Between the Temples

A screwball vehicle for a talented ensemble cast, Between the Temples is headlined by the always delightful screen presence of Carol Kane. Just listening to the way she delivers simple lines like “I’ll be right downstairs” is worth the ticket or a Netflix subscription. In a cinema defined by endless remakes, sequels, franchises, and AI-generated slop, director Nathan Silver at least shows good taste in his influences by transposing the 1971 cult classic Harold and Maude, about an age-inappropriate romance between a 19-year-old man and a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, to a present-day upstate New York congregation of American Jews. The most daring thing about the film, however, is its Hebrew-language “vintage” rock soundtrack featuring Israeli indie musicians from the 1960s and 1970s. Their songs appear at crucial moments to give voice to the internal emotional life of Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), the local synagogue’s cantor, who has lost both the desire and ability to sing following the off-screen death of his wife, an erotic novelist. Quite by accident, the music sharpens the film’s portrayals of the cultural contradictions of 21st-century American Judaism, ultimately exploding them.

“Cantor Ben,” as he’s called in the infantile, permanent summer camp idiom of contemporary progressive institutions, is in his early 40s, and has moved back in with his two lesbian moms: the forever meddlesome Judith, a Filipina convert (the dagger-eyed Dolly de Leon), and his birth mother, Meira (Caroline Aaron), whose Alex Katz-esque portraits of young Ben adorn the walls; Dad has been written entirely out of the picture. As male authority figures go, there’s Rabbi Bruce (a typically on point Robert Smigel), who appears interested mainly in fundraising and golf, and keeps Ben on at the synagogue at the cost of his remaining self-respect, making him caddy on golf excursions and retrieving missed putts in his office, where he works on his short game by aiming golf balls at a shofar.

Into this atmosphere of total emotional and spiritual stasis, conveyed by the asphyxiating, anxiety-provoking close-ups, dizzying handheld swoops, and quirky angles of former Safdie brothers cinematographer Sean Price Williams, comes Ben’s former middle school music teacher, “Ms. O’Connor,” from the era before everyone was on a first name basis. Ben eventually learns to think of her as Carla, daughter of Jewish socialists, who wants the bat mitzvah she never got in the 1960s. The rest is pure mumble-core rom-com, carried by the actors, including excellent cameos from Madeline Weinstein as the rabbi’s daughter, tasked with playing a character who is supposed to be a bad actress; Matthew Shear as Carla’s insufferable psychoanalyst son “Nat”; and Jason Grisell as a Catholic priest Ben turns to for spiritual guidance. For the rest, we are essentially watching Kane and Schwartzman conduct each other through improv workshop exercises: breathing, articulation, gesture, with the question of when the cantor will find his song adding to the suspense.

Silver keeps the film deliberately light on exposition: Ben reveals the manner of his wife’s death over dinner with Carla at a local diner, about half an hour into the movie, between bites of his first ever cheeseburger. We never learn why he wanted to become a cantor, what the attraction of faith was for him, what he likes about Torah, or the Hebrew language, what kind of music he liked to perform, or why he has remained stubbornly walled up inside his grief. The opening scene plays a joke on the audience’s desire to know more, presenting us with a plastic surgeon when we’re expecting a psychoanalyst, thereby announcing that we are watching a play of surfaces.

This style of muted emotive minimalism trains an audience to look at these large negative spaces the film creates and formulate questions around them. The hollowed-out feeling around much religious observance, particularly mainstream, suburban American Jewish observance, is by now a cultural commonplace. Cinematically, the Coen brothers got there in 2009 with A Serious Man, which used the 1960s to talk about the spiritual state of American Jews in 2009. Israel, whether as an idea or an existing state of Jewish people, plays no role in the minds of the characters of Between The Temples, the word "Yisrael" itself is never uttered, not even in the prayers the film depicts. If, as in so many American congregations, an Israeli flag flies somewhere at Rabbi Bruce’s Temple Sinai, we never see it.

This erasure of Israel has nothing to do with the anti-Zionist reaction after Oct. 7—the film was conceived, shot, and most likely edited and wrapped well before then. But it has everything to do with the preexisting conditions that led to the post-Oct. 7 schism within American Jewry. The Jews of Between the Temples are typical Americans who could just as easily live without both Judaism and Zionism, as long as whatever they do choose doesn’t make them look bad in front of the goyim. They could be Presbyterians. What they want from their religious life is a vague promise of meaning within a greater fear of existential meaninglessness, or, failing that, just a sense of structure: “Rules are very important to Judith,” Ben’s biological mother reminds him. The temple is a greater surrogate family, both a haven in a heartless world and, according to the scripts of American adolescence, something you have to outgrow and move on from, especially if you are trying to fill a spiritual and emotional void in your own life.

So what happens when this crew of talented filmmakers need to signal that inside their stunted man-child character is a wild and yearning Jewish heart, beating furiously? They do so with Hebrew prog rock written and performed by actual human beings from the land of Israel—like Shlomo Gronich and Matti Caspi—who sing not in the awkward, embarrassed strangled idioms of modern American-accented Ashkenaz “prayer,” but in full-throated modern Hebrew. Whether or not we want to be thinking about Zionism, or of ourselves as Zionists, it appears like a song stuck in our heads.

The simple truth is that the very existence of this music and its lyrics results from a project that most progressive American Jews are rapidly disassociating themselves from. In that context, it matters less that Gronich and Caspi were part of an autonomous, anti-establishment Israeli indie rock moment than that Silver and his team managed to smuggle Israeli content of any kind without apology into a diasporic, American Jewish rom-com made in 2024. The music is used to express everything that currently has no outlet in the feel-good discursive matrix of progressive Judaism; deep sorrow; longing for the lost and unattainable beloved; joy, and, most importantly, as rock ’n’ roll can do in all its forms, the desire for personal and collective freedom.