By JJ Ledewitz, Arts and Culture Editor
Growing up in a semi-Yeshivish Jewish community, the media I could access — what I like to call “Jewish media” — was everywhere, and I loved it. There were musical audio dramas like When Zaidy Was Young and The Longest Pesach, which I listened to on repeat and whose songs I couldn’t get out of my head. There were book series like the Good Middos Pirates and The Word-Wise Adventures of Yisrael and Meir that I couldn’t stop reading and that have left an impact on me to this day. Best of all, there was Agent Emes, a Yeshivish equivalent to the Marvel movie series, that blew my young Jewish mind.
As I grew older, I put all of this away and fell in love with storytelling on a deeper level. Now that I could reach further than my community usually felt comfortable with, I sunk my teeth into all of the secular classics I could get my hands on, as almost everything out there in the secular world was new to me. I saw tropes, techniques, story structures and character arcs that I had seen in the Jewish media expanded upon and perfected. I saw new genres I didn’t know existed and writing and acting I didn’t think was possible.
Yet recently, as I’ve gotten into more modern secular media, I’ve started feeling this force pulling me back to the “Jewish media” of my youth. Why? I don’t know. It’s all kids stuff, it shouldn’t matter to me anymore. But I think it’s because I notice something missing from so much of the modern media of the secular world, something that drew me toward “Jewish media” all those years ago. It’s something that Jewish as well as older secular media have in common but that modern secular media lacks.
Passion.
Modern novels are not what they used to be. In my experience, they’re not as deep. Never as emotional or fully thought-out. Movies feel similar: the same thing, repeated dozens and dozens of times, with barely any emotional impact. Everything feels the same, while also feeling totally different from what it is supposed to be.
Over the past few years, I’ve developed a sort of addiction to sitcoms. The Office, How I Met Your Mother, Community, you name it. This summer, I made the decision to finally fill in my sitcom blind spot, and I watched the entirety of Friends. After this, I needed something to fill the void. I went from Abbott Elementary to A Man on the Inside to The Paper. But none of these newer sitcoms felt the same as the classics.
And that’s when it truly hit me. I ran to my younger sisters and asked to see the Jewish books they were reading. I scanned through them and saw that it was still there. That passion.
It became clear to me that, at some point, something changed in secular media, and the passion disappeared.
I don’t know how or when that happened, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because of greediness and a lack of care for the readers and viewers, and sometime between 2015 and 2020. “Jewish media” doesn’t have this problem. The passion is still burning. You can read one of these books, or watch one of these films, or listen to one of these audio dramas, and you can feel it.
I’m saying all of this because I think more Jews can access this passion if we try hard enough. Some are already out there, doing it, making stuff they really care about. Passion for what we care about — this is something hard-wired in our brains as Jews. We have an intrinsic feeling of belonging and an understanding that we’re all on this planet with the same goal in mind, the same God we pray to. Because of this, we feel a deep sense of togetherness, which boosts support for our honest passions.
Jewish creatives are special now. We have a passion that is dying out. So, please, create the next Jewish masterpiece. Teach the secular world a lesson or two about why passion matters.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of JJ Ledewitz