You Want I Should Watch?

About ten years ago, a rabbi told me that I had to watch a cartoon about a horse. It took some convincing. Artistically ambitious, so-called prestige TV has been with us for more than a quarter century now, but cartoons? As it turns out, Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Bojack Horseman, in which the titular, washed-up, 90s-era television star cycles through bouts of self-destruction and redemption in an especially godless version of Los Angeles, was strangely compelling and nothing like the cartoons I had watched growing up. Along with its unusual cast of anthropomorphic animals, animalistic humans, and its wicked sense of humor, Bojack also veered into profound meditations on nostalgia, language, the inheritance of family trauma, and the ongoing struggle to truly fix oneself. Soon, I realized that many in my circle of rabbis and Jewish studies scholars had also been bitten by the Bojack bug. And so, when serious reviews started showing up in serious publications like the New York Review of Books, it didn’t even feel like a vindication. We all knew that Bojack was smart television. The question was, Why did it feel so Jewish?

Bob-Waksberg’s new animated series, Long Story Short, which is now streaming on Netflix, covers much of the same thematic and artistic ground as Bojack. It is colored with a similarly inviting visual palette (bright cartoon colors, and characters drawn with enough detail to allow viewers to easily read their emotions), and it, too, pursues the zany contemporary humor that made Bojack famous. But now, rather than a lonely horse, there’s a whole human family, counting two aging parents—Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein) and Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser)—and three adult children—Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson), and Yoshi (Max Greenfield)—with the hilariously portmanteaued name Schwooper. Like Bojack, they’re also Californians, but this time, they’re not anxious animals but worrying Jews.

Avi struggles with his unhappy marriage to—and subsequent divorce from—Jen (Angelique Cabral), a Gentile woman he brought back from college. Shira grapples with her sexual identity as a teenager and later marries a black Jewish convert named Kendra Hooper (Nicole Byer). Yoshi suffers from an array of neurological disorders, apparently contracted when his father didn’t properly sanitize his pacifier whenever it fell on the floor, merely wiping it on his shirt (“Pacifier Shirt Syndrome”). There are many other things that vex the Schwoopers, including AI-threatened professions and COVID-stunted childhoods. But more than anything, the Schwoopers worry about their Jewish futures.

Although Naomi claims to adhere to a ludicrously precise brand of Judaism (“a progressive egalitarian Conservative Judaism with an emphasis on ritual and community over faith and blind practice—that’s literally the only way it makes sense”), in practice, it often feels like all that’s left are linguistic tics, as she and Elliot inflect their speech with Yiddishized rhetorical questions that begin with “you want I should?” Yiddish seeps into the language of the younger Schwoopers as well, but less organically. When she starts showing an interest in Judaism, Avi’s daughter (and the family’s first grandchild), Hannah (Michaela Dietz), begins to use “Yiddish words of the day” fed to her by her TikTok algorithm. Whereas some Jewish parents might kvell, Avi, unsurprisingly, is anxious.

Even ordinary middle-class concerns, like securing a good education for one’s children, are tinged with Jewish worry. In a biting comment on a certain subset of liberal North America, Shira and Kendra fret about whether they are “impressive” enough to land their sons coveted spots in a progressive private school, one that boasts “an environment that shepherds kind, creative, well-adjusted humans”:

Kendra: “Shira, we’re a lesbian couple with biracial Jewish sons. We’re impressive enough!”

Shira: “Are you kidding, Kendra? It’s like friggin’ Bridgerton over here.”

Cue to an image of an astoundingly diverse body of prospective parents, none of whom looks remotely Jewish (in the world of Long Story Short, you can tell).

The ultimate source of the Schwoopers’ neuroses is their mother. Naomi is simply unbearable. Especially in the show’s early episodes, her depiction as a stereotypical yenta borders on the antisemitic, a particularly grating iteration of the well-worn trope of the neurotic and controlling Jewish mother (think Rhoda’s Ida Morgenstern, South Park’s Sheila Broflovski, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Naomi Bunch—to name just a few). Naomi never stops noodging and utzing her children, criticizing everything from their choice of spouse to the number of grandchildren they have provided (not enough) to the fact that, unlike the Haim sisters, the Schwooper siblings didn’t end up forming a wildly successful rock band (“They make a career as a family. Mrs. Haim must be very proud!”).

Yet as the season progresses, Naomi is redeemed, and by the end, even her children grow to appreciate her. In one of the show’s final scenes, Elliot and his kids and grandkids are cooped up in a motel room, haphazardly arranging a makeup shiva for Naomi, who has died during the height of the COVID lockdowns. Bickering about what sort of memorial Naomi would want, Avi quips, “Well, she’d like that we’re talking about her.” Despite Naomi’s incessant nagging—or maybe, because of it—they have ended up leading lives that honor their mother’s memory. And those lives are distinctively Jewish, even if not in the exact ways that Naomi may have liked.

