Let's Chat: Who was your favorite Jewish character on TV this year?
Back in the earlier 2000s (we are still in the early 2000s, even if it’s about to be 2025!!), one of my favorite shows was “Criminal Minds,” the TV police procedural about a group of FBI special agents tasked with catching serial killers. What I loved about it, aside from the irresistible true-crime aspect, was the delightful ensemble cast. There was Mandy Patinkin's sagacious and burnt-out Agent Gideon (Patinkin has been open about being tough on set during the filming of the show, and I really love the kind of teshuva he’s done around it). There is the adorably geeky Dr. Spencer Reid, played by the swoon-worthy Matthew Gray Gubler. But arguably the best character was Penelope Garcia (Kirsten Vangsness), the team's communication liaison, the brilliant underground hacker in technicolor garb and cool glasses who solves all their tech troubles. I wanted her to be my best friend. Or to be her. Or just to have her wardrobe.
Recently, I was watching the Netflix holiday thriller hit “Carry-On” — a super fun and easy-on-the-mind movie about a TSA agent (the handsome Taran Egerton) who gets threatened by a mysterious traveler (played by an excellently villainous Jason Bateman) to let some very dangerous carry-on luggage aboard a Christmas Eve flight.
The cast of the entire movie, which is no award-season contender but is just a perfect holiday watch, is incredible, but my favorite character was the Garcia-like Herschel (the perfect Jewish name). He is played by Jewish actor Josh Brenner, and he’s the partner to Elena Cole (Danielle Deadwyler), an LAPD detective investigating the movie’s villain. Instead of wearing cool glasses, adorable bows and cardigans like Garcia, Herschel dons a Dodgers kippah. When Cole bribes him to help her using peppermint holiday ho-hos, he delights in them, lamenting: "Shira won't buy Christmas flavors." And as the movie progresses, we see he has badass skills to accompany his obviously Jewish character traits.
You might recognize actor Brenner as Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti from “Silicon Valley.” He most recently played Jewish OG SNL writer Alan Zweibel in “Saturday Night,” which made the film, at least for me, a very joyous moment of casual, authentic Jewish representation.
There have been a lot of excellent new Jewish characters on TV and TV movies this year, from the incredible “We Were the Lucky Ones” which gave us a beautiful, heartful Jewish family to Natalie Portman who gave us a complex, ambitious Jewish woman full of nuances in “Lady in the Lake,” but ending the year with a character like Herschel — my favorite TV/movie character trope made Jewish — in a Netflix hit did feel like quite a special last-minute Hanukkah gift in streaming form.
What’s the Jewish representation in TV/movies that delighted you the most this year? Let me know in the comments!
Idk if he counts as a character because he's also a real person lol, but I *loved* Joel Basman's Franz Kafka (and like everyone in that cast tbh) it felt like everyone involved really "got" Kafka, and I thought the way the Jewish content was incorporated throughout the series to be so smart and well done (especially when historically much of the work done about Kafka tends to de-emphasize the role Jewish life and culture played in shaping his perspective)
Golda Rosenbaum in Little Bird, who is the adoptive mother of Behzig/Esther. The award winning Lisa Edelstein in this Canadian indigenous show plays a Holocaust survivor who must come to terms with her adopted daughter’s pain of having been taken from her birth family. Her own pain is twofold, of having benefitted from this cruel system, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter will reject her now for that reason and may supplant her with her native family. We witness love as the way to acceptance and healing. (My one hesitation is that while it was shown this year in the U.S. on PBS, it was shown in Canada in 2023.)