Midge and Esty: performing extraordinary Jewish womanhood in twenty-first century television

Abstract

ABSTRACT The two main characters in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017) and Unorthodox (2020), Midge and Esty, traverse, circumvent, and subvert norms of behaviour that their husbands, families, and communities ascribe to them as Jewish women. Both series examine the friction between public and private spheres in considering the role of a married wife and mother, using specifically the lens of performance, either through stand-up comedy or musical performance, to establish Midge and Esty as extraordinary or peculiar. By relying on the excuse of difference, the two shows undercut Midge and Esty’s delineation of their own paths, employing them as examples of noncompliant behaviour. In staging performance as an act of rebellion tied to a woman’s right to self-expression, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Unorthodox contradict their ostensibly progressive embrace of modern, secular Jewish womanhood and ultimately encourage more traditional female roles. Examining these two contemporary series in tandem offers us an opportunity to consider and understand how, as film scholar Nathan Abrams asks regarding the development of news Jews and Jewesses in cinema, new trajectories of character development centred on the portrayal of Jewish women continue to emerge and to be articulated in the twenty-first century.