On March 7th, Marc will be moderating a conversation about writing in the third generation since the Holocaust between Nathan Englander (For the Relief of Unbearable Urges), Ruth Franklin (A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction), and Rinne Groff (Compulsion) as part of a Public Theater forum on “Imagination and Memory: Anne Frank and the Writers Who Followed Her.”

The forum is hosted by actor Michael Stuhlbarg and will feature author Francine Prose discussing her latest book, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife.

Marc reviewed Franklin’s first book, A Thousand Darknesses, for Tablet in December.

Buy tickets here!

And, this week, Eve Annenberg’s Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish makes its North American premiere at the New York Jewish Film Festival. It’s a new, Yiddish-language, U.S.-made, full-length feature.

Annenberg’s film places the tragic Shakespearian love story in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community, and the filmmaker, who had little previous knowledge of Yiddish, decided that a film set there must use Yiddish as its primary language. For decades, Yiddish, like most foreign languages, didn’t appear in American movies; filmmakers believed American audiences disliked subtitles and portrayed foreign language-speaking characters with actors speaking accented English. But a new trend toward authenticity and realism is returning Yiddish, like other foreign languages, to the screen. In A Serious Man, released two years ago, Joel and Ethan Coen presented a 7-minute prologue set in 19th-century Poland; the characters in it spoke Yiddish.

Yiddish is used in movies to connect with memory, particularly by European filmmakers. French filmmaker Emmanuel Finkiel focused on the lives of elderly Jews who come together on the Promenade in Cannes in his Madame Jacques sur la Croisette (1996). “The Yiddish spoken by this age group is more than a language,” Finkiel said. His Voyages (1999) followed three Holocaust survivors, each with his own narrative, searching for some unambiguous closure. Though the film did not directly relate the horrors of the Holocaust, Finkiel’s approach to the events had the Yiddish world of the past collide and engage in a struggle with the Jewish world of the present, and it was clear that Yiddish held its own. Finkiel provided the setting for a Yiddish world that was dynamic and nuanced, but that teetered as the elderly generation died.

Yiddish movies are even being made in Israel, where, for much of the country’s history, the language was anathema—in 1930, there were riots in Tel Aviv when My Yiddishe Mame was screened. But over the last decade, student filmmakers have turned to the language to either faithfully portray ultra-Orthodox Jewish life or to tackle the divide that for years forced censure of Yiddish and deprived generations of Israelis of a rich Jewish language and culture. In Nava Nussan Heifetz’s The Cohen’s Wife (2000), set in the Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox world, she dramatized a situation in which a Cohen must, according to Jewish law, divorce his wife because she has been raped. In My Father’s House (2006), Dani Rosenberg examined the birth of the state, when new immigrants, survivors of the death camps, were forced to shed their Diaspora personas in order to “properly” assimilate into the new society. “The film had to be in Yiddish,” Rosenberg said. “By Yiddish, I don’t just mean the language, but also the culture which the Israeli government tried to erase.”

Yiddish movies being made in America are set in communities where Yiddish is spoken in the home and on the street. Mendy and Yakov Kirsh shot their 2005 movie A Gesheft (“The Deal”) in the ultra-Orthodox community of Monsey, New York. Here, just as early Yiddish movie-makers saw Yiddish cinema as a way to combat the assimilationist message of mainstream American films, the Kirsh brothers were reacting to mainstream culture by creating what they called “kosher entertainment.” This is noteworthy, as for generations ultra-Orthodox Jews avoided the “corrupting influence” of Yiddish culture as too mainstream.

Eve Annenberg made Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish with exiles from the ultra-Orthodox community. Lazer Weiss and his wife, Malky, the actors who play the star-crossed lovers, spoke only Yiddish until they left the Satmar Hasidic community in their teens; neither had seen a movie when they left. The three are now developing ideas for a second Yiddish film. Meanwhile, there are reports that Topol, best known as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, will star next year in a Yiddish-language Golem, and blogs are even suggesting Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union might be filmed in Yiddish.

