Why one actor threatened to boycott the Seinfeld circumcision episode
Actor Jason Alexander attends the 25th Annual Simply Shakespeare Benefit for the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles at The Broad Stage on December 8, 2015 in Santa Monica, California. Photo by Michael Tullberg/Getty Images
By Frederic J. Frommer October 13, 2023
Millions of Americans laughed at the depiction of the twitchy, ill-tempered mohel in the Seinfeld episode “The Bris,” which first aired 30 years this Saturday. Actor Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza, was not one of them.
In fact, Alexander revealed in a 2013 interview that the original script was even more over-the-top — so much so that he threatened to boycott the episode over what he considered to be an antisemitic portrayal of the mohel. He only dropped the threat after Seinfeld co-creator/executive producer Larry David agreed to “soften” it, even though Alexander still had a problem with the show that NBC wound up broadcasting on Oct. 14, 1993. He made the comment in a conversation with the Television Academy Foundation Interviews: An Oral History of Television.
“The version of it that came to the table, the character of the mohel was disgusting,” Alexander said in the interview, referring to the original script at the actors’ table read. “I think it remains disgusting in the show that we did.”
In “The Bris,” the mohel, played by actor Charles Levin, is cantankerous, combative and clearly hates his job – and babies. “Is the baby gonna cry like that?” he asks when he shows up to perform the baby’s circumcision. “Is that how the baby cries, with that loud, sustained, squealing cry? ‘Cause that could pose a problem. Do you have any control over your child? Because this would be the time to exercise it when baby is crying in that high-pitched, squealing tone that can drive you insane!”
When the bumbling mohel opens his bag, the instruments fall out, but he angrily waves off any help, yelling, “No! Don’t touch anything! Don’t touch a thing.” Then as picks up the items, he says sadly, “I could have been a kosher butcher like my brother. The money’s good. He’s got a union, with benefits. And cows don’t have families. You make a mistake with a cow, you move on with your life.”
Crossed a line
Alexander, who is Jewish (as is Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld), said in the interview that he’s usually game for jokes that poke fun of his people.
“You gotta go a long way to hit my Jew button,” he said. “I give you Jews are funny, and you can be really sacrilegious with me, and I’ll take every Jew joke you got, even the borderline offensive ones.” But he suggested that the topic of circumcision is already one that can make non-Jews uncomfortable.
“To a non-Jew, the whole practice of the circumcision, the bris, is mysterious and kind of distasteful,” he said. “And to present the figure of the mohel, the person who goes, ‘I’m gonna be the guy – my life’s work is going to be to remove the foreskin from the genitals of young Jewish boys, that’s what I devote my life to’ – is already a person of questionable character to the non-Jew. And to make one who is a child-hating, self-loathing, foul-mouthed incompetent, to me was antisemitic in a hurtful way.
“And I went to Larry, and I went, ‘I won’t be in this episode. This one you have to take me out of. I have to boycott this,’ and I said, ‘Listen’ – exactly what I said to you – ‘I’m up for every Jew joke you’ve got. This is an offense,’ and he didn’t see it at first.’ Then he said, ‘I’m gonna soften him, I’m gonna soften it.’”
Alexander didn’t specify what changes were made to the script. An attempt to set up an interview with him last week via email was unsuccessful. It does not appear that others involved in the making of the episode have publicly commented on concerns that it trafficked in antisemitism.
“I’m not proud of that episode – I’m not proud of that portrayal,” Alexander added. “And I don’t think it was a particularly good element in an otherwise pretty good episode.” (That last point is debatable – another storyline features Kramer telling anyone who will listen that there’s a “pigman” at the hospital where the baby was born – “half pig, half man.”)
A fraught topic
In his 2006 book, From Abraham to America: A History of Jewish Circumcision, Eric Kline Silverman highlights the mohel’s quip in the Seinfeld episode about how he could have become a butcher instead.
“Historically, in fact, anti-Semitic fantasies readily connected Jewish circumcision to butchery, torture, and murder,” the author writes, adding that a circumcision opponent once “sneered about ‘kosher cuts’ in an issue of The American Atheist.”
“Jewish circumcision jokes may evidence the internalization of anti-Semitism,” he writes. “Or, as I prefer it, these jokes express longstanding but largely unstated Jewish ambivalence toward the rite.”
In the episode’s bris scene, Jerry’s job is to hold the baby, but Kramer, an opponent of circumcision, snatches the baby away from the mohel. In the commotion that follows, the baby is returned to Jerry, as the mohel yells at the top of his lungs:
“People, people, compose yourselves! This is a bris! We are performing a bris here, not a burlesque show. This is not a school play! This is not a baggy pants farce! This is a bris. A sacred ancient ceremony, symbolizing the covenant between God and Abraham.” Then he shrugs and adds, “Or something.”
As the mohel is set to perform the procedure, George faints, explaining in the next scene, “It was very traumatic.” Meanwhile, the mohel slips, slicing Jerry’s finger instead. It’s a matter of debate about whether Jerry got cut because he flinched. At the hospital, he taunts the mohel as “butcher boy” and “Shakey the Mohel,” and the two men almost come to blows.
A career high
Levin, the actor who played the mohel, had a regular role in the TV show Alice in the 1980s, and also appeared in movies such as Annie Hall and This Is Spinal Tap. “But perhaps the role that brought Mr. Levin his greatest applause was the spastic mohel,” the New York Times wrote in a 2019 story about his death, at age 70.
“My dad was so over the top and ridiculous that he told me that Jerry Seinfeld fell out of a chair laughing at how ridiculous he was,” his son, Jesse Levin, told the paper. “Every bris that I go to now, every mohel compares himself to him. He is the team mascot for that profession.”
View Jason Alexander’s full interview with the Television Academy Foundation.
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