Although I’m a wordsmith by trade, I’m at a loss to describe this year; sh*tshow truly seems most apt. After last year’s election, we were all justifiably anxious about 2025, but the erosion of democratic norms and institutions has happened more quickly than even the doomsayers predicted. Nonetheless, we persist and resist, and Jewish feminist cultural production supports our staying power. So, this year, I’m highlighting the books, films, tv shows, and voices that have inspired us, entertained us, and made us think. May this list of 7 (7 being the number associated with blessings in the Jewish tradition) add different types of joy to our many, many oys.
1) Korean American Angela Buchdahl, who also trained as a cantor, is senior rabbi at New York’s storied Central Synagogue. This year she published The Heart of a Stranger, where she uses the story of her life to play spiritual shepherd to her readers. Although she cracked all sorts of glass ceilings and was serious about Judaism and becoming a rabbi from an early age, she struggled to belong as the product of a Jewish father and a Korean Buddhist mother. This woman of valor has transformed her experiences of otherness into a community of Jewish inclusiveness that has global reach. She is candid about male mentors who nurtured and patronized her, the “female posse” that sustained her, the moments when her roles as rabbi and mother didn’t go according to plan, and her heartbreak over Oct. 7 and failed alliances. Each chapter ends with Jewish wisdom that resonates with the gems of her story—and ours. The Heart of a Stranger hit the New York Times bestseller list, and this reader is grateful that such work of tikkun olam is reaching a wide readership during these challenging times.
2) Reformed is an 8-episode series streaming on HBO Max inspired by the life and writings of French Liberal Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur. It follows Léa Strasbourg (Elsa Guedj) as she tries to find her own way as a young rabbi officiating at lifecycle ceremonies—a wedding, a bar mitzvah, a bris—for the first time. She also negotiates a complicated family situation that includes a secular father aghast that his daughter has committed herself professionally and spiritually to Judaism. An Orthodox colleague, who veers between mentoring her and publicly declaring that a woman rabbi is not kosher, elicits all sorts of complicated feelings as well. Jewish tradition guides and comforts her through the messiness of these fledgling years. Happily, a second season is scheduled to begin February 2026.
3) Pink Lady, an Israeli/Italian co-production directed by Nir Bergman and written by Mindi Ehrlich, is a Haredi tale of marital dissolution and desire. Lazer (Uri Blufarb) is a devoted husband to Bati (Nur Fibak) and a loving father. He is also a closeted gay man whose affair with his male study partner has attracted the attention of violent homophobic blackmailers in his community. When compromising photographs are delivered to their home, Lazer tries conversion therapy, and Bati supports him by praying daily at the Western Wall and by transforming herself into the seductive Pink Lady featured in the porn that Lazer has been given as part of his “cure.” The gay can neither be prayed nor seduced away, and Bati realizes that she wants a husband who looks at her the way Lazer looks at his study partner. This tender but piercing view of the complex contradictions embedded in Haredi sexual culture has been making the rounds of Jewish film festivals this year.
4) Susan Stamberg, a “founding mother” of NPR died on Oct. 16; she was 87 and had retired in September. As host of All Things Considered, a position she assumed in 1972 and held for 14 years, she broke the glass ceiling for women news anchors. After that gig, she became the host of Weekend Edition Sunday, and later could follow her passions as a special correspondent for the arts. A New York Jew with an English degree from Barnard (she was a first-generation college student), she was less interested in politics and more interested in the culture that she believed shaped listeners’ relationship to the world. According to Scott Simon, “she gave NPR a voice, and that laugh that could make microphones tremble.” Thanks to her and Linda Wertheimer, an early NPR political reporter, women like Cokie Roberts and Nina Totenberg also became NPR voices. And for over three decades, she and co-host Murray Horwitz brought us Hanukkah Lights. Not bad for a woman whose voice some Midwestern stations worried would be too New York and too Jewish.
5) For Jewish women of a certain age, especially those of us with “unabashed curly hair,” Carole King and that iconic photo on her 1971 Tapestry album made us feel “so beautiful.” In Carole King: She Made the Earth Move (a volume in Yale’s Jewish Lives series), journalist Jane Eisner crafts a biography that is really the life and times of this complicated and enigmatic piano woman (Eisner points out that most pop stars of King’s era were wed to their guitars, whereas King was centered on the piano, an instrument that historically enabled women’s upward mobility).
Without direct access to King since she is rarely a willing interview subject, Eisner provides a great deal of cultural history as she traces King’s shift from a Brooklyn-bred songwriter wrestling with her dual-commitments to music and motherhood to an anxiety-ridden but compelling performer to an environmentally-conscious Idaho recluse who survived domestic violence and made sure that her son was bar mitzvahed. Thanks to King’s re-recording of “Where You Lead, I Will Follow” for Gilmore Girls and her eventual greenlighting the Broadway show Beautiful, King’s music will continue to be “the soundtrack for a lot of people’s lives.”
6) The first season of Nobody Wants This was a love-hate watch for me; seeing the brilliant Tova Feldshuh cast as Bina, a demonic Jewish mother was excruciating (other stereotypical, noxious depictions of Jewish women made that portrayal seem not a bug but a feature). However, Adam Brody playing “hot rabbi” Noah who courts Joanne (Kristen Bell), his non-Jewish love interest, with Shabbat prayers felt like a Jewish revolution on the small screen. The second season didn’t redeem Feldshuh as I had hoped (yes, scenes from Kissing Jessica Stein danced in my head). However, the formerly loathsome Esther (Jackie Tohn), the hot rabbi’s sister-in-law, turned into a genuinely complex character and an ally to the Gentile interloper. While we wait for the inevitable pleasures and disappointments of Season 3, you might want to check out rabbinical commentary on the show as well as Lilith’s Sarah Seltzer on her preference for Long Story Short.
7) Many of us cheered on New Jersey Senator Cory Booker in March as he broke Senate records, talked for 25 hours about the atrocities happening in this country, lauded the Black-Jewish caucus he formed with Jackie Rosen, and indicated his presence by invoking Hineini, Here I Am. And now we get to celebrate his recent marriage to a Jewish woman, Alexis Lewis. After a civil marriage in Newark, they held an interfaith, family-only ceremony in D.C., complete with rabbi, pastor, chuppah, and breaking of the glass. In these days of polarization and divisiveness, it’s a real blessing to see a loving couple honor religious and foodie differences (Booker is vegan, Lewis is not).
Helene Meyers is the author of Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition.
No responses yet