Mohammed Amer speaks about his Netflix series in Houston, 2022. Photo by Getty Images

If Mo Najjad and Tevye the Milkman ever met, they’d probably have a lot to talk about.

Mo, the beleaguered Palestinian asylum seeker and hero of the eponymous Netflix comedy series, is loosely based on the life of the show’s co-creator and star, Mo Amer. Tevye, as you undoubtedly know, is loosely based on the life of the whole Jewish collective unconscious. Still, the two men have much more in common than just being semi-fictional.

Picture it: Tevye and his cow, Mo and his bottle of olive oil, bump into each other on a dusty road. At twilight maybe. They’re both weary, so they take a seat on a nearby log. They’re both sociable, gregarious fellows, so their conversation flows freely, as it should between brothers.

Tevye tells Mo about life with no rights under the Tsar, about the Cossacks storming Hodl’s wedding, about trying to hold on to sacred traditions in a changing world. Eventually he gets to the worst part: the day his whole community is forced to leave their home in Anatevka.

Mo opens up about his own family’s flight from Palestine, and after that, Kuwait. Maybe he drops a few hints about what Tevye can expect in America: the hostility from the locals, the odd jobs, the exhaustion of pleading with stone-faced immigration officials, the homesickness that never leaves you. He warns Tevye that in the future, it might be Tevye’s own people who drive Moe’s family off their land.

Maybe they fall silent as Tevye takes that last bit in, listening while the Fiddler plays something especially mournful from a nearby rooftop.

You and I, stuck out here in the real world, listen with them, and think about what’s coming for the pair. For Tevye, the near-destruction of the Jewish community, the elimination of almost every Anatevka in Russia and Eastern Europe.

As for Mo, we don’t know; his screen goes black on Oct 6, 2023.

Doykait on the Border

That’s not a spoiler, I promise. In interviews promoting this second and apparently final season, Amer has spoken about how he and his writers quickly realized that it would be impossible to play catch-up with the unfolding crisis, so they decided to keep the story grounded in 2022, and build their narrative around the months leading up to the attacks.

So Season 2 finds Mo stuck in Mexico City, after his disastrous attempt to recover a truckload of stolen olive trees has stranded him on the wrong side of the border. His new life isn’t that much different from his old one: He’s found community, but he’s still scrambling to make a living, selling falafel tacos from a street cart and working part time as a Lucha Libre wrestler, waiting desperately for his lawyer to find a way to get him home, and recording heartfelt voice messages — that he doesn’t send — to his girlfriend Teresa.

A chance encounter with the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico (and his fantastically creepy wife) almost saves the day, but Mo blows his chance when he refuses to accept the description of Israel’s colonization of Palestine as a “conflict.” Desperate, he then ignores his lawyer’s advice, tries to cross the Rio Grande with a coyote, gets caught, and lands in ICE detention, at the mercy of a curt, fed-up guard who nicknames him “Al Qaeda.”

In the grim, packed holding pen, Mo connects with other detainees — one who doesn’t speak but only meows like a cat, another who has landed here after a harrowing journey through the Darien Gap. The scene doesn’t detract from Mo’s story but enriches it: Mo is an exercise in creative doykait, grounded in the specifics of the Palestinian experience but never forgetting solidarity with other refugees and immigrants, documented or otherwise.

Mo finally makes it home, only to learn that Teresa has started dating an Israeli-American chef (“This is emotional terrorism” he wails). Soon, convinced that the new beau has stolen not just his girl but also his idea to sell falafel tacos, Mo storms into his rival’s restaurant to confront him, wearing his Immigration Court-mandated ankle bracelet, and launches into a tirade about Israel’s appropriation of Palestinian food, and everything it symbolizes. A diner’s confusion between hummus and Hamas leads to a viral video and even more trouble, for both Mo and his family.

The gag works. It also resonates spookily with what has changed for Palestinians since Season 1 — if not for Mo Najjad, then certainly for Mo Amer.  Because while Amer seems to be doing much better positioned than his hapless alter-ego, with his citizenship, his fame, his Netflix platform, he’s also been working in a breathtaking position of precarity: trying to tell a Palestinian story, in a country that’s arming and funding the decimation of the Palestinian population, working in an industry that stifles dissent on Israel, for a streaming platform that has pulled almost all of its Palestinian content from its catalog).

The universe of the show may be the recent past, but Amer never lets us forget the present. When Mo’s mother obsesses over videos of soldier and settler attacks on the West Bank, we remember Gaza. The writers even pull what may be sitcom history’s first successful meta-joke about who is allowed to use the word “genocide.” That’s not Fiddler on the Roof, it’s Fiddler on the Roof Parkour.

Still, for most of the season there’s not much to offend even the touchiest of pro-Israel sensibilities. Even those heartrending family conversations soothe us into believing this is the kind of family series liberal Americans can get behind — an intimate universal family drama, a tender story that needs to be told, a reminder that immigrants have dreams too, a timely story of compassion and resilience. You know, the things we like to say.

But Amer is first and foremost a stand-up comic, and a master of the long set-up. For the last episode, he moves the action to Burin, his family village in the West Bank, and forces us to confront our complicity in the terrifying reality of life under occupation, then and now.

That was a spoiler, kind of, so I’ll stop now and just say that in the uncompromising final sequence — set to one of Nina Simone’s best-known battle hymns — Amer drops the jokes and plunges a knife in our heart. Or rather he pulls back to reveal that he’s made the entire series with a knife plunged in his own.

Mo’s shtetl

The final eight episodes of Mo dropped just five days into Trump’s shock and awe presidency, amidst a flurry of Executive Orders and migration sweeps that have spread terror throughout the country, and especially for Palestinians and for the undocumented population. On the very day the season premiered, Trump signed an Executive Order that would allow for sending  undocumented people to Guantanamo Bay, a decree that adds an extra sting to the Al Qaeda insults that Mo undergoes in captivity. And just a few days later, he signed another Executive Order that would have meant Mo could be deported for his outburst at the restaurant.

In a new era of even more impunity for attacks on the West Bank, settlers set fire to a resident’s olive trees in Burin. A week later, Marco Rubio discussed a potential deal to ship both undocumented immigrants and American citizens to the infamous 60,000 person supermax facilities in El Salvador. Under pressure from Trump, the Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum is sending thousands of National Guard troops to the southern side of the border. 

The world in which Mo Najjad strives for dignity and an elusive American dream is in Houston and Palestine, not a shtetl under the Tsar,  but it’s as endangered as any Anatevka. Amer has spoken publicly about hoping to make another season. May it be so — we need our Fiddlers now more than ever.

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