Oct 25 2009
Jews in the Media- Part 2: Jews in Glee
Jews in Glee
We Jews pop up again and again.
Recently we made a very fun appearance in Fox’s hit new series Glee. The humor was so quick, subtle, and relatively esoteric that I must say: I’m impressed.
The show has a character, Puckerman, who is only Jewish because, well, the show decided to make him so.
In episode 8 (about 13 minutes in) he was trying to explain why he was fantasizing about dating the much more obviously Jewish Rachel, the star of the series.
He said how it all started when his family was doing their annual Simchas Torah tradition.
Watching Schindler’s List.
Happily enough for me, I get to be one of the lucky maybe one percent of viewers who understood the ironic humor.
You see, ladies and gentleman, Simchas Torah is a holiday in which Jews across the world celebrate ultra-joyously the completion of the annual Torah reading. It’s filled with non-stop singing and dancing.
Schindler’s List is a violent film about the Holocaust.
The two should never really meet.
What Glee was poking fun at was a double phenomenon amongst the American Jewish population:
#1: The peripheral (at best) connection to Jewish holidays.
And #2: The fact that so few Jews have a connection to Judaism that extends beyond the Holocaust.
So the Puckerman family knew that Simchas Torah was an existent Jewish holiday, and celebrated it in likely the only way they knew how. Holocaust remembrance.
(Sometimes I feel like I was the only Jew who wasn’t really impressed by Schindler’s List. When I was in high school I remember people treating the film as if it were written by God Himself, and it was a full fledged obligation of every member of the Jewish people to watch and love it. But I digress…)
Oh, but Glee didn’t stop there!
They jumped into the next level of poking fun at the ubiquitous inconsistencies of the assimilated Jewish world. Two more phenomena alluded to:
#3: The strange connection Jewish people have to Chinese food. It’s borderline obligatory for the average American Jew to go out for Chinese food on Christmas, mostly stemming from the fact that Chinese restaurants used to be the only thing open. So we would celebrate diversity by, as Puckerman was doing, eating sweet and sour pork, the prince of all non-kosher food.
And #4: Jewish moms love to bash their children with illogical and hypocritical reasons for only dating Jews.
And the package is complete.
Mom connects the family in an incorrect, inappropriate manner to the Jewish religion (Simchas Torah) by doing something that proves her connection is simply one of a depressing obsession with the Holocaust, while simultaneously plowing her children with pork… and then tells her kids they’re no better than Nazis because they date non-Jews.
I love it.
A healthy and humorous poke at the assimilated Jewish world.
I only hope some folk out there even realized they had been made fun of.
I realized the irony and I loved it. Having Jews featured in the show, even in such a tounge-in-cheek way, actually gave me a sense of Jew pride.