Jonah Hill’s Latest Music Video Stars Jerry Seinfeld And Judaism — But No Women

Seinfeld, Hill, and Koenig Image by Forward Montage

By Jenny Singer March 15, 2019

This week, Ezra Koenig’s band Vampire Weekend released a music video directed by Jonah Hill, starring Jerry Seinfeld.

It’s a sentence that reads like a white-Jewish Madlibs, and the video, for the band’s new single “Sunflower,” has that sort of charm to it, like an Urban Outfitters helmed by a put-upon bar mitzvah party planner.

Hill, the actor-turned-auteur who has directed one other music video as well as the 2018 indie feature film, “Mid90s,” sets the enigmatic ditty against a sepia-soaked vision of the Upper West Side, as it once was (it wasn’t.)

We see bandleader Koenig and guest guitarist Steve Lacy bopping around iconic local eateries Zabar’s and Barney Greengrass, eventually joined by a wizened Jerry Seinfeld and various male employees and passersby. It’s world of simple, small pleasures: baseball caps and coffee cups, bicycles and blocks of cheese, salmon and sturgeon and Seinfeld and sunflowers. There are still places where a man can be a man and a Jew can be a Jew, the video seems to say. The finer things remain on the sun-dappled Upper West Side, providing that all women are replaced with smoked fish.

View this post on Instagram

Watch the new @vampireweekend @Steve.lacy MV for sunflower directed by @jonahhill I sit on the floor of @zabarsisny in the background for .1 sec but if u pause it on me I’m basically the star

A post shared by CAZZIE (@cazziedavid) on Mar 14, 2019 at 12:41pm PDT

Larry David’s daughter is in the background of one shot — that’s parity, baby!!!

The men lounge in the temples of Ashkenazi eating, larking around as only boys can and watching the funny-talking foreign man behind the counter working to please consummate Upper West Sider Jerry Seinfeld. Ah, sweet nostalgia for a time when foreigners knew their place and women stayed in the kitchen! (But, you know, not the Zabar’s or Greengrass kitchens, where they might be paid.)

It’s too bad, because food preparation — the purview of women throughout history, though the culinary world is dominated by men — can be a democratizing force in Jewish spaces. And one of Koenig’s other singles, “Harmony Hall,” from this upcoming album Father of the Bride, handles Jewish anxiety during rising anti-Semitism with genius. If only the same could be said for Koenig and Hill’s view of Jewish culture under ideal circumstances.

The Orthodox get a bad rap, but at least when their women are erased from images, you can sometimes see the spaces they leave behind. In Jonah Hill and Ezra Koenig’s greatest fantasy of golden age New York Judaism, women are simply nonexistent.

Jenny Singer is the deputy life/features 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.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO