Sesame Street Slop

You may not have known it, but May is our month: an annual celebration of Jewish American Heritage. Until this year, it just passed me by; I was completely unaware until a recent spate of articles.

Unfortunately (again?), the news isn’t good. Sesame Street, still chugging after all these years, posted a video of actress Kat Graham, a Jew-ette of Color, in meaningful conversation with Abby Cadabby, an irritating little Muppet with a voice like a dentist’s drill or the last forgotten granules in a packet of Sweet-N-Low. The artificial sugariness of it will drive you nuts. No child on earth speaks in that way unless she’s been confined in a Fuller Dome of helium.

So far, so bad, or at least not terrible. But response on X was The Plot Against America, Phillip Roth’s fever dream about state sponsored anti-Semitism. Comments ranged from “Cadabby is a war criminal” to “Nuke the Jews, and start on Sesame Street.” The only thing missing was Rothschild space lasers. It was the whole nine yards of anti-Semitic tropes from bona-fide, verifiable anti-Semitic dopes.

I don’t expect any of this to disappear soon. We have passed the point of genteel anti-Semitism, the hatred that has always dared to speak its name, to full-bore calls for mayhem and extermination. Say what you want, but we should name the thing before us, even if the thing is a pustulated troll.

But what was actually worse was the “content” from Sesame Street. In the dumbed-down world all of us now occupy, the great cultural accomplishment of the Jewish people was nothing else but (wait for it!) chicken soup. Not the Book of Genesis or the Babylonian Talmud, or even the same Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. The Jews have been producing music and art, high culture and low, vital communities of enormous accomplishment, Susan Sontag and Congressman Jamie Raskin for centuries, and the only thing that Ms. Graham could mention was a bowl with matzah balls on Friday night.

Don’t get me wrong: soup is a great big deal. The chicken version is about the only meat dish left on my mostly vegetarian menu of possibilities, but except in the trash culture of debased Jewish experience, soup is not a stand-in for Jewish achievement. I hate the anti-Semites, but here’s my beef with Sesame Street: it took a beautiful, variegated complex civilization and in a few short strokes of stupid reductionism, turned my lovely culture into a pint of broth.

As Kermit would say, it’s not easy being Jewish, but Sesame Street didn’t have to make it harder.

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Written without the use of artificial intelligence, this is the actual product of a struggling human mind.