Film/TV Review
Elon, Ori and Yehonatan Indursky, creators. Shtisel. Abot Hameiri Barkai and Yes Network, 2013.
Reviewed by Batya Weinbaum, American Public University, Charles Town, WV, USA
How Strong Jewish Orthodox Women Won Their Show to Soon Grow in Brooklyn: Women Propelling Shtisel’s Success
Tablet Magazine described Shtisel, created in 2013, now streaming on Netflix (which bought Shtisel in Dec 2018) as “all black hats and beards.” Shtisel centers in a Haredim community in Geula, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood adjacent to Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim. Debuting in June of 2013, the show was synopsized as being “about an aging Haredi widower in Jerusalem and his hapless grown bachelor son.” Yet a vibrant circle of strong women in the community account for some momentum of the show’s success, resulting in a contract for a third season. First-season ratings were not substantial given its low-visibility in a niche channel Abot Hameiri Productions developed for a satellite service which broadcast the show in Israel in 2013. Yet critics paid attention. By 2014, the series claimed Israeli Emmys (Ophirs) for best drama and best original screenplay. Israel’s public broadcaster purchased the rights two years later. Over its first two seasons, the show won more than a dozen Israeli TV awards (Gruen). Three years after first appearing, Shtisel episodes ranked among the most-watched shows in Israel; shortly after Netflix began Shtisel’s international distribution, Hannah K.S. Canter and her mother, Marta Kauffman, co-creator of Friends and of Netflix’s Gracie and Frankie (Bruner) sold a Brooklyn-set American adaptation of the show set to Amazon, following other original Israeli shows that became US series including Showtime’s Homeland. (Fleishman). Soon after Netflix bought streaming rights to Shtisel in December 2018, in Jan. 2019 a huge new fan base cropped up via a Facebook group called “Shtisel — Let’s Talk About It.” The page has around 784 posts every 30 days and boasts a membership of 11,439 worldwide with for a period approximately 2500 onboarding monthly. Two Detroit women moderate the group: Nancy Kaplan (Conservative) and Mimi Markofsky (Orthodox). Most of the members are women asking questions about the lives of many interesting women, like why they sleep in headgear (snoods). Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 2 (2018) 1 ISSN 1209-9392 © 2019 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
Film/TV Review
Grandma, the new matriarch, emerges in the Shtisel family a year after the family matriarch dies. Not receding into the background when her son places her in a home for parents and seniors, she gets the family to organize a 70th anniversary celebration for herself and her departed husband in her new home, assigning each family member a special task, insuring everyone’s presence. She also gives advice to children and grandchildren inside the walls of the Parents Home and Hospice for the Elderly, her residence. This dynastic matriarch to whom all hopeful family newcomers present themselves, and whom each family member visits repeatedly, is smart and gutsy enough to get a taxi to the sea in where no one in the family agrees to take her. Unbeknownst to them, she comes to the end of her list of reasons to stay alive (there were two). Having arrived at a park bench by the beach, she follows her friend’s lead, who committed suicide earlier. Later one of her sons gets a phone call. In Tel Aviv, her body has washed up. Everyone is shockingly moved. Gitti, another female character, takes over the money lending business, keeping cash in two oversized religious books in her apartment after her husband abandoned her for a shiksa [non- Jewish woman, in Yiddish] in Argentina, and refuses to take charity from the husband’s employer. She seeks work on Jerusalem’s Walking Street. When she answers an ad in a store window, the storeowner originally would not hire her, advising she seek employment in her own neighborhood. Gitti tells the shop owner that she doesn’t want anyone in her community to know she had been deserted. The shop owner invites Gitti to care for her own son, cooking and cleaning for her home. Gitti does so for a while until bringing her own child to work costs her the position. This is the same Gitti who went against her own parents, as the audience sees in flashbacks. They did not want to give consent to marry the first man she met on an arranged date. They give in to her resolve, and she marries him. Later, she convinces the head rabbi of a prestigious yeshiva to take in her son after the school rejects him; her husband refused to question the authorities. Furthermore, she sends her husband to forbid the righteous husband of her 15-year-old daughter to come to their house, even though the husband doesn’t want to. She has more resolve and pushes her will over his. By the series’ end, she opens a restaurant. Somewhere along the way, she tells her husband when he returns home after months in Argentina, having abandoned her to care for their five children. that she is checking into a women’s retreat up
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 2 (2018) 2 ISSN 1209-9392 © 2019 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
