With the long-awaited return of The Sopranos looming Sunday night, you may already feel you’ve read every possible angle on the show’s cultural significance. Not this one, I’ll bet. The Jewish news-and-culture paper The Forward is featuring a set of essays looking at Jewish themes, stereotypes and tributes in The Sopranos and six other HBO shows. (For a full list of the essays, click here and scroll down.)
The piece on The Sopranos makes some obvious references–Jewish Soprano-family associate "Hesh" Rabkin, for instance–but it goes on to argue that its philosemitism is best expressed through its use of a largely Jewish contribution to human thought: psychiatry. The irony, it notes, is that Tony explores "a quintessentially Jewish form of soul-searching"–from Sigmund Freud to Woody Allen–with the assistance of a fellow Italian, Dr. Jennifer Melfi.
Other standout pieces include a dissection of Entourage’s Ari Gold as a modern Sammy Glick figure and, of course, a look at Larry David’s ambivalent but omnipresent take on Jewishness in Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which, author Michael Green says, David turns L.A. into a modern-day shtetl: "A place where, as David draws it, everyone knows everyone. Where all are related (if by business instead of blood). Where the one person you’re hoping to avoid will no doubt be seated at the table right next to you at L.A. Farm."
After The Sopranos Sunday, HBO debuts the highly promising Big Love, about a family of fundamentalist-Christian polygamists in Utah. It may take a little longer to find the Jewishness in that one.