Like many of their films, the Coen brothers' A Serious Man at once portrays a society dominated by men and calls into question what it is to be a man, especially but not exclusively a Jewish man. Indeed, while Larry Gopnik's wife is the source of much of his trouble, she, like her unmanageable daughter and the seductress-neighbor—the only women characters in the film—occupies minimal space in the narrative. But the role of the female, or the characteristics that differentiate men from women, occupy maximal space in the narrative: They are incorporated throughout the film in Gopnik's behaviors, in parodies of those behaviors, and in stereotypes of Jewish men, and non-Jewish men for that matter, that have a lengthy history in American television and film and in Western, Christian culture more generally. And so we find the central irony of A Serious Man, which is the presence of the female restricted to an indirect “male” presence that articulates the problem of male Jewish identity as it is construed and challenged in the context of American suburban life.

Ostensibly, the film hinges on the coming of age of a young man with the celebration of his bar mitzvah, the moment that marks the transition from boyhood to manhood in Jewish tradition and the age when a boy becomes responsible, both morally and religiously, for the obligations that are incumbent on all grown men in the Jewish faith. What happens, the film begs us to ask, when Jewish boys become men? While the boys in the film seem to be fairly conventional with their teenage malaise and disrespect toward their elders, the men surrounding them portray a much more complicated picture. How does Jewish identity and a traditionally patriarchal religion change when set in suburban, Midwestern America? The film thus sets up a series of important contrasts—the difference between youth and maturity; the difference between Jew and non-Jew; and most important for the present discussion, the transformation regarding masculine identity as it emerges across these categories. While the Coen brothers defy any definitive conclusions about Jewish male identity, they use issues of religion and gender to delineate and define moral identity; ultimately, the mix of male and female characteristics underscores just how vexed the issue of masculinity and Jewishness is in the world inhabited by these men and boys. As discussed here, Jewish masculinity in the film is undermined by a deep-seated ambivalence and anxiety that stretches from religious and cultural identity to professional ability, and autonomy to moral sensibility and action.

In some ways, Larry Gopnik is a conventional father and husband in the 1960s Midwestern suburban world he inhabits: He is the breadwinner of his family, a man who returns home in the evening to find his wife dressed up and dinner on the table. As head of the household, Larry takes responsibility for his troubled brother, pays the bills, fixes things around the house (climbing to the roof to improve the television reception, for example). But even while he engages in stereotypically masculine “head-of-household” actions, he both is ineffectual in accomplishing any goals and seems passive, powerless, and almost submissive. One need only recall the first encounter between Larry and his family, on his return from work, at the beginning of the film, to witness the “schlemiel side” of his character. On his arrival home, the family sits down at the dinner table; Larry suggests that they wait to eat until his brother, Arthur, comes to the table. His daughter sneeringly rejects any such rules of etiquette, already provoked, it should be added, by the fact that her uncle has taken over her favorite domain, the family bathroom. “Are you kidding!”Footnote ¹ she responds, as she digs into her meal, purposefully rejecting her father's mildly expressed suggestion. Everyone else follows suit, Larry included. Thus at the family table, he is displaced from acting as head by a child—and a female child at that. This displacement sets the stage for a series of events constituting Larry's complete displacement from the role of head of the household, events in which the women of the family control and define the direction that the family takes and the tenor of its interactions.

As the dinner conversation progresses, Larry wonders aloud why their neighbor, Mr. Brandt, is mowing part of their lawn. Once again, Larry is dismissed, this time by his wife, who silences him by asking, “Does that matter? . . . Is it important?”Footnote ² Larry's question in fact recognizes a point involving the property line that is of the utmost importance to Mr. Brandt; Mrs. Gopnik's dismissive response suggests that if the issue is unimportant to her, it must intrinsically be of little or no value. In effect, Larry as a man is undercut by the other personalities in the film (his daughter, his wife, and his neighbor). In their next step, the filmmakers establish Larry's obliviousness to interpersonal dynamics and the emotional state of his family. After the dinner meal, his wife reveals to Larry her romance with Sy Ableman and her wish for a divorce. Larry's failure to perceive his family's dysfunction, and his passive cluelessness in responding to the news of his wife's lover, combine with his ineffectual sputtering wonderment and failure to act or react in any meaningful way. That he is devoid of aggression, anger, or other typical and blatantly manly responses confirms the fact that despite some of the daily trappings of a conventional man of his times, emotionally, Larry Gopnik is portrayed as little more than a disempowered, emasculated wimp.

