Consider what that means. American television has produced generations of Jewish characters, but almost always through irony: the neurotic, the comic, the awkward son-in-law. Rob Reiner, who this month received a posthumous Emmy for his role in "The Bear" — he was killed in December along with his wife Michele — had won his first two statuettes, in 1974 and 1978, playing Mike Stivic, Archie Bunker's liberal son-in-law in "All in the Family." The television Jew was the man who argues. Robby is the man who prays.
And nobody imposed that prayer on him. No quota, no representation consultant: it was the actor-writer who decided that his ER doctor would say the Shema, and then that he would carry the grief of Pittsburgh. Wyle describes a faith Robby is still "wrestling with," to the point of wondering whether he has one at all. The Shema, he says, works almost like "a child's primal cry."
Wyle describes a faith Robby is still "wrestling with," to the point of wondering whether he has one at all.
The evening was not one-sidedly Jewish, though. Saul Metzstein, the Scottish director and son of modernist architect Isi Metzstein, beat Wyle himself in the directing category for "Slow Horses." But Jason Segel, Lisa Kudrow, Harrison Ford and Hannah Einbinder all went home empty-handed. And "Nobody Wants This," Netflix's romance between a rabbi and a non-Jewish podcaster, lost to "Widow's Bay." The intermarriage comedy lost; the Shema drama won. The symbol is worth what it's worth, but it is there.
Here is what we take away. Robby Robinavitch doesn't know whether he believes. He doesn't go to synagogue, he doesn't debate halakha: he heals. And yet, when everything collapses around him, it is the Hebrew words of his childhood that come back. That is a portrait of a large share of American Jewry today: distant from its institutions, unsure of its faith, but caught up by its identity in the moment of emergency — and Pittsburgh was that emergency. In "The Pitt," Jewish identity doesn't return through study; it returns through the emergency room.
That America's best drama series makes this man its hero, two years running, says something about the American mainstream: it is ready to love a visible Jew who prays without apologizing. In a cultural landscape where Jewishness is whispered and Israel is shouted, that is a breach. The Shema in prime time is no substitute for policy, but it reminds us of what the boycott activists would like everyone to forget: popular culture doesn't belong to those who shout the loudest.
