?
He's a nervous wreck.
He can't stand up to his boss, he has
pains in his side all the time -
I mean, something must have happened
to leave a man
so scarred.

He told me how beautiful you were.
The dark, dramatic type.
Usually he doesn't talk about you
but when we - well, long ago -
when - at night -
we - in the dark, always -
he used to call your name
at a certain moment

It's none of my business
but you must have done
something very special
to make a man
remember you so

LILITH TO EVE

I merely said 'no'.

That's when he gave me
his attention
for the first time


LILITH'S DANCE

Lilith sins?

Lilith sings
Lilith speaks many a cross word
Lilith has an anger like love
like a procession of pillars
of fire
Lilith has the delight
of a woman scorned
he modeled me
I was his clay thing
into me he breathed life
I became his golem
I went forth and I destroyed
havoc my middle name

I am the dybbuk of delight
I slip into the souls
of those who need me

perhaps you breathed
just a little
too much life, a sniffle too long
but once tasting the air
I would not be still, not
be silent, not return
to my feet of clay

I will not gather dust
I do not cower beneath cobwebs
I do not fear the hot streets
I walk
in the middle
of the pavement

I do not hug the shade
of cowardly buildings
I do not stay in my ghetto
but I strut and stride
into the ghetto
of men
I interrupt
the invisible universal
which denies men their souls
and women their being

I do not creep

I do not crawl

see

I am proud

I have taken the cloth
from my mirror
of mourning

for your birthday
(if gods have birthdays)
I shall give you
a mirror

To the Mandel Maven's Nest Television Remote Patrol

To the Mandel Maven's Nest Reel Life: Flick Picks

To the Mandel Maven's Nest Music Tips: Radio Not Just For Listening

To the Mandel/Shultz Maven's Nest

Did I miss any Jewish women on TV lately? Comments, corrections, additions, questions welcome! Contact Nora Lee Mandel at mandelshultz@yahoo.com
Copyright © 2009

Other Jewish sources of info and Next Book.

These Web pages obviously aren't joining the campaign to boycott Yahoo, but shame, shame, shame:
“Suppose that Anne Frank had maintained an e-mail account while in hiding in 1944, and that the Nazis had asked Yahoo for cooperation in tracking her down. It seems, based on Yahoo's behavior in China, that it might have complied. . . .(Representative Chris Smith . . . drew the Anne Frank analogy.) . . . Chinese court documents . . . say that Yahoo handed over information that was used to help convict [dissidents]. We have no idea how many more dissidents are also in prison because of Yahoo. . .Yahoo sold its soul and is a national disgrace.”
From China's Cyberdissidents and the Yahoos at Yahoo by Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, February 19, 2006