Larry's character plays into a familiar stereotype of the weak, even emasculated, Jewish man that has its roots in early Christian Europe and the diasporic space that Jews occupied as a politically disempowered and marginalized minority. This emasculation of Jewish men is regularly characterized by so-called typical female characteristics, such as passivity and weakness. Indeed, these representations often portray impotence, or even the absence of the phallus, to establish as dramatic a contrast as possible between the Jewish male and the masculine traits most valued by the dominant majority culture. Images of castration, for example, were often linked to revulsion for the Jewish rite of circumcision. Indeed, Freud argued that the Jewish bris was a “symbolic form of castration” and as a result, the castration complex was a central source of prejudice against Jews.Footnote ³ In this sense, even though the climax of the film is set with the celebration of Danny Gopnik's bar mitzvah, the events in the film that lead up to this celebration hearken back to the earlier ritual in a Jewish man's life, the bris, and the at-times Freudian anxiety accompanying it.

The suggestions of femininity and homosexuality that accompany images of the emasculated Jewish man have a long history in American visual culture as well. As Maurice Berger notes, “stereotypes of the unmanly, powerless Jew—sexist and anti-Semitic constructions designed to allay fears of Jewish intelligence, wealth, or political power—are also exemplified by Jewish male characters on television who hint at effeminacy or homosexuality.”Footnote ⁴ Indeed, this association of the Jewish male with effeminacy was not only an on-screen identity; many Jewish American actors suffered professionally because viewers understood Jewish men as “less than normatively masculine.”Footnote ⁵

The Coen brothers very consciously play on, and even parody, this long-rooted history in the development of a number of their characters. Perhaps most literally, the Hebrew school bully, Mike Fagle, embodies this stereotype, since the Yiddish meanings associated with his name undercut his toughness (although this does not stop Danny Gopnik from fearing him): Fagle (pronounced “faygel”), recalls the Yiddish word fageleh, which literally means “little bird” in Yiddish, and has come to mean “gay” as well. Other characters exhibit emasculation in their various forms of ineffectual behavior: The chairman of the physics department, with his shuffling walk and passive aggression about tenure, presents one example; Larry's divorce attorney, Don Milgram, who alludes bitterly to his (that is Don's) stagnant career, suggests yet another version.

The emasculation of these men is explored more centrally through the issue of health and the portrayal of the Jewish body. Sy Ableman, Fagle, and the lead lawyer Sol Schlutz are all overweight, playing into the stereotype of fatness as a Jewish malady associated with sexual impotence. As Sander Gilman writes, “The association between unmanliness (even in a god) and fat stems from the notion of the fat male body as not man enough. It is a body out of control.”Footnote ⁶ Food and overeating have often been associated with images of the Jew as corrupt, undisciplined, and obdurate, and sickness more generally became associated with the Jewish body: “the Jew's body came to represent all of the potential for disease and decay associated with the modern body of the fat boy.”Footnote ⁷

Larry Gopnik might not be overweight, but his body and health are the source of much attention and speculation in the film. The viewer's first image of him is in a physician's office room where he is undergoing a physical examination. The script states, “The doctor palpates Larry's midriff, digging his fingers into the hairy, baggy flesh.”Footnote ⁸ Larry is, even if not fat, the opposite of a toned athlete. Just as his state of undress emphasizes his vulnerability, the stage notes emphasize his lack of virility or toughness. And while the film centers on Larry's moral condition, the question mark hovering over his physical health is reignited at the end of the film, when he answers a phone call from his doctor, presumably bearing bad news, although what it is the viewer never finds out.

