The Twilight of the Nebbishes
A Yiddish Archetype in the Age of #MeToo
Gimpel the Fool is a very loveable stock character. He’s endlessly kind, completely trusting – and, from the beginning, the people of Frampol take craven advantage of him. The practical jokes are endless – he’s told that the rabbi’s wife is in labor and school is canceled, that the tsar is visiting Frampol, that the Messiah has come and Gimpel’s risen father and mother are calling for him. And every time there’s a practical joke Gimpel falls for it. “Maybe something had happened. What did I stand to lose by looking,” Gimpel thinks to himself. The jokes continue well into adulthood and the last and nastiest one is to marry Gimpel off to the town prostitute – she goes on to have six children, all with men other than Gimpel, all of whom Gimpel takes care of dutifully and skillfully.
But there’s a trick. Gimpel is passive and good-natured but he is not really so innocent as he lets on. “To tell the truth I knew very well that nothing of the sort had happened,” he confides to the reader in his narration of the Messiah hoax. Not long after the death of his wife – her last words the confession of non-paternity of Gimpel’s children – Gimpel is visited by the ‘Evil One.’ The Evil One points out, persuasively, that the people of Frampol have done nothing but deceive Gimpel and that he would be well in his rights to deceive them in turn – and, as the town baker, he has the perfect means at his disposal, to piss in his dough and parcel that out to the people of Frampol. “In brief,” narrates Gimpel, “I allowed myself to be persuaded.” But after the bread has been kneaded and baked, Gimpel has a crisis of conscience, buries the loaves in the ground outside his shop, then gives all the money he has to his children, tells them to “forget that such a one as Gimpel ever existed” and sets out, he says, “into the world.”
Gimpel (he exists in legend form, but all the details quoted are from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1953 short story) is a classic nebbish, a Yiddish stock type meaning ‘person of no account.’ The Yiddish language is of course a versatile instrument for taxonomizing low-status types, and in her paper ‘The Nebbish In Popular Culture’ for The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Jennifer Caplan goes to great length to differentiate the ‘nebbish’ from kindred spirits – the ‘schnorrer,’ the ’schlimazel, the ‘schlemiel,’ the ‘nudnik,’ the ‘shnook’ – before concluding that the nebbish really is the lowest of the low, truest son of ‘the kingdom of the ineffectual.
’After Gimpel’s time, though, the nebbish goes on a curious and unexpected journey. As Caplan writes, “The nebbish began as a negative, often anti-Semitic stereotype, and evolved into an Everyman character with whom the audience can, and even wants to, identify.” Ostensibly, the nebbish remined low-status, but, as least common denominator, the nebbish is relatable, likeable, and, paradoxically, has a certain freedom and power – the nebbish’s long experience with humiliation results in a rare buoyancy and strength while the nebbish’s apparent harmlessness gives him an ability to speak usually-forbidden truths (which is all the more the case if the nebbish happens to be funny).
What I’m describing sounds like the apparatus of the clown, but the nebbish is a bit different – the clown occupies a fictitious realm in which its unending humiliations are, ultimately, in the spirit of play; the nebbish is embedded in reality and therefore has some capacity (whether that’s realized or not) of improving his fortunes – which, in turn, makes the nebbish’s ensuing failures that much more painful. An even more critical difference – and this wouldn’t be noticed for some time – is that, whereas the clown is assumed to be childlike and non-sexual, the nebbish has the sex drive of an adult (even if that drive is ignored or well-hidden). And, specifically, the sex drive of a man – if the clown is gender-neutral or, really, pre-gender, the nebbish, at least per Dr. Caplan, is inherently male. “Women who are treated in a nebbish-like way become tragic figures, not comic relief,” she writes.
All discussions of the nebbish in his American incarnation center on early Woody Allen, and there’s a very powerful moment in Annie Hall, which is the nebbish’s coming-of-age, Allen’s altar ego Alvy Singer sitting in an interview with a WASPy, hammy comedian, being asked to write material for him, and thinking to himself, “Jesus, this guy’s pathetic, I don’t know how much longer I can keep this smile on my face, if only I had the nerve to write my own jokes.” And cut to: Singer killing it in front of an audience of hip college students, with material about philosophy classes and Freudian analysis.