It’s not just new projects. Old Yiddish films are being restored, Yiddish-cinema courses are being taught on campus, DVDs of the Yiddish film classics are easily found, and Yiddish short films can be seen on the Internet. Yiddish is not only a vibrant language but also a culture and lifestyle. Finally, its cinema is being introduced to a whole new generation of cineastes.

Eric A. Goldman teaches cinema at Yeshiva University. A new edition of his Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present was recently published by Holmes and Meier.

Now he’s starring in Fyvush Finkel Live!, a musical revue that runs through November 7 in Manhattan. On his day off, Finkel regaled Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry with stories about the early days of Yiddish theater, his expedited entry into serial television, and the mesmerizing maggid of his neighborhood shul. And he sang for her, too. Running time: 14:22.

But Finkel is an even bigger star in the world of Yiddish theater. He is currently back on that stage for a three-week run of Fyvush Finkel, Live, a musical revue, which was the perfect excuse for Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to pay him a visit. The interview got off to a rocky start, however:

Soon, though, he and Sara became fast friends. Come back and give a listen Monday. It’s probably the most charming conversation you’ll hear during election week.

• Elif Batuman examines what is to become of Franz Kafka’s papers? [NYT Magazine]

• A private Israeli security guard shot a Palestinian dead in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Clashes have since ensued. Gulp. [LAT]

• Russia is nixing the planned sale of sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to Iran in deference to the U.N. sanctions. [JPost]

• J Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami calls on Prime Minister Netanyahu to extend the freeze (and J Street is running a whole bunch of print ads backing him up). [JTA]

• American Jews’ outsize political influence runs headlong into disproportionately un-Jewish Iowa’s outsize political influence. [Jewish Week]

• Yesterday, former President Clinton fingered not only settlements but also Russian immigrants in Israel as obstacles to peace. [Foreign Policy]

• Harold Bloom on Isaac Bashevis Singer. [NYRB]

• President Abdullah Gul talks Turkey … and Israel and Iran. [WP]

• Matt Duss compares what Helen Thomas and Martin Peretz said, and contrasts their fates. [Boston Globe]

• A profile of JDub Records artist Clare Burson, whose new album is Holocaust-inspired. [NYT]

• Barry Gewen situates the Park51 controversy in the broader American historical context. [Entanglements]

• Support the (Jewish) troops! While there are plenty of military rabbis, there is a severe shortage of Torahs. [Arutz Sheva/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Israeli know-how + Chinese manufacturing = a lot of money for one Israeli private-equity fund (maybe). [WSJ]

• Fascinating first-person essay from a Jewish U.S. Marine. Reminded me of “Defender of the Faith”. [Commentary]

• A Serious Man lead Michael Stuhlbarg plays Arnold Rothstein in HBO’s new Boardwalk Empire. [Jewish Journal]

In other news, the big winner last night, taking Original Screenplay, Director, and Picture, was The Hurt Locker (which you all really should go see: it’s excellent, and thriling). However, other than the single Oscar Inglourious Basterds’s Christoph Waltz won for Supporting Actor, all six of the films I identified as the most Jewish contenders were shut out, including Israel’s third consecutive Foreign Language Film nominee, Ajami, and the Coen Brothers’ fantastic A Serious Man.

But having a friend of the magazine succeed more than makes up for that. Here’s The New Tenants trailer:

David Rakoff [Tablet Magazine]
The New Tenant [Oscars]

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee
Your Oscar Cheat Sheet

UPDATE: This list should have included An Education (see comments). Your guide follows:

An Education
• What: Nick Hornby adopted this film from a memoir about a young girl in early-’60s England who falls for an older Jewish man, played here by Peter Sarsgaard.

• Up for: Best Picture; Leading Actress (Carey Mulligan); Adapted Screenplay (Hornby).

• Will win: Its best chance is in Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 5. While the older man’s Jewishness isn’t the film’s dominant theme, or even necessarily his dominant characteristic, it’s certainly in there.

And now, the list.

5: Up in the Air
• What: This flick, adopted from Walter Kirn’s novel, stars George Clooney as professional fire-er. Fans say it’s very now; detractors say it’s very mediocre.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Jason Reitman); Adapted Screenplay (Reitman and Sheldon Turner); Actor (George Clooney); Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga); Supporting Acress (Anna Kendrick).