Larry's emasculation is further exaggerated by his juxtaposition to the film's non-Jewish male characters: a hyperbole of maleness is present in Larry's student Clive with his well-muscled physique and aggressive manner and by Mr. Brandt, the combative neighbor who exhibits a love of hunting and a disregard for “sissy” values like education. Clive's father is similarly aggressive when he approaches Larry. These three men are parodies, and that they are non-Jews is not surprising. Examples abound of both more and less recent Jewish authors who represent the goy as “crude, violent, macho, and hypermale”—a response, as Daniel Boyarin has claimed, to “the feminization of Jewish men by European Christian culture.”Footnote ⁹

That two of these men are Asian once again presses the issue of masculinity, since Asian men, like their Jewish counterparts, often fall prey to stereotypes of femininity and emasculation. All three images reflect the filmmakers' focus on and manipulation of stereotypes. On the one hand, the stereotype of the gun-wielding, baseball-throwing Mr. Brandt pushes the stereotype of a “real” American, whatever that might mean, to an extreme. On the other hand, the filmmakers invert assumptions of the Asian student as academically superior, or particularly talented in the sciences.Footnote ¹⁰ In this sense, the stereotypes of these non-Jewish men appear no different from those that the filmmakers create around their Jewish men: All are intended to ironize the notions that stereotypes depend on, to expose their humor and their absurdity.

The irony of difference among the stereotypes is furthered by the fact that Larry Gopnik, Gar Brandt, and Mr. Park have a central characteristic in common: They are all fathers of sons and their relationships with their sons are, to varying degrees, used to develop their respective characters. The pairing of the fathers and sons produces a mirror image and doubling effect of the initial parody. Mr. Brandt is almost always pictured with his pugnacious little boy, who dresses and behaves like a miniature version of his father. The father's disregard for education is set forth as an issue of family values and father–son bonding: When explaining why his son is not in school, Mr. Brandt tells Larry, “Took him out of school today. So he could hunt with his dad.”Footnote ¹¹ Mr. Park and his son Clive, albeit not always presented together, have a similarly bonded set of priorities. Both aggressively deny any wrongdoing in their attempts to bribe Larry, and both pursue a single goal—a passing grade for Clive. Indeed, in both families, the father is a more strident, more exaggerated—a larger—version of the son: Mr. Park not only supports the fact of the bribery, but explains his plan to sue Larry for defamation should Larry ever expose his son.

What does this suggest about the other father–son partnership of the film, that of Larry and Danny? The two rarely spend time together, and their relationship is marked by fracture and noncommunication. Danny is consumed with the media outlets of his 1960s adolescence, either television or music, and the lengthiest conversation he has with his father is the “emergency” phone call he makes to him, at the moment when Larry is at a lawyer's office. Believing the boy to be in trouble, the secretary transfers the call and Larry rushes to answer, only to discover his son is calling because the television antenna is not functioning properly. Thus, while the father–son relationships portrayed by the Parks and Brandts reflect an exaggeratedly unified front, a unity whose value Larry questions in his conversations with them, Larry's dysfunction, his inability to connect with anyone, is illustrated here by the lack of a relationship with his own son as well.

The other notable distinction among these three fathers is that while little, if anything, redeems the figures of the Park men and Mr. Brandt, the moral questions that Larry asks suggest an inner life, a spiritual struggle that eludes the other fathers. That is, the qualities that define Larry as unmanly, his vulnerability, his search for meaning—in a word, the qualities that define his Jewishness—are precisely the qualities that set him apart from his Christian counterparts. In this sense, the emasculation of Gopnik does not need to not be viewed as entirely negative: Larry's educational values, his desire to question, his search for meaning, might contribute to his emasculation, but such attributes reflect a positive aspect of his Jewish identity as well.Footnote ¹² Here too, the filmmakers' irony cannot go unnoted. That is, just as their stereotypes of Jewish and non-Jewish men create a metanarrative on the identity of these individuals, we see their irony at work as they reverse the negativity of emasculation into something positive.

