Jewish cosmopolitans on our screens: The case of Unorthodox (Schrader, Winger 2020)

This article explores the relationship between cosmopolitanism, and secular and orthodox Jewish identities in recent Jewish film and television dramas with a focus on the Netflix series Unorthodox (Schrader 2020). It argues that Unorthodox presents a cosmopolitan image of Berlin and has Jews constitute an affirmative, symbolic and embodied presence in the multicultural city. The article demonstrates how this stands in contrast to historical negative equations of Jewishness with parasitical and rootless cosmopolitans for Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. In Unorthdox secular Judaism is equated with a positive form of cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, this is only once orthodoxy is left behind, and an enclosed Jewish ultra-Orthodox space comes to signify a negative counterpoint to Jewish cosmopolitanism.