Between the Temples and the New Jewish Cinema 

What makes a film Jewish? The question lacks a definitive answer—but then again, that’s common in the Jewish experience. As the saying goes, “two Jews, three opinions.” The first examples to come to mind are likely films about the Holocaust or a Woody Allen-style comedy. But there’s no fixed definition of a Jewish film, nor is there a strong consensus beyond a film containing some sort of Jewish theme or plotline. 

Between The Temples, directed by Nathan Silver, certainly fits within this broad definition. A hilarious and heartfelt comedy, it follows a depressed cantor (Jason Schwartzman) helping his former music teacher (Carol Kane) prepare for a late-in-life Bat Mitzvah. Following a warm reception at Sundance, it will finally reach a wider audience when it releases in theaters on Aug. 23. But it arrives at a moment that feels more significant than a single movie can convey: It’s the latest unapologetically Jewish film that taps into unique Jewish sensibilities without being about historical trauma. There have been many wonderful Jewish films that aren’t about the Holocaust that explore what it means to be Jewish, including Hester Street (1975), Annie Hall (1977), Yentl (1983), Crossing Delancey (1988), and A Serious Man (2009). But the films that make up the modern Jewish canon have often been released years, and sometimes decades, apart. 

Silver’s film is the most recent in what feels like a watershed moment for American Jewish cinema, movies that span multiple genres and defy expectations as they explore what it means to be a Jew in contemporary society. In these films, Jewish protagonists can be heroes, heartthrobs, or some of the most dreadful people you’ve ever come across. 

Read more: The Problem With TV’s New Holocaust Obsession

Between the Temples; Uncut Gems; Armageddon Time; You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah; The Fabelmans; Beau is Afraid, and Shiva Baby reflect a new, unencumbered attitude toward Jewish representation. Being Jewish in contemporary society means constantly confronting some new article discussing how you should feel or act. But these films, all released in the past five years, remind viewers that the experience is anything but a monolith.

Even two films about the same topic—a Bat Mitzvah—feel like they come from completely different universes. While Between the Temples masters cringey humor and hysterical, nerve-shredding dinner scenes, Sammi Cohen’s You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (2023) is an earnest and sweet teen comedy. Yet both offer insight into a distinctly Jewish experience, beyond just the coming-of-age ceremony itself. Bat Mitzvah examines the challenge in balancing the Jewish values taught in Hebrew School with the typical pressures of middle school, while Between the Temples explores how we can find ourselves by reconnecting with our religious roots later in life. 

Characters vary in their degrees of religiousness. Ari Aster’s horror Beau is Afraid (2023), which the director has described as a “Jewish Lord of the Rings,” contains no specific references to Judaism, but the clues are there for those in the know, including the distinct sound of the blowing of the shofar in the final scene. In Shiva Baby (2020), an exceptional (and exceptionally) anxious comedy, Danielle (Rachel Sennott) doesn’t have much interest in the religious aspects of Judaism, but her parents do. These films explore cultural Judaism as well as religious Judaism—a great deal of tension in Shiva Baby comes from discussions between Danielle and her parents about whether particular characters are practicing Jews, for example.

While both Armageddon Time and The Fabelmans are period pieces, the fact that two period films distinctly about the Jewish experience were released within weeks of one another in 2022—and neither one is about the Holocaust—is a clear marker of how things have shifted. It seems like every few years there’s a new Schindler’s List, The Pianist, or Life Is Beautiful, conditioning audiences to expect a Jewish film in a period setting to automatically take place during the Second World War. (This year saw the release of One Life, based on a Schindler-esque true story, and the award-winning Zone of Interest, which took a unique approach to the atrocities of Auschwitz.) But these two films are different: Both are extremely personal, semi-autobiographical films that explore the filMMAker’s nuclear family. They aren’t specifically about Judaism, per se, but they indirectly explore the religion through hyper-specific family experiences. And both are invested in issues of the contemporary Jewish experience.

