Media that focuses on Jewish people, culture, and religion.
To qualify, a work must feature Jews in central roles, and their heritage must play a significant role in the plot or characterization. Just being told they're Jewish isn't enough.
Works featuring The Holocaust are listed here and on Works Set in World War II.
See also Christian Fiction, African-American Media, Asian-American Media, Latino-American Media, Native American and First Nations Media, and Pacific Islanders in Media.
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Comic Books
- American Dreams (2021) tells the story of Jake Gold, a Russian Jewish immigrant who is granted superhuman powers which he uses to protect his fellow Jewish immigrants from a German gang. The character was created by Jewish writer Daniel Kalban, and Jake is advised in his adventures by several notable Jewish figures, including magician Harry Houdini and socialist Emma Goldman.
- The Big Kahn: The funeral of an Orthodox rabbi is thrown into turmoil when it comes out that he was a Gentile conman who Became the Mask. The focus is on his family's response to the revelation.
- A Contract with God, by Will Eisner, is a collection of short stories about Jews living in the Lower East Side in the early 20th century.
- Fagin The Jew, also by Eisner, is a Sympathetic P.O.V. prequel to Oliver Twist, showing how Fagin's experiences with classism and antisemitism shaped the person he became.
- Mendy And The Golem is about an Orthodox Jewish boy who creates a golem.
- The Rabbi's Cat: The eponymous cat is owned by Jews and wants to convert to Judaism himself.
Fan Works
- Goldstein is about a minor Harry Potter character's experiences as an Orthodox Jew in Hogwarts.
- A Thing of Vikings has a major subplot about the Hooligan tribe and the Jews of Normandy, with several of the Hooligans being descended from Dror ben Ezra, a Jewish escaped thrall who taught the tribe to read and write. They return the favor by inviting Jews to settle in their new territories. One of the Jews, Esther, becomes a significant supporting character.
Film — Animated
- An American Tail is about a family of Jewish mice, the Mousekewitzes, fleeing pogroms by Cossack cats in the Russian Empire to immigrate to New York City in the 1885.
- The Prince of Egypt is an adaptation of the Book of Exodus.
- Joseph: King of Dreams, the prequel to The Prince of Egypt, adapts the story of Joseph from Book of Genesis.
- Seder-Masochism is a retelling of the Book of Exodus, mixed with interviews with the creator's father about his experiences as a Jewish man.
Film — Live-Action
Documentaries
Fiction
- Ace of Aces: The Rosenblum family are klezmer musicians and find themselves having to play for an unsuspecting Adolf Hitler at one point.
- An American Pickle: An Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant is revived after spending a century preserved in pickle brine, and meets his secular great-grandson.
- In The Angel Levine, a poor Jewish man who feels that God has abandoned him meets an angel.
- The Believer: The story of a young Jewish man, Danny, who's also a Neo-Nazi. As you'd expect, the story delves heavily into his conflict over his identity, and alternate hatred of his Jewishness along with still in part embracing it. This was Very Loosely Based on a True Story.
- Ben-Hur: Adaptations of the Lewis Wallace novel about the journey of Judah Ben-Hur, a framed-up Jewish nobleman of Jerusalem, to hell and back at the time of The Roman Empire. The conflict is kicked off by Judah's childhood Roman friend's frustration over him refusing to help further subjugate Jews to Rome.
- The City Without Jews: Jews are expelled from the fictional city of Utopia, the economic troubles of which don't stop afterwards and even worsen.
- Coco: Eccentric Nouveau Riche Simon "Coco" Bensoussan (Gad Elmaleh) wants to throw the biggest party possible for his son's bar mitzvah.
- Crossing Delancey is a Romantic Comedy centering around a young New York woman from an Orthodox Jewish background.
- Defiance is about Jewish partisans fighting the Nazis in Belarus during WWII.
- Disobedience has a woman returning to her estranged family's Orthodox Jewish community for her father's funeral.
- The Dybbuk: Yiddish film set in a Polish ghetto about two Star-Crossed Lovers from different classes within the Jewish community.
- Exodus: Film following the founding of the state of Israel through several characters, including Holocaust survivors.
- Exodus: Gods and Kings: Adaptation of the Book of Exodus.
- The Frisco Kid is about a rabbi (played by Gene Wilder) traveling across the Wild West with a cowboy (played by Harrison Ford, another Jew).
- Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem: Israeli protagonist Viviane Amsalem has to battle her husband Elisha in a rabbinical court for years to obtain divorce.
- The Golem (1920) is an adaptation of the Jewish folklore legend of the Golem of Prague.
- The Golem (2018): During an outbreak of a deadly plague in Lithuania, a mystical woman must save her tight-knit Jewish community from a gang of ruffians led by a local landowner, but the entity she conjures to protect them turns out to be a far greater evil.
