BY SHELLEY A. SACKETT
Daniel Robbins, the director and co-writer of the award-winning film “Bad Shabbos,” discovered two things about himself at a very early age – he loved Judaism and he loved making films.
Raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family, he attended Westchester Day School up to 8th grade and then Ramaz, the yeshiva in New York’s Upper East Side, for grades 9-12. Every year, the “funny kids” in the upper grades were tasked with making a short video. As “funny kids,” Robbins and his friends were drafted in high school. “I felt the spark,” Robbins told the Journal by phone. “From my junior year in high school, I wanted to go to film school.”
He also loved growing up in a family that gathered for Shabbos dinner every Friday night. “Even on the most chaotic nights, there was a warmth,” Robbins says. He still observes this tradition with family and close friends. “It’s not about your week or how your work is going, but rather about your dignity as a person and connecting with the people around you.”
What he most appreciates about Judaism (and especially Modern Orthodox Judaism) is that it takes universal values (family, community, loving other people, for example) and builds habits around them. “It’s one thing to cherish those values, but Judaism also gives us an actual framework that pushes us to practice them,” he says.
I think Shabbos dinner is probably the main way we can improve our lives. Which is why we made a movie about it.”
“Bad Shabbos,” released in 2024 and co-written and produced by fellow Ramaz alumni Zack Weiner and Adam Mitchell, has taken the festival circuit by storm. This film is not, however, about your bubbe’s Shabbos dinner. Unless, of course, your regular family Friday night gatherings included a prank gone awry, a death (an accident, or possibly a murder) and Cliff “Method Man” Smith masquerading as an observant Jew. Throw in the first meeting between parents of engaged children (a visiting Catholic couple from the Midwest and their hosts, observant, wealthy New York Modern Orthodox Jews), and you’re getting close to the tenor of what becomes a very bad, very funny, and ultimately very poignant Shabbos dinner.
The film stars Kyra Sedgwick as the matriarch, David Paymer as patriarch, and Jon Bass, Milana Vayntrub, Meghan Leathers, Theo Taplitz and Ashley Zukerman, Catherine Curtin and John Bedford Lloyd.
Robbins and his team’s primary goal was to make a film that authentically portrayed their subculture as New York Modern Orthodox Jews in a loving light. His second goal was to take everything he loves about the fast-paced comedies he grew up with (anything Mel Brooks, “Meet The Parents,” “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” “The Birdcage,” and “Death At A Funeral,” among others) and adapt it to modern times. Coming from a horror film background (his first film, “Pledge,” debuted at the 2018 Screamfest where it won Robbins an award for Best Directing), the film also had to have a dead body. “I love horror and the dead body trope,” Robbins says. “With horror, the realer it is, the scarier it is. It’s the same with comedy – the realer it is, the funnier it is.”
Waxing more serious, he shares how he sees Modern Orthodox Judaism as a metaphor for the film’s family. The family members in “Bad Shabbos” must manage their individual polarities, between personal freedoms and familial expectations and between unconditional love and constructive criticism, all while trying to get along with each other. Similarly, Modern Orthodox Jews must manage the polarities between the secular and the religious, balancing the sometimes-conflicting agenda of the traditional and contemporary.
“I feel like Jewish content hasn’t shown this section of Judaism, the kind that interacts with the secular world while also keeping their traditions very seriously. I thought if we could show the energy of one of those households honestly and with a break-neck plot, this could be a movie people would love,” Robbins says.
The film has resonated with Jewish and non-Jewish audiences from Berlin to Seattle to a packed Coolidge Theater earlier this month (“I think Boston might be our best audience,” says Robbins. “They got every joke in the movie”). It won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival and audience awards at many others, including Boston Jewish Festival.
Robbins explains that “Bad Shabbos” neither mocks religion nor lampoons Judaism. It is a loving portrayal of characters trying to find equilibrium by incorporating religion into their lives. Their goal is to deepen their connection to religion and find a way to make it work for them. In that way, it stands apart from the many films that parody religion and depict people trying to self-actualize by ignoring, rejecting or escaping religion. “It’s a faith-based movie,” Robbins says.
It’s also a funny movie that celebrates Jewish humor and Jewishness at a time fraught with antisemitic, anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiments. Robbins says that finding laughter in the dark spots is part of what defines Jewish humor. “People forget that there’s a Jewish responsibility to also rejoice, to remember how beautiful life can be, that it’s not just about suffering and complaining about how bad things are,” he says.
Robbins remembers the film’s premiere at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival. There was a huge crowd and someone asked him how he could make a comedy during these difficult times. His response was that if Jewish artists waited for good times to make comedies, there wouldn’t be any Jewish comedies. Says Robbins, “We still have to persevere and do what we can, even when times aren’t great.” Θ
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