O PINION
Larry David Has Never Been More Jewish Than in
This Season’s ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
“CURB YOUR Enthusiasm”
has always been a Jewy show,
but this season it is downright
Jewish. On the HBO sitcom, now in
its 11th season, Larry David has
never been shy about surfacing,
and lampooning, Judaism and
Jewishness. He has contemplated
the dilemmas of Holocaust
survival, waded into the Israeli-
Palestinian confl ict (via a local
chicken restaurant) and gotten
stranded on a ski lift with an
Orthodox Jew on Shabbat.

Th is season, it’s not just the
occasional matzoh ball joke, or
the Yiddish lesson he gave Jon
Hamm in the season premiere.

David is plunging into
questions of Jewish pride and
belief, and if he isn’t exactly
Abraham Joshua Heschel,
he could provide a Jewish
educator with a semester of
lively classroom debate.

In the latest episode, for
example, a Jew for Jesus joins
the cast of the show that Larry’s
character is developing for
Hulu. Although neither Larry
nor his Jewish friends are
remotely religious, they seem
genuinely upset by the actor’s
apostasy, and Larry gives him
a rather sober warning that he
shouldn’t proselytize on set.

A week earlier, a member
of his golf club (played by Rob
Morrow) asks Larry to pray for
his ailing father. Larry declines,
saying prayer is useless. He also
wonders why God would need,
or heed, the prayer of a random
atheist like himself instead of
the distressed son who wants
his father to live.

For anyone who has gone to
Hebrew school, it’s a familiar
challenge, usually aired by the
wiseacre in the back row who
the teacher suspects is perhaps
the most engaged student in
the classroom. And it is not just
atheists posing the question,
“Why pray?” Th e Israeli philos-
opher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a
devout Orthodox Jew, believed
that “worship of God must be
Be heard.

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totally devoid of instrumental
considerations.” In addition to a Jewish
funeral, the episode has a
bonus theological theme:
“Middah k’neged Middah,” or
as Morrow’s character puts
it, “what goes around comes
around.” Morrow warns Larry
that his actions will have
consequences, which actually
gives Larry pause. If anything,
the entire “Curb” enterprise is
an exercise in Jewish karma.

Larry is constantly being
punished in ways large and
small for his actions, inactions,
meddling and slights. As the
old theater expression has it,
Larry spills coff ee on the
Klansman’s robe and off ers
to have it dry-cleaned. Good
liberal Jew that he is, Larry
appears genuine in his belief
that empathy is a better
response to hate than confron-
tation, and that if he turns the
other cheek it might lower the
temperature in a post-Trump
America. Of course, it doesn’t
work out that way, and the last
word goes to his friend Susie
Green, who performs a pointed
act of Jewish sabotage that gets
the Klansman pummeled by
his fellow racists. Give David
credit for embedding within
a preposterous half-hour
wrong. He is what Rabbi Joseph
Soloveitchik might have called
a “Halachic Man” — an actual-
izer of “the ideals of justice and
righteousness,” even when the
rest of the world resents it.

If you think I am overdoing
it, remember that there is an
actual discussion in Talmud
about the right and wrong way
of putting on a pair of shoes.

And just as in the Talmud,
there are no easy answers in
David’s moral universe: If a
friend lends you his favorite,
one-of-a-kind shirt, and you
ruin it, what are your obliga-
tions to him? (See: Bava Metzia
96b) If a thief breaks into your
Make no mistake: The Larry David character is sacrilegious and heretical,
and “Curb” is no friend of the religious mindset. But to dismiss him as
“self-hating” is to miss out on the unmistakably Jewish conversation at
the heart of the show. David’s character is a deeply principled person:
Most of the nonsense he gets himself into is the result of his enforcing
unspoken social rules that others appear to be flouting.

if Larry opens a donut shop to
drive a rival out of business in
act one, his own shop will burn
to the ground in act three.

A prior episode was even
more self-consciously Jewish:
Larry attends High Holiday
services only because he
lost a golf bet to the rabbi,
and he literally bumps into
a Klansman coming out of
a coff ee shop. Th e latter sets
off a string of plot twists, as
he and the KKK guy trade a
series of favors and obliga-
tions that will have disastrous
consequences for both. Larry’s
salvation comes at the end,
when he blares a shofar from
his balcony, literally raising
the alarm on antisemitism and
waking his neighbors to the
threat of white supremacy.

Th e episode suggests the
failure of good intentions.

JEWISH EXPONENT
of television a debate about
vengeance and resistance
that engaged the followers of
Jews as diff erent as Jesus and
Jabotinsky. Make no mistake: Th e Larry
David character is sacrilegious
and heretical, and “Curb”
is no friend of the religious
mindset. But to dismiss him
as “self-hating” is to miss out
on the unmistakably Jewish
conversation at the heart of
the show. David’s character
is a deeply principled person:
Most of the nonsense he gets
himself into is the result of
his enforcing unspoken social
rules that others appear to be
fl outing, whether it is taking
too many samples at the ice
cream counter or dominating
the conversation (poorly) at the
dinner table. Larry is rude and
inconsiderate, but he is seldom
house and then drowns in your
swimming pool, which wasn’t
protected by the required
fence, who is owed damages
and how much? (See: Ibn Ezra
on Exodus 22:1-2)
In last week’s episode, Larry
even touched on — consciously
or not — a classic debate in the
Talmud: If you and a friend
are stranded in the desert, and
your canteen has only enough
water for one of you to survive,
must you share it or save your
own life?
Yes, Larry was talking about
sharing a phone charger, but if
the Sages had cell phones, what
do you think they’d be talking
about? ●
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-
in-chief of The New York Jewish
Week and senior editor of the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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