arts & culture
Frustrating ‘Beauty Queen’
Still Hooks You In
JARRAD SAFFREN | STAFF WRITER
N etflix’s “The Beauty Queen of
Jerusalem,” which debuted on
May 21, can be seen as a lot of
things: a portrayal of Spanish Sephardic
Jews, of Jerusalem before it was Jewish
again or of the evil eye and its implica-
tions, among other possibilities.

But really, it’s a whole lot more Jewish
than all of that. For “The Beauty Queen
of Jerusalem,” at its core, is about a char-
acter straight out of a Philip Roth novel: a
man, Gabriel Ermoza, played by Michael
Aloni, who cannot seem to overcome his
domineering mother, Merkada Ermoza,
played by Irit Kaplan.

And over the first two episodes, his
inability to do so takes on the entertain-
ment quality of a car wreck or a melt-
down on reality television: You just can’t
look away.

Throughout these early episodes of the
series, which is based on a novel by Sarit
Yishai Levy, you root for this handsome
and capable dude to take control of his
own life. As I leaned forward on the edge
of my couch, I found myself shouting in
my mind.

Take control of your father’s shop!
Go marry the Ashkenazi girl you
really love!
Leave this constricting little village
environment, and all of its small-minded
biases and pressures, for the land of the
free in America!
Just go, man! Go!
But Gabriel Ermoza does not go. He
stays; he listens to mother; he remains a
good boy.

And you hate him for it.

Yet you also empathize.

Does a man not have a responsibility
to his mother, family and community?
Would it not have made him even less of
a man if he had just upped and left?
You even sympathize, too.

Merkada has the audacity to blame
her son for the death of her husband/his
father, who died the morning after he
learned that Gabriel was cavorting with
his Ashkenazi lover. Then she pushes him
to marry the family’s lowly shop cleaner,
who is Sephardic like them, because she
claims that Gabriel’s father told her to do
Netflix’s “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem”
that in a dream.

The son considers leaving for the
United States, but is told by another
member of the community that, if his
father wished for him to marry this
woman, he would have sons that would
grow strong. What would you do in that
situation? Would you defy all the people
in your community who are telling you
to listen to your dead father?
Gabriel is a victim, in a sense, though
not one without agency.

It is he who decides to listen to his
mother’s kooky and manipulative logic. It
is he who chooses the comfort of his own
world over the frontier spirit of America.

It is he who tries to make a deal with the
devil, by marrying the shop cleaner Rosa,
played by Hila Saada, a woman who he
does not love, in exchange for strong sons.

It is Gabriel who fails to transcend
his mother, the arbitrary responsibilities
of his world and, ultimately, his cursed
fate. God put him in a situation and gave
him a chance to decide, as God does in
the Jewish faith. Yet Gabriel chose to let
others decide for him.

The show makes a point of lingering
on the tragic elements of the character’s
cursed existence. During the births of
his first two children, Gabriel is shown
running around and praying toward the
sky for a “male heir.” But as the series
makes clear with flash forwards to the
character’s middle-aged life, his prayers
are never answered.

In those flash-forward scenes, the son
seems doomed to repeat his fate from
generation to generation.

When Rosa is not satisfied with
Gabriel’s punishment of their daugh-
Courtesy of Netflix
ter Luna, played by Swell Ariel Or, for
staying out late, Rosa forces Gabriel to
inflict a stricter punishment. The hus-
band listens, taking his daughter into
her bedroom to be whipped by a belt. Yet
once in there, he allows his daughter to
take control, pretending to whip her by
hitting the bed as she cries out in con-
trived agony.

It is, of course, not a problem that
Gabriel listens to his women. It is a prob-
lem that, in the case of his mother and
wife, he listens to people who want to
override his agency.

The most frustrating part of the Gabe
experience is that he seems capable of
so much more. As a young man, he’s
handsome enough to attract two differ-
ent women. As a middle-aged man, he’s
successful enough to buy his daughters a
hot new record player.

But at every crossroads moment of his
life, he gets out of his car and switches
seats with the passenger.

The cycle is frustrating enough to
make you want to watch the last eight
episodes. JE
jsaffren@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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