I’ve been having a great deal of fun watching The Pitt recently, it’s been wonderful watching a show that’s so joyful and complex not just in its Jewish characters and storylines, but also in its complex approach to ethics and philosophy within a medical workplace. I definitely understand what they mean about intending it as a spiritual successor to ER, which I’m on Season 6 of my watch-through!
I’m obviously really enjoying writing fanfic for the series, as evidenced by the 60k of fic I’ve written in the past month.
Michael Robinavitch, who’s a main character and is depicted by Noah Wyle – he’s an executive producer on The Pitt, and in the 90s played John Carter in ER – is my absolute favourite. Their characters are very different, and honestly, I’m actually so glad that they didn’t get the rights to do it as a direct sequel to ER, because John Carter is a blue-blooded and very rich Chicago Protestant, whereas Robby is a working class Jew with crazy survivor’s guilt from Covid mixing with his Jewish guilt, and while I do like Carter in ER, I could never love him as much as I do Robby.
Robby kind of sucks – he’s suicidal, he’s snappy, he’s controlling, he’s a bit of a bully, he refuses to seek help for his problems and ends up taking them out on other people; he’s also caring and loving beyond measure, is desperate to teach and mentor and protect others, feels called to service others, has a stupid little motorbike, breaks down crying at work, and is soooo sexy.
It’s always so satisfying when I get a show that has some complex and nuanced Judaism and relationship to Jewish identity beyond the “oh, one of my parents is Jewish and I had a bar mitzvah and Hanukkah is the only holiday I celebrate because it’s Jewish Christmas, otherwise I say nothing about Judaism so that I don’t put off the gentile viewers” stock character.
Writing fic for him, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of my favourite Jewish movies, and I thought I’d put together a rec list! Some of these I’ve talked about before and recommended, but I think the majority I haven’t.
These recommendations consolidated on Letterboxd here.
Boarding School
Jacob is having a bad day at school.
When troubled 12-year-old Jacob Felsen is sent away to boarding school, he enters every kid’s worst nightmare: a creepy old mansion, deserted except for six other teenage misfits and two menacing and mysterious teachers. As events become increasingly horrific, Jacob must conquer his fears to find the strength to survive.
This movie fucks severely. I talked about it more in detail in my favourite movies of 2025 post – as a film it basically delves into a lot of really fucked-up psychosexual dynamics as a young man struggling with his own parents’ heterosexual demands of him and also with the weight of homophobia and antisemitism in the world around him.
It’s a pretty brutal film in terms of how it presents parental abuse and the willingness to kill their children or allow for them to be further abused – brutal in that I think it’s pretty fucking realistic about it, in a way that many movies aren’t, especially given that this is also a film that unflinchingly explores burgeoning teen sexuality and how complicated it feels.
I really liked the dynamic between Jacob and his new mentor, where it’s like, hey, this guy is a working-class Brooklynite, he’s on the small side, he’s probably been mistaken in life for a Jew himself… but he’s still gonna break out some of the antisemitism when it comes to sizing this kid up.
An American Werewolf in London
From the director of Animal House… a different kind of animal.
American tourists David and Jack are savagely attacked by an unidentified animal while hiking on the Yorkshire Moors. After retiring to the home of a beautiful nurse to recuperate, David soon begins experiencing disturbing changes to his body and mind.
This movie has it all. Jewish guilt. The natural villainy of the Yorkshire moors. Homoerotic grief. Werewolves. Lads with their tits out. 80s gore. Very fucked-up and cool body transformation. A banging soundtrack.
I’ve expressed to people before that this is a favourite Jewish movie of mine and have been very surprised when people haven’t realised how Jewish it is, but to put it very bluntly, this is a film about a young man who survives a horrible, violent, random and yet seemingly targeted act of violence, and then spends the rest of his short and miserable life terrified that the manifestations of his guilt for surviving – not to mention the many people desperate to execute him for surviving – will kill those closest to him, or even just random bystanders.
A lot of werewolf movies draw on the antisemitic and antiziganist tropes that are baked into a lot of classic lycanthropy myth – you see the same stereotypes in the werewolves in movies like A Company of Wolves – but this one engages quite earnestly with those tropes and makes a surprisingly heartfelt and touching film which is still a horror.
The Fly (1986) is a nice pairing if you want another tragic body horror film starring a shirtless Jew experiencing the horrors, if you want a double bill to both be horny about and cry over.
To Dust
Shmuel, a Hasidic cantor in Upstate New York and distraught at the untimely death of his wife, struggles to find religious solace, while secretly obsessing over how her body will decay. As a clandestine partnership develops with Albert, a local community college biology professor, the two embark on a darkly comic and increasingly literal undertaking into the underworld.
This movie is so weird and I love it to absolute pieces.
