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By Anna Rahmanan, JNS.org
The Netflix animated series Long Story Short, which premiered last month, is drawing attention both for its creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, of BoJack Horseman fame, and for its treatment of Jewish family life through humor.
The series follows the Schwoopers, a middle-class Jewish family, across decades. It proceeds in a non-linear fashion, highlighting the tensions, joys and incongruities of American Jewish life.
Jeremy Dauber—the Atran professor of Yiddish language, literature and culture at Columbia University, and director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies—said that he has been enjoying the series “very much.”
Bob-Waksberg has a “deep sense of certain kinds of Jewish language and Jewish knowledge that is sometimes absent in some treatments of American Jewish life,” Dauber, author of the 2017 book Jewish Comedy: A Serious History, said.
“It has a lightness of touch. It makes it enjoyable and anthropological at the same time, just like ‘BoJack,’” he said. (BoJack Horseman, an animated series that ran for six seasons, has developed a cult following and has won and been nominated for several awards.)
Dauber thinks Long Story Short balances specific and universal themes effectively, and, though the Schwoopers don’t represent all American Jewish families, the show captures the diversity and contradictions of Jewish life.
“It’s sort of honest to a wide range of experiences without being precisely identical to any particular one,” the scholar said. “Comedy a lot of times is from the juxtaposition of opposites and wonderful incongruity, and he is able to draw on some of these differences in order to create those clashes even within a family structure.”
The interplay between conflict and closeness is central to both the narrative and to the Jewish comedic tradition, according to Dauber.
“Any story about a culture has to be about a narrative conflict or dynamism, or else you don’t have a story,” he said.
Bob-Waksberg “does a nice job of giving us a sense of how acorns of familial tensions and stress can grow into kernels of conflict, and how distance and proximity are hand in hand,” he said. “They’re close, but they are alienated and take different paths.”
Judy Batalion, author of the forthcoming novel The Last Woman of Warsaw, has often written on Jewish identity and culture. She told JNS that the series uses comedy in line with a long tradition of Jewish humor, serving as both a coping mechanism and a cultural connector.
“Humor has helped Jews cope and survive through many difficult historical moments and functions in different ways,” she told JNS. “Humor provides solidarity. Humor shows and reinforces distance from trauma. Self-deprecation is a way to control an otherwise uncontrollable situation.”
When one laughs, “one feels relief and pleasure, even if for just a few seconds,” she said.
Dauber said that Jewish humor has, at times, operated in very different ways.
“Jews use comedy in all sorts of different ways,” he said. “One of those ways is to reflect on history and take external events and think about them, but other ways are about taking a mirror that is being held up to different facets of my life, one shaped by my Jewishness.”
The focus in Long Story Short on a distinctive but relatable family reflects the modern American Jewish condition, according to Dauber.
“You have a diverse, composite family here that is very unique and individual, but in that sense, its idiosyncrasy is a hallmark of the American Jewish condition,” he said. “The modern one in particular.”
“This is a show whose kind of ‘unique’ and ‘idiosyncratic’ feels very American Jewish, because American Jewish life has generated the possibility of being so unique and idiosyncratic,” he said.
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