American culture these days has so many fault lines that it’s hard to know which ones will cause a true seismic shift. But last month, two Jewish artists offered two divergent visions of the life worth living that anyone curious about the state of our union ought to examine.
The better known artist was Seth Rogen, the actor whose previous forays into metaphysics included playing a foul-mouthed alien named Paul fleeing the U.S. army, a foul-mouthed sausage named Frank fleeing ravenous humans, and a foul-mouthed actor named Seth Rogen fleeing the demons who had finally arrived to punish mankind for its sins. In his latest film, An American Pickle, he plays Herschel Greenbaum, a dusty ditch-digger from the fictional shtetl of Schlupsk who flees the pogroms and comes to America in search of a better future for himself and his pregnant wife. He finds a job at a pickle factory, but is chased here, too, driven by a pack of wild rats into an enormous vat of pickles. There he slumbers, like a briny Rip Van Winkle, only to awaken a hundred years later, perfectly preserved by dill and salt, and stumble into modern-day Brooklyn.