Larry's moral identity is exhibited in very specific ways: When Clive laments his failing grade, Gopnik responds firmly: “Actions have consequences. Not just physics. Morally.” When Larry's brother defends his illegal gambling habit as something that doesn't hurt anybody, Larry immediately scolds: “That doesn't make it right!” Gopnik's willingness to distinguish right from wrong does not make him any more muscular. To the contrary, he refuses to aggressively litigate against his wife by accusing her of infidelity; instead, he grapples with whether he should pay for Sy's funeral, despite Sy's identity as his wife's lover. These painfully nonaggressive moments reinforce Larry's emasculated identity, but they simultaneously suggest a moral life that the other characters in the film lack, and the bar mitzvah that marks the climax of the film suggests their link to Jewish law. It is not just Larry's identity; it is his Jewish identity.

Park and Brandt offer an important point of contrast for other reasons as well. As Gopnik's neighbor, Brandt provides Gopnik with a vision of how a “normative” American life might look (whatever that actually means), just as he symbolizes a certain version and vision of American values. As an immigrant father, Park suggests another classic American story, and his litigious attitude is as much a commentary on American values as it is his own. Where does that leave Gopnik? Are American values his values? That Brandt seeks to move the property line and diminish the size of Larry's yard is a not-so-subtle suggestion of his desire to push Gopnik out—a nonverbal version of his racist treatment of Park. And here we must consider for a moment the setting of this diasporic story in the suburban Midwest.

American Jews began moving out to the suburbs following World War II, and by the time of this film's setting, 1967, suburban Jewish life had become well established. How to define Jewish identity and community in this new setting, however, was a separate issue, and the debates on the subject suggest an anxiety about the changes that suburbanization had on the diasporic identity of American Jews.Footnote ¹³ That is, if Brandt's character speaks to the image and values of the “majority culture,” what does this signify for Gopnik's identity and place in their shared suburban community? In some ways, Larry seems quite secure in his Jewish identity: He is unabashed when he mentions to the FBI agents that he is sitting shiva; the majority of the people he interacts with are Jewish; and he even raises his voice in protest when he learns that his daughter is saving money for a nose job. Despite the seemingly comfortable space Larry occupies in the community, however, there is a sense of the futility, paradoxical as it sounds, of a detached engagement with Judaism that suggests an anxiety regarding his suburban Jewish identity and its future (envisioned as it is through the bar mitzvah of his son). He is in his suburban way just as uncertain of his Jewish future as were the Jews of Eastern Europe, a life recalled in the film's prologue.

The disengagement Larry experiences within the Jewish community is reflected in his visits to two of his synagogue's rabbis, whom he meets in a desire to come to grips with his personal problems, specifically his looming divorce. Gopnik's career as a physics professor suggests a possible connection to his rabbis: They give concrete advice pertaining to this world, while he himself is an expert on the study of matter and its relation to the universe. And yet, even in discussing the specifics of Larry's divorce, Rabbi Scott provides little spiritual insight:

Neither spiritual nor empathetic, his character suggests a cynicism on the part of the filmmakers with regard to the evolution of spiritual leadership within the Jewish community. As a rabbi, Scott has a cultural connection to his Jewishness, but he seems ignorant of, or at least distant from, the religious aspects of Judaism, and is unable, at least initially, to even recognize the term Gett, the document by which a husband divorces his wife according to Jewish law. Instead, his suburban, Americanized persona has created a blandness that is reinforced by his diluted Jewish identity. The materialism of his world is summed up by the concreteness of his advice, as exemplified with his metaphor that compares a parking lot to a philosophy for living. Remember, he chides Larry, to see God in the world around you: “ . . . I mean the parking lot here. Not much to see. . . . But if you imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn't familiar with these . . . autos and such . . . somebody still with a capacity for wonder. . . .” With these words Rabbi Scott urges Larry to think of his current difficulties as an expression of God's will, and to remember that “things aren't so bad. Look at the parking lot, Larry. . . . Just look at that parking lot,” he gushes as he looks out the window and marvels at the most mundane of suburban structures, thus ending his spiritual advice to Larry with a comically nonsensical image void of any spiritual content.Footnote ¹⁵

