Jill Soloway Of ‘Transparent’ Wants To ‘Reclaim’ The Word Zionism

Jill Soloway Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer November 12, 2018

You can love Israel and want it to exist without loving Israel’s current government or every aspect of Israeli society.

That’s the radical (or not) message Jill Soloway, creator of the watershed Jewish family drama “Transparent,” is spreading.

Soloway, the auteur behind the four seasons of Amazon Prime’s “Transparent” and the network’s short-lived “I Love Dick,” told Advocate magazine, “I think you can have dreams for the Israel that you imagine without giving any credence to the way that Israel is being run right now.”

For a person like Soloway — a gender non-binary artist responsible for perhaps the most nuanced mainstream portrayal of gender issues and family dynamics ever — warmly embracing Israel is almost unheard of. “It’s too dangerous right now to use words like Zionism,” Soloway lamented to Advocate.

In fact, the fourth season of “Transparent” is a tender, audacious interrogation of Israel’s role in the Jewish-American imagination and in the liberal Palestinian imagination. Despite the controversy of “Transparent” anchor Jeffrey Tambor’s sudden firing from the show after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, if the fifth season is produced, one storyline is likely to continue on in Israel and the West Bank.

Soloway’s vision for the Jewish state is Herzl-like. The artist believes in “reclaiming the word Zionism and not having it be about the current state of Israel, which is patriarchal and militarized. Instead, this other dream of Israel would be about love and peace.”

Listen — nobody would have guessed a show about a hyper-Jewish family whose patriarch comes out as transgender, created by a gender non-binary person, starring mostly small names, would be a massive hit. But it was. And Soloway’s dreams don’t stop there. “Sometimes I have these ideas like, ‘Wow, Trump, who hosted a reality show, dreamed about being president and then became president,’” the artist said. “I hope that can happen for my dream. You know, like being chief rabbi of Israel.”

If you will it — or at least write a really good dramedy about it — it is no dream.

Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO