My Happiest Moment as a Fannish Jew (Jewish Fan?)

[lomedet]

My squee for this was more intense than my squee for just about anything ever, and I wasn't even properly in fandom yet.

When it aired, the Sports Night episode April Is The Cruelest Month made my heart absolutely explode with joy, for the following reasons

Comments

[dafnagreer]

I love that SN ep as well, but my happiest fannish Jewish moment was years earlier, watching "Northern Exposure" and specifically the "Kaddish for Uncle Manny" episode in which Joel's friends are trying to round up Jews for him in Alaska. Joel is portrayed as a very typical New York Jew, the kind who doesn't think Judaism exists west of Pennsylvania, and so he skeptically asks this total big burly Alaskan logger type to say the Shema. And the logger guy does.

It made me happy both as a not-from-NY Jew myself, but also just because of the universality of it. Joel is not particularly observant, but he knows enough to ask the guy to say the Shema. And of course the guy knows it. It just felt very very right.

[mamadeb]

I seem to remember Joel rejecting the minyan his friends so laboriously found for him, saying it was the friends who counted.

[dafnagreer]

Yes, well, I'm not always a fan of how those plots turned out, but I'll cling to all the representations of American Jews living outside of the Northeast that I can get. :)

(Other than the folks in that episode and Willow, I can only think of Dharma and the Jewish family in "Relativity" but I'm sure there are others.)

[mamadeb]

Oh, absolutely - it was wonderful. Not only did they find these widely disparate Jews in unlikely situations - funny and true - but ALL of them were more than willing to stop what they were doing to do a mitzvah for a total stranger. :) I can't say enough for the people of Cicely or the men they found.

[lomedet]

*looks sheepish*

I've been to Roslyn, WA, several times, but I never managed to get in to Northern Exposure. That episode sounds *awesome* though - it's always sort of a miracle when the media remember that there are Jews outside of the Northeast U.S.