Sasson Gabai reprises his role as Nuchem, who runs grifts on grieving widows. Courtesy of Izzy

By Mira Fox March 5, 2025

A Haredi Jew, dressed in a black hat and coat with long payot, dangles a diamond necklace in front of his strikingly bulbous nose; he’s telling a grieving widow that her recently deceased husband had commissioned the jewels for her as an uncharacteristically generous gift. Only he died before he could pay and now she needs to fork up the cash, right here, at her husband’s shiva. The whole thing is a lie — her husband is too stingy to have done such a thing — but she’s overcome with emotion and agrees.

The image of an Orthodox Jew swindling a widow sounds straight out of a piece of Nazi propaganda, or perhaps something dreamt up by more modern antisemites online. In fact, it’s a scene from the first episode of Kugel, the follow-up to the sleeper hit Shtisel. Where the original Israeli series drew rich portraits of each member of the eponymous family through their lives in the cloistered Haredi neighborhoods of Jerusalem, Kugel shifts its focus to a different branch of the family, living in Antwerp where observant Jews dominate the city’s famed diamond exchange.

A prequel of sorts, Kugel follows the Belgian branch of the Shitsel family. They’re led by Nuchem, the bulbous-nosed swindler, who creator Yehonatan Indursky described as a “holy charlatan” in an interview with The New York Times. (Devoted Shtisel fans may remember Nuchem and his daughter, Libbi, from the original; Libbi ends up marrying the protagonist, Akiva, a misunderstood painter who can’t quite tear himself from his religious community even as he grates against its strictures.)

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Indursky excels at slow, carefully-drawn portraits of the Haredi community, and Kugel is still full of lingering glances, internal jockeying for prestige in an insular community, and shidduch — or matchmaking — politics.

Shtisel focused on highlighting the tension between the constrictions of Orthodox Judaism and its spiritual beauty. Most of the show’s three seasons focus on Akiva’s vacillation between pursuing his heart’s desire — art — and staying true to his community. Kugel on the other hand, largely removes, or at least ignores, the exoticism of the Haredi world.

To be clear, Kugel is full of religious detail. Each character mutters a blessing over every bite of food, of which there are many. (The show’s name is apt; eating kugel plays a central role.) They never fail to kiss the mezuzah even in passing scenes. When a character is woken by an early-morning phone call, he ritually washes his hands and rushes through the “modeh ani” prayer before answering.

Yet Kugel doesn’t make a fuss over any of these moments. It doesn’t stop to explain a prayer or highlight the inconveniences they sometimes pose. They’re just part of the characters’ lives, and there’s plenty of freedom still to be had.

After Libbi stops to talk to a suitor on the street and recounts the conversation to her father, he jokes, “Remind me: Are we still Haredi?” But he also compliments her on her boldness. When she gets her short stories published by a local Orthodox paper, no one scolds her for stepping outside a woman’s role — though the publication does scoff at paying her, at first — and she’s applauded for her talent. Even though there are, of course, norms that limit each character, the focus is not on repression, as in other Haredi stories like Unorthodox, but on the freedom that exists in between the rules.

In a way, the contrast between the two shows mirrors creator Indursky’s own arc. Raised Haredi, he left the religious world because of the limitations it put on art; he was secular when he wrote Shtisel. He has since returned to Orthodoxy, and it is once again the water he swims in.

Perhaps that is why he doesn’t see the danger in creating a character like Nuchem, an antisemite’s everyman, or every-Jew at least. Since he is a rather unsuccessful gem merchant, he supplements his income by convincing tearful widows still sitting shiva that their husbands had commissioned an expensive gift for them, if these women wouldn’t mind ponying up for a final token. He doggedly goes from shiva to shiva to repeat the grift; meanwhile, we never see him honestly sell a single gem.

There’s an interesting moral philosophy at play here: Nuchem argues at points that he is giving great comfort to these women, even when it is for his own benefit; they are comforted in their grief by the idea that their husbands bought them something so nice. The idea of good existing even amid deceit parallels much of Shtisel’s take on the balance between Haredi repression and spiritual depth.

On the other hand, not only does Nuchem come off as a near photograph of the “happy merchant: — perhaps the most famous of antisemitic caricatures — but the deceased husbands are implied to be stingy and uncaring as well, hence their wives’ surprise over the jewelry. Other exchanges, such as a prestige battle about who merits membership at an exclusive luxury sauna, also imply that the community’s values rest entirely on money and that Judaism is a religion of avarice.

Yet were the characters not Haredi, none of this would be a problem. Kugel would be a richly-drawn show about moral ambiguity and families in an insular community. Instead of seeing greediness in Nuchem’s scams, we might empathize with his struggle to get out of debt by any means possible. Imagine the show set in a small town in Middle America, where everyone knows each other and they’re all just trying to get by given limited resources. Perhaps people would complain about the show’s slow pace — while Kugel is a bit more plot-driven than Shtisel, it’s still a show of characters not events — but they would extol its artfulness and tough questions.

Still, we live in a world of increasing antisemitism. A show made by a Haredi man about the Haredim is, even in Israel where it premiered, an ambassador of sorts for the Orthodox; people who see it will assume it’s an accurate portrayal of a world they can’t step into, just as they did with Unorthodox and Shtisel before it.

And perhaps it is; after all, Haredi Jews are people just like anyone else, with imperfections. There are upstanding mensches, and there are Nuchems. After all, isn’t expecting perfection a kind of dehumanization, too?

Kugel is now streaming on Izzy.

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