Portnoy’s Complaint, another seminal text in nebbishdom, is, as a whole, a sort of encyclopedia of the inner life of the nebbish – all his sexual neuroses, his envy, his insecurities – and then, very close to the end, Portnoy on a plane sees himself through the eyes of some passengers he’s been chatting with, as “a tall, good-looking, young Jewish lawyer,” who has an impressive job working for the city and is “single! a match for somebody’s daughter!” In other words, the nebbish soul is very much intact but the nebbish has, to external appearances, become respectable, successful, even – astonishingly enough – sexually appealing.
That trajectory is most obviously evident in Allen’s career. People I know moved to New York “trying to find Woody Allen.” Somebody I went to school with said that what she wanted when she grew up was “to be in a Woody Allen movie.” For a very long time – it’s worth remembering – there was no career in America that was as enviable, as steady or as creative, as Woody Allen’s.
And, of course, I don’t need to spell out what happened next. Actors in Allen’s films widely disavowed him – Elliot Page said that working with Allen was “the biggest regret of my career,” Timothée Chalamet, Selena Gomez, etc, donated their salaries from Allen’s films to charity. Not only is Roth pretty much canceled but his biographer is as well. And Bashevis Singer himself is on thin ice.
When Louis C.K. – a classic nebbish-made-the-big-time – was laid low in 2017, one of my first thoughts was of a scene in Louie where Louis stands on a subway platform and simultaneously watches a classical violinist and a homeless man bathing himself. And the idea there is that Louis – nicely-dressed, well-off, playing the role of good bourgeois giving pocket money to a classical musician – is, in truth, closer in spirit to the homeless guy: the nebbish soul never disappears entirely.
***
Such is the backstory of the nebbish. But recently, post-#MeToo, the nebbish has rematerialized – with a conspicuously different attitude towards sex, in a string of highly-successful works of art made by men who very self-consciously identify as low-status, like untouchable, like all-the-way-at-the-bottom-of-the-social-ladder.
I started to notice the phenomenon of the new nebbish while listening to Sleep With Me, Drew (“Scoots”) Ackerman’s podcast dedicated to ‘putting you to sleep.’ Sleep With Me is a unique kind of cultural artifact: the premise is that it’s so boring, the stories in it so pointless, so meandering, that you can’t help but doze off. And it works: I’m usually out in the first ten minutes, during the ads for products like Helix mattresses and AllForm weighted blankets, and don’t even get to the main event, which features topics like a frame-by-frame recap of The Mandalorian or a discussion of how best to fold laundry. But a couple of nights I woke up unexpectedly and found myself deep in Ackerman’s psyche – telling stories about his middle school experience in Syracuse, New York, or about his own struggles to fall asleep. And somewhere in there I noticed that Ackerman is actually a very impressive person. He had wanted to be a writer, sort of in the mold of Garrison Keillor, found that it wasn’t working and then decided to flip the script: instead of trying to entertain, he would endeavor to be as boring as possible. And he’d succeeded wonderfully at it. At its peak, Sleep With Me had over two million monthly downloads, making it one of the most downloaded podcasts in the world. Ackerman was actually very funny, very soulful, a hard worker (he estimates that for each hour of content he puts in fourteen hours of work, much of it spent eliminating any sleep-disrupting words, words like ‘spider,’ for instance, that might “elicit strong emotions in listeners”), running a successful business, performing a public service, developing his own genre – a practical joke spun out at such length that it rose to the level of art – but you wouldn’t know any of that from listening to Sleep With Me: he was “the bore-friend, the bore-cuz, the bore-sis, the bore-bestie,” the guy who was so dull that his very presence put you to sleep.
When How To with John Wilson appeared on HBO, my first reaction was that I knew that voice – it struck me as the persona and narrative strategy of Sleep With Me exported into documentary film. Wilson, the creator, protagonist, and narrative eye, couldn’t possibly have a lower-status persona. He summarizes his career as follows: “I told myself that after the first [beef] infomercial I did that I would never return under any circumstances, but five years later I was still somehow behind the same camera filming the same beef the same way.” His coping mechanism – or unhealthy obsession (it’s interpreted within How To as a crutch rather than as art) – is to videotape everything around him, every lonely meal, every unsatisfying interaction, every oddball obsession. In one memorable montage, he flips through a cache of video to show all the footage he has accumulated of, for instance, dogs defecating in the street.
