Television’s Most Ordinary, and Most Unusual, Orthodox Jew

Nov. 22 2021

In an episode of the short-lived science-fiction series Firefly, viewers are introduced to a character named Amnon, clad in the yarmulke and ritual fringes of an observant Jew. Amnon is a benevolent minor character who works at an interplanetary post office; no mention is made of his religion or ethnicity, and he never appears in subsequent episodes. As Yair Rosenberg has uncovered, the actor who played him—Al Pugliese, who died this summer at the age of seventy-four—was at the time deeply engaged in studying Judaism, so as to better understand the roots of Christianity. The subject remained a lifelong passion for Pugliese.

Rosenberg also asked the episode’s co-writer and director, Tim Minear, why he chose to insert a Jewish character, and found something far more unusual:

“We were trying to make the character more real,” he explained. “When you have someone who’s only there for a couple scenes, you want to find ways to make [him] seem more substantial.” By giving the galactic postal clerk a clear Jewish identity, the show gestured to a wider world beyond what was explicitly seen on screen. “We wanted it to feel like he had an existence outside of the frame.”

This answer sounds simple, but it’s actually quite unusual for mainstream television. Typically, whenever a show introduces a visibly Jewish character, it’s to make some point about his faith in service of the story. Too often, religious Jews are oddities whose strange practices serve as convenient plot devices. What makes Amnon remarkable, however, is that he is not remarkable. None of the characters in Firefly comments on his faith, because it is entirely unexceptional to them. In this universe, 500 years into the distant future, Jews are not a curiosity or a plot point or an endangered species, but simply a normal everyday presence.

Read more at Atlantic

More about: Orthodoxy, Science fiction, Television

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023