What does it mean to be Jewish in today's United States?

It's often recalled that Hollywood is an industry created and governed by Jewish executives. But the paradox this entails is much less discussed. Commercial cinema and, to a large extent, the American audiovisual industry have never given prominence to the everyday experience of Judaism. Pragmatic, the promoters of the Hollywood studio system were clear that one of the great potentials of cinema was to become an assimilationist tool, a mass communication medium that would allow millions of immigrants from around the world to integrate into an idea of an American nation that was identifiable, with respect to religious social practices. We have countless films and series about the celebration of Christmas, but we don't know much about how Hanukkah is celebrated.

That's why it's striking. Long story short, the new work by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator of BoJack HorsemanWe never tire of praising this Netflix production that ended up becoming one of the most influential series of the last decade, and therefore we welcome each new proposal from Bob-Waksberg. If one of the merits of BoJack It was how well he took advantage of the serial format to make his characters evolve to the point of leaving a strong emotional mark, in Long story short Bob-Waksberg seems to have wanted to practice in the opposite direction. We are faced with a much more contained and intimate fiction, of only ten episodes, and with a structure close to that of a sitcom familiar.

The dramatic framework is reduced to the Schwopper family: Grandpa, Shira, Yoshi, and the parents, Elliot and Naomi. But if the sitcom It is a centrifugal format that always starts from the family nucleus and then follows the trajectories of some characters, Long story short It is structured centripetally. We meet the eldest son, Grandpa, now independent, when he returns with his girlfriend to his parents' house for the celebration of his younger brother, Yoshi's, bar mitsvah. From then on, almost every episode puts a different member of the family at the center, but the story goes back and forth, always tending to return to the home as an explanation for so many things. Of the home, and especially of the mother, Naomi, an exegesis of the archetype of the Jewish mother, who is present in the lives of the other characters even when she is no longer there.

Bob-Waksberg applies his skill for combining extreme comedy (the first episode gives off the chaotic energy of The party by Blake Edwards), the satire of certain customs and systems (the ultra-protective parents in the sixth episode, the (self-)destructive spiral of capitalism in the seventh...) and the empathetic embrace of what makes us human and keeps us together. But since the series is more synthetic, you also anticipate more of the creator's "formula" for success. As for animation, Bob-Waksberg avoids both technical and aesthetic sophistication to offer simple, realistic and familiar drawings, more similar to the cartoons we saw on TV in the last century.

At one point in the plot, one of the characters in the series unexpectedly becomes orthodox. The discussions surrounding this choice underline the will to Long story short to explain, beyond religious practice, what it means to be Jewish in the United States today. The series, which runs temporarily until 2022, doesn't delve into international politics. Perhaps in the next season, already confirmed, it will liven things up.