There’s an implicit irony in How To, which is that – by the time I saw it – it had been picked up by HBO as a miniseries, and that would seem to negate the entire premise of the show: how many meetings are going right this moment involving very famous, very cool people all scheming about how to get a series on HBO, dreaming-big for what John Wilson of all people has accomplished. Wilson gets around this problem nicely with a narration that’s a brilliantly nebbishy parody of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Sex and the City voiceover. Every sentence starts off optimistically, in search of some clever pun or analogy, and tails off into a stuttering mass of confusion: “Fortunately there was a uh scaffolding convention happening down in uh New Orleans. This was supposed to be the cutting edge of scaffold technology and I was, uh, I was very excited.” And so, even with the HBO deal in place, low-status is carefully preserved. Every scene has humiliation built into it – a vacation at a resort in Cancún results in lots of young, drunk people shunning Wilson; the usual power move of turning on a camera and asking reportorial questions backfires when Wilson’s attempted interviewees start asking him why he’s being so weird; even Wilson’s accountant turns out to be too low-status for an office and, wanting to look more professional for the camera, insists on having Wilson book him a workspace (“Uh, so I did” is Wilson’s typically hapless response). Humiliation is encoded above all in insuperable social obstacles – the building scaffolding that blankets New York, the fixed slot machines in Las Vegas, and in the self-satisfied kapos who embody these injustices (a casino pit boss explains that “some people are natural-born losers, I’ve seen it year after year, week after week, day after day, it’s crazy”; a swaggering scaffolding executive is spotted “half-drunk, without a care in the world, trying to find the right strip club to go into like uh Goldilocks tasting porridge”). And the humiliation – this is the real heart of How To – leads to surprising bonds with other dead-enders: the one similarly lonely guy at the Cancún resort who tells Wilson about his friend’s suicide; the night staff at the ‘uh other Best Western’ in Ketchum, Idaho who spend hours talking about the ‘Mandela Memory Effect’; the landlady for whom Wilson constantly tries and fails to make a plate of risotto – a kind of vast archipelago of the lonely with their odd preoccupations and rich inner lives.
You may have noticed that something is missing from the psyche of the new nebbish – these are adult men who are completely sexless. The double entendre ‘sleep with me’ of Ackerman’s podcast is a joke turned on itself – the point is that he does actually mean it in the innocent sense of helping somebody to fall asleep. Wilson, like Gimpel, is a fully functioning member of society, employed, kind, considerate, law-abiding (“I have always been hand-in-glove with the IRS,” Wilson proudly reports), but the only time we see him have any kind of a personal relationship with a woman is when his hand grazes his landlady’s while the two of them are watching television. It’s understood within the show that Wilson is completely unfuckable and if other nebbish types rebel against that status – Charlie Chaplin is forever looking up skirts, George McFly eventually gets it together to punch out Biff and win the girl – Wilson accepts it as a matter of course. One of the more moving moments in the show is his bonding with the organizer of the Mandela Effect conference. “I’m not going a lie, I’m a bachelor,” confesses the conference organizer. “Me too,” sighs Wilson. And the organizer gets excited by this sudden camaraderie. “Really! Very nice!” he says. “That’s the way to be man. Save a lot more money that way!”
This self-effacement reaches an extreme in High Maintenance, also (like How To) a web series turned HBO show, also a vignette-y treatment of contemporary New York City, also wildly popular and understood to have hit a cultural vein. The main character of High Maintenance – ‘The Guy’ – would seem to be kind of a cool dude, he’s a drug dealer, after all, and urban and self-assured. But that’s not how the show plays out – he’s always overlooked, ignored, mildly mistreated. Conspicuously, he goes unnamed for several seasons – the point being that nobody really cares what his name is – and in the first season the only time there’s a personal interaction involving him is his ex-wife’s new girlfriend complaining about her “neighbor talking her ear off,” which becomes an object lesson to The Guy in not burdening other people with his problems (she is a public defender, he is a mere weed dealer; he is in the wrong for taking up time on one of her few free nights). He finds himself part of the same archipelago of the lonely as in How To – the apartment full of fractious nudists, the shut-in who buys pot from him just to have somebody to talk to, the tour guide endlessly practicing his routine – and, like How To, the overarching point of the show is the discovery of human beauty in the most unexpected places.
