Incorporating Popular Culture in Personal Reflection:
Rediscovering the Deep Jewishness of Northern Exposure
I’m rewatching Northern Exposure. I say I’m doing it for the book. I am working on an essay about watching it when it originally aired in the first half of the 1990s, a time in which the main character—Dr. Joel Fleischman—was Jewish in a way I wasn’t used to seeing in mainstream media. And I will certainly include that essay in the book, but as with a lot of what I write, the question of whether I’m doing it to write about it or writing about it to justify doing it is an open and probably unanswerable one.
I think there is a valid criticism that the early episodes play a little heavily on stereotypes (but I’d argue that they are ingroup stereotypes… the kind that are often prefaced with the phrase “Jews don’t…” and end in something that, really, people who live in cities don’t do). But as the show goes on, it takes great pains to push back against the very tropes it relied on to build this character.
Perhaps my favorite episode is Kaddish for Uncle Manny. It’s twin storylines are almost targeted to my interests; in the first, Fleischman needs to find nine other Jews so he can form a minyan, and the whole town forms essentially an outreach committee to track down Alaska’s Jews. They find an assortment of folks whose Jewishness is indisputable, but who so shake the stereotypes Joel himself has about what it means to be Jewish that his discomfiture and disbelief eventually derail the process. (I’m pretty sure the writers intended us not to see this as derailment, but as his realizing who his real community had been all along… but once you put art out into the world, the audience gets to make of it what they will.) By happenstance, the b-plot is about some men with a grudge against the local DJ, who is from Wheeling, WV, drive up to settle the score. They, too, start out as stereotypes and quickly become more complex, interesting characters.
It’s tricky writing an essay that centers on a piece of popular culture that’s been out of circulation for a couple of decades. I have to assume many readers will have never heard of it, and others will only vaguely remember it. But I also suspect that I’m not the only Jewish person with whom the show resonated, and that part of my readership will share the joy of re-experiencing the show with me.
How have you, friends, found ways to include popular culture artifacts—particularly ones out of the current era—in your work that includes all members of your readership in your writing? I worry that if I go too much into detail, explaining why the show mattered to me (as much as any show can, of course, which is less than any real life thing), I’ll alienate the people who do remember it, but that without enough background, people who have never seen the show will be lost. I’d love your tips for working around this!
I loved that episode. The scene where Joel asks someone to recite the Shema to prove their Jewish was perfect.