July 3, 2008
Is Adam Sandler the most important living Jewish commentator? Believe it or not, this actually isn’t the first time those words have appeared in print. In fact, the question was posed way back in 1999, on the cover of the national Jewish student magazine New Voices.
At the time, I thought it was an absurd question. After all, Sandler’s brand of humor isn’t particularly Jewish, owing more to the bathroom than it does to the Borscht Belt. What can a guy who made his name singing faux-operatic ditties on Saturday Night Live and punching out Price Is Right host Bob Barker in Happy Gilmore teach us about the Jewish condition?
Then I watched 50 First Dates.
Yes, that 50 First Dates — the 2004 slapstick comedy in which Sandler woos an amnesiac Drew Barrymore. Aside from his name, Henry Roth, there’s nothing recognizably Jewish about Sandler’s character, who lives in Hawaii, of all places, and works as a marine veterinarian, of all things. There’s not so much as a hint that the character is Jewish — until, that is, the movie’s ending, when (spoiler alert!), completely out of the blue, Sandler is standing under a huppa sporting a yarmulke and a tallis.
To be an American Jew today is to be, like Sandler, a part of the mainstream, not apart from it. In our daily lives, most of us are not so different from our non-Jewish neighbors. (Unlike in Annie Hall, none of Sandler’s 50 dates involved taking Barrymore to see The Sorrow and the Pity.) At the same time, we’re not abashed when it comes to expressing our Jewishness. Getting hitched under a huppa is no longer so exotic. That’s why, I would humbly argue, 50 First Dates may very well be the single most accurate cinematic depiction of contemporary American-Jewish identity.
Nor is Sandler’s contribution to Jewish culture limited to the silver screen. He’s also responsible for the single most important Jewish song of the past quarter century. Seriously, is there a Jewish song in the post-Fiddler on the Roof/“Hava Nagila” era that is as widely beloved by Jews and non-Jews alike as the “Chanukah Song”? The song also represents a revolution in Jewish self-assertion.
For these reasons, I had high hopes for Sandler’s latest film, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, in which he plays a cracker-than-crack Israeli commando who leaves his conflict-ridden homeland to pursue his dream of being a hairstylist in New York City.
Let’s just say I wasn’t disappointed.
Zohan is a stupid movie; I couldn’t stop laughing. And if you look beyond the gross-out humor about intergenerational intercourse and the gratuitous animal cruelty gags, Zohan also happens to be a spot-on send-up of Israeli cuisine and culture, manners and mores.
The movie conveys the national obsession with hummus (which the Sandler character uses as a hair-care product, toothpaste, and fire-retardant), the wild popularity of cheesy dance music, the sabra directness that can occasionally veer into crudeness, and the pushy salesmanship of Israeli electronics merchants.
No mainstream American film has ever delved so deeply (or so shallowly, as the case may be) into such everyday attributes of modern-day Israeli-ness. (For those worrying that Sandler is tarnishing Israel’s image abroad, fear not: The film’s Arab characters don’t come off any better. So it’s a tie.)
Because its protagonist is a war-weary Israeli operative who finds a multicultural refuge in New York City, Zohan has drawn comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated drama Munich. The New York Times calls Sandler’s Zohan “basically a less anguished version of the character played by Eric Bana in Munich.”
It’s not, however, an apt analogy. For starters, Bana’s character couldn’t catch a speeding bullet with his nostril or immobilize foes by tying them into pretzel shapes, let alone make elderly women’s hair look “silky smooth.”
More broadly, Spielberg’s Munich had remarkably little to do with Israel as it actually is. The film grafted a cautionary post-9/11 warning about the dangers of retaliation onto a storyline inspired by the Mossad counterterrorism efforts in the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, cavalierly rewriting history to suit its thesis.
Granted, Zohan also dabbles in simplistic moralizing, the message being that Israelis and Arabs are really the same — so why all the fighting? The film even comes complete with a Palestinian love interest for the Zohan. But at least Zohan doesn’t do violence to the historical record. And who really goes to an Adam Sandler film for the purpose of being educated in the nuances of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Sandler’s strong suit isn’t politics — it’s sociology. And Zohan manages to perfectly capture Israel’s complicated national mood: the deep-rooted patriotism on the one hand, and the fatigue from the ongoing conflict on the other. “I love my country, but the fighting, it never ends,” the Zohan explains to a pair of shaggy dogs with which he is sharing the cargo hold on a transatlantic flight.
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan may aim low, but it also rings true. Then again, I wouldn’t expect anything less from the most important living Jewish commentator.
Daniel Treiman is the Forward’s Web editor. A version of this article originally appeared in the Forward and is reprinted with permission.
- Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