• Will win: Very long shot at Picture, Director, and Supporting Actress; slightly less long shot at Actor; favorite at Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 2. Largely on the strength of Jewy (and kind of insufferable) director/co-writer Reitman.

4: The White Ribbon
• What: German auteur Michael Haneke’s extremely dark film about a village in Germany immediately before World War I.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film; Cinematography.

• Will win: It’s the Foreign Language Film prohibitive favorite.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 3. Not really explicitly Jewish, but it is dark and German. Plus a prominent Jewish writer called it fantastic in a certain magazine of Jewish life and culture.

3: Inglourious Basterds
• What: Quentin Tarantino’s crazy, violent, hilarious, awesome World War II movie about a group of American Jews whose mission is to brutally kill as many Nazis as possible and then assassinate Hitler, as well as a French-Jewish movie theater owner who secretly plots, also, to assassinate Hitler. Spoiler alert: They succeed.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Tarantino); Original Screenplay (Tarantino); Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz); Cinematography; Film Editing; Sound Editing; Sound Mixing.

• Will win: Waltz is all but a lock, and Tarantino is the Original Screenplay (though not Director) favorite. Also a threat in the technical categories.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 7. Except for Waltz’s SS agent and Brad Pitt’s commando leader, the major characters are Jews; the French-Jewish theater owner is even played by a young French-Jewish actress named Mélanie Laurent. On the other hand, at its heart, the movie isn’t about Jews, Nazis, or really anything besides other World War II movies. Also, Liel hated it (though Germans liked it!).

2: Ajami
• What: Israel’s third consecutive Best Foreign Language nominee, and the first in Arabic, its gangster plot depicts Palestinian-Jewish relations in the titular Jaffa neighborhood.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film.

• Will win: It’s a long shot.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 8. I mean, it’s Israeli!

1: A Serious Man
• What: The Coen Brothers’s quiet, comic, and in the end deeply serious tale of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor in late-1960s Minnesota who wonders why his life has gone totally to hell.

• Up for: Picture; Original Screenplay.

• Will win: In a just world, both of them (and Michael Stuhlbarg would have an Actor nomination). In this world, probably nothing.

•Jew rating (out of 10): 10. If it were just that all the characters were Jews, and that the comic climax took place at a bar mitzvah, then it would be an 8, maybe a 9. But this movie wrestles with what it is to be Jewish on the most profound level; short of Yom Kippur services, nothing will make you reflect on your Jewishness like sitting through it. The day after A Serious Man gets no love, go see it, even if it’s your fifth time.

Nominations [The Oscars]

Related: Painfully Good [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee

To begin with, I strongly urge you to read Liel Leibovitz’s careful consideration.

For Juliet Lapidos, giving the film a welcome second look in Slate, Gopnik’s defining quality is his essential meekness:

A physics professor, Gopnik knows that ‘actions have consequences,’ as he puts it to Clive, the student who’s trying to bribe him. He adds, ‘Not just physics. Morally.’ It seems more difficult for Gopnik to grasp that inaction may have consequences, too. But, intellectually at least, he knows that’s the case. When his brother, Arthur, complains that ‘Hashem hasn’t given me shit,’ Gopnik replies, ‘It’s not fair to blame Hashem. Arthur, please. Please calm down. Sometimes you have to help yourself.’ It’s his truest line.

It’s tempting to say that Gopnik is a latter-day Job. But Lapidos knows better. Job is not meek: Job is angry. More importantly, Job’s uncertainty is quite different from Gopnik’s. Job wants to know why God allows such bad things to happen to a good man. Gopnik wants to know if there even is a God to allow such bad things to happen to him. If the novel is the epic of a world abandoned by God, then this is a movie for that age as well.

Which is why, for me, a key part of the movie is its invocation of Schrödinger’s cat, a widely misunderstood physics thought experiment, which Gopnik tries, in vain, to explain to a failing student. Allow me to attempt a better job.