- In The Great Houdinis, Harry Houdini is a Jewish man who marries a Gentile, to his mother's great displeasure.
- The Hebrew Hammer is a Blaxploitation Parody about a Jewish vigilante.
- Hester Street is about a married Jewish immigrant couple in 1890s New York.
- Holy Rollers: The protagonist is a young Orthodox Jewish man who uses the cover of his religion (clothes especially) to smuggle drugs in the USA beneath notice.
- It (2017) portrays Stan Uris as a practicing Jew who stresses over his Bar Mitzvah and his Torah reading.
- In the Presence of Mine Enemies is about a rabbi struggling with his faith in the Warsaw Ghetto.
- Ivanhoe: The eponymous knight finds allies in a Jewish community led by Isaac of York to help him free Richard the Lionheart, and he must save Isaac's daughter from being burned at the stake at the end.
- The Jazz Singer is about a young Jewish man who wants to become a jazz musician instead of following in his cantor father's footsteps.
- Jew Süss (1934): After working his way out of the Jewish ghetto of Württemberg, Josef Süss Oppenheimer sacrifices all to gain political power out of personal ambition and to improve the condition of his people, who are subjected to intolerance. Spiritual Antithesis to the 1940 Nazi German film of the same name.
- Keeping Up With The Steins has a man trying to outdo his rival with a party for his son's bar mitzvah.
- Lévy and Goliath: Two French Jewish brothers, the Lévys — the religion-observing Moses and the secular Albert — are antagonized by a drug dealer named Goliath in Paris.
- A subplot in Mabul involves the protagonist preparing for his Bar Mitzvah.
- The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob: A bad tempered and prejudiced French Christian businessman finds himself having to impersonate a rabbi, and his outlook on Jewish people changes for the better over the course of the story.
- Monty Python's Life of Brian: While it's mainly a spoof of the Christian Gospels about Jesus, the film also features bickering 1st century AD Jewish factions in Roman-dominated Judaea.
- In Once Upon a Time in America, the protagonists are Jewish gangsters.
- A Serious Man is a Coen Brothers film that draws on several stories from Jewish religious works to tell a story about a modern Jewish man navigating modern trials.
- Shiva Baby is about a Jewish family going to sit shiva, and the chaos that ensues when Danielle learns that her sugar daddy is there. Every single character is Jewish except for Max's wife Kim (though she is played by Jewish actress Dianna Agron).
- Sixty Six is about a 13-year old British Jew having his Bar Mitzvah on the same day as the World Cup Final.
- The Ten Commandments (1923): Adaptation of the Book of Exodus.
- The Ten Commandments (1956): Another adaptation of the Book of Exodus (by the same director as the above).
- Tevya is about a Ukrainian Jew living in the Pale of Settlement.
- Uncut Gems is about a Jewish-American New Yorker and his immediate family; the film features an extended Passover Seder scene.
- La Vérité si je mens!: A jobless gentile Frenchman pretends to be a Jew, enters the Jewish textile business of the Sentier district in Paris and progressively converts to the religion.
- Yentl: Adapted from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story, Barbra Streisand stars as a Jewish girl in 20th century Poland.
- You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is about a Jewish girl preparing for her bat mitzvah.
- You Don't Mess with the Zohan follows an elite Israeli agent who just wants to be a hairdresser, and his Culture Clash with Jewish and Arab-Americans in New York.
Literature
- Alpha and Omega is about the discovery of The Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem, and the subsequent culmination of Jewish Messianic prophecies.
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay tells the story of two Jewish cousins who create their own comic books during the Golden Age. One of them escaped Nazi-occupied Europe.
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.: The protagonist is essentially agnostic; she believes God may or may not exist. However, she doesn't know the word "agnostic" and thus feels like she's "nothing" because she's neither religious nor an atheist. Her mother is Jewish, so her maternal grandmother sometimes tries to convince Margaret to convert to Judaism, but Margaret doesn't want to.note
- Ben-Hur: The journey of a framed up Jewish nobleman of Jerusalem to hell and back at the time of The Roman Empire, book-ended by meaningful encounters with Jesus.
- The Bible chronicles the history of early Judaism, from the creation of the world to the birth of Christianity.
- See also The Talmud, the compendium of Jewish law.
- The Chosen is a coming-of-age novel about two Jewish boys, one Hasidic and one Modern Orthodox, living in Brooklyn in the 1940s.
- The Dyke And The Dybbuk is about a demon from Jewish mythology who has been assigned to curse a particular family for seven generations. The current generation is a Jewish lesbian in London who falls in love with an Orthodox woman.