Likewise, the second rabbi with whom Gopnik meets, Rabbi Nachtner, hardly fulfills the ideal of a spiritual leader and adviser. Nachtner does have an authority that his younger colleague lacks, and appears initially to have a spiritual resonance to match it. He tells a parable about a Jewish dentist who finds a secret message on one of his (non-Jewish) patients' teeth. But when asked the key question—what does it mean?—and what does it mean that Gopnik's life has been turned upside down, his responses have little spiritual or religious content. Like the dentist of the story, he counsels Gopnik on the practical, and refuses to lend or interpret meaning to the parable of the teeth. Do not fret about these events or signs, he urges. Get on with your life. Even his logic for helping others is more expedient than moral: “The teeth,” Rabbi Nachtner says, referring to the parable he has just narrated, “we don't know. A sign from Hashem, don't know. Helping others, couldn't hurt.”Footnote ¹⁶ Nachtner and Scott are defined by that which they lack—a sense of historical and religious connection to Jewish culture and ritual. They identify more with their suburban environs than with their Jewish heritage. That is not to say that traditional religion, the religion (and superstition) of the East European shtetl is the answer: The third rabbi of the congregation, a visual throwback to earlier times, Rabbi Marshak, remains completely inaccessible to Larry, suggesting that a return to the religion of his ancestors is not possible either.

The loss of a connection to a Jewish past and the struggle to connect to a Jewish present contribute to Larry's sense of alienation, the extent of which is exaggerated in a parody that typifies the filmmakers' approach to ethnic and gender identity, but also begs the viewer to reconsider its significance. This loss is thus itself symbolized, metaphorically, by the loss of the phallus that Larry exhibits specifically, but that seems endemic to the Jewish men in the film more generally. That is, it is another trope in the experience of loss that defines castration. As Kaja Silverman writes, “Physical castration consequently provides the form through which the subject is ideologically encouraged to live—or not to live—the loss of being, and all subsequent crises that reprise that loss.”Footnote ¹⁷ In A Serious Man, the emasculated male body of the Jew represents Jewish diasporic culture as a site that vacillates between assimilation and history, amnesia and memory. As Larry searches to understand his moral state, he suggests that the assumptions of the emasculated Jewish male can be rearticulated: Weakness or emasculation need not be conceived of as entirely negative. Nonetheless, his search reiterates the complexity of the relationship between the space he presently occupies and Jewish ritual and memory, both of which are central to his identity.Footnote ¹⁸

In this context, the bar mitzvah ceremony presents itself as a crucial mode of remembering and transmitting a male Jewish identity. As a father, Larry's Jewish identity is reaffirmed in his obvious and unmitigated pleasure at seeing his son reach this stage. As a husband, the event brings Larry and Judith together for one sole moment in the film. That is not to say that this unity of experience is perfect: Danny Gopnik's pot-induced haze challenges what memory and tradition mean to a thirteen-year-old boy, and the unity of shared experience between father and son remains similarly ambiguous. Danny performs his bar mitzvah duties surprisingly well, but his relationship with Larry never parallels the unity exhibited by the Brandt and Park sons with their fathers. Occurring during a ceremony that marks the passage into manhood in the Jewish tradition, the lack of an intimate connection between Danny and his father not only reiterates Larry's alienation but also suggests how challenging the transmission of values is between a Jewish father and son, and how powerful the forces of Larry's present condition, that is life in suburban, diasporic America, are in forming, maintaining, and passing on a Jewish male identity. Nevertheless, the scene suggests the filmmakers' view—and perhaps reflects on their own experience, given the autobiographical nature of the film—that the anxieties of the male Jewish experience, which Larry Gopnik articulates, can to some degree be answered through the performative process of remembering and reenacting.