Schrödinger’s cat is in an opaque box, along with a Geiger counter and hammer poised to fall upon a vial of cyanide. The Geiger counter contains atomic matter with a half-life of one hour. Should the matter decay, the counter releases the hammer, which smashes the vial of cyanide, which kills the cat. After one hour, therefore, it is exactly as likely that the cat is alive as it is dead. But because of the way physics works at the quantum level, where we are totally unsure what that matter will do, there is a sense in which, for us, outside of the box, the cat is both alive and dead. And that’s where most people’s understanding of the paradox ends: The cat is, almost mystically, in a state of simultaneous life and death.

But, of course, the cat isn’t both alive and dead. Use your common sense! It’s either alive, or it’s dead; and if we were to open the box at any given moment, we would see the cat either alive or dead. The point of Schrödinger’s cat is to illustrate that existence at the quantum level is fundamentally different from the existence we know. In the observable world—think Isaac Newton’s laws—all actions have somewhat predictable or at least quantifiable consequences, and cats are either alive or dead. But at the level of subatomic particles, those rules are actually thrown out the window. It’s a post-Newtonian existence.

… Yet it’s also a pre-Newtonian one, isn’t it? For God, if He (or She, or It, etc.) exists, is also capable of throwing all the observable rules out the window, and of producing consequences without actions. Larry Gopnik knows that things are different at the quantum level. And so the movie is about Gopnik trying to figure out if things are different at the cosmic level, too: whether all of his misfortunes—his wife leaving him; his kids ignoring him; his bosses forsaking him; his health failing him—possess cosmic meaning or are simply a random chain of events in the Newtonian world. This is why, as Lapidos notes, Gopnik’s heroic moments are those few instances where he acknowledges that he needs to help himself: not because God hates him, or won’t help him, or doesn’t exist, but because in the absence of that certainty, that is how we have to play the game.

For us, standing outside the box, God must appear in a state of both existing and not existing. But use your common sense! He either exists, or He doesn’t exist. We can never be sure, but that’s not the same thing as there not being an answer.

Which is all a very long way of saying: I strongly hope A Serious Man wins Best Picture. And I am very ready to be disappointed. Shrug.

“What’s Going On?” [Slate]
Taking It Seriously [Tablet Magazine]

This being Hollywood, several Jews were recognized for work that was not explicitly Jewish, including Up in the Air director and co-writer Jason Reitman, and David Rakoff, who had a hand in the writing of The New Tenants, a nominee for Best Short Film (Live Action). Did we mention that Rakoff is a Tablet Magazine contributing editor? Well, he is.

Finally, Ajami, Israel’s first-ever Arabic-language submission to the Academy, became the third consecutive Israeli offering to score one of the five Best Foreign Language Film nominations. Will it be the first to win? The Oscars are Sunday, March 7th, so we’ll find out soon enough.

Do read Tablet Magazine’s resident film buff Liel Leibovitz on A Serious Man (loved) and Basterds (hated). Plus—spoiler alert!—you will be able to read his thoughts on Ajami soon enough.

The 82nd Annual Oscar Nominations [ArtsBeat]

Earlier: Israel Nears Third Straight Oscar Nomination

Related: Taking It Seriously [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

I was particularly drawn to the relationship between the film’s protagonist, Larry Gopnik, and his wife, Judith. He is a pale physics professor, with eyes by Bambi and hair by Schiele; she is his rapacious ringmaster, a venomous creature who can deliver more derision with a flick of an eyebrow than most humans can with carefully considered words. It’s giving away little of the film’s plot to reveal that it begins with Judith leaving Larry for the delightfully awful Sy Ableman—a baritone-voiced phony—and ends with the two reconciling, holding hands and swapping smiles at their son’s bar mitzvah. The soulful, sultry, and weed-addled neighbor, Mrs. Samsky, offers a brief spell of seduction, but it’s Judith, clearly, that Larry truly wants and, more devastatingly, needs.

There are, of course, many ways to read this bit of narrative, and more than one critic has accused the Coens of perpetuating negative stereotypes of meek Jewish men and grating Jewish women. But an altogether different explanation is possible, and it comes to us courtesy of this week’s haftorah.

