Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Time-Hopping Family Tapestry

Christmas has come early for America’s Jews. Beset by Nazis and Islamists at home, and riven by internal strife about Israel there has been precious little to cheer about for the last 690 days. Until now.

Every minute of the animated sitcom Long Story Short from BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob‑Waksberg, delivers another gift. Whether it’s a punchline, a shrewd observation or another guest voice (Rachel Bloom, John Cho, Gillian Jacobs, Gina Rodriguez, Zach Braff) for the extended Schwooper family that already has Max Greenfield, Paul Reiser, Abbi Jacobson, Lisa Edelstein and Nicole Byer in regular evidence.

It’s not the voices that make the show, though, but the excellence of the writing. Despite the time-hopping, multi-generational, inside-joking, unrepentantly Jewish nature of this show (inspired by Bob-Waksberg’s own family), the characters are always perfectly developing.

It’s no surprise that, though it only premiered today, (August 22 2025) the series has already been renewed for a second season.

Bob‑Waksberg tells the story of the Schwoopers, spanning the 1950s to the present in 10 brisk, 25‑minute installments. Each is a standalone vignette, yet together they weave an emotionally resonant narrative. Naomi and Elliott, with children Avi, Shira, and Yoshi (and later their spouses and children), take center stage as viewers witness their joys, fractures, and shifts across decades.

Wit and warmth are in bold supply. Bob‑Waksberg’s characteristic wordplay — sharp but tender — is on full display. Shira finds a reCAPTCHA that instructs her to prove she’s a human by identifying “the bisexuals” (“Where are your glasses? It says bicycles.”) The program operates like a moving mosaic, each flash between time punctuates a quiet heartbreak, familial tension, or shared joy. Every request is an opportunity to feel rejected. Every phone call is a regret waiting to happen.

The genius of the show is to bring together a broad swath of American Judaism – in terms of race, gender, religious practice, generations, sexuality, location and more – into a single family without it seeming tokenistic. At one point black lesbian convert Kendra Hooper (Nicole Byer) says, in a sensible, calming way, “there’s no one right way to be Jewish” to which matriarch Naomi (Lisa Edelstein in a tour de force) responds loudly to the gathered family:

But there is: a progressive, egalitarian, Conservative Judaism with an emphasis on ritual and community over faith and blind practice. That’s literally the only way that makes sense. I figured it out. And I gave it to my children because I love them, but they reject it because they want to reject me.

It’s pure genius. Because she’s absolutely right that that’s where the heart of American Judaism lies, but just as the heart comprises less than 1% of an adult human’s body mass, the kind of normative Ashkenazi Jewishness she’s talking about is a minority even in America, let alone in her family. The dissonance sits there spoken, personal, funny. Yoshie (Max Greenfield), her youngest, points out that their religious choices are not a personal jab: “Mom, not everything is about you.”

“That is the meanest thing you could possibly say to me.”

It’s also worth pointing out that this scene takes place at an oceanside AirBnB where Naomi and Elliott have called the family together ostensibly for an intervention for Yoshie, but actually to make sure that the family gathers for their wedding anniversary. As with everything about the show, the details of kitsch Americana in the foreground and background are exquisite. As Naomi folds her arms and turns away from Yoshie, there’s an orca-shaped “Whalecome” sign hanging on the door behind her.

The show is a sweet, perceptive portrait of a family but also a tender satire. It’s laugh out loud at some points — the A/B test of Kendra’s Jewishness thrown at her by a competitor is a deep cut: “Ashkenazi or Sephardi?… Litvak or Galizianer?… Litvak from Vilna or Litvak from Vitebsk? … Mel Brooks or Albert Brooks?” But more often we are invited into the jokes and the family shorthand: the way Avi says “Y’know” instead of “I love you,” the way he and Shira answer the phone to each other with “Who died?”

When the answer to that latter question is “Mom,” (of Covid) it’s still sweet, but suddenly there’s an extra beat where the two of them realize that their relationship carries a little more weight than they are used to.

Given the way that language is foregrounded it seems appropriate that the final episode is dedicated to the most iconic phrase of the series: “Is a shnook not entitled?” In the second scene of the entire series, Avi is obsessing over the meaning of a song’s lyrics to his girlfriend Jen who wants to just listen to the music. It’s Paul Simon’s “The Obvious Child” and Avi is delighted with how the lyrics can convey the swift passage of time: one moment they have a child “Sonny” and the next moment “Sonny gets married and moves away.” It’s a clue to how Long Story Short works, but also how Avi – the Bob-Waksberg figure – works. One could say that he has rejected the Talmud, but not the talmudic principles of textual scrutiny, Long Story Short would never be so heavy-handed.

Without spoiling the ending, because I’m telling you to go and watch all ten episodes right now, the bizarre phrase “Is a shnook not entitled?” that has appeared throughout the decades and episodes, gets explained with flashbacks, memory sequences, corrections, and the visits of characters we have grown to love and detest over the course of the previous 4 hours. The funeral from which the core family is driving before the credits of the first episode (“Kids, can you not — there’s bereavement happening in the front.”) is never truly escaped and the final episode is also about a funeral.

As with so much about Judaism, life is structured around rites. Sometimes those rites are pot luck feasts to get your kids into schools, sometimes the rites include your cousin eating corn on the cob inappropriately (well, we’re 80% sure she did), and sometimes it’s the life that happens in the folds of the rites that matter.

In the midst of death we are in life. Etcetera.

Is a shnook not entitled to choose life?