High Maintenance originated as a flâneur-like web series, with The Guy less of a central character than a linking thread between different social worlds, but in the third season of the HBO show, when enough time has passed that we feel we need to know more about The Guy, there is, suddenly, a love story. Out of town, The Guy meets an attractive woman, Lee, appealing, above all, because morally pure – he spots her meditating by a lake and paying for a stranger’s gas. The Guy proves himself by being alone with her in a cabin and taking a separate bed. It turns out that Lee has been with a #MeToo man, a high-status actor, and is in the midst of her recovery from his very toxic masculinity. The Guy, sensing how vulnerable she is but also unable to deny that there’s chemistry, finally kisses her – and this is kind of a defining moment for the new nebbish, The Guy, hulking, bearded, shuffling forward as if in slow-motion, arms crossed over the front of his body, everything about his physicality expressing that he is not a threat, that Lee is completely free to refuse him. They kiss – she’s been thoroughly disabused of alpha males by this time; she’s appreciative of The Guy’s gentle qualities – but then it just doesn’t work out. She is higher-status than he is, he finds her to be a bit stuck-up, and, really, his true self is in the nebbish archipelago: the episode in which he and Lee break up ends with The Guy riding off blissfully on his bicycle, dissolving into a distinctly New York sort of anonymity – exactly the way that John Wilson fades into the city at the end of How To’s second season.
More explicitly than the others, High Maintenance is a kind of treatise in how to be an ally, a fellow traveler, in an era of feminism and wokeness, but Sleep With Me and How To share with High Maintenance the same core sensibility – the conviction that the proper way to be a man is to be of service, endlessly giving, endlessly respectful; and with the corollary that if one finds oneself undesired, in the role of nebbish, then one’s responsibility is, like Gimpel, to accept that with ceaseless humility. But this self-effacement is so elaborate, so insisted-upon, that at some point you start to suspect it of insincerity – is Scoots Ackerman’s goal in life really to be your ‘bore-bestie,’ as he insists night after night, is John Wilson really satisfied, as both of his season finales would have it, cooking risotto for his landlady?
Gimpel accepts his lot uncomplainingly – every time a practical joke is played on him, he reasons that it’s better to play along (“and I hoped that it did [the people of Frampol] some good,” he thinks to himself at one point), and every time he catches his wife in bed with another man he pretends to accept her preposterous explanations – but once in the story, when the ‘Evil One’ visits, the mask drops. Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 novel Antkind, a cri de coeur of the nebbish, a kind of nebbish cosmology, is that moment of the mask dropping repeated at book-length. Kaufman comes across as an old-style nebbish – the nebbish-made-big. His screenplay for Being John Malkovich was passed around in Hollywood as an impossible-to-make film, and then, as if in some show business fairy tale, a few big names, Malkovich, Spike Jonze, John Cusack, tired simultaneously of all the scripts they were reading, asked explicitly for something ‘unproduceable’ – and were handed Malkovich. By the time he had made Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine For The Spotless Mind, Kaufman had become a national treasure for a kind of dreamy, alternative crowd, but Kaufman never wore success very easily and gradually lost his momentum in Hollywood while remaining true to his nebbish soul.
B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, the hero of Antkind, is a dyed-in-the-wool nebbish carrying out an elaborate internal charade of being at the mid-century nebbish peak – writing lengthily-titled monographs on art house films, sauntering around the city with his African-American actress girlfriend (“you would know if you saw her, you would definitely know her,” he tells us very often), adjusting nimbly to changing times. He is, he reports, “a first, second, and third wave feminist.” His preferred pronoun is ‘thon’ – as he informs everybody he meets. “In this and many ways I am evolved, ‘woke’ as the children today say, and have been so long before it was fashionable,” he informs us. But, in fact, Rosenberg is in freefall. His ‘girlfriend’ has stopped answering his calls; his new ‘romantic interest’ Tsai just dispatches him to the deli to pick up sandwiches for her and to the laundromat to do her wash. His daughter keeps a blog dedicated entirely to her loathing of her father – “I hate men. I hate men. What do they (he, thon!!! Jesus Christ!) bring to the world? Is there anything kind or decent that has resulted from this aberrant chromosome?”
