The full text of this essay first appeared in Salon.
I want to skip ahead for a second, because against everything I experienced previously while watching Hallmark's nonsensically titled holiday movie "Hanukkah on Rye," I cried at the end. There's a moment where the romantic leads' grandmothers realize they have a deeper connection than the plot contrivance of their respective deli behemoths, and I was, in spite of my better judgment, touched. Images of diasporic Jews finding each other after lifetimes apart will always carry with it a certain bittersweet resonance, even when it comes after 80 minutes of regressive vapidity. Ya got me.
Directed by Hallmark workhorse Peter DeLuise – whose CV includes the Lori Loughlin-starring "Garage Sale Mystery" series – "Hanukkah on Rye" seems inspired by "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940), that James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan comedy about two rival shopkeepers who fall for each other as anonymous pen pals. The often retold story also inspired 1949's Judy Garland musical "In the Good Old Summertime" and Nora Ephron's 1998 update "You've Got Mail" with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. But instead of a shop that sells leathergoods, music or books, with "Hanukkah on Rye" it's Jewish delis.
I'm not sure if screenwriter Julie Sherman Wolfe, who has written 24 films for Hallmark, is making some kind of comment on the Jewish lineage of this surprisingly evergreen story, yet the connection is obvious enough: the original "Shop Around the Corner" story comes from a play by Miklós László, adapted by Samson Raphaelson and directed by Ernst Lubitsch – all Jews. Ripping apart a Hallmark film has become somewhat de rigueur and extremely easy, but I was genuinely interested in this latest attempt at a Jewish-centric story partly because of this lineage, and also because the channel has made honest and concerted efforts into inclusion of the "other" December holiday since 2019. All efforts to this point have been alarming, to say the least, but this one finds the channel really perfecting the art of racial pandering.