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January 2001 Issue

Why Must TV Portray Jewish Males as Weenies?

By Andrew Wallenstein

With the advent of the holiday season, Christmas-themed programs blanket the TV landscape like a Buffalo blizzard

A slight sprinkling of Hanukah and Kwanzaa is also evident, but their portrayals are usually so caricatured that their absence would probably be preferable.

My misgivings about this kind of token programming resurfaced during the holiday episode of NBC's top-rated Friends, in which Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) teaches his son about Hanukah.

This sitcom has not been on my list of appointment TV for quite some time, but I was curious to see its treatment of the holiday season in light of a report recently released by the American Jewish Committee, "Television's Changing Image of American Jews."

In the episode, Ross informs his part-Jewish son, Ben, about Hanukah, but the boy could care less. Accustomed to spending Christmas with his non-Jewish mother, Ben is obsessed with Santa Claus.

For Jewish viewers, the episode underscored their discomfort with how ubiquitous the public celebration of Christmas has become.

The AJC in particular probably wasn't too thrilled to see the episode, either, considering one of the main trends outlined in the report is the lack of Jewish couples depicted on TV. This episode came across like a nightmarish scenario of intermarriage.

The prevalence of intermarried couples on TV doesn't really bother me because I feel it is a realistic reflection of a major problem for the American Jewish community. Still, as a Jew, the episode annoyed me, too, but I couldn't instantly put my finger on why.

Friends is discussed in an interesting chapter of the AJC report titled "Invisible Jewish Families," which examines instances of ethnic ambiguity on TV. There's the "crypto-Jew" phenomenon exemplified by Seinfeld, which featuring a cast of ostensibly non-Jewish names like George Costanza and Elaine Benes acting in stereotypically Jewish mannerisms, speech inflections, etc. Friends apparently takes ethnic ambiguity to a new level, featuring characters who occasionally hint at their Judaism without ever making overt reference to it.

That doesn't bother me much, either. In an age of rampant assimilation, there's something apt about not being able to figure out whether some Friends characters are Jewish or not.

But I was surprised to read about the confusion over the ethnicity of Friends; I've always assumed Ross was Jewish. But true to the AJC assessment, I can't remember his character ever explicitly stating his religion before last week's episode. Pressed to decipher exactly why I had come to the conclusion he was Jewish, I finally realized what disturbed me about Friends depiction of Judaism.

Consider Ross, a nerd paleontologist so unlucky in love that he is thrice divorced. His first wife left him for a lesbian. He's actually a rather strapping fellow, but his hangdog expression and sullen demeanor neutralize his sexuality.

From Woody Allen to the present, Hollywood has so closely correlated the emasculated neurotic with the American Jewish male that when I see the former I just assume the latter. Even the lesbian ex-wife shtick is a direct rip-off from Woody's Manhattan. It's not just the milquetoast-and-lox persona that gives away Ross' ethnicity. He is the latest in a long line of primetime characters who have difficult romantic relationships with beautiful "shiksas," just like in Mad About You, Murphy Brown, Northern Exposure and Anything But Love.

What really irks me is the ossified gender roles assigned to TV's intermarried couples. If producers insist on depicting them, just once I would like to see the male not be a sniveling geek, or at least reverse the equation and have the Jewish neurotic be the woman and the non-Jewish beauty be the man.

Surveying the contemporary primetime scene, there's not much to give me hope. The most recent example of a non-neurotic Jewish male coupling with a shiksa is The X-Files. Avid watchers know that Agent Mulder (David Duchovny), who had a slight romantic entanglement with shiksa Agent Scully (Gillian Anderson), is Jewish. But Mulder is a guy portrayed as so obsessed with chasing aliens that he has no time for women. He's handsome, but practically asexual.

As for gender reversal, don't give me Dharma & Greg. The only thing ostensibly Jewish about Dharma Finkelstein is her surname, and Jenna Elfman infuses this neo-hippie character with zero neuroses. Elfman even played the shiksa-goddess role in the film Keeping the Faith.

Our last hope may be Debra Messing, who plays the heterosexual half of Will & Grace. If the loveably quirky Grace would only spend less time hanging out with gay guys, she could find a good "goy."

At least there are still some crypto-Jews out there. In my opinion, the unlikely heir to Seinfeld happens to be the WB. Check out the protagonist of Dawson's Creek, whose every attempt at intimacy is hobbled by his acute sense of self-consciousness. Felicity may try to hide its own crypto-Jew by giving him a Christmas-sounding name like Noel, but I'm on to him, too.

For now, I'll find solace in the unlikely figure of Goldberg, the Jewish wrestling veteran on TBS's WCW Thunder. Last week, he was seen in a holiday promotion wearing his trademark black underwear and boots, but this time with a matching skullcap, screaming about celebrating Hanukah by eating "kreplach and smoked salmon." Maybe it's a caricature, but at least he's a real man

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