New Director Emma Seligman Plays With Modern Judaism in ‘Shiva Baby’

Screenshot from the ‘Shiva Baby’ trailer available on YouTube.

(REVIEW) Opening with the sounds of twinging strings, Emma Seligman’s “Shiva Baby” immediately takes hold of your nerves and wrings them, preparing you for the comedy nightmare that will be Danielle’s (Rachel Sennott’s) full day spent at a shiva — a post-burial gathering after a Jewish funeral.

“Shiva Baby” explores the complexities of contemporary Judaism in culture rather than religious practice. The story — set over the course of one day at a shiva, focuses on Danielle and her relationships: with her mother and father, who are deeply ingrained in Jewish culture, her ex-girlfriend and her sugar daddy. 

Her father and her sugar daddy’s unexpected previous connection seems built to give more socially conscious audiences extreme secondhand embarrassment. Each older woman in the community coming and grabbing Danielle’s cheeks to comment on her weight loss asking, “do you never eat?” twinges at the audience’s nerves, begging for a cringe — accompanying the sound of the stark minor chords of the haunting soundtrack. 

Danielle is a modern secular Jew and NYU gender studies major who is attempting to distance herself from the religion but is constantly pushed back into the cultural aspect — whether that be her identifying as a vegetarian surrendering to a bagel with lox or her accidentally breaking the ceremonial shiva decor and kissing the Torahs to appease God. 

The plot is quite unorthodox as a comedy that focuses on Danielle’s relationship with her sugar daddy, Max, who she finds out is married at the shiva. Her relationships with her family and friends in the Jewish community provide for a realistic experience of living in a modern culturally Jewish community. 

Because of the film’s traditionally scorned themes, the plotline does not appeal to an Orthodox audience — considering it is a depiction of modern secular Jews or people that identify as “culturally Jewish.” 

Danielle fits the stereotypical model of a modern liberal arts student (specifically NYU) that creates her major and is looking to find meaning in the world through exploratory means — namely her relationship with her sugar daddy. She seizes control in her life, not through an after-grad career, but instead through her entrance into the community surrounding the transactional nature of sexuality, and more specifically, sex as a means of power. 

Danielle is traditionally privileged in that her parents are entirely financially responsible for her. By standard means, Danielle doesn’t need to use sex transactionally but instead chooses to. 

Director Seligman, a bisexual, secular Jew from Brooklyn, capitalized on her own experience to cultivate the humor so prevalent in the film — whether that be in the irony of her father, Joel, played by Fred Melamed, holding the daughter of Danielle’s sugar daddy and his “shiksa princess” wife or Danielle’s mother, Debbie, played by Polly Draper, and her friendly yet hostile relationships with all of the older Jewish mothers at the shiva. 

Seligman was clear and intentional with her casting — enlisting actors that look like people you would see at an average Jewish family gathering in New York. Seligman made the conscious decision to include primarily Jewish representation in the film, considering it is not all so common in the media today — considering that John Hamm plays a Jewish man in “Keeping Up With the Joneses” and the majority of the cast of ABC’s “The Goldbergs”. 

Seligman is honest about the experience of identifying as Jewish but not sincerely practicing — knowing that it is essential to her identity but not as central as it was to her relatives generations ago. 

This gradual un-religiousness is not individual to Seligman’s, or Danielle’s, story. In 2014, Pew Research Center found that 62% of American Jews seldom or never have a frequency in prayer, scripture study or religious education, and 49% of American Jews say they attend services once or twice a month or less.

Both Danielle and her ex-girlfriend, Maya, played by Molly Gordon of “Booksmart”, subscribe to the religious community through their families’ events without outwardly saying that they dated to the entire community. Though it is assumed that only Maya’s mother and Danielle’s parents know about their serious relationship, much of the community knows that both Maya and Danielle were “experimenting” with their sexualities — demonstrating the growing liberalism of American Jews as a whole. The same Pew study in 2014 found that 81% of American Jews believe that homosexuality should be accepted within the community. Though, Danielle’s Jewish circle is not so forgiving about the idea of Danielle’s married sugar daddy, and frankly, neither is she. 

Seligman explores Danielle’s internal battle about control and power and how her upbringing affirms or denies her way of life as a contemporary bisexual Jewish woman experimenting with transactional sex work. The film delves into modern, non-religious morality and how a young woman comes of age among a highly concentrated Jewish community at a shiva behind twinging strings playing traditionally Yiddish melodies. Because, if not at a shiva in front of every family friend, lover, and family member, where else?

Mattie Townson is an editorial intern for Religion Unplugged and a journalism student at The King's College in New York City. She is the Managing Editor for her school’s magazine, The Empire State Tribune Magazine.