Currently Browsing: Television 34 articles
Challenging TV Stereotypes
Barbara Borts discusses Jews on recent television. We are the stars of this past couple of weeks. Everywhere you look, there we are. There is Ridley Road, Paris Police 1900, Scenes from a Marriage, and, on Shabbat past, Yentl. There was even more, but let’s stop there. Ridley Road and Paris Police 1900 concern themselves […]
A Talmudic Director
Nathan Abrams reflects on the Jewishness of Mike Leigh’s work. Although he hasn’t made a film since 2018, Mike Leigh is back on the radar. Today, a new edition of Faber’s Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh edited by Amy Raphael is released. The BFI is celebrating his work with a major retrospective at its Southbank […]
The Jewish Kardashians
Sue Fox stays up late binge-watching Netflix’s latest Jewish reality show. It’s too hot to sleep. There are things I could do at 2.00 am like ironing, reading, listening to Proust on Audible, learning a new language or writing a chapter of the book I’ve been working on forever. Nothing appealed quite as much as the seven (or […]
‘Shalom, Jackie’: The end of ‘Friday Night Dinner’
Sue Vice laments the end of an era. As confirmed by Channel Four’s anniversary documentary, Friday Night Dinner: 10 Years and a Lovely Bit of Squirrel, broadcast on, fittingly, Friday 28 May 2021, the series has now finished. There will be no more weekly visits by twenty-something Adam and Jonny to the suburban Jewish home […]
New Trek is Jew-Trek
First airing in 1966, Star Trek was always heavily influenced by Jews and Jewish thought but now it’s Jewier than ever. Famously Kirk, Spock and Chekov were all played by Jews (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Walter Keonig). Some of the writers who worked on the original series such as the noted sci-fi authors Harlan Ellison (City […]
Britain’s Small Screen Jewish Gangsters
Contining with our series on Jews and Crime, Nathan Abrams explores British Jewish gangsters and criminals on the small screen. The image of the British Jewish gangster isn’t an obvious one but we’ve had two significant crime families on British television in recent years. McMafia (BBC, 2018) was an eight-part British crime drama television series […]
WandaVision and the Spectre of the Jewish Nazi
Alana Vincent The latest episode of WandaVision has re-ignited a long-running point of discomfort among Jewish comics fans, as it reminds us that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the young Wanda Maximoff willingly joined Hydra—a shadowy successor organisation to the Third Reich—as a volunteer. Why is this an issue? Well, in the comic books, […]
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic…
Will it be possible to update this homage to consumerism that was originally set amongst an incredibly narrow and privileged New York social elite?
Is The Mandalorian a Space Jew?
Nathan Abrams wonders if Disney’s creation is a member of the tribe. ‘Is There a Jew Under the Mandalorian’s Mask?’ Charlotte Gartenberg asked in The Tablet. She wrote this as the show debuted. There is certainly a great deal of mystery to the bounty hunter at the centre of Disney’s new Star Wars derived drama […]
What’s in a Name? Lovecraft Country’s Hiram Epstein
Elyce Rae Helford takes another look at the troubling and antisemitic character of Hiram Epstein on HBO’s Lovecraft Country. In September 2020, in The Times of Israel, Philissa Cramer asked, ‘Why does HBO’s anti-racist ‘Lovecraft Country’ stumble into anti-Semitic tropes?‘ The question came to me as well, and Cramer does a superb job of clarifying […]