Film/TV Review north because she needs a break. She does this even though he just got home and explains he has a business date. She leaves him with the children, nonetheless, over protestations. Gitti goes away, not to a retreat---but to a small hotel to get an abortion. She undergoes questioning of the panel of two men and one woman, alone without support. She admits to the persistent male head of the panel that she does not want the abortion for health reasons, successfully arguing her case, even after the female social worker tells the male head doctor that he is being unethical when he refers her to a rabbi for input to her decision. Then she abruptly leaves, after getting a phone call about an emergency in the family (the matriarch fell trying to get downstairs to watch television in the Parents’ Home and Hospice for the Elderly-- another plot-turn based on women’s agency and female resolve). Gitti’s eldest daughter Ruchami, at night, reads to her little brothers from what she calls “Hannah Karenina.” At 15, furious at her father for abandoning her mother, Ruchami takes her mother’s cell phone calls, him, and says not to return. When he does, she prints 100 WANTED posters showing her father depicted as a criminal for abandoning his family. She puts these up on walls throughout the community. Subsequently, to rebel, she begins to watch a young man pray in the basement of a shul where he also sleeps. She falls in love, proposes, finds witnesses in a café, marries, and moves into the shul basement with him. These depictions are unusual, because Israeli cinema by secular (male) directors often depict women in these communities as deserving pity, as Ruth Margalit writes in the New Yorker: “The film Kadosh, from 1999, by the (nonreligious) Israeli director Amos Gitai, seemed to reaffirm… bias: telling the story of two Haredi sisters—one whose husband is advised to leave her because they can’t conceive and the other forced into a loveless marriage—the film portrayed Haredi women as enslaved, yearning to break free.” Margalit recognizes strong women characters exist, and that their strong performances account for the strength of the show. The spell cast on audiences stems from “several powerfully understated performances, most notably by Ayelet Zurer, in the role of Elisheva, and Neta Riskin, as Gitti— "two fiery, intelligent women who have been let down by life.” In fact, Margalit writes: “Shtisel may be fueled by Akiva and Shulem, (the father and son around whom most reviewers have noted that the plot revolves) but it’s the women who turn up the heat. “You don’t really see me,” Elisheva tells Akiva at one point. “I don’t have the energy to start
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 2 (2018) 3 ISSN 1209-9392 © 2019 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
Film/TV Review over.” “Start what?” he asks. “Everything,” she says. “I don’t have the energy for love, a wedding, a home, furniture, more family, more children, more life.” Thus, two male secular directors center one of the planks of the women’s liberation movement: the unacknowledged unpaid labor of women is work. They listened to feminism, and created women characters to speak the movement’s wisdom, with a primetime microphone. When Gitti presents herself to the abortion panel became another moment for a glint of feminism. Here, when facing the panel of two men, one the doctor, and a female social worker, the doctor grills Gitti, asking whether she had consulted a rabbi, beginning to refer to rabbinical opinion and how that might weigh in on the decision of the woman sitting in front of him, who begins to answer, yes, consult a rabbi? She did. But the social worker interrupts the male doctor, saying, that’s unethical…making room for Gitti to continue to advocate for herself, further explaining the basis for her decision with embarrassment and shame, as if expressing personal failure, but nevertheless with conviction. Squint a little, Margalit reflects, and this could be a character out of Jane Austen— She reflects, they didn’t write Shtisel for Haredim. (For one thing, most ultra-Orthodox households don’t own a television.)” But almost as soon as it aired, something strange happened. Shtisel became “cultlike” among Haredi viewers, as Riki Rath, a Haredi culture journalist for the religious newspaper Makor Rishon, told Margalit. “Episodes were shared illicitly, mostly on the social-media network Telegram. Inasmuch as a Haredi pop culture exists, Shtisel became a mainstay. Phrases favored by the characters… infiltrated the Haredi lexicon. Bands playing at ultra-Orthodox weddings… began to feature the show’s original music. One Haredi newspaper, in search of the next ‘Akiva Shtisels,’ sent out a reporter to interview ultra-Orthodox painters. ‘The most common question at the end of Shabbat used to be, ‘D’you have a cigarette?’ ” one Haredi reviewer wrote. ‘These days there’s a new question: ‘D’you have the new episode of Shtisel?’
Margalit mentioned women’s strength, but she didn’t discuss what influence feminism has on either of the male creators. She only discussed their various Zionist or religious backgrounds. But feminism came up on the Facebook group. In spite of all of the above, mainstream coverage of the show as indicated in publicity photos persist in emphasizing the maleness, the black hats, and the beards, with the women popping up if at all as silhouettes, hovering in the background, or as brushstrokes over the top to add texture, such as coverage in the LA Times:
Set in Jerusalem, the series suggests that while a man pores over the Torah to inspire his soul, he must also embrace and wrestle with his passions and humanity, much in the same way secular characters do on shows like “Parenthood” and “This Is Us.” The power of “Shtisel” is in demystifying religious orthodoxy as we follow the lives of Shulem Shtisel (Doval’e Glickman), a bearded, pious yeshiva teacher, and his artistic, disappointing and unwed son, Akiva (Michael Aloni). Theirs is a black-hatted world of matchmakers, holy men, strong women, crowded apartments, prying neighbors, adultery, pride and the sense that the temptations and moral equivocations of the larger world are Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 2 (2018) 4 ISSN 1209-9392 © 2019 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
Film/TV Review encroaching. “I had to push him into it,” Shulem tells a friend about Akiva’s arranged marriage. “More important, is he happy?” replies the friend. “What kind of question is that?” says Shulem. “Are we here to be happy?” Such scenes are leavened with tenderness, insight and magical realism to soften the strictures of an omnipresent religion in which men’s faces are bordered in ribbon curls and married women, to appear chaste, slip on wigs before they leave the house.
