Published: 8 February 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
The Kominsky Method, starring Michael Douglas as an ageing acting coach and Alan Arkin as his grumpy best friend, even has a Barbra Streisand lookalike in an early episode to ramp up the Jewish content.
In Grace and Frankie, Lily Tomlin plays Frankie Bergstein, a shikse hippie art teacher to Jane Fonda’s WASP retired cosmetics mogul Grace. The format is a somewhat cliché-ridden sitcom but it does provide a showcase for two veterans who can still pull an audience (presumably largely made of viewers who have grown old with them)
Shows created for a younger audience like The Marvellous Mrs Maisel bring fresh talent to the screen in an edgier vehicle. The satirical period comedy drama pushes a few boundaries, gently, starring Rachel Brosnahan as a 1958 New York housewife who has a knack for stand-up comedy with a touch of blue, encouraged by her friend Lenny Bruce. (By coincidence Midge Maisel has a day job behind a cosmetics counter)
The Jerusalem Post praised the show for its accurately pitched ‘Jewishness’ although TV critic Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker questioned whether some characters (ie Midge Maisel’s father) might not be caricatured with a heavy hand bordering on anti-Semitism.
And while Transparent has run into trouble because of #metoo accusations against its star, Jeffey Tambor in the role of transgender Maura Pfefferman, the series included scenes at Yom Kippur and a barmitzvah, leaving no viewer in any doubt as to its cultural milieu.
And then there’s Woody Allen’s TV drama debut with his series A Crisis in Six Scenes, which received scathing reviews for its by-now familiar depiction of a neurotic writer (guess who?) in 1960s New York. ‘Lazy’ and ‘lame’ were two of the words used to describe the writer/director’s familiar shtick but no one can deny that, together with Seinfeld, Allen is responsible for probably the most visible examples of Jewish angst and humour of our time.
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The current flourishing of Jewish storytelling and talent prompts the question: where are the Jewish characters on Australian screens? The answer is: nowhere.
Granted, the Jewish population here is much smaller than in the US, where such shows cater to a significant demographic but still, in a diverse, multi-cultural country, Jewish characters and stories are notable by their absence from Australian screens large and small, with a few distinguished exceptions - in the hugely successful Rake, Danielle Cormack plays Scarlet Engles, a Jewish criminal barrister, married to Cleaver Greene’s best friend Barney Meagher.
Back in the 1980s, on the ABC, The Dunera Boys was justly hailed as a landmark series, telling the true story of some 2000 refugees who were interned here during World War Two. Written and directed by Ben Lewin and produced by Bob Weis, it won high acclaim for the way it addressed a serious historical subject with a light, often comic touch. (Back then detention and internment in Australia were less harsh than today.)
Nearly 40 years later, long-running TV drama A Place Called Home drew on the events of World War for its emotional heft, despite being an Australian story set in the early fifties. Central character Sarah Adams, played by Marta Dusseldorp, converts to the Jewish faith when she marries Dr Rene Nordmann in Paris.
Her husband is later deported to a concentration camp, and his fate delivers a haunting ongoing storyline. Originally screened by the Seven Network, the series eventually got renewed by Foxtel who extended its life by two years due to its popularity with viewers. The Times of Israel said ‘the series has something important to say to Jews’ and praised the richness of characterisation in the way Sarah’s character evolves through her new faith.
On the big screen film director Cate Shortland’s assured direction of Lore, based on a short story by English writer Rachel Seiffert, showed audiences the perspective of the war from the point of view of two German children whose parents are members of the SS and who encounter a mysterious young man as they attempt to cross the country to safety - their first experience of a Jew.
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But these stories all reference the past. In a powerful shift towards stories with a more contemporary emphasis, Tony Krawitz wrote and directed the award-winning short feature Jewboy, about a young man who rejects his family’s Orthodox beliefs following the death of his father and embarks on a secular life.
Krawitz’s name comes up in conversation with one of our most successful and versatile Jewish actors, Sacha Horler, together with that of Louise Fox, another Jewish screenwriter with an enviable list of credits, including Love My Way and Glitch, although to date, Fox has not used her heritage as a source of material.
Horler says she has only played an overtly Jewish character once - in a 2001 feature called Russian Doll, co-starring Hugo Weaving and David Wenham, directed by Stavros Kazantzidis and co-written with Jewish screenwriter Allanah Zitserman.
Although well-versed in her mother Lilian Bodor’s Hungarian heritage and the circumstances that brought her here (which almost deserve a mini-series of their own), Horler had to embark on intensive research for the role as the central female character’s best friend, learning to speak Russian and visiting the Hakoah club in Bondi to record voices to help achieve authentic intonation.
She is philosophical about the cyclical nature of screen content when it comes to telling stories that express cultural diversity. “Look how long it’s taken to get Indigenous and Asian faces and stories to our screens,” she says. “Every culture needs its champions. I would love opportunities to play a Jewish Australian woman in a story set in the present day.”
Our literary culture is studded with Jewish writers. People like Bram Presser, Sarah Krasnostein, Morris Gleitzman, Lally Katz to name just a few. It can only be a matter of time.
Main photo: Alan Arkin (left) and Michael Douglas in The Kominsky Method
