Marty Supreme Took Me to Shul
A spiritual reckoning of talmudic proportions
**SPOILER ALERT**
The Talmud contains far more than the collected works of leading rabbinic thought.
Translated literally as study, talmud is both a multi-millennia universe of stories, ideas, and arguments and a singular mode of study unto itself.
The Talmud is the original Wikipedia – richly tapestried in self-reference and citation. The text is alive. It is multi-dimensional. On December 25, 2025 director Josh Safdie and producer Timothée Chalamet dropped the latest volume of the Talmud: Marty Supreme.
If you walk out of an alien spacecraft and into a theater, absent any context, the film would still be damn entertaining. It moves fast and fierce, dazzling and disturbing with our antihero’s every escalatory step. But when experienced through the prisms of pop culture, history, and liturgy, Marty Supreme can fully transform the viewer.
In this parable of class and unplanned parenthood, the opening credits scene mimics that of the similarly themed 1989 comedy Look Who’s Talking. The eighties reverberate throughout the score, beginning with a version of the 1984 hit Forever Young. A surface-level reflection of Marty’s delayed adolescence and pursuit of immortality, Forever Young also evokes the rags-to-riches hustle of another New Yorker raised by a single mother – Jay-Z – who sampled the Alphaville song in his 2009 Young Forever.
While a keen ear to the 2000s opens new layers of meaning, the eighties dominate our understanding of Marty Mauser and his manic joyride through 1950s New York. The music of the future is Marty’s internal metronome, his anachronistic clarion call. The original score pulses with eighties synth, and New Order, Peter Gabriel, and Tears for Fears feature prominently.
While such luminaries filled the cold war radio waves, from 1980 to 1991 Art Spiegelman serially released what would become Maus, a graphic novel of his Polish Jewish father’s experiences before and during the Holocaust. In Maus, Germans are depicted as cats and Jews as mice. In 1986, Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg joined in casting Jews fleeing persecution as mice – but for the whole family, in An American Tail. Chalamet’s character is not named Mauser incidentally; his friend and colleague played by Tyler, the Creator calls him “mouse,” evoking both the striving New York immigrant journey of Fievel Mousekewitz and Spiegelman’s father facing the Nazis’ industrialized mass murder.
Not that the eighties have a cultural monopoly on Marty Supreme. This film is very much a spiritual sequel to Uncut Gems, the 2019 tour de force co-directed by Safdie and his brother Benny (and co-written by Marty Supreme co-writer Ron Bronstein). Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme share more than a few character actors and resonant soundscapes. Protagonists in both films head to Manhattan’s diamond district to hawk jewels, and they both finesse inequitable power dynamics with Black co-conspirators. Both stories hinge on a leather bag filled with cash, on infidelity, and on the mortal threat of the gangster’s gun. In Marty Supreme, the deaf Japanese table tennis star Endo is played by the actually deaf table tennis champion Koto Kawaguchi. In Uncut Gems, professional basketball player Kevin Garnett plays the role of professional basketball player Kevin Garnett.
The uncut gem that gives the film its namesake is carved out of raw earth by Ethiopian Jews, a deeply unjust racial, tribal, and colonial relationship Adam Sandler’s character is more than willing to exploit. But in Marty Supreme, Mauser is the one chiseling away at priceless African stones. After his devastating rout in the finals of the Table Tennis World Championships, Marty is reduced to touring as the halftime freak attraction of a more famous freak attraction, the Harlem Globetrotters. Marty considers them – and himself – among the world’s greatest athletes, an insult hammered home by a montage of exhibition locations the majority of which have hosted the Olympic games. 1980’s Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime plays throughout, a callback to 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – a tale about the lengths we go to excise the memories that are too painful to remember. Amidst all this darkness and shame, Marty sneaks away from the group photo to cut off a small piece of a pyramid. When he returns home at the end of the tour, he gifts it to his mother: “we built this.”
And this is no ordinary Jewish mother. This is Fran Drescher, America’s Jewish mother. She nods, knowingly. “We built this” is biblical, but it simultaneously triggers another frequency given Christendom’s historic prohibitions against Jewish ownership of real estate and participation in the building trades. Throughout much of European and American history, Jews literally could not build things, let alone own them. Contrast this midcentury antisemitic constraint with Marty’s nemesis and potential mentor, a magnate named Milton Rockwell. Or Rockwell’s starlet wife, Kay Stone. This isn’t subtle: the elite WASP surnames alone boast the privileged position of permanence and property to which Marty’s family can only aspire.
