In the 1960s and 1970s, a memorable television commercial aired with the tagline, “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish Rye.” The ad featured people from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds enjoying Levy’s rye bread. The same line is appropriate for the new and very amusing film by David Robbins, “Bad Shabbos,” playing at the M.V. Film Center starting July 5.
“Shabbos” is the Yiddish word for “Shabbat,” from which we get the English word “Sabbath.” The word is commonly used among Ashkenazi Jews to refer to their time of rest from Friday night to Saturday night, typically spent with family. And a very dysfunctional family is at the heart of this story.
Appropriately, the film opens with two older Jewish men walking down a residential avenue on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One of the gentlemen is in the middle of telling a joke about a rabbi and his prize student, when out of the blue, bam, a body falls from the sky right in front
of them.
The film immediately jumps back two hours. We meet David (Jon Bass) and Meg (Meghan Leathers), a recently engaged interfaith couple heading to Shabbos dinner at David’s parents’ house. David is especially anxious because Meg’s parents from Wisconsin are coming to meet his family for the first time, and he worries that they will be unsettled by the religious aspects of the evening, not to mention his family’s rather cantankerous relationships. When Meg and David arrive at his parents’ building, they are greeted by Jordan (rapper Cliff (“Method Man”) Smith of the Wu-Tang Clan), a doorman well-versed in the family’s business. Jordan asks the couple about their nerves, and warmly reassures them that everything will be fine.
Upon entering the apartment, it’s immediately clear that all is not fine. David’s mother, Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick), a particularly nervous Nellie, clearly dislikes Meg, even though she is studying to convert to Judaism. For instance, when trying to make herself useful, Meg offers to cut the fruit that she and David brought, but she can’t possibly do so — or anything else — to Ellen’s satisfaction.
David’s father, Richard (David Paymer), is endearingly nerdy, going on about his new obsession with the Alexander body alignment technique. David’s angry, neurotic, high-strung younger brother Adam (Theo Taplitz) adds plenty of additional tension to the mix. David’s sister Abby and her disagreeable boyfriend Benjamin arrive soon after, adding another layer of bickering and
squirmy tension.
Almost immediately, disaster strikes in the form of an unexpected death, leaving the group to deal with a body just before Meg’s parents, Beth (Catherine Curtin) and John (John Bedford Lloyd), arrive. The evening devolves into a chaotic, entertaining farce. A seamless ensemble cast, witty dialogue, and antics are sure to please as the story unfolds, bringing us back full circle to the opening scene.
While it may be a bad Shabbos for this group, the comedy, which won the Audience Prize at the
2024 Tribeca Film Festival, makes for a good time.
“Bad Shabbos” plays starting July 5 at the M.V. Film Center. For information and tickets, visit
True story: When I was a young girl, for years my father drove me to Sunday school class at our synagogue half an hour away in Asbury Park. For only a few weeks a girl I knew joined us on these rides, attending Sunday religious classes with me. I knew she had a non-observant Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, and although I also assumed she wasn’t being raised as Jewish, I supposed her parents wanted to expose her to some Judaism. So one day after Passover had ended, we were in the car headed to Asbury and I asked Claudia if she’d eaten any bread during the Passover holiday. She replied that she had not, only “kosher bread”. “Oh, you mean ‘matzo’”, I corrected. “No” she said, “I ate Levy’s Jewish Rye”.
PS Shabbos is a Hebrew word. Shabbat is the Israeli Hebrew pronunciation. I was not taught modern Israeli Hebrew when I was learning my Hebrew alphabet a million years ago, so many Hebrew words with today’s T sound were pronounced with the S sound back when I learned them. It was an intended adjustment American synagogues made (probably in the 1960s?) so that modern Israeli Hebrew and American Hebrew could be the same. Shabbos became Shabbat. Yiddish is a mishmash of languages using words from German, Hebrew, English and other languages. (Not that I remember much of any of it anymore.)
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