Seeking Ferret

I know lirazel is a big fan of Mark Oppenheimer, but I hadn't listened to any of his work until I stumbled on Dara Horn's promo for his podcast Gatecrashers, which sounded very up my alley. It's about the 'secret Jewish history of the Ivy League', which is to say, the secret history of the non-Jews running the Ivies trying desperately to keep their schools from being overrun by Jews. I did not personally attend an Ivy, but I spent Shabbos at the Hillel of every Ivy except Cornell in the early 2000s, and I formed definite opinions about the Jewish character of these schools.

I really liked Oppenheimer's presentation of the facts. There's a definite Jewish trauma around the Ivy quotas and the history, and it would be easy to present a simple story about the hateful goyim running the show (and this tends to be Dara Horn's presentation of these facts, fwiw), but the reality is a lot more complicated and Jews are a lot more culpable for our participation in the system than the simple story would suggest. Oppenheimer gets that. He gets how the Jews who got in felt differently than the Jews who didn't, he gets how the Jews were not always sympathetic to Asian-Americans and African-Americans faced with similar systems, or how many Jews regarded the inability of POCs to work around the system in the same way the Jews did as a failure of intellect or discipline. He gets how the social dynamics after the fall of the quota system were not always to the credit of Jewish students. I really appreciate the way he balanced these debilities against the constant way the Ivies reminded Jews that they didn't really belong.

I do wish he spent some more time acknowledging that while this trauma is real, it was nowhere near as high on the radar of most Jews as the actual violent traumas that have been experienced. And I am sure Oppenheimer could have found incidences of anti-Semitic violence or threats of violence on Ivy campuses, to the point where the show's emphasis on the effects of quotas and micro-aggressions and the occasional slur starts to seem trivializing.

The West Wing Weekly: Tomorrow and The Good Place The Podcast: Series Forking Finale Parts 1 and 2

Two podcasts wrapped up last week with massive final episodes- The West Wing Weekly's three year journey through The West Wing finished with an over two hour episode featuring several dozen guests from the cast and crew, notably including the return of Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme.

I think it wasn't as meaty a delve into the episode as some past episodes of the podcast have been, the overcrowded nature of the guest cast meant it was necessarily somewhat shallower, but it was still profoundly satisfying as a wrapup, full of new behind the scenes stories and interesting perspectives on what The West Wing meant.

Meanwhile, the final episode of The Good Place was accompanied by an over two hour conversation between Marc Evan Jackson and Mike Schur and Drew Goddard, though Schur does a lot more talking than Goddard. I liked the Good Place finale before listening to the podcast, but it covers so much ground and ties up so many arcs that I found myself at something of an emotional remove from some of it, but listening to Schur unpack the show for two hours helped me find my emotional connection to the meaning of the story, its bridges between Eastern and Western philosophy and its wonder about the awe-inspiring nature of the world we live in. And appreciate many of the jokes I'd missed.


They're both long investments of time, longer than the episodes they're about, but they're both well worth if if you are a fan of the underlying media.



Birds of Prey

Jews dance in this film. (If Harley Quinn is Jewish, which she is. She shoplifted Stella D'oro cookies, come on now!)


Superstore Season 5

To be fair, this season has been perfectly funny in the same way as previous seasons, sharp and realistic about the petty cruelties of work at a big box store and keenly observant of the surreality of reality. The union storyline has been brutally funny, various episodic storylines have been hilarious, but... the Mateo of it all has been something of a letdown only because last season's finale hinted at the possibility an even more powerful and complicated show that Superstore could become. Instead, Mateo's storyline has been restored to the conventional by means of all the sitcom trickery that the S4 finale was so notable for avoiding.

Jerry and Sandra's wedding has been a brilliant storyline, though, and the trope of their relationship is that feels funnier to me because I haven't seen it anywhere else that I can remember. Two people who are perfect for each other because of how bland and uninteresting they are... It's amazing how much humor they've wrung from that seemingly terrible premise. Garrett's wedding toast was beautiful.



Star Wars Episode 9 podcasts

I listened to a bunch of different podcast responses to the latest Star Wars movie including bessyboo's,which was all about emotional history with the Star Wars saga and how Episode IX engaged with that, and Fangirl Happy Hour, which used the word fuck a lot and was mostly about the construction of the plot and storybuilding and how shitty they are, and I listened to Our Opinions are Correct, which was all about the sociological place of fandom in society and how cultural investment in Star Wars has driven the response to this movie, and I listened to Nice Jewish Fangirls mostly talk about the experiential side of things, the excitement and joy of actually watching the movie.

It was a kind of nice reminder of all the different ways we experience art, and has helped me come to more peace with how frustrated I was with the movie.


Grey's Anatomy Season 16 Episode 12

An odd episode, in which the hospital doesn't appear at all and Meredith only appears in voiceover at beginning and end. There were two self-contained storylines, one about a disastrous dinner party hosted by Richard and Catherine, and the other about Levi and Nico dealing with the death of Nico's great-uncle.

The less said about the Richard and Catherine storyline the better. I hate the way they've been writing Catherine this season, they've been using her so much as an engine of plot and conflict that we haven't seen a sympathetic side to her in ages, and it made the story of Richard and Catherine's crumbling marriage hard to feel emotionally. There was some humor in the awkward dance of Jackson and Maggie and Vic, and a nicely cathartic ending to their tensions, but otherwise this storyline was just sad and unpleasant.

But Levi and Nico's story was so beautiful. We've already seen the importance of Jewish ritual to Levi in the scene when he calms a woman with severe anxiety by singing Shalom Rav to her. Here the Jewish ritual of watching the body of a Jew and washing it to prepare it for burial is giving a loving and emotional spotlight as the central transformative moment of the episode, where Levi's understanding of his relationship with both Nico and his family evolves as we watch him tend to his uncle's body.

I love so much that this is part of what Grey's Anatomy is, that faith and the ways that it intersects with medicine and life keeps coming up in different ways on this show.