The violent, eerie plucking of a violin ushers in Emma Seligman’s breakout hit Shiva Baby; it’s a foreboding, ominous warning of things to come. The strings build and swell into a feverish cacophony, punctuated by the moaning of our main character: almost-college graduate and part-time sugar baby, Danielle (Rachel Sennott). The feeling is tense as she speeds through small talk with her sugar daddy, and a sense of dread descends upon this film, never easing up until the final frame. Danielle departs for a shiva — a Jewish wake — waving at other attendees as she walks toward her parents, unaware of the albatross hanging around her neck or the Twilight Zone episode that she’s about to walk into. The shiva is riddled with family members, old friends, elderly strangers, and acquaintances — a minefield of chaotic, particularly Jewish anxieties personified. While Danielle does well to field the prying questions about her past, present, and future, she is about to face an unimaginable fear: she spots her dad talking to her sugar daddy.
What follows is more than just a series of unfortunate events for our protagonist. As the story comes together — or falls apart — you become more and more unnerved and unprepared for what’s coming. What began as a short film for her senior thesis, Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby has evolved from student work to indie darling to mainstream success. The film is a brutally told story of young adulthood and tradition, a clashing of themes and ideologies that is not exclusively Jewish, but somehow is indisputably Jewish. Stories of Jewish women confronting their sexuality alongside their faith are not new. Yentl, The Way We Were, Crossing Delancey, and even Private Benjamin are notable examples. But no such film modernizes these concepts, or presents them in a more terrifying way, than Shiva Baby.
Raised religiously, but not so much culturally, Jewish, film and television were my ways of connecting to my Jewish identity. Jewish people have had a long-standing, albeit sometimes troubled, relationship with film and TV, which has worked toward establishing and dismantling our collective ideas of Judaism and Jewish life. From Fiddler on the Roof to Uncut Gems, stories surrounding Jewish characters have had a great impact on our ideas about Jews: both mythologizing and normalizing slices of Jewish life to audiences everywhere. My first glimpses into Jewish culture, beyond what I experienced during Sunday school or speaking with my grandfather, were Tommy Pickles’ mother and grandparents on Rugrats — in their casual but definitive representation that often featured yiddish references and entire episodes dedicated to the celebrations of Passover and Hanukkah. As Edward Delman notes in his 2016 Atlantic piece, “Rugrats also had a profound impact on the television that I sought out as I got older. I realized, as I aged out of children’s television, that I kept seeking shows that also offered affirmative models of American Jewish life.” While other kids’ shows might’ve made vague, sometimes stereotypical references to Jews, I had mostly been accustomed to Jewish references in the form of decidedly religious programs like VeggieTales. Observing casual, but undoubtedly Jewish characters formed my Jewish education just as much as Hebrew school and High Holy Days. Even still, I had yet to truly relate to any of these characters.
I searched for deeper, more personal narratives centering Jews. Everywhere I looked there were stories of young men and their bar mitzvahs, men and their mothers, men and their wives — very few pieces of art with the female perspective or the chutzpah that I craved. Aside from a handful of historical tales of Jewish women, including but certainly not limited to the impactful historical fiction exhibited in Inglourious Basterds, the vast majority of films that featured strong Jewish women belonged to the genre of romance. The Way We Were is immensely significant, as an incredibly headstrong Barbra Streisand navigates her relationship with an equally headstrong, but otherwise vanilla, gentile Robert Redford. Streisand’s Katie Morosky is almost defiantly Jewish, from her political activism to her frizzy hair, both factors ultimately becoming a point of contention in her relationship to the WASP-y male shiksa.
Then there’s the beloved Crossing Delancey, with Amy Irving’s reluctantly Jewish Izzy Grossman who even more reluctantly falls in love with Nice Jewish Boy Peter Riegart, aka the pickle man. Moving away from the heartbreaking ending of The Way We Were, Crossing Delancey presents a more heartwarming premise for our Nice Jewish Girl, one that takes Jewish disillusionment and the clashing of cultures into consideration without robbing us of a happily ever after. The same could be said for Gillian Robespierre’s abortion rom-com Obvious Child, as Jenny Slate’s Donna Stern falls in love with the goy-boy of her dreams, despite her worries that she will be “the menorah that burns his Christmas tree down.”
