Last night’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Palestinian Chicken,” examined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of chicken (if one ignores that a chicken lens would be opaque unless sliced very thin). I wouldn’t say it was as polarizing as the Mideast situation itself, but it at least has generated some hot discussion at The AV Club as to whether it merited the A+ rating reviewer Meredith Blake gave it.
I wouldn’t rank it as an all-time great, though I agree with Blake in liking the idea of the episode: the Philip Rothian concept of a protagonist who holds his Jewishness at a distance and ends up turned on by the idea of rebelling against it, here by eating at a Palestinian restaurant and getting it on with the bird shack’s hot, virulently anti-Israel owner.