It’s so funny and so sweet and so utterly heartfelt, and I really like this depiction of a Hasid as isolated from secular society but not then treating him as stupid or naive: he just has a different set of skills and experience, and the way that this film approaches grief whilst exploring like, quite a Jewish need to understand a process and to learn and explore and debate in order to grapple with the immensity of his feelings is! So much!
The Chosen
One boy. Two worlds. A time to choose.
In a 1940s New York, two Jewish teenage boys are determined to remain friends despite the deep differences between their two families.
This movie is gay as Hell, I’m interested in reading some of Potik’s books and particularly this one, of course, but yeah, I really like how this engages with two young boys becoming men and engaging so deeply with the ramifications of their philosophies in their personal and broader lives.
Marty Supreme
Dream big.
Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.
I will almost certainly write a proper piece about this film at some point, because I really enjoyed it, and then came out of the movie like, “You know, a lot of people will miss how this entire movie is literally just about this one guy’s experience of Jewishness and antisemitism,” and someone we’d seen the movie with us was like, “Oh, yeah, I just thought he was an asshole,” and I was like, well. That’s the point, my guy.
This is a movie where the lesson that the protagonist is desperate not to learn, and desperate to prove wrong, is “You will always be a Jew – and to non-Jews, you will always be just a Jew. You can never be an American hero without that asterisk. You can never be a hero to the gentile world in any way that matters. You have to accept that.”
And he says, no, I can be a sportsman. I don’t want to be trapped in the drudgery of this boring life like my boring family who keep nagging me to be boring. I’m charismatic, I’m charming, I’m an excellent sportsman, I have good ideas – a white American boy like me can rule the world!
But… he can’t. First his family tell him. Then his Black friends tell him. His girlfriend tells him. The world tells him. And then, whilst sexually humiliating him in front of his other businessman friends, a gentile businessman tells him.
Yes, he gets to go and compete internationally and yes, the American troops will cheer him on – so long as he’s being used as a cudgel to humiliate a Japanese man. As soon as he’s back on that plane, he’s back to being just a Jew.
Such a nuanced film! So funny! So dark! So well-paced and well-written! It didn’t need to be that long, but I still really liked it.
Minyan
Wherever ten men gather in prayer, there the divine presence resides.
In a rapidly changing New York of the 1980s, a Russian Jewish teenager wrestles with his identity, faith, and sexuality, all of which seem irreconcilable until he befriends two closeted men in his grandfather’s senior housing complex.
This is a coming-of-age movie that fits well with The Chosen, I think, where it too is about a young man exploring the world and seeing how he fits in with other Jews and with his own Jewish identity, especially when homosexuality is being positioned to him as inherently secular, and then he gets to see that that’s not true unless he wants it to be.
Demon
A bridegroom is possessed by an unquiet spirit in the midst of his own wedding celebration, in this clever take on the Jewish legend of the dybbuk.
I have a lot of feelings about this film – I cannot think of another movie that is from a gentile perspective and yet is basically about like… reckoning with the absolute horrors of antisemitic violence, the ones that your family committed and crucially that you still benefit from today, and basically taking on responsibility for it and turning away from that?
The bit where the old mensch, the last Jew in the village, is in the taxi and is just chattering on about all the Jewish people that used to live here before the bride’s family and friends fucking pogromed them is so impactful.
Yentl
In a time when the world of study belonged only to men, there lived a girl who dared to ask…”why?”
In a time when girls were forbidden to study religious scriptures, a Jewish girl masquerades as a boy to enter religious training and unexpectedly finds love along the way.
I love a gay trans Jew flustered by Mandy Patinkin’s tits. Just like me for real.
Hester Street
Goodbye O Lord, I’m Going To America!
A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he’s molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York’s Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.
This movie is just a lot of classic Jewish period slice-of-life stuff, and it’s very sweet.
The Vigil
Say your prayers
A man providing overnight watch to a deceased member of his former Orthodox Jewish community finds himself opposite a malevolent entity.
I really love this film a lot, I think the sense of horror is so thick on the air as the tension builds, and there’s a great use of light and shadow and the actual geography of the house – it has a lot of the elements that I wish The Offering actually had but doesn’t.
Fiddler on the Roof
To Life!
In a pre-revolutionary Russia, a poor Jewish milkman struggles with the challenges of a changing world as his daughters fall in love and antisemitism grows.
Another classic – and for a reason.
Watch this with an intermission and give yourself space between the acts, because it is a big fabulous musical where you’re meant to have space in the middle to digest it.
Once you have seen Fiddler, you will see references to it anywhere and everywhere – I’ve talked fondly before about how Jeff Goldblum quotes Golde’s love speech in his weird homoromantic homocidal speech to his fellow journalist/spouse/platonic best friend Ed Begley Jnr in Transylvania 6-5000 – and again, rightly so, because it really does fuck.