As the reading begins, the prophet Ezekiel conjures a strange image:

“The word of the Lord came again unto me, saying, Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim and for all the house of Israel his companions: And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand. And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying, Wilt thou not shew us what thou meanest by these? Say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand.”

Likewise, the rest of the chapter speaks of the reunification of the divergent kingdoms, that of Israel in the north and that of Judah in the south, which have split into two separate entities after a brief and bloody internecine battle in 920 BCE. According to most available accounts, the northern kingdom was the one most likely to succeed, surpassing its neighbor to the south in everything from urban planning to sophisticated warfare methods and blessed by far greater rainfall and therefore more robust agriculture. Judeans, on the other hand, focused mainly around Jerusalem, and spent a considerable amount of time fretting about ritual and tradition.

One kingdom, therefore, looked to the future, another to the past. And it’s a tribute to Judaism’s magical sense of time—or, perhaps, sense of magical time—that it was the Judeans who far outlived the crumbling kingdom of Israel. Judah took Judaism seriously, while Israel concerned itself with becoming a player in the complex geopolitical struggles of the region. Judah was provincial, Israel worldly. Israel lasted exactly 200 years before being overpowered by the Assyrians; Judah fared considerably better.

Why, then, would the prophet seek to reunite them? Why not bid adieu to the sinful Israel, with its penchant for Baal worship, and cultivate instead the mostly pure Judah? Such a spiritual equivalent of natural selection might eventually make for a more just, more righteous people. It would also, however, be utterly unrealistic: for a people to survive, the Bible knows well, it needs priests and politicians, prophets and soldiers, urban planners and religious scholars alike.

The same could be said of the Gopniks. Judith spends the duration of the film in search of earthly bliss: she philanders and conspires and is eager to get rid of her poor, hunched husband so that she and the able Ableman may have the house all to themselves. Larry, on the other hand, seeks the advice of rabbi after rabbi, eager to unearth some secret, divine meaning to the trials and errors of modern life.

They need each other, those two. There may be more alluring partners out there, more illustrious and more tempting neighbors and friends. But if the Gopniks are to survive, they need both the seeker and the scammer, the greedy and the godly, the serious man and the sensual woman. The same is true of us Jews. It always has been.

There once was a Jew who felt his life was spiraling out of control. He had done some things he was certain were sinful, and found it increasingly difficult to quell his conscience. After a few sleepless nights, he decided to go see the rabbi and ask for his advice. On his way to the rabbi’s study, however, the man’s stomach began turning: there was no way, he realized, that he could bring himself to confess all of his shameful deeds to the pious, aged reb. And so, just a few yards away from the rabbi’s door, the man finally found a solution. He went in, shook the rabbi’s hand, and began talking.

“Rabbi,” he said, “I’m here on behalf of a close friend of mine. You see, this friend is a terrible sinner, and he’s done many awful things, but he couldn’t bring himself to come and confess to you and he asked me to go in his stead.” Feeling secure in his ruse, the man then proceeded to speak at length and in detail about all of his questionable behaviors.

A few minutes later, when the man was finally done talking, the rabbi nodded his head gently and smiled. “What a fool is your friend!” he cried out. “All he needed to do was come see me and tell me he was speaking on your behalf.”

The rabbi wasn’t being cute. He understood that the man, by way of his conceptual trickery, has found a way to live both inside and outside the boundaries of his own consciousness, to be himself and not himself at the same time. A few centuries later, quantum physicists would give a similar principle the name complementarity, and acknowledge that it was entirely possible for things that intuitively seem antithetical to each other to coexist without much conflict.

In theory, Larry Gopnik, the Coen’s new protagonist, portrayed with rare gentility by Michael Stuhlbarg, should understand such principles well. When we see him at work, teaching physics at a Midwestern college in the late 1960s, he’s scribbling interminable equations on an enormous blackboard and droning on about Schrödinger’s Cat, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and other staples of quantum mechanics. But when his marriage collapses, his career begins to careen out of control, and a swarm of other niggling concerns descend on him with alarming proximity, Gopnik has little use for modern abstractions. What he needs is an answer, clear and definitive, to the question “why me.” Looking at Stuhlbarg’s restless brown eyes—they press themselves against the thick lenses of his glasses like fish contemplating an escape from their tank—one could easily be tempted to believe it’s the only question that has ever truly mattered to mankind.

