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<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe Netflix\u00a0movie, which began airing in January,\u00a0has been savaged by reviewers. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com called<\/a> it \u201ca stunning misfire, an assemblage of talent in search of an actual movie.\u201d Wendy Ide at\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>\u00a0called<\/a> it \u201cfrequently excruciating.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n My own take away after subjecting myself to two hours of cinematic torture: This movie plays like a primer on how to be a self-hating Jew in America today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou People\u201d depicts a romance between Jewish 35-year-old Ezra, played by Jonah Hill, and Lauren London\u2019s Amira, the Muslim Black woman he initially mistakes for his Uber driver. Their parents, Shelley (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and David Duchovny as Arnold for the Jews, Eddie Murphy (Akbar) and Nia Long (Fatima) for the African-American side, are caricatures who straddle the line between tone-deaf and hateful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s mostly played for laughs and there were a few decent chuckles in the film. But while Murphy’s Louis Farrakhan-worshipping Akbar doesn’t pull any punches in his contention that his daughter should not be going out with a white man (ironically, Lauren London has a Black mother and an Ashkenazi Jewish father), Ezra\u2019sparents are just clueless. It\u2019s not only their awkward attempts at being more woke than their potential mach<\/em>a<\/em>t<\/em>u<\/em>nim<\/em>, but about their Jewishness in general.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is to say that, other than an opening scene in a synagogue (actually the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles) for Yom Kippur, there are no positive depictments of what it means to be Jewish. Beyond saying,”We’re Jewish,” any actual Jewish content in the form of rituals, holidays or discussions of contemporary Jewish issues are simply missing. Suffice it to say the words \u201cIsrael\u201d or \u201cZionism\u201d are never uttered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What there is instead is a steady stream of pandering\u00a0by\u00a0the Jewish protagonists\u00a0to position themselves as\u00a0cool and acceptable\u00a0to Amira\u2019s family.\u00a0As Andrew Lapin writes<\/a> in JTA, \u201cIn a modern-day twist, the white liberal family, rather than expressing anxiety over the race of their child\u2019s partner, fetishizes her family instead.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The one redeeming scene in \u201cYou People\u201d takes place during the initial cringe-worthy meet-cute between thetwo families. When Akbar asks Shelley if she\u2019s \u201cfamiliar with the work\u201d of Farrakhan, a notorious antisemite, Shelley briefly drops her solicitous smile and quips \u201cWell, I\u2019m familiar with what he said about the Jews.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Good for you, Mom, but then Ezra immediately changes the subject \u2013 to no avail. The disagreement comes back again in a rip-roaring shriek fest on which community \u2013 Black or Jewish \u2013 has suffered more oppression. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAre you trying to compare the Holocaust with slavery?\u201d Akbar asks menacingly over dinner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOh, I would never do that,\u201d Shelley recoils, before adding, \u201cAlthough the Blacks and the Jews have a similar struggle.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cJews were the OG slaves,\u201d Duchovny\u2019s Arnold offers sheepishly, which Murphy\u2019s Akbar dismisses as being 3,500 years too far in the past. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Arnold doubles down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don\u2019t have to go back to Egypt. I just go back 75 years. Jews only make up one half of one percent of the world\u2019s population because we were systematically annihilated,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That small percentage \u201cseems to be doing pretty good right now,\u201d Akbar shoots back, employing a classic antisemitic trope that jettisons any trauma Jews have suffered for a transactional approach that defines us as no different than the white majority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur people came here with nothing, like everybody else,\u201d Shelley responds, to which Fatima, Amira\u2019s mother, lets loose the conspiracy screed that the Jews came to America \u201cwith the money [they] made from the slave trade.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That inflammatory indictment is never addressed further due to some slapstick hijinks involving a flaming kufi <\/em>(cap) Akbar received from Farrakhan himself. The denigration is dropped like a hot knish, mustard-side down. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then the film reverts to its main message: Jewish apologetics and attempts to prove who\u2019s the most woke. No one defends the Jews again over the next hour and a half. At one point near the film\u2019s end, Shelley asks for forgiveness from Amira and her family \u201con behalf of all Jewish people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLouis Farrakhan is actually the hero of this movie,\u201d writes<\/a> Allison Josephs on the\u00a0Jew in the City<\/em>\u00a0website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As this is a rom-com, we all know that the couple will hit rocky times before the inevitable happy ending. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn’t buy it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After so much vitriol has been spilled on screen, and so much ignorance is left unrefuted, the idea of any of these unself-critical leopards changing their spots is as ludicrous as the making of this movie was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film never acknowledges the partnership between Jewish and Black activists marching for civil rights together in the 1960s. Rather, in its ill-conceived attempt at showing how two very different communities could conceivably come together, it achieves the opposite. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In that sense, \u201cYou People\u201d is the ultimate anti-assimilation comedy. Perhaps representatives of the Jewish Agency should show this as an aliyah inducement?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Jewish Internet has also been up in arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere\u2019s much Jewish apologizing for racism. None for antisemitism,\u201d tweeted<\/a>\u00a0David Baddiel, author of \u201cJews Don\u2019t Count.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s shameful when the groveling, oblivious, over-woke Jew is the best we can do,\u201d\u00a0added<\/a> Israeli media consultant Linda Lovitch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not saying that all films must have an uplifting moral about loving the other unconditionally \u2013 strife and conflict are the propellant for much art \u2013 but I disagree with producer Kevin Misher\u2019s assessment that \u201cdetailed discussions of antisemitism would have distracted\u201d from the film being a character-driven comedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were certainly characters in \u201cYou People.\u201d Comedy, I\u2019m not so sure about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n