Jewish sitcom moms are popping up on my Netflix screen, wagging their fingers and berating their offspring for my entertainment. And they’ve got me thinking. Both Naomi from “Long Story Short” and Bina from “Nobody Wants This” are classic Jewish mother figures, each brunette, short, and loud (like me). But only one feels real, and it’s the cartoon.
My opinion is that being a mother means you’ve signed up for a long-term relationship with anger. There’s your own anger—smothered by shame, diverted by errands, belittled by sexism. And there’s your children’s anger; justified or not, often both, it lands squarely at your feet.
For Jewish women, saddled by heavy cultural expectations of nurturing, success, and continuing the tribe, it’s not hard to see where the plain facts of our existence coincide with unfortunate stereotypes. All that anger just living there, in the middle of the love. When a mom is angry and resentful below the surface—and kids are angry as part of the natural course of things, and everyone is nonetheless sitting happily together over bagels—that makes for a rich emotional tapestry, the subject of art, writing, and therapy sessions.
That’s my point of view as a writer and a Jewish mother of two. And it’s clearly shared by Bay Area Jewish showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator of “Long Story Short” (with his high school friend, animator Lisa Hanawalt). Think of a cartoon family sitcom, but make it Jewish, and maybe on psychedelic drugs. The show flits back and forth and loops around in time, poignantly and surreally showing how small-seeming moments in childhood and adolescence haunt, define, and create the adult personalities of the three Schwooper children. Instead of a buffonish sitcom dad, the central parent is matriarch Naomi, a quintessential tough cookie. In an oft-quoted moment, she criticizes a seating arrangement for one of her kids’ bar mitzvahs by saying that it’s worse than anything Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did—“and they got the chair!”
“Naomi is such an archetypal Jewish mother—pushy, controlling, critical, passive-aggressive, self-dramatizing—that she often reads as a caricature,” writes my friend Judy Berman, Time magazine’s television critic. But Berman adds this: Naomi ends up being the “heart” of the family, and the story. Because keeping a family functioning, and intact, might require being pushy, controlling, critical, and frankly, difficult.
Compare animated Naomi, whose characteristics get deepened and expanded over the course of the season, with her live-action sitcom counterpart, Bina, of the hit romcom “Nobody Wants This” (colloquially known to many as “the hot rabbi show”). Bina may seem realer, but she’s actually more cartoonish. Played as a glaring steamroller by the beloved Tovah Feldshuh, Bina is unable to rise above her stock role; the other Jewish women on the show don’t do much better. They form a phalanx of monsters blocking the gentile Joanne from her romance with her dreamy rabbinical love object, Bina’s son.
Keeping a family functioning, and intact, might require being pushy, controlling, critical, and frankly, difficult.
These women, brunettes to Joanne’s blonde, are a “horde of judgmental Jewish women… one-dimensional nightmares who together fuel stereotypes. They are needy, overbearing, and nasty,” Esther Zuckerman wrote, also in Time. Many critics noted that the show is written and created by a blonde L.A. convert, who may not have confronted her own biases when creating antagonists for her stand-in, Joanne. “Nearly every Jewish woman in the show is… manipulative, spoiled and selfish,” wrote Jessica Grose in The New York Times. These think pieces about the show represented a quiet moment of revolt from Jewish women writers, asking for fairer portrayal.
One moment that raised particular ire was the pork scene. Bina erupts at Joanne for thoughtlessly bringing pork into the house (Joanne’s lack of knowledge about Jewish customs in modern-day L.A. is laughably unrealistic), only to be caught red-handed, huffing the discarded prosciutto from the trash can. Joanne promptly blackmails her.
This crass, humiliating moment is the writers’ attempt at adding dimension to Bina.
Now, back to “Long Story Short”—specifically, a memorable episode in which Naomi, our difficult cartoon mom, is being feted at her local JCC. In shock, her children hear her described by recovering addicts and others whom she counseled for as—giving, patient, selfless, and flexible—all the things she will not, cannot be with her own kids.
And then, when the Schwooper kids band together for an anodyne “Mad Lib” toast that offers no homage to their mom’s personality, she praises it as the best toast of the night. Naomi liked it not because of the content, but because her children were together, and present, the family continuing on. The writers offer us a new understanding of how Naomi sees her role in the family and in the world at large, and her Jewish motherness unfolds into something more complex, more human.
When I was in college, I used to feed and care for my friends and brag about being a “future Jewish mother,” sure that this role would involve more nurturing than cajoling. Maybe that’s how my children will remember me; but they may remember the latter, too. I hope that if they do remember the cajoling, they will understand what I wanted for them, the tools I tried to give them. Eventually, after hardship and loss, Naomi’s children begin to take this lesson from her, and it’s a moving development.
I hope that season two of the otherwise charming “Nobody Wants This,” arriving on our screens this fall, will give its Jewish women the dimension that Naomi and her cartoon family have, revealing something genuine and surprising beneath those hectoring exteriors.
No responses yet