Matt notes that the Coen Brothers' new movie, A Serious Man, is very, very Jewish. I'll be interested to check it out at some point (although, I'll have to plan for when. I sort of anticipate that this weekend may be spent in repeat viewings of Where The Wild Things Are, after I see it at a critics' screening tonight). Matt's worry is that the Gentiles in the crowd may get lost. I'm not sure that's entirely a bad thing. Given how many movies about Jewishness are about the Holocaust, rather than actual, normal lived Jewish experience and ritual, I'd rather see occasional overkill rather than total shying away from the subject material. I think good filmmakers will probably be able to make movies about Jewishness that are accessible to Gentiles in the same way that black filmmakers can portray their own experiences to white audiences, expecting not total and automatic comprehension, but instead a willingness to immerse yourself in something you don't quite understand, but would like to.
All of which is a very round-about way of saying that Vardit, one of my best friends and an occasional commenter on this blog, gave me David Liss's first two Benjamin Weaver novels, A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption, for my birthday, and so far, I'm loving the former. What Liss seems to do in the Weaver novels, and in The Coffee Trader, is to restore some of Judaism's broader historical context to fiction. One could spend a lifetime reading only Holocaust novels: Holocaust novels for YA readers, Holocaust novels about the Warsaw Ghetto, and the founding of the state of Israel, and terror, and resistance, and surrender, and recovery. It's a lot of very rich material. But remembering that Judaism's history is also the world's is a useful tonic against bigotry, and an important creative note to novelists. Whether good books follow the course of African Jewish polygamist traders, or contemporary Israeli street artists, Jewish history, and Jewish fiction isn't--and shouldn't be--bounded by the greatest Jewish trauma.