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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?