L ike many millennials, I miss the 1990s. Doubtless many GenXers do too. It was a prosperous time, one before smartphones, when it was still possible to go out and have fun without photographic evidence of said fun reaching the wider world. People interacted in person and were not online all the time, suggesting that one another “touch grass.” The clothes were better (fast fashion had yet to tank garment quality), as was the music. It was an era of greater geopolitical peace. A less identity-aware time, for better and worse, but on the whole a more placid one. These were the years before 9/11, and the ensuing wars, not to mention the ensuing thing where you’re stopped from bringing guacamole on an airplane because this count as a liquid. Meanwhile, the horrors of the two World Wars were long enough in the past that it really did feel possible that life was going to be, on the whole, pretty good. The Cold War had ended. Americans’ optimism levels were, per Gallup polling, higher than in 2022, and trending upwards. Further fueling 1990s nostalgia in the 2020s is the knowledge of all that would come in the decades that followed: Trump, Covid, and the ubiquity of social media. Even those of us who didn’t relish every bit of the 1990s (i.e. who were in middle school for much of them) may see positives in retrospect. And calm times tend to be good ones for a certain group of people who are often scape- goated in more tumultuous ones. Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about Jews. A 2022 Anti-Defamation League report offers a clue as to why Jews might yearn for decades of the recent past: “In 2021, ADL tabulated 2,717 antisemitic incidents across the United States. This represents a 34% increase from the 2,026 incidents record- ed in 2020 and is the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.” While it is not possible to quantify exactly how antisemitic any particu- lar era (apart from Nazi German, of course) felt—and while there will always be regional variation—some data suggest that global antisemitism began rising around the year 2000, or the start of the Second Intifada, and then into the so-called War on Terror. This is in keeping with my own memory of that period, which is that while antisemitism certainly existed in the 1990s, circa 2000 is when it shifted from a phenomenon of old- school xenophobes to something tied up, in the mainstream, with people’s interpretations of world events. It was possible, in the 1990s, to see antisemitism as something on its way
We were everywhere, but not openly everywhere. The big one, though, was Fran Drescher’s The Nanny , which ran from 1993 to 1999. It was the rare show told completely from a Jewish perspective. By this I mean that the (Bebe Newirth as Lilith, sultry even in pleated khakis, the ones that recently came back into style: #goals.) out, in a way that would not have been in 2004, and that really wouldn’t have in 2022. The 1990s were also a deeply Jewish moment in popular culture. We were every- where in sitcoms— Friends , Mad About You , Seinfeld . The 2000 movie Meet the Parents , wherein Ben Stiller is a Jewish man marrying into a non-Jewish family, was a critical and box office hit. (It’s close enough to the ‘90s to count, in my books.) Even Frasier , a show about gentiles, was chock-full of explicitly and ambiguously Jewish love interests. gentile characters are portrayed as having strange gentile ways: being uptight, drinking more than Manishewitz, wearing too much beige. It is they who are the oddities, from the show’s standpoint. The Jewish char- acters represent not ethnic curiosities but familiarity. And we had, in Monica Lewinsky, a Jewish headline-news story that, while upsetting in what it said about the state of sexual misconduct, had nothing to do with antisem- itism. If anything, the problem was that the gentile leader of the free world loved her a little too much. T he 1990s is not the only era to be the object of Jewish wistfulness by any means. There is, for example, the longing for the shtetl, or at least the Fiddler on the Roof version thereof, as representative of a lost form of Jewish authenticity. And nostalgia for the Jewish delicatessen—see David Sax’s 2009 book, Save the Deli —involves poignant taste-memories of a New World but still dis- tant (mid-century, roughly) Jewish existence. As a general principle, Jewish nostalgias have always been tinged with an understand-
ing that even if some elements of the past are appealing, we are nevertheless fortunate to live in the times we do. Uncomplicated nostalgia, the carefree kind, was for other people, for members of groups that had not been genocide victims, enslaved, or other- wise mistreated on a grand scale. (Louis C.K. had a (pre-cancellation) 2008 comedy rou- tine about how a time machine to the past would be fun for white people but not Black ones. So too for Jews. Fond as I am of the décor on Poirot , you won’t catch me wishing I lived in the 1930s. Are the 1990s, perhaps, the first exception to this longstanding rule? Is part of their nostalgic appeal that they were they better for Jews than today? While it might seem that the decade was on the whole superior, a closer look at some of the Jewish pop culture of that era complicates matters. We were everywhere, but not openly everywhere. Coded, hinted-at Jewishness could make it in the mainstream, whereas explicitly Jewish content remained—or creators and gatekeep- ers feared would remain—too niche. I think of the unspoken quasi-Jewishness of Seinfeld , which read as super-duper Jewish… to Jewish audiences. Mainstream viewers were none the wiser, unless they happened to catch one of the few episodes where Jew- ishness explicitly came up. Indeed, something curious happens when you stop and think about the iconic Jewish film and television characters of the 1990s. If you start—in the most innocuous way pos- sible—making a list, you soon discover that a number of these fictional creations are… not actually Jewish. Jerry Seinfeld, the person as well as the sit- com character: both Jewish. No doubts there. But George Costanza? He was portrayed by a Jewish actor, but as written in the show, the Costanzas are Italian-American, religion unspecified. The most we learn about George is that his faith of origin is not something he’s attached to. We learn this in the episode where he converts to Latvian Orthodoxy, for a woman he’s involved with, giving as his reason, “I like the hats.” It’s an intensely Jewish intermarriage plot—Estelle Costanza’s metaphorically tearing her hair out in strongly New York-accented English—but Jews go unmentioned. Yet George is coded as Jewish. He is a prototypical nebbish, a neurotic over-analyser whose parents (briefly) move to Florida. And as viewers of Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000 and ongoing) can hardly miss, George is something of an alter ego of Seinfeld creator Larry David, whose Jewishness is not up for
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