David Baddiel explores the problem of TV portraying Jewish life on screen | Tech Reddy

This article was originally published on Radio Times Magazine.

Ironically, in the race that racists assume to dominate film and television, Jews don’t seem to enter our televisions much. A little more on film, but that would be films about the Holocaust, and the reason they are made is less about Jews, and more about winning awards.

This is especially true of British TV. I remember in 1976, when I was 12, watching the Jack Rosenthal Play for Today, Bar Mitzvah Boy. It may have been the first time I saw something like my life – that is, the life of an ordinary British Jew – on television. Before that, I had seen other versions of my life – which were not real, namely: Jewish cartoons, which sometimes turned into sketches in the Two Ronnies, or jokes in the Comedians.

There were Jewish actors on TV, but they weren’t playing Jews. Andrew Sachs played bad Spanish in Fawlty Towers. Warren Mitchell played racist Alf Garnett in Til Death Us Do Part. Since then, in sitcoms at least, there have been Simon Amstell’s Grandma’s House and Robert Popper’s Friday Night Dinner, although both of these shows have a difficult relationship with their Jewishness, and could be watched by a lot of people who don’t know, I think. their Jewish circumstances. It wasn’t as out-and-out Jews as the little-known 1990s sitcom, Haunt Me, in which Miriam Karlin played the ghost of a very Jewish mother-in-law.

In the US, there are more Jews and everything is more Jewish – especially comedy. The top spot is probably Seinfeld, but it’s hard to say exactly what is Jewish about Seinfeld, beyond Jerry himself being Jewish. Undoubtedly, it has little to do with New York, and endless discussions about the small details of life, once described by producer Larry Charles as “the black Talmud”.

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Curb Your Interests, though LA-set, is also very Jewish. There is an episode where Larry David ends up in a ski chalet owned by an Orthodox Jew. After eating something that is not kosher, he is told that he must bury the dish for three days to purify it. Even I, who went to an Orthodox Jewish elementary school, had never heard of this.

But it’s complicated. 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 to a Jew anyway, but there was a sense that the audience would not break many Jews – if they had a share. So they made George Italian.

Some of you may be muttering about the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and in fact, she is also very Jewish. But it takes us to a different topic, that even in this Jewish show, the main character is played by an actress, Rachel Brosnahan, who is not Jewish. This is also the case with the family in Friday Dinner (only Tracy-Ann Oberman, who played Auntie Val, was Jewish), and Tom Hardy’s character in Peaky Blinders, James Norton’s in McMafia, and many others.

In my Channel 4 documentary, Jews Don’t Count, we examine this oddity in the current approach to reality, among many other examples of how political identity discourse doesn’t seem to work for this one minority.

The point of me and the likes of artist Sarah Silverman is that, of course, actors should be allowed to do things, including members who don’t represent their backgrounds. But if realist concepts apply in film and television to other minority characters, why not Jews?

Television is not sure about Jews. Another person I talk to on the show is the Jewish actor David Schwimmer, who played the Jewish character, Ross, on Friends. And in 10 seasons, this fact about Ross only got one main story (in the episode titled The One With the Holiday Armadillo).

Friends, of course, was attacked – correctly – for the lack of diversity in depth, but it is instructive that no one is allowed to suggest that there was a minority represented in Friends. As Schwimmer says, that will only meet the deportees “not a real minority”.

At one point in the book Till Death Us Do Part, faced with the idea that he might be Jewish, Alf Garnett says: “I’m not Y*d! I’m not Jewish! This is all a lie!” The fact that the Jewish actor who plays Garnett was given lines in his defense denying that he is Jewish is interesting, because many Jews are afraid to publicly identify themselves as Jews.

There is a shift between television’s uncertainty about how to portray Jews, and Jews’ uncertainty about how to portray themselves. Is Bar Mitzvah Boy, 45 years on, still the best portrayal of ordinary British Jews I’ve seen on television? That doesn’t sound right, given the strides made in inclusion and representation elsewhere.

We are still waiting for a Jewish show next to Goodness Gracious Me or Famalam. Actually, I’ve been on one, called Friday Night Jews. Except it’s not, it’s called Jews on Freitagnacht, and it’s on German TV. I’m not talking about that anymore.

David Baddiel: Jews Don’t Count airs on Monday 21st November at 9pm on Channel 4, while his bestselling book Jews Don’t Count is available to buy now.

Looking for something else to watch? Look at ours TV guide or Stream Guide.

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