Just as notable, though harder to notice, is what Indursky and Elon don’t show. You can almost smell it, too, in the food that the characters eat-omelettes, cholent, soft bricks of kugel, washed down with soda and the occasional tipple of whiskey-and in the cigarettes that the show’s patriarch and namesake, Shulem Shtisel (the great Dov Glickman), and his son Akiva (Michael Aloni) smoke by the pack. You can see the creators’ commitment to verisimilitude in the show’s settings-the crowded yeshiva halls and the small, modestly furnished apartments, where bookcases filled with brown volumes of the Talmud get pride of place-and you can hear it in the language, a mix of Yiddish and Yiddish-inflected Hebrew, punctuated with ritual blessings and original insults. Even after Lippe repents and returns to the fold, Ruchami can no more forgive her father than Karenin can forgive his wife-whom she describes to her brothers as a Jewish woman named Hannah, lest they let it slip that she has smuggled secular contraband into the house. Under the pretext of earning money abroad, Ruchami’s father, Lippe (Zohar Strauss), has abandoned the family, shaving off his beard and taking up with a shiksa in Argentina, while her mother, Giti (the quietly ferocious Neta Riskin), strains to keep the household together. In one scene, the spirited teen-ager Ruchami (Shira Haas) reads “Anna Karenina” aloud to her younger brothers. Instead of the glossy blur of nostalgia, he and his partner, Ori Elon, give us pointillistic specificity with its richly worked texture and deft, patient rhythm, the show delivers pleasures similar to those of an expansive nineteenth-century novel, and has similar stakes.
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Traditional Jewish life has been fodder for popular entertainment before, but, with all due respect to Tevye and company, “Shtisel” is no second coming of “Fiddler on the Roof.” (That would be a different TV tale of a hapless father who struggles to preserve custom against the encroachment of a rapidly changing society and the demands of his willful daughters: “Downton Abbey.”) Yehonatan Indursky, “Shtisel” ’s co-creator, grew up Haredi, and attended yeshiva before going to film school. A third season, produced in response to the passionate reception of the first two, has just been released, and it is as funny, moving, and humane as they were. In short, people loved this series, and now there is more of it to love. Observant Muslims said that they were glad to see a religious community depicted with such sensitivity a Norwegian Christian confessed that “Shtisel” made him long for the childhood he never had in Geula, the Jerusalem neighborhood where the show is set.
Then it was reported that Haredi viewers (the very phrase is something of an oxymoron) were also binge-watching the show. Such fans were surely responding, in part, to a bittersweet sense of shared heritage: there but for some ancestor who threw away his yarmulke go we. Newspapers around the globe covered “ ‘Shtisel’-mania,” and members of the tribe not normally inclined to piety reported that they had taken to kissing mezuzahs upon entering and leaving a room. On the Upper West Side, my parents were hooked. My phone lit up with messages from “Shtisel”-obsessed friends in Stockholm and Paris.
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When the series came to Netflix, at the end of 2018, secular Jews everywhere went crazy for it. Its characters are Haredi Jews, whom English speakers usually call “ultra-Orthodox,” and its raciest moment involves a woman trying to discourage a suitor by taking off her sheitel and revealing her graying hair.
The show, which débuted in Israel in 2013, has no nudity, no violence, and no dragons. Of all the unlikely runaway hits in the history of television, “Shtisel” must be near the top of the list.
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