Oddly, for a race thought by racists to control film and TV, Jews don\u2019t seem to get on our televisions much. Slightly more so in film, but that would mainly be films about the Holocaust, and the reason they get made is less about Jews, and more about winning awards.<\/p>\n
This is particularly true on British TV. I remember in 1976, when I was 12, watching the Jack Rosenthal Play for Today, Bar Mitzvah Boy. It was probably the first time I\u2019d ever seen something like my life \u2013 that is, the life of an ordinary British Jew \u2013 portrayed on a TV screen. Before then, I had seen some versions of my life \u2013 untrue ones, that is: Jewish cartoon stereotypes, who would sometimes turn up in sketches on The Two Ronnies, or in-jokes on The Comedians.<\/p>\n
There were Jewish actors on TV, but they weren\u2019t playing Jews. Andrew Sachs played a hapless Spaniard in Fawlty Towers. Warren Mitchell played racist Alf Garnett in Til Death Us Do Part. Since then, in sitcoms at least, there has been Simon Amstell\u2019s Grandma\u2019s House and Robert Popper\u2019s Friday Night Dinner, although both of these shows have complex relationships with their Jewishness, and would have been watched by many people who were unaware, I think, of their Jewish settings. Neither was as out-and-out Jewish as the lesser-known 1990s sitcom, So Haunt Me, in which Miriam Karlin played the ghost of a very Jewish mother-in-law.<\/p>\n
In the US, there are more Jews and everything is more Jewish \u2013 especially comedy. The high point is probably Seinfeld, but it\u2019s hard to say exactly what\u2019s so Jewish about Seinfeld, beyond Jerry himself being Jewish. Arguably, it\u2019s less that and more to do with New York, and with endless discussions about the tiny details of life, described once by producer Larry Charles as \u201ca dark Talmud\u201d.<\/p>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Curb Your Enthusiasm, although LA-set, is also very Jewish. There\u2019s an episode where Larry David ends up in a ski chalet owned by an Orthodox Jew. After eating something non-kosher that he smuggled in, he\u2019s told that he must bury the plate for three days to purify it. Even I, who went to an Orthodox Jewish primary school, had never heard of this.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s complex. In Seinfeld, the character based on Larry David, George, is not Jewish: the network felt that one Jew in the main cast was enough. Obviously, David wrote him Jewish anyway, but there was a sense that the audience wouldn\u2019t hack too many Jews \u2013 that they had a quota. So they made George Italian.<\/p>\n
Some of you may be muttering about The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and indeed, that too is very Jewish. But it moves us on to a different subject, which is that even in this very Jewish show, the main character is played by an actor, Rachel Brosnahan, who is not Jewish. This is also the case with the family in Friday Night Dinner (only Tracy-Ann Oberman, who played Auntie Val, was Jewish), with Tom Hardy\u2019s character in Peaky Blinders, James Norton\u2019s in McMafia, and many more.<\/p>\n