How Resilient Are Jewish American Traditions?
5 min read
In 1975, a largely unknown 23-year-old actor named Carol Kane starred in Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street as Gitl, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant in Manhattan’s Lower East Side around the turn of the 20th century. While her husband preferred speaking in English, Gitl persisted in Yiddish; their son was “Yossele” to his mother and “Joey” to his father. With her girlish voice and voluminous pre-Raphaelite hair, the young Kane seemed a figure out of time—and though Gitl eventually becomes an independent American woman, the film was tinged with a real sadness over the ties to the old country severed in her triumphant assimilation.
When, at the end of the film, Gitl corrects an acquaintance’s mention of her Yossele—“His name is Joey”—she begins a transformation that her portrayer would have understood innately. Kane’s grandmother was a Yiddish speaker but, after emigrating, never spoke the language to her granddaughter; for Hester Street, Kane had to learn Yiddish from a dialect coach. Over the decades that followed, Kane carved out a space for herself in Hollywood as a daffy and neurotic character actress who generally read as Jewish—but, crucially, culturally Jewish. She’s “New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings,” as Woody Allen says to her character in Annie Hall. “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype,” is her reply—a comment, perhaps, on how easily heritage can be boiled down to a set of showbiz tropes.
This bittersweet absorption into America—a past traded in for a future—unfolds over many generations, for many populations. Questions of how central Jewishness should be to Jewish American identity—and what parts of Jewishness should be central to Jewish American identity—have long divided older and younger family members, who may share a broadly liberal outlook while having different habits of religious observance, experiences of anti-Semitism, and feelings about Zionism. Such questions have taken on more urgency since the October 7 attacks, as many parents and children find themselves freshly alienated from each other’s understanding of Judaism. How is a cultural birthright to be passed on, when so much of it might seem like a burden to its inheritors? Similar anxieties resound through Between the Temples, in which Kane plays Carla O’Connor, née Kessler, a retired music teacher who decides, in her elder years, to have her bat mitzvah. As she prepares for the rite with her synagogue’s Millennial cantor, who is very much mired in his own personal crises, the director Nathan Silver’s hopeful film demonstrates the adaptability of tradition, and the possibility of reconciliation and continuity across the generations.
When the film opens, Cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is a mess. Mourning his wife’s death in a freak accident, he has been temporarily relieved of his duties during prayer services because of the possibly psychosomatic loss of his voice. Up on the bema, Ben literally cannot profess his faith. Having moved back home, he’s fussed over by not one but two Jewish mothers, a married couple played by Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon. Morose as he is, Ben is still a nice Jewish boy—both adorable and arrested as played by Schwartzman, similar to his breakthrough role in Rushmore.
It’s in tutoring Carla, his former music teacher, that Ben resumes his life. Between practicing Carla’s Torah portion, the two joke, perform vocal exercises, and experiment with hallucinogens, generally opening up to each other. There’s something Freudian about Ben and Carla’s relationship—when he stays over at her place, they sometimes sleep together in the same bed while he wears her son’s pajamas. But Carla’s decision to make a fresh start inspires Ben’s own. “Even my name is in the past tense,” Ben had lamented—Ben as in been. To be a widower is, in some ways, to be defined by the past; through Carla’s adolescent rite of passage, Ben finds a way into the future.
If Ben is smothered within his tradition, Carla is suffocating outside of it. She was a red-diaper baby, she says—a child of American Communists, like Kane’s character was said to be in Annie Hall, raised with American Judaism’s secular values but none of the religion. Carla feels the absence of the latter, as well as a more general malaise. In one scene, she describes to Ben her deep frustration with her parents for not allowing her to have a bat mitzvah. Instead, on her 13th birthday, she got her first period, a merely biological, not spiritual or cultural, symbol of “becoming a woman.” She relives the moment so emphatically that she suspects Ben isn’t listening; using an old teacher’s trick, she has him repeat what she said back to him.
Silver, who also co-wrote the film with C. Mason Wells, has long been fascinated with the power of performance. His earlier, lower-budget films include Stinking Heaven, about members of a sober-living community who record one another during dubiously beneficial reenactment-therapy sessions that play like a Method-acting workshop gone horribly wrong. In Between the Temples, the ritual of the bat mitzvah serves a similarly cathartic function, with much more positive results. Carla’s “becoming a woman” speech and Ben’s mirroring, itself like an acting exercise, is hardly the only time in the film that recitation and repetition become important. Ben and Carla’s bond is also anchored by her bat mitzvah classes, in which the teacher recites the Torah portion and the student repeats it. (Coincidentally, Ben read the same Torah portion for his own bar mitzvah, once upon a time.) As the two rehearse, the ritual recurs and transforms. The film is jokey about some aspects of Judaism—Ben’s rabbi, played by Robert Smigel, practices putting by aiming golf balls into the shofar—but a current of reverence vibrates through the lively, disputatious scenes of Ben and Carla flirting via their study of the Torah.
Although Carla’s sudden enthusiasm for a bat mitzvah raises eyebrows, the ritual has always been adapted to new circumstances, as she herself notes: The first American Bat Mitzvah was held only in 1922, conducted by a rabbi for his eldest daughter. Carla’s point—borne out by her own, ultimately unconventional ceremony—is that Jewishness can be adapted to fit the everyday life of Jews who will not be Jews as their grandparents might have known it, but can still find joy and meaning in their tradition. Hearing Carla chant in Hebrew, in the same familiar bubbly voice—but lower now, raspier and firmer—in which Kane, at the other end of her career, once spoke Yiddish, one remembers that Carla is touching a core part of her tradition that would have remained inaccessible to Hester Street’s Gitl. Ben and Carla, from different generations and with different relationships to Judaism, both bend their faith to their own ends, and so demonstrate its resiliency.
