MAY 25 • 2023 | 51

baby … and a beautiful car!”
The sketch presents the rabbi as, in 
Caplan’s words, “a sellout.
” He should care 
only about the baby, but he works at selling 
the car. Caplan observes, “In an earlier time, 
a nationally televised sketch turning a rabbi 
into a car shill of questionable ethics would 
have been seen as poor taste at best.
”
In a 1977 sketch, SNL writer (and later 
U.S. Senator) Al Franken presents a fake 
game show, “The game all Americans 
love to play: ‘Jew, Not a Jew.
’” Jews in 
entertainment is a regular column in the 
Jewish News — but the idea that non-
Jewish Americans “sit around discussing 
which celebrities are Jews is funny and then 
slightly unsettling.
” 
Caplan observes that “it is rarely a good 
thing when non-Jews are also keeping track 
of who is and is not Jewish.
” 
The “Jew, Not a Jew” sketch generated 
considerable objections from the Jewish 
community. Apparently making fun of 
Jews could be unsettling. “But making fun 
of Judaism goes unremarked, at least in 
1977.”

GEN X HUMORISTS
That changes in the 21st century. Caplan 
reports that Generation X humorists sur-
prisingly often present Jewish ritual as 
valuable. In Jennifer Westfeldt’s 2001 movie, 
Kissing Jessica Stein, during a Yom Kippur 
service, the main character reprimands her 
cranky mother and grandmother, saying 
“Would you shut up? I’m atoning.
” The 
characters may deserve ridicule, but obser-
vance gets respect. 
At a Shabbat dinner in the same film, all 
banter stops as the characters partake in 
the rituals of Kiddush and Hamotzi. Caplan 
summarizes: “Throw Jews under the bus, 
if you please, but save a little respect for 
Judaism.
”
Caplan finds similar, possibly grudging, 
respect for Jewish ritual in the Coen broth-
er’s 2009 movie A Serious Man. The protag-
onist’s bar mitzvah seems to mean nothing 
to him, but it results in a reconciliation 
between his estranged parents. In Jonathan 
Tropper’s 2009 novel, This is Where I Leave 
You, a dysfunctional and not particularly 
observant Jewish family benefits profoundly 

from observing a traditional funeral, burial 
and week of mourning. 
Caplan asks readers to remember some of 
the best moments in fiction, essays, televi-
sion and film humor, and alerts us to works 
we may have missed. Readers will appre-
ciate how Caplan ties these representative 
works to her larger take on the changing 
generational tasks of the American Jewish 
community. 
Some works in Caplan’s study do not 
seem to fit neatly into her categories, and 
there is room to wonder if the works that 
she does not present would support her 
schema as well. A few of Caplan’s assertions 
come across as puzzling: She does not draw 
examples from the works of Mel Brooks 
because “they rarely confront Judaism or 
Jewishness head-on.
” Caplan explains the 
antipathy of Jewish comics of the postwar 
period to the perception that “Religion, it 
seemed, had nearly been the death of the 
Jewish people, and its continuation was a 
danger to Jewish survival.
” Was religion 
really central to the Nazi effort to murder 
the Jewish people? 

