Jewish pop culture without Jews

For Shabbat, two items about Jewish pop culture and non-Jews and the relation between them.

• The Patient tells the story of a serial killer who holds a psychiatrist hostage, seeking therapy to stop him from killing. Non-Jew Steve Carrell plays the explicitly and deeply Jewish therapist, Dr. Alan Strauss. This character's Jewishness goes beyond the name; it is central to the character and the story. Strauss mourns his deceased wife, a Reform cantor; he is estranged from his son, who became Orthodox; flashbacks show tension points around the wife singing at the Orthodox wedding and giving ice cream to her non-Orthodox daughter's children when the Orthodox son's grandchildren cannot have it (long explanation of the laws of Kashrut). The most recent episode, Kaddish, revolves around Strauss reciting the Mourner's Kaddish for his wife.

Carrell (as ever) is great in the role. But the show highlights the representation question--when should a Jewish actor play a character so identified with Jewishness. This is not an incidentally Jewish character where the writers happened to give him a Jewish name; Strauss' Jewishness and Jewish faith is inextricable from the story. Showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields (both Jewish; Fields' father was a rabbi) said the original version of Dr. Strauss was not necessarily Jewish; that part of the character filled-in as the project developed. Carrell does an OK job with the prayer (which, FWIW, is Aramaic rather than Hebrew), although he recites it with an Eastern-European-cum-old-Jewish-Brooklyn-man tone different from his normal speaking voice.

• Bad Sisters is a pitch-black dramedy in a small city in Ireland; it tells the story of four sisters plotting (and perhaps succeeding?) in killing their fifth sister's abusive husband. This decidedly non-Jewish show features Leonard Cohen's Who By Fire in the opening credits. That song is inescapably Jewish--even by Cohen standards. It riffs on Unetanneh Tokef, a central (and troubling, to many) piece of the Yom Kippur liturgy that asks who will live and find peace and happiness and who will suffer and die and how in the coming year, mitigated by prayer, righteous actions, and returning to Hashem. I have not figured out why they chose this song, beyond it being great. Certainly not for its Jewish themes. Maybe because it is about punishing a person for his misdeeds? Maybe because it lists different ways someone might die, some of which feature in the actual plot?