The Bupkes goes Hollywood: rebooting a liberal Zionist classic for better use
From the Hudson to the East River, Zohran Mamdani is giving hedge fund managers one hell of a shiver.
Don’t miss the exclusive trailer for our based-on-a-true-story minor motion picture about the rise of a NYC mayoral candidate who nobody except normal people wants!
If you weren’t raptured by Zionist occult circa 2008, you may have missed a major motion picture courtesy of Friends of AIPAC. Starring New Hampshire’s Second-Favorite Yid, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan was a smash hit among a minority of people with majoritarian desires.
Adam Sandler was the perfect choice to play Zohan — a magical Mossad superhero who leaves Israel for the true Holy Land of New York City, where he confronts his most formidable challenge yet: a midlife crisis and finally meeting Arabs he has to treat like people.
Perfect, because Sandler is most beloved for his Billboard hit sing-alongs, which reassured angsty Jewish American children throughout the 1990s and 2000s that the goy world around them was actually full of Jews
“just like you and me.”
Speaking of Chanukah, it’s never too early to start sock shopping — sales season is on now!
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, released on the 41st anniversary of the Six Day War and six months before Israel’s first major atrocity-ridden clobbering of Gaza since its 2005 “disengagement,” was a sort of capstone to this trajectory.
The movie offers up a seder plate’s worth of hasbara1, more Middle East tropes than you can shake a lulav2 at, and enough low-fat schmear of Liberal Zionist Imaginary convincing itself that democracy and equal rights for everyone are surely compatible with ethno-national supremacy, it would give even Leon Uris3 indigestion.
If you will it, it is no fairytale4. Just Hollywood schlock.
But worse than all that, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan simply isn’t very good. How many scenes of Moshe Dayans engaging in obscene acts with hummus can one take before screaming dayenu?
We have a story for that, too.
Ostensibly, the moral of the movie is that, one day, they shall beat their swords into salon shears and their spears into curling irons. At least below 34th Street. L’chaim!
We at The Bupkes, though, have a better story5 to tell. One that trades a trite Zohan for a compelling Zohran. One about an actual underdog fighting an actual adversary: the billionaire class determined to do anything to push him into Long Island Sound.
They say the original is always better than the remake, but in this case we disagree. If you think so, too, let us know. Your support — as a like, a share, a shoutout, a loaf of pumpernickel rye — is hardly bupkes.
Pro-Israel public affairs, aka propaganda.
Sandler is good, but Paul Newman is such a shayne punim.
For a trope reversal, check out this 2002 black comedy by Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman.