An American Pickle: Seth Rogen and the Myth of the Blood
There is a meme of the "ordeal of civility", that European Jewry was ripped into modernity in a particularly jarring fashion. In this telling, Eastern European shtetlbillies especially, but even the Western Jewish religious authorities who excommunicated Spinoza, awoke one morning to discover that their dark-age neighbors had undertaken a Renaissance and Enlightenment, a thriving intellectual culture, intercontinental trade, an agricultural revolution or two, and completely left them in the dust. The attempt to grapple with this dominates Jewish intellectual life for the next two hundred years, and results in facially secularized, and often intellectualized, attempts to integrate Jewish and Western thought and mores. Larry David's comedy is probably the culmination of this line of thinking.
It's tempting to view "An American Pickle" through this lens, given that the movie is premised on a Fiddler on the Roof pastiche ditch-digger finding himself magically transported to contemporary Brooklyn. The comedy does result from the clash of mores. The difference is that the clash isn't with a Seinfeld style goyisch straight man of the week, but literally between the protagonist and himself.
Seth Rogen plays both a Brooklyn hipster, and his great-grandfather, preserved in a vat of pickle juice (get it?) for 100 years and magically released. He is a disgusting caricature, in both cases - a dissolute hipster with a bullshit barely-job as an app developer, and a coarse, pugilistic FOTB who becomes a pickle merchant serving slop out of the trash. The difference is that Rogen the Elder's coarseness is portrayed not as needing to assimilate to the advanced society he finds himself in, but rather the opposite - he represents an authentic Jew, an ultimately aspirational figure for the younger because he is in touch with his past. This ethic is not merely a "Jewish community" in a religious or cultural sense, but a biological bond. His first instance of violence is to start a fight with some workers erecting a billboard over the family grave. Not just any ad, but Russian vodka. Like the Cossacks (pthew, pthew). Their filthy hooves must not be allowed on our hallowed land!
Rogen the Elder despises the Younger's refusal to "connect" with his dead family through traditional Jewish prayer, grave honoring, and ultimately reproduction. The Younger internally perceives his own jealousy of the Elder's rootedness as resentment of attempts to impose it on him, and baits the Elder into revealing his uncultured opinions on women and the disabled on Twitter. Minus some pro forma protests, this backfires and everyone finds this charming. Ah, but when the Younger asks publicly for his opinions on Christianity, the powerful Christian lobby finds his perfectly defensible talmudic recitation unacceptable and have him deported.
This is a very paint-by-numbers conflict. In just about every other film, we'd roll up Act III by discovering that both sides have so much to learn - the daughter realizes her father loves her, and the father realizes he needs to concede to four years of her using "party" as verb, or whatever the pro forma conflict entails. In this case, if we followed the trope, we'd realize the Elder loves the Younger, but they can settle for the Reform temple twice a year. This does not happen, because the Ordeal of Civility is deprecated.
After the Elder is deported, the Younger realizes him to be fundamentally in the right about the primal, overriding importance of heritage, in the sense of heritability. He flies to Poland to reconcile, which is only made possible because the Elder realizes the Younger's shitty app was named after pet names for his parents, and thus he must care about family. They bond over a couple prayers for the dead as they physically merge, the Elder shaving his beard. They fly back to America, say another Jewish prayer, and go into business together.
The movie is a fairly obvious allegory that really requires no elaboration and is not particularly funny or worth watching. The only interesting thing is the subversion of the classic "both sides must learn they love each other but the lib position is correct" trope. It's not particularly obscure why we get a movie about this in the Jewish context rather than a Geatish warrior convincing his rootless descendant that there really needs to be more pillaging, or a Calvinist minister causing his great grandson to realize he has responsibilities as one of the Elect. The struggle of assimilation or even amalgamation is over, and the Myth of the Blood dominates - but of course, only for the officially oppressed.