Is ‘A Real Pain’ the Jewish Oscar film we’ve been waiting for?
The acclaimed film avoids the tropes and tragedies that have defined other Jewish Academy Award nominees
Benji (Kieran Culkin) and Dave (Jesse Eisenberg) in A Real Pain. Photo by Searchlight Pictures
By Olivia Haynie February 27, 2025
For the most part, this awards season’s Jewish stories are pretty typical of Hollywood – a stereotype-filled comedy in the form of Nobody Wants This; the star-studded Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown; The Brutalist, a devastating Holocaust tale. But there’s also a departure from the norm: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain.
The movie, which follows two cousins, Dave and Benji, on a Holocaust tour of Poland, differs from typical Oscar-nominated Holocaust films, which tend to be narratives from the view of victims. A Real Pain focuses on the third generation after the Holocaust and its relationship to inherited trauma. Contrary to Holocaust films like The Pianist, the film does not solely focus on Judaism as a traumatizing curse; instead, it exposes non-Jewish audiences to the beauty and comfort of Jewish traditions. The cousins don’t run from their heritage; they run toward it, seeking to find their grandmother’s old home and looking for signs of Jewish life in the former Jewish quarters of Poland. They lay stones on the doorstep of their grandmother’s apartment building, mirroring the tradition of laying rocks on headstones.
A Real Pain avoids the kitschy Jewish stereotypes that are so prevalent in mainstream comedies, such as Nobody Wants This, which presents Jewish women as neurotic, haughty, and unattractive.
So often comedic portrayals of Jewishness fall into one of two types: superiority humor or self-deprecating humor. Both rely on negative tropes about a particular ethnic group — whether it is superiority or self-deprecating is determined by who is telling the joke and who is hearing it. The superiority theory of humor was coined by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1655 book The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, in which he asserted that “laughter is nothing but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”
In self-deprecating humor, jokes are made about one’s own ethno-racial group, highlighting historically demeaning stereotypes or characteristics. In his book, Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America, scholar David Gillota argues that these sorts of jokes are often a “psychological defense mechanism.” Theoretically, they take the power of aggression away from the dominant group since the stereotypes are being used by the targeted group. These forms of humor are prevalent in Nobody Wants This, which features a Jewish basketball team called The Matzah Ballers, who are there so the audience can laugh at how physically inept Jews are.
The characters in A Real Pain aren’t perfect: Dave borders on neurotic and Benji’s unmoored life is somewhat tragic. But these traits are not their defining characteristics, nor are they exaggerated for laughs. Their legacy as descendants of Holocaust survivors does weigh on them: Dave struggles with how members of their generation, who seemingly have every luxury their grandparents didn’t, can struggle just to go a day without weed or anti-anxiety meds. But the grief is not shown in isolation from the beauty of Judaism, and, unlike in A Complete Unknown — where Dylan’s Jewish background gets mentioned once and is never revisited — it’s not a one-line write off.
This isn’t to minimize the value of Holocaust films, especially in an age in which revisions of Nazi history seem to run amok. And of course humor is important, too; one of my favorite comedies, Crazy-Ex Girlfriend, is full of self-deprecating jokes that also speak to me. Tova Feldshuh’s song “Where’s the Bathroom?” caricatures the neurotic Jewish woman, but it’s also catchy as hell and reminds me of my beloved late grandmother.
But I also want the bright parts of Jewish heritage, the beauty of our tradition, and the warmth of our community to be shown to the world. Movies and TV shows like Shtisel and Between the Temples achieve this but they have rarely attracted attention from non-Jews.
A Real Pain signals that may be changing.
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