As is the case with existential conundrums of this magnitude, the very act of pondering could get tricky, for character and audience alike. If drama, as Alfred Hitchcock neatly put it, is life with the dull bits left out, metaphysical musings—the kind involving God, the universe, and our reasons for being—can too often seem like the dull bits with the rest of life left out. What unfurls on the screen lacks a particularly defined plot, any semblance of character development, or any of the other tropes that constitute cinema as we know it. Which, of course, has sent some critics reeling: the film, they argued, was too bleak, the protagonists too stereotypical, the narrative too lackluster. A viewer about to see A Serious Man would do well to ignore these voices and, like Gopnik, get ready for some serious grappling.

And grappling is what the film is about. The plot, or whatever little of it matters, is is concerned less with Gopnik’s questions and more with those he entrusts with answering it. The hapless physicist seeks the advice of several rabbis. It would betray much of the film’s considerable charm and dramatic tension to disclose just what each one says, but it comes as no surprise that a definitive, convincing, elegant explanation of God’s plan for the universe fails to materialize.

What Gopnik gets instead are platitudes about perception, empty praise, and repeated exhortations to soldier on with life even as it makes less and less sense. The exhorters include not only rabbis but also lawyers, colleagues, neighbors, family members, and friends, all of whom offer Gopnik a measure of assurance—some fake, some sincere—taken largely from modern society’s infinite supply of certainty. A real estate-minded esquire, for example, promises to resolve a dispute over yardage with precise measurements, and a fellow professor blurts out awkward reassurances about Gopnik’s ongoing quest for tenure. Even the sultry next-door neighbor—who tans in the nude and speaks with that deflated, matter-of-fact voice common to the incurably bored—sounds more like a physician than like a temptress when she offers Gopnik a touch of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll.

All these individuals fail the film’s sweet, suffering hero because their very outlook—the outlook of the upwardly mobile middle class that trusts that everything can be measured and understood—is inherently ill-suited to exploring the far more elusive and infinitely more profound terrain with which Gopnik is concerned. They may know the law or the science or the culture, but he’s interested in the Meaning of Life. In many ways, Gopnik is like the cat in Schrödinger’s box, whose condition is entirely unknowable for the duration of the experiment.

Lesser artists might have used this weighty premise as the backdrop for a modest character study, or, at the very best, engaged in Charlie Kauffman-style metaphysical mindbenders. But the Coens, serious men, came into this film curious about the very same questions Gopnik hurls at his conversationalists. They want to know why. And, like Gopnik, they’re not afraid to ask.

This intellectual ferocity makes A Serious Man a very rare film. More than the tale of Gopnik and his petty woes, it tells another, far more universal story. In short, here it is: once upon a time, there was a people, the Jews, whose faithful sons and daughters lived in small shtetls and spoke Yiddish and realized that certain phenomena lay past the realms of their understanding and accepted that God moved about in the world in ways they couldn’t possibly know. When members of this nation immigrated to the New World, however, and shaved off their beards and shook off their mamaloshen, their mother tongue, they quickly became besotted with the promises of modernity. They were urged to replace the yearnings for Olam Ha-ba, the messianic and redemptive world to come, with lust for the trappings of Olam Ha-ze, the earthly realm in which we live. They exchanged the Talmud for the law book, the medical text, the tax code. Even when they pursued theological studies, they did so with deference to the principles of the Enlightenment that had emancipated them. And, like other sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, they embarked on the pursuit of the precise, devoting their lives to erecting strict systems of thought that sought to explain life in all of its infinitesimal detail. This transformation came with its rich rewards, but it also exacted a devastating price, chief among which was the loss of the ability—to paraphrase a quote by Rashi the Coens use as an epigraph—to receive with simplicity everything that happens.