Shtisel is good to watch just to see the streets of Jerusalem, yet it can be difficult to get past the male view. For example, the aging male character religious school director, the head of a yeshiva, dates. Women cook and feed him; they even cook his special recipes for him, eager to please. Even the cinematography is masculinist. The repeated opening of this series is two men, shot from the back, one man older, one man younger, shot from behind. One man rolls up a tube and looks up at a bird on a fire escape, another lights a cigarette…thus narrow closeup views of two phallic objects within a few seconds in a setup results from clear directorial decisions. The opening shot is a male gaze on a male world, happily moving leisurely through a universe as if it is theirs to do. Yet, even so, the cinematography is intriguing. After flashing the letters of Yes, the original production company, then come the credits at which viewers gaze through window frames, a fire escape, and rickety metal stairs, peering up at clothesline to the roof, beyond to the sky reminded unconsciously of just who would be staring out those windows, and who would have worked all day in order to put the clothes there. The cinematography shows close quarters, in slow motion, creeping close ups of each of the two men, the younger looking to the left, the older to camera right; then father’s arm goes around son as they go up the stairs. Slowly just their feet are seen as the last four steps are climbed up. This movement in the first episode transcends into a dream sequence, something that reviews have not touched upon. Throughout the show, the narrative goes in and out of reality as if naturally, using cinematography. In one episode, viewers are immersed immediately into a dream in which the son enters a café and sees his mother in the cold with an Eskimo. In the next scene, he discusses this dream with his father. In other instances, a woman wakes up at night and goes into her kitchen where she discovers her first two husbands, both of whom are dead, sitting around her tiny kitchen table discussing whether she should get involved with Akiva. Nonchalantly, they turn to her. In another scene, in another episode, Father Shtisel goes out on the balcony of his apartment where he discovers his departed wife and sits down to talk with her perfectly naturally. He offers her a drink, goes inside to get her one, and when he returns, she is gone. It is this going in and out of reality, or the nonchalant, naturalistic layering of different dimensions of reality, requiring the suspension of disbelief, that creates the feeling of bereftness that many feel Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 2 (2018) 5 ISSN 1209-9392 © 2019 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
Film/TV Review when the show is over and they must return to the real world, and this tiny world of mixing of dream and fantasy is gone. Also, the tiny world thick of many interacting in small spaces disappears, and modern viewers must return to occupy large modern spaces after Ein Kerem, small bakery shops, a procession in the streets of a funeral. tattered leaflets in Hebrew on the wall, baby carriages rushing down the street, the repeated mating ritual, down to meeting some man on a date in a hotel, the young men studying for yeshiva, the Mea Shearim hotel --glimpse after glimpse into an entire antiquated most never fully exist in, and only visit. Many had returned over and over, to peer into through Netflix, at what? The past? Roots? Nationalism some secretly long to still have the right to have? Origins? Let’s see what the clearly feminist producers of Grace and Frankie do with (and for) Brooklyn women.
Works Cited
Brunner, Jeryl. “How TV Talent Marta Kauffman Gave Life to Grace and Frankie.” Forbes, March 31, 2919. Accessed 5/18.2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerylbrunner/2019/03/31/how-tv-talent-marta-kauffman- gave- life-to-grace-and-frankie/#3c4e0fba72e5
Fleishman, Jeffrey. “Shtisel, an Israeli TV Show about Ultra-Orthodox Jews, is a Hit on Netflix.” LA Times, APR 16, 2019 | 12:25 PM “https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-ca- shtisel-jews-netflix-20190416- story.html?fbclid=IwAR2AZ1bKlLKdxm0DIUpMlBdoFwyAC0wtyNpLsHHEOLHADZRw5s3 cYBuJ1
Gruen, Judy. “The Universal Appeal of the Charedi World in ‘Shtisel.’” Jewish Journal, March 6 2019. Accessed April 27, 2019.
Gruen, Judy. “‘Shtisel’ The Popular Israeli Drama on Netflix! Rare View/Dus Iz Nies.” March 7, 2019. Accessed Apr 27, 2019.
Margalit, Ruth. “Seeing Inside the Israeli Ultra-Orthodox Community on the Netflix Series ‘Shtisel.’” April 14, 2019. New Yorker. Accessed April 27 2019 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/seeing-inside-the-israeli-ultra-orthodox- community-on-the-netflix-series-shtisel
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal Volume 15 Number 2 (2018) 6 ISSN 1209-9392 © 2019 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.