Whatever form it takes, the Judaism of Bob-Waksberg’s characters is clearly communal. In the motel makeup shiva, the Schwoopers gather as a family. But the Judaism of the show also works to bring together larger social groups. When she continues to struggle to make friends after the pandemic, Hannah wonders who would come if she had a bat mitzvah. Jewish collectivism is also the thing that first attracted Kendra to Judaism.

To make a long story short: Although she is not initially Jewish, when Kendra misses work one fall, she ends up fibbing that she was at shul for Rosh Hashanah. When pressed to explain, she ends up insisting that she is “delightfully” and specifically Jewish (a Litvak whose people come from Vitebsk, Belarus, and who is a fan of both Mel and Albert Brooks, to be exact). To keep the lie going, Kendra is forced to accept an extra ticket to Yom Kippur services from a nice Jewish coworker named Noah. High Holiday scenes are often used by showrunners to lampoon American Jewish life—think of Larry David’s ticket-scalping shenanigans—and Kendra’s Yom Kippur experience also begins humorously. As she enters the synagogue and is handed a mahzor, she asks the greeter if Noah is there. Gesturing at the full sanctuary, he responds, “There’s probably, like, fifty Noahs in here.” But her experience quickly turns serious, even moving. Unable to find her coworker, she takes a spot next to a tallit-wearing, gray-haired older woman, just as the synagogue is reciting the Ashamnu prayer.

“These are the prayers of confession. We’re saying how we’ve sinned. We have trespassed. We have betrayed,” her neighbor explains in a European accent. “I have trespassed. I have betrayed . . . I have deceived, I have mocked,” Kendra prays, tearing up and beating her chest rapidly. But her neighbor quickly grabs her fist and offers a correction: “No, sweetie. We. We have.” “We,” Kendra ponders as she looks around, teary eyed, at the synagogue praying in unison.

Over the course of the season, most of the Schwoopers end up returning to some form of Judaism. Hannah’s Judaism is expressed in her TikTok-inspired yiddishisms and her desire for a bat mitzvah, Shira’s through her desire to mourn her mother and preserve her recipes. Shocking his family, Yoshi, after years of searching, ends up finding himself by becoming a Modern Orthodox Jew—much to the chagrin of Naomi, who asks, “Why would you need a rabbi? That’s what a mother is for!” Although seemingly just another maternal jab, Naomi’s quip amounts to a larger reflection on the transmission of Jewish culture. For the Schwoopers, Judaism is the result of Naomi’s nagging, not the lessons of a rabbi.

In the end, only anxious (and unlikable) Avi is left without any meaningful Judaism. Ultimately, his Judaism amounts to the realization that even his nonhalakhically Jewish daughter would have been counted as a Jew by the Nazis. “I go by Hitler rules—if you’re Jewish enough for Hitler, you’re Jewish enough for me.”

The Schwoopers’ lives—their intermarriages, their conversions, and most of all, their grappling with the continued pull of the Jewish tradition, however thin their actual Jewish practice and knowledge may be—are a surprisingly accurate, if cartoonishly amplified, reflection of American Jewry. The stickiness of Judaism is a phenomenon that sociologists still struggle to explain, especially in light of the dire warnings about the demise of “Jewish continuity.” And yet, with all its knowing references to the lived reality of Jews in North America, Zionism and the State of Israel are conspicuously absent. The show’s timeline ends around 2022. One wonders if—and if so, how—Long Story Short will deal with October 7 and its aftermath in the next season.

Like Bojack but more so, Long Story Short is a nonlinear story. To help viewers keep track of things, scenes are prefaced with years, mostly from the twenty-first century but occasionally also from the Schwoopers’ youth. Less frequently, the show includes scenes from earlier on in Naomi’s and Elliott’s lives. Although this can be disorienting, the result imbues later scenes with surprising historical and emotional heft. The viewer feels how these earlier moments in the Schwoopers’ lives, even in the lives of their parents, continue to impact them, as they relive their own traumas and those of their ancestors. This is especially true when the adult Schwoopers are together as a family: childhood upsets, the long-ago remarks of relatives, not to speak of fears for the future, all haunt the present. Schwooper time is cyclical, recalling Soloveitchik’s description of how a Jew experiences time, “not in the standard tripartite division of past, present, and future” but rather so that “all three dimensions converge into a single integrated existence.”

I don’t know if Bob-Waksberg was thinking of Soloveitchik, but he, or at least his characters Shira and Kendra Hooper-Schwooper, seem to have been thinking of another great twentieth-century Jewish thinker when they named their twin sons Walter and Ben, in what I suspect is an homage to Walter Benjamin. In his most famous essay, Benjamin compared our perspective to that of the angel of history. Where “we perceive a chain of events,” Benjamin’s angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” This is a fair description of the Schwoopers’ compounding troubles, especially now that their mother is gone. “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise.”

And yet the show is hilarious. You want it should be any different?