Simplicity is the enemy of modernity. So is doubt. Modernity—in its American strand, at least—requires of its practitioners a growing specialization, an increased sophistication, a neverending striving towards certainty. It is, in other words, the very opposite of the Talmudic undertaking, in which the argument itself is the central pursuit and a finite truth, should it ever materialize, is of little concern. When Jews rid themselves of the Talmud, the ars gratia artis, the scholarly license to see the world for all of its competing and contrasting strands, and when they immerse themselves instead in the target-oriented, painfully concrete, and intolerably specific modern world, then, the Coens tell us, they’re in deep spiritual trouble.

Wherein, then, lies salvation? For that, the Coens suggest, we should turn to Danny, Gopnik’s teenage son, whose Bar Mitzvah is one of the film’s funniest and most poignant narrative threads. A stoner who is obsessed with trashy television shows and rock music, he, too, is searching for enlightenment. But whereas the father looks up to the guardians of an ossified religious establishment, thoughtless and irrelevant, the son looks to popular culture, as whirling and as potent as a tornado. When, in the film’s final scene, Danny finds himself face-to-face with an actual storm, with Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” screaming on the soundtrack, one feels an odd sense of purity: the tremendous spirit of the Jews won’t die, but will be reborn in a new generation of seekers, far less traditional than their ancestors but equally as capable of transcendence.

That the film is a vaguely autobiographical account of the Coens’ own childhood, and that Danny—celebrating his 13th birthday in 1967—is the exact same age as Joel Coen was that year, is no coincidence. Even as they remain as reticent as ever to talk about the meaning of their work, it is hard not to see the film as the brothers’ cri de coeur. The movie’s eponymous serious man, after all, isn’t Gopnik, but the tartly named Sy Ableman, the lover of Gopnik’s wife and a man whose every becalmed baritone pronouncement betrays the lust and greed lurking just below the surface. For his pretense, Ableman is revered by his community and enjoys the kind of virile and accomplished life Gopnik père is too timorous to imagine. But in the Coens’ moral and intellectual universe, it’s the junior Gopnik who shall inherit the earth, even if, for the time being, he experiences it through eyes reddened by marijuana smoke and ears cracked by Grace Slick’s howling.

That the reefer mad youths grew up to be filmmakers, and that they produced a masterpiece as profound as A Serious Man, should surprise no one who’s been paying attention to the film. If there’s anything that quantum mechanics and Judaism both teach us it’s that the exact path of anything can never be exactly determined. With some luck, the same would apply to the film itself, and this philosophical and theological gem—unadorned by famous actors and strongly rooted in the fertile soil of American Jewish communal and religious life—will receive the consideration and admiration it so richly deserves. As for us Jews, all we need in order to renew our spiritual thrust, to reconcile the ancient and the modern, and to understand our place in the world are a few serious men.

Years ago, the Coens told The New York Times for Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section, they wanted to make a movie about a bar mitzvah boy who studies with a very old rabbi, “a Semitic Wizard of Oz,” says Ethan Coen. “He never spoke, but he had great charisma.” (In A Serious Man, the son studies for his bar mitzvah by listening to “Rabbi Youssele Rosenblatt Chants Your Haftorah Portion, Volume 12.”) The brothers says beyond the fact that their own father was a professor and that, like the boy in the film, they too had an affinity for the sitcom F Troop and a distaste for Hebrew school, the story is not autobiographical.

As for the Yiddish beginning, Ethan Coen explained it at a preview in Minneapolis: “You look at a shtetl, and you go, ‘Right—Jews in a shtetl.’ And then you look at the prairie in Minnesota and you kind of think—or we kind of think, with some perspective on it, having moved out, ‘What are we doing there?’ It just seems odd.” Added Joel Coen: “Mel Brooks once had a song called ‘Jews in Space.’ I guess that’s sort of the idea.”

Biblical Adversity in a ’60s Suburb [NYT]
The Coen Brothers Talk—Reluctantly—About Talking [MinnPost]
The Coen Brothers’ ‘A Serious Man’: More Jewish Than Matzo Balls? [LA Times]