With a kind of boundless mansplaining buoyancy, Rosenberg keeps insisting that all is well, that he is an ally, but as his fortunes plummet it becomes harder and harder to keep up the façade. The entire novel being in the realm of absurdity, his problems are accordingly ludicrous – he’s shrinking, he keeps falling into manholes (‘personholes’), he keeps downsizing apartments until he sleeps in a chair and then has to take a roommate to sleep in the chair next to him – but all are excruciatingly painful for Rosenberg, who is, at core, a very proud person. The slide from self-assured wokeness appears first in the form of slips-of-the-tongue – “It is a woman (pardon my assumption but I am foggy and have not the energy for nonbinariness)”; “The man was a genius and not because he was a man, of course. Had he been a woman I would be saying the same thing but not referring to him as a man” – but as Rosenberg’s disasters multiply he simply doesn’t have it in him any longer to maintain the pose of stalwart fellow traveler. “I am no longer the happy and carefree man I have always been,” Rosenberg admits somewhere in his freefall. “I have become a frighteningly different person, an angry person, angry at the slights, at the unfairness, at the system, at the culture.” In the midst of arguing with his daughter, who is railing against the patriarchy, Rosenberg abruptly asks, “You think I’ve had every opportunity? Then why has my professional life been one of constant struggle and humiliation?” To which his daughter replies, “One has to be supremely untalented as a white man to fail as frequently and spectacularly as you have.” In other words – as his daughter acutely, scathingly observes – there is no possible spin in which he is an ally, a self-effacing martyr to the future of gender equity, he is just a failure, a loser, as much a nebbish as Gimpel the Fool was a nebbish.
The overarching plot of Antkind is that Rosenberg, a film critic, discovers the best movie ever made, inadvertently destroys it, and then does everything in his limited power to attempt to reconstruct the film. But the brilliance of the destroyed film isn’t just what’s portrayed on screen, its creator Ingo has devoted far more work to creating lifelike puppets, with richly developed backstories, that never make it into the film at all, an army of the ‘Unseen.’ “Most of us are invisible. When we die, it’s soon as if we have never lived,” Ingo says. “These characters exist and are just as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.” Ingo is black and most of the puppets are black, and Rosenberg goes through many inner contortions about whether his privilege (white, cis, male, etc) precludes him from being the right caretaker of the film, but those questions never bother Ingo – we are completely in the realm of the Unseen, of true nebbishdom: failure and loserishness cut across all cultural lines.
The visceral cri de coeur of Antkind casts the artwork of the new nebbish – Sleep With Me, How To, High Maintenance – in a very different light. Here, a useful term is ‘ketman’ – Czeslaw Milosz borrowed it from heterodox traditions in Islamic countries to describe daily life in the Eastern Bloc. (Parallels are Homi Bhabha’s ‘sly civility’ and the Jesuit practice of ‘equivocation.’) Milosz describes ketman as being, essentially, the process of acting throughout the course of one’s life – “acting in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even in the room one lives in…a style of acting in which everyone plays to everyone else, and everyone is fully aware that this is so.” When ketman is instituted in a society, it becomes very difficult to divine the true motives of anybody else – people’s words are no guide and often point in some deliberately misleading direction. At a wild guess, the creators of Sleep With Me, How To, High Maintenance, are after wealth, fame, recognition – but you wouldn’t pick up on that from the fictional personae of ‘Scoots,’ ‘John Wilson,’ or ‘The Guy.’ Antkind, on the other hand, is a full-throated, brave, and cunning attempt to push nebbish-art all the way to its logical absurdity and reveal what’s hidden behind the veil of ketman. And, it turns out, as Rosenberg amply demonstrates, that nebbish-art is not really interested in being ‘of service’ at all. It’s an expression of an abiding frustration with sexual hierarchies and hypocrisies, the ways in which certain people through no fault of their own (usually just by being born unattractive or, if not, then by getting old) fall out of the sexual market entirely. It’s an insistence on a sort of absoluteness of failure – that there is, at core, no possible narrative (whether of allyship or service) that can soften the pain of being unloved and undesired. It’s a cry of rage.
Great! I really hope more people come across this Substack. So nice to have patient, intelligent writing somewhere on the web.
No arguments here! Nicely analyzed.