James Sherman’s God of Isaac is an amalgam of high and low art, featuring sincerity and stereotype in almost equal quantities. If you don’t mind the cardboard cutouts, you’ll find occasional authenticity in this tale of a young Jewish man’s search for what religion can mean in his own life.
His quest is an important one; but it also features cliché Jewish figures from the intimidating mother to the oversexed shikse, from solicitous hasids to a workaholic father. There are some less familiar figures also: angry members of the Jewish Defense League, a taciturn tailor who survived Auschwitz, and a would-be-Orthodox young woman among them.
But God of Isaac wants everything: to investigate with scorching honesty the meaning of Jewishness, while winning our laughter with overfamiliar characters from a Borscht Belt skit. The result is, to say the least, complicated.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2010.