10 | DECEMBER 16 • 2021 

PURELY COMMENTARY

opinion

Larry David has Never Been More
Jewish than in this Season’s ‘Curb’
C

urb Your Enthusiasm 
has always been a 
Jewy show, but this 
season it is downright Jewish.
On the HBO sitcom, now 
in its 11th season, Larry 
David has never 
been shy about 
surfacing, and 
lampooning, 
Judaism and 
Jewishness. 
He has 
contemplated 
the dilemmas 
of Holocaust survival, waded 
into the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict (via a local chicken 
restaurant) and gotten 
stranded on a ski lift with an 
Orthodox Jew on Shabbat.
This season, it’s not just 
the occasional matzah ball 
joke or the Yiddish lesson he 
gave Jon Hamm in the season 
premiere. David is plunging 
into questions of Jewish 
pride and belief, and if he 
isn’t exactly Abraham Joshua 
Heschel, he could provide 
a Jewish educator with a 
semester of lively classroom 
debate.
In the latest episode, for 
example, a Jew for Jesus 
joins the cast of the show 
that Larry’s character 
is developing for Hulu. 
Although neither Larry 
nor his Jewish friends are 
remotely religious, they seem 
genuinely upset by the actor’s 
apostasy, and Larry gives him 
a rather sober warning that 
he shouldn’t proselytize on 
set.
A week earlier, a member 
of his golf club (played by 

Rob Morrow) asks Larry to 
pray for his ailing father. 
Larry declines, saying prayer 
is useless. He also wonders 
why God would need, or 
heed, the prayer of a random 
atheist like himself instead of 
the distressed son who wants 
his father to live.
For anyone who has gone 
to Hebrew school, it’s a 
familiar challenge, usually 
aired by the wiseacre in the 
back row who the teacher 
suspects is perhaps the 
most engaged student in 
the classroom. And it is 
not just atheists posing the 
question, “Why pray?” The 
Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu 
Leibowitz, a devout 
Orthodox Jew, believed that 
“worship of God must be 
totally devoid of instrumental 
considerations.”
In addition to a Jewish 
funeral, the episode has a 
bonus theological theme: 
“Middah k’neged Middah,” or 
as Morrow’s character puts 
it, “what goes around comes 
around.” Morrow warns 
Larry that his actions will 
have consequences, which 
actually gives Larry pause. 
If anything, the entire Curb 
enterprise is an exercise 
in Jewish karma. Larry is 
constantly being punished in 
ways large and small for his 
actions, inactions, meddling 
and slights. As the old theater 
expression has it, if Larry 
opens a donut shop to drive 
a rival out of business in act 
one, his own shop will burn 
to the ground in act three.
A prior episode was even 

more self-consciously Jewish: 
Larry attends High Holiday 
services only because he 
lost a golf bet to the rabbi, 
and he literally bumps into 
a Klansman coming out of a 
coffee shop. The latter sets 
off a string of plot twists, 
as he and the KKK guy 
trade a series of favors and 
obligations that will have 
disastrous consequences for 
both. Larry’s salvation comes 
at the end, when he blares 
a shofar from his balcony, 
literally raising the alarm on 
antisemitism and waking his 
neighbors to the threat of 
white supremacy.
The episode suggests the 
failure of good intentions. 
Larry spills coffee on the 
Klansman’s robe and offers 
to have it dry-cleaned. 
Good liberal Jew that he 
is, Larry appears genuine 
in his belief that empathy 
is a better response to hate 
than confrontation, and 
that if he turns the other 
cheek, it might lower the 
temperature in a post-

Trump America. Of course, 
it doesn’t work out that way, 
and the last word goes to 
his friend Susie Green, who 
performs a pointed act of 
Jewish sabotage that gets the 
Klansman pummeled by his 
fellow racists. Give David 
credit for embedding within 
a preposterous half-hour 
of television a debate about 
vengeance and resistance 
that engaged the followers of 
Jews as different as Jesus and 
Jabotinsky.
Make no mistake: The 
Larry David character is 
sacrilegious and heretical, 
and Curb is no friend of 
the religious mindset. But 
to dismiss him as “self-
hating” is to miss out on 
the unmistakably Jewish 
conversation at the heart of 
the show. David’s character is 
a deeply principled person: 
Most of the nonsense he 
gets himself into is the 
result of his enforcing 
unspoken social rules that 
others appear to be flouting, 
whether it is taking too many 

Andrew 
Silow-Carroll
JTA.org
In a recent episode of the 11th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry 
David feels obligated to clean a Klansman’s robe. 

JOHN P. JOHNSON/HBO

