#Larry David may actually be one of the only public Jews left that really feels truly Core Twentian to me

[frances-kafka]

A giant chunk of my thing with Twentian Studies is that as a Jew, I am very, very alienated. Jews left an outsized mark on Twentian public life and pop culture and our cultural footprint is disappearing. We have no real place in the current Victorian order and they made that clear. But what's more is that Jewish culture changed drastically in my own lifetime and stopped being something I recognize. I feel like my kind of Jew is a thing that is basically dying, and I've been left here on this island by myself. I feel like one of the very, very youngest of this kind of Jew and like most of the core group alive are Boomers. People love our culture but don't love US, and that can be said even of later generations of Jews. Public Jews of my generation are increasingly either deeply assimilated and rather de-fanged, or just more and more actually trad. There is a certain American Ashkenazi 20th century *thing* that died. You will never get another Blazing Saddles but it's not for the reason that internet blowhards think; it's not that it wouldn't be made. It's that another Mel Brooks will not exist, and would not be allowed to write it. Nobody who made anything you love, would ever be in a writer's room today. And when he is gone, he is gone.