
Daily Kickoff: Interview with Taffy Brodesser-Akner + Jewish groups pressure Amazon
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we talk to members of the incoming freshman class of Capitol Hill legislators about their recent wins, and interview writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner about the TV adaptation of her book Fleishman Is in Trouble. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Rhoda Smolow, Tevi Troy and Miriam Adelson.
Jewish leaders are calling on Amazon to remove the book series and 2018 film “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America” from its online marketplace, which they say contain tropes that “actively endanger Jewish safety here and now,” in an effort being spearheaded by the Anti-Defamation League.
The letter, obtained by Jewish Insider, expressed “how disturbed” the 19 signatories are at the series’ continued sales. Jewish Federations of North America CEO Eric Fingerhut, Hadassah’s Rhoda Smolow and Elan Carr, the former special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, are among those who signed the letter.
The film and book series were promoted on social media last month by Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving, who sidestepped questions about antisemitism amid growing pressure for him to distance himself from the post. The signatories note that “the antisemitic book and film shot to #1 on Amazon’s bestsellers list” after Irving’s social media post.
Two weeks ago, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and the Brooklyn Nets sent a letter to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, asking for the company to either remove the book and documentary or provide context for the content. Amazon said at the time it was working with the ADL to consider adding some sort of disclaimer to the film.
As of this morning, Amazon has still not affixed a disclaimer to the listing for either the book or film. Since Irving’s post, the film has received an additional 800 reviews, and is rated a 4.5 out of 5 stars on the site.
book to screen
Taffy Brodesser-Akner brings Toby Fleishman to TV

In the first episode of the new FX for Hulu series “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” the camera pans around a table at a diner. Around it sit familiar faces: Walt from “The Squid and the Whale,” Seth from “The O.C.” and Janis Ian from “Mean Girls,” and they are goofing around as they order sandwiches and pancakes. It only takes a minute to realize that it’s actually 2022, not the early aughts, and the people around the table are not the teenagers that were household names for the millennial set, but Toby Fleishman and his friends Libby and Seth (to be clear, not the same Seth that lived in Orange County). And they do feel like old friends — people known to each other and audiences for years, from the time they were teenagers to the present, when they are parents both on- and off-screen. “They are now people grappling with age, same as you who grew up with them,” Brodesser-Akner told Jewish Insider’s Melissa Weiss days before the show’s Nov. 17 premiere. “And that’s kind of what Fleishman is about, about whether or not you’re old.”
Midlife moments: The eight-episode series follows the trio as they navigate the quintessential challenges of middle age: when to buy a preteen their first cellphone, discovering a child has used the family computer to look at pornography, feeling disconnected from suburban family life, debating the right time to settle down, attempting dating for the first time in decades. The characters are not caricatures; though they inhabit a world of New York prestige and wealth, their struggles are relatable. The title character, Toby Fleishman, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is the first of the group to hit the life-cycle benchmarks. Though Libby narrates both the book and the series, Toby is the central character. Libby serves as a reliable narrator, her life more stable than that of either Toby — who is navigating online dating and single parenting while his children are on summer break — or Seth, a party boy reluctant to trade in late nights for stability.
Real talk: While Brodesser-Akner’s fiction — and even her profiles in the Times, which have taken her skydiving with actress Melissa McCarthy and to the set of the filming of a “Real Housewives” reunion — focuses on the extravagant and the elements of life that are beyond most people’s reach, the core of “Fleishman,” and of most of her work, highlights the challenges facing everyone at their core. The show, she said, “is something that strives to exist in realism. And realism is the only place where you can have all the factors that are affecting your life lead to an inevitable conclusion.”
Not niche: In the first minutes of the series, you are transported to Toby’s apartment, a bachelor pad with broken blinds in a building with grim, fluorescent-lit hallways. A mezuzah is posted outside his front door, but at no point does Toby draw attention to it. It’s one of several subtle references to the characters’ Jewish backgrounds — flashbacks to a family Shabbat dinner and preparations for Toby’s daughter’s upcoming bat mitzvah serve as vehicles to move the story forward, but don’t draw outsized attention. Brodesser-Akner is quick to point out that although the characters are Jewish, Fleishman is not a Jewish book. “I think about you know, The Corrections, right, or Crossroads, the Jonathan Franzen novels. Crossroads is literally about a youth minister, and nobody ever called it a Christian novel,” she explained. “And yet this is called a Jewish book. And to me, what that says, when people think that — even you, even me, even my mother, even people on the street, even the fact that you guys are interested in interviewing me — it says to me that…Jews, I always thought we had finally integrated into being American. And to me, these questions sort of indicate that we haven’t.”
Typecasting: A number of recent TV shows and films that center around Jewish characters have come under criticism for casting non-Jewish actors in leading roles. In “Fleishman,” three of the four central characters — whose friendship was cemented during a year abroad in Israel — are played by Jews. The decision, Brodesser-Akner pointed out, wasn’t intentional. “It’s such a complicated question, because I didn’t think about it. As an equal-opportunity employer, I extra did not ask anybody what their religion is,” she said. “But when I thought about who the right people were for this, that’s who there was. I don’t know what elements of them make them right for it. I’m not smart enough to know that. Like, I don’t know if it’s their genetics, it’s their cultural influences, I don’t know. I just know they were perfect for it, and I didn’t have to grapple with this question.”