James Gray’s Armageddon Times investigates the director’s own childhood growing up in New York in the 1980s. Paul Graff (Banks RePeta) dreams of being an artist, something his strict but loving parents struggle to accept. But his grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) offers sage, paternal wisdom encouraging him to pursue his dreams. The film explores Paul’s middle-class Jewish upbringing, but simultaneously how this identity intersects with his privilege as a white person, particularly in relation to his Black best friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb). We see the ways the Graff family has had to assimilate into American culture to survive and attempt to thrive, including changing their last name to make their Jewish identity less obvious. Armageddon Time wrestles with ideas of privilege and race, depicting members of Paul’s family using slurs and benefiting from the color of their skin even as they also face discrimination. Paul sees firsthand how Judaism sets his family back yet their whiteness pushes them forward. 

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans follows teenage Sammy Fableman (Gabriel LaBelle) and his family as the father’s (Paul Dano) job moves them from New Jersey to Arizona, then California. Sammy faces intense antisemitism, getting verbally and physically assaulted for existing as a Jew. Sammy doesn’t take this hatred lying down, immediately standing up for himself when the boys at school start calling him “Bagelman.” He gets punched in the face, but instead of backing down he does what Jews have done for generations: uses his artistic expression to process his trauma, becoming widely liked at school for his filMMAking gifts, profoundly altering his relationship with those who tormented him. Even in its 1950s and ‘60s setting, The Fabelmans’ explores an extremely contemporary concern, offering an enticing response to intolerance: not to change yourself to obtain approval, but instead to defiantly stand firm in your beliefs and use your naturally given gifts to rise above the bigotry.

Josh and Benny Safdie’s crime-thriller Uncut Gems (2019) also offers a unique approach to antisemitism, presenting Howard (Adam Sandler) as a rather appalling person. He ticks off plenty of ugly stereotypes about Jewish people; he’s greedy; lies and deceives to get ahead; and cares about money more than anything else on Earth. He also wears these things like a badge of honor. He’s about as far from the nebbish Woody Allen-type as a Jew can get. To paraphrase Sandler’s Howard, being awful is how he wins. Belonging to any religion, it goes without saying, doesn’t automatically make anyone a better person, and it’s refreshing to see this explored on-screen. This new wave of Jewish cinema allows considerable moral flexibility in its characters, centering (if not always celebrating) the unlikable (including in Shiva Baby and Beau is Afraid), or even downright detestable. In Uncut Gems, Howard owns who he is so completely, and so proudly, that you can’t help but root for him. It also explains why he possesses considerable sexual magnetism (not a trait that is typically ascribed to Jewish men), attracting beautiful women like his employee Julia (Julia Fox).

Speaking of heartthrobs, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah does something genuinely radical: How many times have you seen the cute, vacant yet sporty teen heartthrob proudly wear a Star of David? As if it wasn’t revolutionary enough to have a genuinely Jewish teen movie, Bat Mitzvah, based on Fiona Rosenbloom’s YA novel, feels special in a number of other ways. Judaism on-screen is often overwhelmingly white, but Cohen’s film has a diverse cast of Jewish characters, and it imagines an almost utopian world for them. There’s not a whiff of antisemitism, and while 13-year-old Stacy Friedman (Sunny Sandler, acting opposite real-life dad Adam) is a complicated and sometimes cruel character, she’s ultimately loving and caring, and would do anything to make things right with the friends she’s betrayed. For Stacy, the actual Bat Mitzvah ceremony isn’t important; “It’s important to you and other old people and God and stuff, but to me, the party is important,” she tells her parents (Idina Menzel and Adam Sandler, in a complete departure from their Uncut Gems partnership). Eventually, Stacy realizes the significance of her Bat Mitzvah, but she still cares about her outfit, boys, friends, and party a whole lot more. And in this thrilling new world of Jewish cinema where characters can be anything in any genre, that’s all perfectly kosher.