L ifestyles /C ulture
Israeli Drama ‘Shtisel’ Lives up to Hype
T ELEVISION
SELAH MAYA ZIGHELBOIM | JE STAFF
SHTISEL, AN ISRAELI drama
Netflix picked up in December,
can best be summarized by a
quote from Marta Kauffman, the
creator of Friends, who has said
she is working on an American
version of the show.

“Make sure those stories,
and the universality of those
stories, is what people take in,”
she told Variety in 2016. “The
rest is just background.”
Shtisel, which is available on
Netflix with English subtitles, fol-
lows a Haredi family in the Geula
neighborhood of Jerusalem.

Since its Netflix release — it
originally premiered in Israel in
2013 and ran for two seasons
— word has spread. On social
media, people are recommending
the show to their friends, and
reviews have lauded Shtisel for
portraying the ultra-Orthodox as
“ordinary” people.

What is certainly true about
the show is that its storylines
and the actors’ performances
are so engrossing, it’s almost
easy to forget about the char-
acters’ peyot and sheitals. This
is probably because the stories
aren’t about how the charac-
ters’ struggle with their reli-
gion, unlike other portrayals of
the Orthodox in mainstream
media, such as One of Us,
Disobedience and The Chosen.

Instead, they are about love or
loss or other universal stories.

That certainly does not mean
their ultra-Orthodoxy is merely
incidental. It shapes the sto-
rylines, such as in one plotline
where a main character searches
for love during hotel lobby dates
arranged by a matchmaker.

The way the show follows its
characters and its subtle, slow
drama is reminiscent of Amazon
Prime Video’s Transparent,
another show about a Jewish
family. Shtisel’s primary focus is
on the family’s patriarch, Shulem
Shtisel (Dov Glickman), and his
youngest son, Akiva (Michael
22 FEBRUARY 28, 2019
From left: Michael Aloni as Akiva Shtisel and Dov Glickman as
Shulem Shtisel
Screenshots from the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival trailer
Neta Riskin as Giti Weiss
Aloni), the last of Shulem’s chil-
dren to still live at home.

Shulem is an imposing man
in his 60s with a dark gray beard,
whose wife passed away about
a year before the start of the
show. He works as the teacher
and later principal of a cheder
and has a penchant for falling
asleep in front of the Talmud as
he studies late into the night. His
rigid demeanor, sense of duty to
tradition and attempts to control
his offspring might spark some
dry laughter in viewers. During
the series, he spends time with
a few widows and divorcees but
is reluctant to settle down with
any of them, seemingly more
interested in their cholent.

Akiva, on the other hand,
is a romantic and a dreamer.

(Sometimes literally, such as
when in the first episode, he
starts a heater loan program
after dreaming about being cold
— in the early spring.) He’s
a young man in his mid-20s,
fresh out of yeshiva and starting
a job as a teacher at his father’s
Michael Aloni as Akiva Shtisel
Shira Haas as Ruchami Weiss
cheder, while nursing aspira-
tions of becoming an artist.

Outside of work and his time
sketching animals at the zoo, he
meets young women in hotel
lobbies for dates. He’s in pur-
suit of true love and has been
disappointed by his dates so far.

Then, he meets Elisheva (Ayelet
Zurer), an older woman and
twice-widowed mother of one
of his students. He pursues her,
while she struggles with guilt
over the deaths of her husbands.

Aloni shines in this show.

His performance exemplifies
how the show almost makes
you forget that its characters
are Haredi. Akiva’s status as
both an insider and an out-
sider (he’s accepted as one of
the Haredi community, though
considered somewhat peculiar)
provides the secular audience
with a relatable perspective
and an entry point into the
insular Haredi community.

The show also follows other
members of the family, in par-
ticular Akiva’s sister, Giti Weiss
JEWISH EXPONENT
(Neta Riskin), a homemaker
and mother of five. After her
husband abandons their family
and stops sending money from
Argentina, where his work as a
shochet takes him for months at
a time, Giti struggles to make
ends meet. She keeps her situa-
tion a secret from almost every-
body so as to make it easier for
her husband to return. The only
one who knows is her teen-
age daughter, Ruchami (Shira
Haas), who fills in as parent for
her younger siblings.

Other important characters in
the family at the start of the series
include Shulem’s octogenarian
mother Malka (Hanna Rieber),
who has taken to watching soap
operas in her nursing home,
and Zvi Arye (Harel Piterman),
Akiva’s older brother, whose
lighthearted escapades are maybe
intended to release tension from
the show but which instead take
time away from other more com-
pelling storylines.

Shtisel’s Netflix release has
renewed interest in the show
to such a degree that Dikla
Barkai, a producer for the pro-
duction company behind the
show, told The New York Times
that the creators are thinking
about creating a third season.

That popularity has been
evident in Jews from across the
religious spectrum.

One of the show’s creators,
Yehonatan Indursky, grew up in
a Haredi family, which lends the
show its needed authenticity.

“Shtisel gives secular Israelis,
live-and-let-live Jewish Americans
of all persuasions, and non-Jews
alike a glimpse into the myste-
rious and cloistered world of the
ultra-Orthodox,” one Orthodox
commentator, Ruchi Koval, wrote
for the Cleveland Jewish News.

“But when it draws back that cur-
tain, here’s what you find: your
father, your sister, your neighbor.

They are you, and you are they.

That’s what makes it so lovable,
and that’s what makes it so fun.” l
szighelboim@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0729
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