Jordan Hoffman on 'A Serious Man': Coen brothers craft the Jewiest film of all
The Times of Israel Daily Briefing
The Times of Israel
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 May 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
Welcome to The Reel Schmooze with ToI film reviewer Jordan Hoffman and host Amanda Borschel-Dan, where we bring you all the entertainment news and film reviews a Jew can use.
This week, we learn that famed actress and chanteuse Barbra Streisand received an honorary Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Borschel-Dan, who is reading the artist's massive memoir, calls on all podcast fans to send in the names of their favorite Streisand films for a future episode.
We then turn to the monumentally Jewish movie, "A Serious Man," written, produced, edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen in 2009.
Set in 1967 Minnesota, the film focuses on the Gopnik family: father Larry, mother Judith, kids Danny and Sarah, and uncle Arthur. On the surface, the middle-class family appears to be merrily rolling along, anticipating Danny's approaching bar mitzvah. And then everything falls apart and it becomes a very funny retelling of the Book of Job.
However, before the movie takes off, the audience is treated to a quote from the great rabbinic sage Rashi and is shown a Yiddish-only shtetl ghost story short -- just... because.
Stay tuned for our duo's thoughts on the much-recommended Coen brothers' film, "A Serious Man."
The Reel Schmooze is produced by Ari Schlacht and can be found wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Times of Israel's The Real Shmooze, bringing you all the Jewish entertainment news and movie reviews a Jew can use. |
| 0:13.7 | I'm your host Amanda Borschell, Don from Jerusalem, joined by our movie Maven, Jordan Hoff Hoffman straight from New Jersey. |
| 0:23.1 | Hello, thank you for having me. |
| 0:25.2 | Thank you for the listeners. |
| 0:26.5 | Once again, it's great to be back. |
| 0:28.3 | We were off last week. |
| 0:29.8 | We had a week off, and I don't know if you did anything exciting during that week off. |
| 0:34.5 | I can't remember what I did, but I feel like it was exciting. |
| 0:38.3 | Yeah, I had a great staycation. |
| 0:40.8 | I visited many places in my wonderful Jewish homeland that I hadn't been to for quite a while. |
| 0:46.5 | Nice. |
| 0:46.8 | And I had a great time. |
| 0:48.1 | Yeah, friends and family. |
| 0:49.6 | You were saying that you were going to maybe try to check out Caesarea because there's |
| 0:53.6 | been some changes there since you were last there, try to check out Cizaria because there's been some changes |
| 0:54.4 | there since you were last there, you know, in the year 1,000 BC there were some changes. |
| 0:59.7 | But what were the new changes that you saw this time? |
| 1:02.4 | Well, actually, I hadn't been there for probably 12 years or so. |
| 1:05.6 | And the whole port area has been redeveloped and there's a big visitor center. |
| 1:12.7 | I was there with my son. My eldest son was out of the army for a few days and so we hung out together and had an amazing |
| 1:19.3 | meal on the port sea, you know, front view at a place called Chiqui Carlos. So they are not paying us, but it was an amazing pizza and probably the best salad I've |
| 1:32.5 | ever and the coffee to die for. |
... |
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