“She had style, she had flair”: Jewish Womanhood in The Nanny and Shiva Baby

As a kid, my connection to Judaism was tentative. It was a menorah next to the Christmas tree, lopsided matzah balls and kugel topped with Frosted Flakes. I mostly associated it with the loud, affectionate, unabashed women around me, but that’s not how pop culture wanted me to see it. According to film and television, modern Judaism was either gawky boys stumbling through Torah portions, or neurotic men who substitute therapy for romantic relationships (AKA my type). I didn’t think on-screen portrayals of Jewishness could be anything more, or that I wanted them to be, until I found The Nanny. 

I would stay up late to watch Nick at Nite reruns of the show until my eyes felt like those Jell-O cakes that 1950s housewives invented to destroy horniness once and for all. The ‘90s sitcom, The Nanny, followed Fran Fine (Fran Drescher), a fashionable cosmetics saleswoman from Queens after she’s hired as nanny for a widowed Broadway producer's three children. The opening theme is the greatest musical achievement of any century and this has been fact-checked for accuracy.

Fran’s Jewishness was familiar; she worshipped Barbra Streisand and consolidated meat platters at parties. She was as devoted to raising the children as she was to securing a soulmate and descending the stairs in designer ball gowns (Fran is, as they say, the blueprint). My brain short-circuited trying to reconcile her big, curly, frizzy updos with magazine headlines that told me having straight hair would make boys want to kiss me.

Growing up in the community I did, it only occurred to me later that not every woman was some version of Fran (read: I thought a WASP was just a mean bumblebee). This became clear when I dated a man whose family spoke to one another as if they were strangers with shared fluency in the language of “Bible verse.” Meanwhile, I would describe my weekly yeast infection to my mom with a level of detail usually reserved for a graduate thesis. English teachers across America are calling this “juxtaposition.” 

Maybe it was because I wasn’t searching for it, but I hadn’t felt another connection to an onscreen portrayal of Judaism until I watched Shiva Baby. The film, directed by Emma Seligman and based on her 2018 short film of the same name, follows Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a queer college student forced to attend a shiva with her parents, ex-girlfriend and sugar daddy. Danielle spends much of the runtime avoiding a run-in with her sugar daddy’s “shiksa princess” wife (Dianna Agron) and screaming baby. It’s claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing and nightmarish, but watching it felt less like being stuck in an elevator with your worst co-worker and more like a hug you didn’t know you needed. 

It was cathartic (and, dare I say, hashtag relatable) to see a young woman confront anxieties over her Jewish identity and her place in the world. I recognized the hushed conversations and critical smirks that meant to highlight how Judaism informs others’ expectations of Danielle’s future. And Danielle’s relationship with her ex brings up how bisexuality fits into those expectations. 

Shiva Baby came to me just as I was dealing with anxiety over that thing called the pandemic and my understanding of how my religion fit into it. If I actually came to any conclusions then I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be too busy praying and being chaste, but it was nice to consider for a minute.

One thing that drew me to both The Nanny and Shiva Baby was how the characters embrace womanhood. Fran juggles work, dating and child-rearing. Danielle seeks validation and self worth through sex. But the invisible string (Folklore hive, rise) linking the two is how each portrayal is laced with the anxiety of coming to terms with Jewish womanhood. That means, for example, dodging queries about your love life or being weighed up against your mom’s best friend’s cousin’s daughter, a Harvard PhD student who gives CPR to stray animals in her spare time. It also means reconciling your vision for your life with the one that’s predetermined for you and separating the traditions that mean something to you from those that don’t. 
I was mostly attracted to the anxious underbelly of each portrayal: the metaphorical bobby pins buoying Fran’s high hair, the rotten lox on Danielle’s bagel.It’s like that scene in American Hustle where Jennifer Lawrence, in a Long Island accent so bad that it’s an affront to my very existence, describes the smell of her nail polish. It’s “perfumey, but there’s also something rotten,” she says, “and, I know that sounds crazy, but I can’t get enough of it.”