Love almost finds a way in the straight-person’s-gay-movie Kissing Jessica Stein, a film that attempts to tackle modern womanhood, modern Jewishness, and modern queerness while barely doing any of these topics justice. I won’t even get into the convoluted but, admittedly, iconic Nice Jewish Girl presence in The Heartbreak Kid, as Jeannie Berlin’s inspired performance deserves far more analysis and appreciation than a sentence could provide. Nice Jewish Girls clearly come in many forms, but I couldn’t help but wonder: is there any room for this archetype outside of romance?
Shiva Baby offers a different kind of Nice Jewish Girl narrative, one that still features meddling mothers, clever dialogue, and plenty of nosh, but minus a traditional Nice Jewish Girl marriage plot. Instead of being placed into a romantic dream, we are transported into a unique, Jewish nightmare — one that belongs among the lore of the dybbuk and the Golem. Danielle is not just a Nice Jewish Girl, she is the evolved version of her: a Nice Jewish Girl who is, remarkably, rightfully, bad. The film does well to not judge or chastise sugar babies as a phenomenon, but instead it shines a light on the reality of many young women who find power in their sexuality and in their independence. As a nice/bad Jewish girl myself, it’s always gratifying to see portrayals of Jewish Bad Girls, and Shiva Baby delivered her in the form of the sensational Rachel Sennott, who brought something nuanced and sympathetic to the complicated role of Danielle. She is an incredibly sexually-empowered character, even as we watch the foundation of her confidence crumble around her. Through Sennott’s masterful line delivery and physical comedy, we’re able to observe the layers of her complex spirit. Like many Nice Jewish Girls that came before her, Danielle is infantilized and fussed with mercilessly, only this time, the audience is privy to the details of her very mature proclivities — placing us more directly into this anxious environment.
Though Shiva Baby is more akin to a horror movie than a romantic comedy, there is an undeniable amount of charm and dedication to its characters. This allows us to connect with our Nice Jewish Girl more than ever. Throughout the shiva there is an increasingly torturous sense of claustrophobia, matched only by the one exhibited in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate, that is exemplified by the ensemble of Polly Draper, Fred Melamed, Jackie Hoffman, and real-life Nice Jewish Girl Dianna Agron. Molly Gordon’s Maya is the perfect frenemy, constantly providing both comfort and judgment as Danielle traipses through her odious odyssey. Maya and Danielle’s relationship also brings the Kissing Jessica Stein paradigm into modernity, providing us with a fully-realized queer love affair among the chaos of this film. Danielle is the amalgamation of all of the Nice Jewish Girls that came before her: the unyielding individuality of Katie Morosky, the bad luck of Donna Stern, the somewhat uptight idealism of Izzy Grossman and Jessica Stein, the unapologetic femininity of Judy Benjamin — all of these ingredients coming together to form a brilliant, layered character that seems fit for the ever-evolving Jewish, female perspective.
There is no shortage of sublime Jewish narratives in cinema — though few are as shpilke-inducing as Shiva Baby — but as the landscape of filmmaking advances and as the nature of anti-Semitism becomes more insidious, the need for compelling Jewish storytelling remains paramount. What I love most about being Jewish is also what I love most about film: while there is a dedication to tradition, there is also an openness to change and interpretation. Just like Babs wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I presume Emma Seligman’s work will not be either, but to me she’s a mensch for her contributions to the Nice Jewish Girl community. As a Jew who’s viewed plenty of Jewish stereotypes in film, my sense of humor is constantly at odds with my sense of justice. Shiva Baby perfectly encapsulates the somewhat jaded but never satiated perspective of a young Jewess of the twenty-first century without squandering her relationship to her faith, as it positions its sex appeal, its tension, and its comedic aptitude amid one of the most solemn, and somewhat confusing, of Jewish traditions. Just like the matriarchs of many a Jewish family, Nice Jewish Girls are the backbone of countless Jewish stories, and Shiva Baby presents us with one befitting the truly meshugana times we are currently living in. Voyeuristic, paranoid, and full of surprises, Shiva Baby is a perfectly piquant coming-of-age film — one that is sure to leave you feeling verklempt.