If you’re in the mood for another big Jewish musical, there’s the obvious Hello, Dolly! or Funny Girl, too.
A Real Pain
Join the family.
Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair’s old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.
I really enjoyed this film as quite an understated exploration of grief and emotional turmoil – Eisenberg has two characters here who are in many ways immensely restrained whilst being in their own ways quite tortured, and yet so desperate to connect with one another and with each other, and also… with themselves?
Just a beautiful film.
A Serious Man
Accept mystery.
It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances Sy Ableman.
Nearly pissed myself laughing the first time I saw this, I still laugh every time I watch it, like… a lot. It’s so darkly funny, I love the different rabbis, the bit with the goy’s teeth has me kicking my feet every fucking time I watch it, and Fred Melamed gives an unrivalled performance as the most infuriating man imaginable.
These aren’t Jewish movies per se, but they explore Jewish identity and/or antisemitism in very impactful ways.
Deep Cover
There’s a thin line between catching a criminal… and becoming one.
Black police officer Russell Stevens applies for a special anti-drug squad which targets the highest boss of cocaine delivery to LA—the Colombian foreign minister’s nephew. Russell works his way up from the bottom undercover, until he reaches the boss.
Another movie where one day I will do a proper essay about it, but for now, here’s this.
Deep Cover is first and foremost a Blaxploitation film that explores Black masculinity and the immensity of a Black man’s grief and his desperation to heal from the loss of his father to a manufactured drug epidemic and a violently white supremacist police state. He’s paralysed and tortured by his grief, and at the same time has such a desperate yearning for power and agency and autonomy that he ends up feeling torn between policing and the power and money offered by the cartels.
This film understands racialised masculinities so fucking well though – the MC’s masculinity as a Black man is neatly contrasted with the experiences women have around him, both Black and brown women and how he’s able to benefit from the misogyny that impacts them but also able to see the broader scale of it; and then different racialised masculinities…
Including Jewish masculinity. Jeff Goldblum is across from Lawrence Fishburne in this, two powerhouses to say the least, and the way that this film calls out Jewish fetishisation of Blackness whilst also really understanding the violence of Jewish emasculation, the sense of powerlessness it comes with and how connected it is to that racist fetishisation, it’s just… a masterclass.
Apt Pupil
If you don’t believe in the existence of evil, you’ve got a lot to learn
One day in 1984, Todd Bowden, a brilliant high school boy fascinated by the history of Nazism, stumbles across an old man whose appearance resembles that of Kurt Dussander, a wanted Nazi war criminal. A month later, Todd decides to knock on his door.
So, take this recommendation with a big grain of salt – Bryan Singer, who directed this film, is a gay Jew, but he’s also an infamous sexual abuser, and is one of many sex offenders who now lives in Israel, using Jewish citizenship laws to avoid criminal retort to his abuses in the US or elsewhere. With that said, based on how Singer has talked about his experiences and his motivations as an abuser of young boys, he was almost certainly groomed and abused from a similar age, and this film is an exploration of precisely those power dynamics.
It was a film that made me very uncomfortable and feel very gross during and after, but it’s quite skilled in how it approaches its subject matter, and is precisely so impactful in part likely because of the director’s own understanding of these dynamics.
The original short story by Stephen King is about a young man who fixates on a neighbour who he believes to be a Nazi officer who has escaped prosecution and then blackmails him with this knowledge, and who ultimately spirals into obsessive violence of his own.
This film delves far more into the power dynamics and the sexual implications of that dynamic – he doesn’t have as much power over the officer as he believed; there’s layers of intimacy and sexuality to it even though the officer and the young man are ostensibly heterosexual; and most of all, it explores how much power the main character has as a young blond handsome gentile boy, and how his desire to engage in racist violence and ritual humiliation of his lessers – homosexuals, Jews, people of colour, anybody else – is actually going to benefit him socially and professionally with other men like himself.
David Schwimmer plays the young man’s counsellor at school, and he’s not someone I generally rate especially highly as an actor, but the way that he depicts the absolute fear and grief and genuine dismay at having his Jewishness targeted and used against him in this film is just really striking.
It’s obviously very fucked-up as a film, but it really understands the cycles of abuse it’s portraying – as one might expect, from such an expert abuser as the director.
For The Love of Spock
Live long…
The life of Mr. Spock, as well as that of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played him for almost fifty years, written and directed by his son: Adam.
Like half of the movies I’ve listed here are big bummers, and this movie is so sweet and so loving, and Nimoy was obviously such a mensch and brought such joy and beauty to the world with all of his art, but of course as well with his portrayal of Spock, and…
It’s not a movie about Judaism or specifically his Jewishness, but it’s just a really lovely documentary about a very lovely man.
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