PicoBlog

The Shrink Next Door—the first three episodes of which released Friday on Apple's TV+ content farm—is perhaps the most Jewish show currently on air. It is more authentic in its portrayal of Judaism than anything I've seen since last year's adaptation for HBO of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. But where that show was set in the 1940s, safely trapping its Jews in the traditionality of yore, The Shrink Next Door daringly proclaims that Jews existed as recently as the '80s.

These characters are lamb chop-roasting, synagogue hora-dancing Hebrews down to the bone, with shreds of their parents' Yiddish accents still clinging to their palates. There's only one problem: most of the main cast isn't Jewish.

The Shrink stars Will Ferrell and Kathryn Hahn, neither of whom are Jewish, alongside Paul Rudd, who is in fact so Jewish it feels like a violation of the social order that he is currently People's "Sexiest Man Alive."

The show tells the real-life story of Marty Markowitz (Ferrell), a quintessentially meek and anxious Jewish man who seeks out therapy at the behest of his sister, Phyllis (Hahn), after suffering a panic attack when a customer at his inherited fabrics store puts on the New York Jew equivalent of a Karen routine. But Dr. Ike Herschkopf (Rudd) has no sense of boundaries or ethics, and soon worms his way into Marty's life to control him from the inside out, cutting him off from his family and friends while siphoning his money and moving into his Hamptons house.

The quality of the show notwithstanding (it's fine), what I find most intriguing and oftentimes baffling about it is how much it wants to be Jewish without coming across as Jewish. "Yes, this is a show about Jews," the show seems to assure us, "but it's not a Jewish show. You can still watch it, goyish America!"

Ike's first big boundary-crossing is to suggest that Marty have a second bar mitzvah for his fortieth birthday, since Marty's actual 13th birthday was marred by his anxiety. Meanwhile, we find that Dr. Ike, having been raised in poverty, didn't get a bar mitzvah party of his own as a child, signaling to the audience that this exercise is self-serving rather than therapeutic.

Revolving around this subplot, the second episode spends much of its time inside of synagogues. Hearing Will Ferrell croon the Saturday morning liturgy in perfect Hebrew is a bit like watching a fish tap dance. Even if the dancing is good, that's not what you're going to focus on.

Ferrell and Hahn do look Jewish, yes. But that's exactly the problem. Imagine Scarlett Johansson, who is Jewish, being cast as a shrewish Jewess the way Hahn is here. Hahn, whose ethnic heritage (I am told) is German, certainly has the Eastern European features stereotypically associated with Ashkenazi Jews and is consistently given roles as Jewish women who bitch and kvetch. Johansson has claimed she could play an Asian or a tree, but I've yet to see her play an Upper West Side yenta.

Hahn looks so Jewy that I simply assumed she was a member of the tribe until I Googled it while watching her excellent performance in WandaVision, and she has played a rabbi on Transparent. She was also set to portray Joan Rivers in a now-cancelled biopic. But as anybody who belongs to a marginalized culture knows, the performance doesn't feel authentic when someone else does it. After being cast as so many Jewish women, hearing Hahn say the word "rabbi" with all the nasally, hook-nosed energy of Marge from The Simpsons is starting to feel a little insulting.

As pointed out by Jewish comedian Sarah Silverman, there is a disturbing trend in Hollywood where Jewish characters whose Jewishness is foregrounded—especially female characters—are seemingly never allowed to be played by actual Jews. Silverman dubs this "Jewface."

The problem with putting Jewish culture front and center in a project like this is that it becomes surficial, a signifier with no signified. It's a shallowness summed up neatly by NPR's Eric Deggans, who, in speaking about Dr. Ike's self-serving bar mitzvah plot, writes, "Dr. Ike distracted Marty from his own exploitation, but [the show] didn't say as much about how the therapist weaponized their shared culture to make the bond stick."

The show accidentally encapsulates its own hypocritical approach to Jewish characters in a telling moment where Marty and Ike discuss famed fashion designer Ralph Lauren and Dr. Ike points out that his real name is Ralph Lifshitz. The preppy designer knew such a Jewish name would turn his target demographic off, so he adopted the WASPy moniker. Later, when Marty sports a Polo shirt, he tells his employees, "It's a Lifshitz." To hear a non-Jew in the role of a Jew call out a real-life Jew for not being proudly Jewish is so incredibly and boldly fucked up that I almost have to respect the show for going there. Almost.

Postscript: I find the term “Jewface” to be clunky and the application of a term associated with anti-Black racism to Jewish issues to be semantically ill-suited to the task of describing what the problem is. It also serves to delineate between Jewish and Black liberation struggles, which can have the effect of making it harder to find allyship between marginalized communities. Rebecca Pierce writes incisively about the topic here.

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