- The Entertainer and the Dybbuk is about a boy who died in the Holocaust and came back as a dybbuk, a possessing spirit.
- Everything I Know About Love is a Memoir by a Dolly Alderton that includes a lot details about her experience growing up in Stanmore, a North London suburb with a large Jewish community. Her best friend and Heterosexual Life-Partner Farly is Jewish and as teenagers they formed a band that played at any bar mitzvah that would have them. Before she and Dolly first became friends, Farly hung out with a group of girls she knew from Brady club, a Jewish children's social club with its roots in London's East End.
- The Fixer: A Jew in late-Tsarist Russia is accused of murdering a child, based on little more than anti-Semitic hysteria, and is thrown into prison.
- Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir: The autobiography of writer Shalom Auslander. The main focus is on his Orthodox Jewish religious upbringing and the (often disturbing) impact it's had on his psyche growing up.
- Gentlemen of the Road chronicles the adventures of a French and an Ethiopian Jew in the Middle Ages as they travel through the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria (which actually existed!).
- In The Golem and the Jinni, the Golem, a creature from Jewish mythology, is taken in by a rabbi.
- In the Presence of Mine Enemies follows a small group of secret Jews who survive in a world where the Nazis won WWII.
- In Ivanhoe the plight of the Jews in medieval England is a major subplot. It's stated that one of the only jobs they can do is moneylending, and their obscure healing knowledge is mistaken for witchcraft.
- Julia's Kitchen has a Jewish girl going through a Crisis of Faith after the deaths of her mother and sister in a House Fire.
- Letters From Rifka is about a Jewish girl fleeing pogroms in Russia, and her struggles to immigrate to America.
- Little Red Ruthie is a kids' book parodying Little Red Riding Hood where the main characters are Jewish and are wanting to cook for Hanukkah.
- The Many Mysteries of the Finkel Family: The Finkel siblings are Ashkenazi on their father's side and Sephardic on their mother's. Noah calls them "Ashkephardic." A Yom Kippur sermon about atonement inspires Lara to make amends with her family.
- The Netanyahus: A Jewish professor teaching at a very WASPy college in a very WASPy town sometimes wonders how much the prevailing WASP culture will ever let Jews "fit in."
- Rashis Daughters is a trilogy of historical novels about the daughters of Rashi, a prominent medieval rabbi.
- Sammy Spider is a children's book series about a young Jewish spider who's learning about Judaism.
- The Second Mango and sequels, also called the Mangoverse, is a high fantasy series taking place in the fictional Jewish kingdom of Perach, ruled by a young queen who is coping both with the recent death of her father and being the only lesbian she knows.
- Shtetl Days is set in an Alternate-History Nazi Victory where historical reenactors play The Theme Park Version of Ashkenazi Jews, and come to identify more with the Jews than the Reich.
- Snarkout Boys: The main character is the child of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; antisemitism in school is a minor plot point.
- Spinning Silver: One of the protagonists is the daughter of a poor Jewish moneylender.
- "There's Magic in Bread" is a short story about a Jewish baker during the Holocaust who ends up making a golem.
- There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Dreidel is a kids' book parodying There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, about an elderly Jewish woman who swallows a dreidel, mistaking it for a bagel.
- To a Place You Do Not Know is an Alternate History about the Israelites getting teleported to the uninhabited islands of New Zealand rather than entering Canaan, and how history changes from there.
- "Unto the Fourth Generation": Sam Marten finds his great-great-grandfather, "Phinehas ben Jehudah, assigned the name Levkovich by the ukase of the Tsar". The two bond over their common Jewish heritage, Marten asking Levkovich for his blessing in business and to pursue a woman in marriage.
- The Weight of Ink is a historical novel about a 17th-century Jewish woman who serves as a blind rabbi's scribe.
- When the Angels Left the Old Country is about a Jewish angel and demon from a Polish shtetl who emigrate to America. Nearly every character is Jewish and the story draws heavily on Jewish folklore and mythology.
- The Yiddish Policemen's Union takes place in an alternate universe where the Jewish refugees from the Holocaust were settled in Alaska instead of Israel.
Live-Action TV
- Broad City: The two protagonists are Jewish, and frequently satirize Jewish-American culture.
- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has a Jewish-American protagonist who refers to herself as a Jewish American Princess. The show features multiple scenes with the Jewish East Coast community.
- Everything I Know About Love (2022): Birdy is Jewish and also the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her mother feels that she's turning her back on her heritage by dating her gentile boyfriend, Nathan.
- The Goldbergs is about a Jewish-American family.
- Hunters is about a group of Jewish Nazi hunters.
- The Jews Are Coming is an Israeli sketch comedy show about Jewish history.
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is about the upperclass Jewish community in 1950s New York.
