Hollywood and Stein: The tragedy of Jewish success
Keeping Up with the Steins, the new movie which opened in limited release last Friday, is one of those cultural events that remind you just how different contemporary Judaism is from your grandparents’ Judaism. The story revolves
around a family preparing for the bar mitzva of their son. As shown in the movie, a bar mitzva in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb involves booking rock stars, luxury boat cruises, and million-dollar-a-night arenas. The movie takes its inspiration from recent reports of some very high-profile bar and bat mitzva parties.
Judaism is not prudish in its embrace of materialism. There is no mitzva in being an ascetic. While the rabbis tell us “he who is wealthy is he who is satisfied with what he has,” Puritan moderation is not seen as an ultimate value. The Jewish tradition does not oppose nice Hanukka gifts, generous hospitality, and, yes, even dress-up parties with good food and entertainment.
Of course, their over-the-top spending makes the Steins and the rest of the characters in this movie easy targets for anyone who has a shred of moral and ethical decency. You don’t have to live in Hollywood to question such values. Even in the fervently Orthodox, or haredi, community, some have attempted to curb a trend toward conspicuous consumption by demanding that people restrain themselves by limiting their spending on weddings and bar mitzva celebrations.
But this movie teaches something else besides moderation. It tells us about who and what we have become as Jews.
What’s new here are not Jews outdoing other Jews. The first lesson is that Americans want to be like Jews. The Jew has become an icon of a religious and ethnic minority moving into the mainstream and into wealth. Keeping Up with the Steins is the economic and social equivalent to Madonna’s interest in Kabala, or Kobe Bryant’s comment that “I wouldn’t mind being Jewish,” or the non-Jewish kids who have been asking their parents for bar mitzva parties without the bar mitzva. It is cool to identify with Jews.
Yuri Slezkine, the historian from Berkeley, in his much-acclaimed work, The Jewish Century, suggests that “The modern age is the Jewish age, and the 20th century, in particular, is the Jewish century.” According to Slezkine, in the 20th century the world adopted patterns of behavior and modes of thinking traditionally associated with Jews, such as social mobility, capitalistic instincts, and intellectual achievement.
The Jewish century paved the way for a generation of immigrant children — what Slezkine terms “Tevye’s children” — to grow up and become “Steins,” a successful “Jew-ish” family that America as a whole can identify with. It’s not Judaism that attracts the admirers and wannabes — it’s the Jew-ishness.
And like so many other Americans, the Steins too want to be Jew-ish. How and why Jews like the Steins merely become Jew-ish is simpler than what any demographer or social scientist will admit. Crudely put, being Jew-ish is more “fun” than being a Jew. As the bar mitzva’s father Adam Fiedler (played by Jeremy Piven) says, “It’s not about what happens in temple. It’s about what happens at the party.”
The movie resonates because people are all too aware of the real-life prototypes for its characters and situations. The paradigm for American wealth is no longer a reserved Protestant man sipping his scotch at the club. It’s the latte-sipping, iPod-buying, Hummer-driving, sweat suit-wearing, hedge fund-managing Jew-ish type. What is Jewish here are certain cultural and economic attributes that Slezkine and others have shown are traditionally — often unfairly, but sometimes accurately — associated with Jews.
Some might take comfort in the notion that the Steins and their friends are at least a community of Jews. However, the fact that these Jews are neighbors with Jews of similar wealth and social status is more chance than anything else. It’s not ethnic ties that bring or keep them together, but the similar corporate, social, and intellectual ladders they climbed. While such propinquity may have held Jewry together in the 20th century, I doubt it will provide the glue to hold it together in the 21st.
The second lesson, and the real tragedy about this movie, is not that America has become Jewish — as the saying goes, keyn yirbu (let them increase). The tragedy is Jews have forgotten their Judaism. Being economically and socially mobile, putting a premium on education, and even providing a loving home for children might make Jews the best Americans, but it will not help ensure a future for Judaism. Jewish sentimentality and ethnicity will never take the place of Jewish content. No matter how much everyone loves a party, in the long term what matters most is what happens in the synagogue.
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