Apparently, we've got a Jewish joke problem. Most Jewish humor comes at the expense of someone, often the high and mighty, which is OK, but sometimes the incompetent schlemiel or the down-on-his luck schlemazel. We make fun of stupid, awkward and unlucky people. What's that all about? And all too often, Jewish humor targets humans of the female variety: mothers, wives, mothers and, oh yes, mothers. We also make fun of ourselves, but not in a good way. Cheapness, superficiality, and how we "control" Hollywood, the banks and the media. It’s no laughing matter anymore - because we know we’re kidding, but these days, some other people don’t seem to get the joke.
"Hollywood seems to find an almost obsessive, near-pathological need to dilute female Jewish characters. Or erase.
The examples are vast, and they are also maddening. In “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” Jewish heroine Midge is played by non-Jew Rachel Brosnahan. In “On the Basis of Sex,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the modern-day thinking Jewish woman’s pin-up for her groundbreaking contributions to constitutional law, is played by non-Jewish British actor Felicity Jones. And in Hulu’s “Mrs. America,” Jewish second-wave feminists Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem are played by Tracy Ullman, Margo Martindale and Rose Byrne — none of whom are Jewish. Julianne Moore (not Jewish), also played Steinem in Julie Taymor’s “The Glorias.” And in ABC’s long-running sitcom “The Goldbergs,” shopaholic balabusta Beverly Goldberg is played by non-Jewish comedian Wendi McLendon-Covey. Even Elsa, the adolescent “Jew in the Wall” in Taika Waititi’s Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit,” is played by non-Jewish actor Thomasin McKenzie.
My current favorite: in Guy Nattiv’s upcoming Golda Meir biopic, Helen Mirren (and, yes, the Oscar-winner is an inarguably gifted actor), will play Israel’s lone female prime minister, an iron-fisted global leader who commandeered Israel to victory during the Yom Kippur War. Because nothing says Kiev-born, Milwaukee-raised kibbutznik-turned-“gray-bunned grandmother of the Jewish people” — a political figure who embraced her “ugliness” as a political asset and whom David Ben Gurion was fond of calling “the best man in the government”—than a regal British Dame with ancestral ties to Russian nobility.
As Sarah Silverman, who speaks freely of oft being considered “too Jewish” to play certain roles, noted on her podcast and on “The Howard Stern Show” last November: “Lately it’s been happening — if that role is a Jewish woman, but [if] she is courageous, or she deserves love, or has bravery, or is altruistic in any way, she’s played by a non-Jew.”"
Green addresses the age-old question of how a modern, empirically-minded Jew can swear allegiance to the Creation and Exodus stories, as we do when we say the Friday night Kiddush, and still accept science. We all need to ask that question - and he provides a very satisfying response.
"That moment (making Friday night Kiddush) is the highlight of my week. It is the most personally significant ritual act that I regularly perform as a Jew. But what is my relationship to that text I so fervently call out? It is one of love and commitment, a feeling that the text is as filled to the brim with meaning as my cup is with wine. It is a statement of my faith in divine Creation, of my gratitude for the gift of perceiving a sacred presence that underlies all that is. But surely it could not be called “belief” in the Torah’s creation story in any literal sense.
I understand that this planet is approximately thirteen billion years old, and that it came to be as a result of a great stellar explosion that took place several billion years earlier. I also understand that the seas and dry land, the trees, grasses, and plants, the birds, fish, animals, and creeping things all described as created on one or another of the six days preceding that first Sabbath of Genesis, in fact evolved over the course of a long and complex bio-evolutionary process, running across thousands of centuries, rather than being “declared” into existence all within a week, however that “week” is conceived. Yet the story of Creation, and the weekly repetition of it, is vital to my religious life.
My non-literalist faith that we live in a created world is part-and-parcel of my personal quest for meaning and my sense of responsibility to act in protection of this beautiful and fragile planet. Such a non-literalist theology of Creation builds not on the world of science, but the world of myth, especially that which grows of ancient Jewish stories about how this world came to be.
What I search for in these tales is not a factual description of the world’s history but the profound kernel of truth that helps us connect to the deeper meaning of the world we live in and our connection to it. And yet, to make the most of these truths as modern people, living in the scientific age, we must find a way to tell them together with the “reality” being daily articulated and refined by astrophysicists, geologists, evolutionary biologists, and lots of others. Such an approach can lend to the new story some of the mystery and depth of the old, while not forcing us to take a stance against scientific thinking and modern notions of truth and knowledge."
You can take these questions to the beach with you over the coming weeks, and prepare for an early High Holidays to recharge your spiritual batteries!
Have a restful, replenishing summer.
Rabbi Joshua Hammerman
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