- Masada is about the most famous episode of the Jewish Revolts, the siege of the fortress of Masada, which was the Last Bastion of the Jewish Zealots' resistance against The Roman Empire. The religion is brought up quite a few times.
- Moses the Lawgiver is an adaptation of the Book of Exodus.
- The Nanny is about a Jewish woman who finds herself the nanny of a wealthy family.
- Northern Exposure has a Jewish protagonist who is a doctor in a strange Alaskan town in exchange for his medical school.
- The Sarah Silverman Program features a Jewish-American protagonist.
- Schitt's Creek stars a mixed Jewish-Catholic family.
- Shtisel is about a Haredi family in Jerusalem.
- Unorthodox follows a teenage girl's escape from her restrictive Hasidic community in Brooklyn.
- Vienna Blood: Max Liebermann and his family are German Jews living in pre-World War I Vienna, Austria. One of the B-plots of the miniseries involves Max's father looking for investors to expand his tailoring business and having to navigate the antisemitism common in upper-class European society at the time.
- In Weeds, the protagonist is Jewish, and it comes up fairly often. Andy enters a rabbinical school to avoid military service.
- "Kaddish" is an episode of The X-Files where a Jew murdered by antisemites comes back as a golem to exact revenge.
Music
- Daniel Kahn and The Painted Bird is a klezmer revival group, and nearly all of their songs are about Judaism or Jewish history.
- The Foxy Bard is Jewish, and several of his alter egos (Dovid Mordechai and Shmuel Pallache) are Jewish and explore Judaism and Jewish music.
- Yom & the Wonder Rabbis is a French band blending klezmer music with synth music and other modern music forms.
- John Zorn is Jewish and has many albums exploring that heritage through instrumental music. Kristallnacht is about the lead-up to the Holocaust. The Masada Songbook is his attempt to create a canon of "new traditional" Jewish music: while the songs are reinterpreted as jazz (or a dizzying variety of other genres, thanks to a ton of guest musicians), he wrote them exclusively using the two scales associated with traditional Jewish folk music. And his record label, Tzadik, has a Radical Jewish Culture series to spotlight other artists who, in their words, put out "adventurous recordings bringing Jewish identity and culture into the 21st century."
Podcasts
- Seen and Not Heard: Protagonist Bet Kline is Jewish and meets with her rabbi for guidance.
Theatre
- 13: The protagonist Evan Goldman is Jewish, and part of the show's conflict is that Evan is trying to have the perfect bar mitzvah during his parents' divorce and a move across the US.
- Crossing Delancey is a romantic comedy about a New York Jewish woman whose bubbe hires a matchmaker that sets her up with a working class Jew from the Lower East Side. Also adapted into a 1988 film.
- Falsettos: All the characters are Jewish (and Whizzer is half-Jewish), and Jason's bar mitzvah is a plot point.
- Fiddler on the Roof is about the conflict between tradition and outside influences in a Russian shtetl.
- Funny Girl is based on the Jewish entertainer Fanny Brice; the role was originated by the Jewish Barbra Streisand.
- The Jew of Malta has a Jewish Villain Protagonist.
- The Last Five Years: One of the two characters is Jewish, and the relationship is specifically interfaith.
- Leopoldstadt is about two intermarried Jewish families in Vienna across the first half of the 20th century.
- The Merchant of Venice: The titular merchant Shylock and his daughter Jessica's Jewishness is central to the plot, though it's nowadays often seen as horrendously antisemitic.
Video Games
- The Shivah: Several characters, including the protagonist Rabbi Stone, are Jewish, and Judaism is a central theme.
Visual Novels
- Havenfall Is for Lovers: Vanessa is Jewish and her faith comes up multiple times in her route.
Web Video
- YidLife Crisis is a satirical look at modern Jewish life in Montreal, in subtitled Yiddish.
Western Animation
- Big Mouth: Both Jessi and Andrew come from Jewish families. The first season has an arc building up to Jessi's bat mitzvah.
- "The True Face of a Monster", an episode of Extreme Ghostbusters in which a synagogue is regularly attacked by antisemitic thugs and a golem is summoned to get rid of them, only for said golem to grow out of control.
- The Ghost and Molly McGee: Libby is Jewish on her mother's side. One episode revolves around her Bat Mitzvah, while another has the McGees visit her family for the last day of Hanukkah.
- Rugrats: Didi Pickles is Jewish (her old parents are Jews from Eastern Europe who moved to the US), and by extension so are Tommy and Dil. The series featured episodes on Jewish holidays such as Hanukkah and Passover.
- South Park: Kyle is Jewish, and his heritage and religious identity is a plot point (and source of mockery, particularly from Cartman) in many episodes.