Sneaking back into his lower east side tenement, in the middle of the night Marty finds his mother asleep in his bed. She appears to cradle an infant in her dream: is it the baby Marty or the baby Moses? For all its rich layers of musical and literary reference, Marty Supreme draws on the biblical Israelites’ exodus from Egypt above all else.
The mercurial dog driving much of the film’s second act is named Moses. Like the Israelite Moses, the dog is adopted by a corrupt and powerful man with a hardened heart. If the implication wasn’t clear enough, the sound of frogs syncopates an up-tempo synth track near the end of the film, hinting at the second of the ten plagues. Just like his namesake, Moses the dog never reaches the promised land. But neither does Nachshon – the Israelite who famously jumps into the Red Sea before it even begins to part, triggering the miracle that freed the slaves from Egypt. The Talmud richly debates the meaning of this story, distilling mythologies of faith, agency, sacrifice, and vision. From this latest edition of Talmud emerges Marty Mauser, a descendent of the line of Nachshon rather than that of Moses.
As they flee a gun-toting farmer, Marty and his partner Rachel drive through a cornfield to safety. This modern-day parting of the sea of reeds also occurs in the 2014 Christopher Nolan tearjerker Interstellar, with the young Chalamet assisting his father in shotgun. In classical fashion, Interstellar calls a parent away from his children to save them – and to regain his humanity in the process. In Marty Supreme, coming home is the source of salvation. Fatherhood saves him in the end, orienting his life toward purpose and concrete value. He mourns the loss of innocence and the end of adolescence. But the call of familial duty instantly instills in him more joy than all the championships and brand partnerships ever could.
Yes, this is a story of maturation; and of ambition and arrogance and unbridled hubris. Sport exists in Marty Supreme, but only as fantasy. As fairy tale. As a fantastical distraction. A life well-lived, fulfilled, and sustained by table tennis stardom is no more real than a full-court no look pass from a Harlem Globetrotter in Sarajevo. Marty Mauser is two generations and thousands of miles away from the shtetl, but his life path is still inescapably circumscribed by narrow shtetl math.
They say “there are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese.” But just as Fievel learns that to be false, Marty must confront a resilient postwar antisemitism laced with resentment over America’s fallen blue-blooded sons: “My son died liberating you,” Rockwell tells Marty’s friend and colleague Bela Kletzski upon noticing his Auschwitz tattoo. The intent is to shame, to extract some measure of impossible justice to patch up his gaping wound.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Kletzki earnestly replies, but Rockwell isn’t satisfied. Now the master at work: Marty insists Kletzki recount for Rockwell a story of his time in the camp. The primary play is to keep Rockwell at their table as long as possible, intriguing Kay Stone and luring her into Marty’s corner. But if Marty can turn Rockwell’s antisemitic revulsion against him, all the better.
In the only flashback of the film, we see Kletzki carefully dismantling bombs on the outskirts of Auschwitz, having been identified and saved on account of his athletic prowess. He notices a honeybee, follows it to its hive, smokes all the bees out, then slathers the honey all over his body.
“Why?” asks the incredulous Rockwell.
So that when he returns to his barracks, his fellow prisoners can lick the honey off of his body. “For sustenance,” a scene we experience in vivid detail. The string music approaches a crescendo, at which point the flashback cuts directly to Kay approaching and entering Marty’s suite, the seduction complete.
This scene demonstrates Marty’s capacity for dominance, his ability to ensnare and manipulate and redirect shame back at its projector ten times the fiercer. It doesn’t matter to Kay how he is able to lock her husband in at his table; what matters is that he can. But for Rockwell, this act of emotional jiu-jitsu exposes his bigotry through a mere glimpse of what Auschwitz was really about.
This sequence completely destroyed me. Obliterated. In 90 seconds Marty Supreme did what Spielberg’s Schindler’s List couldn’t do in three hours and fifteen minutes.
I sat there in the theater broken. Sobbing, crying with my full body. Breaking apart at the seams, because despite my best effort I couldn’t watch this without being Jewish. I had an involuntary Jewish reaction; not one borne of genes, but from the life I have lived.
I have spent much of the last five years relating to Judaism from a distance. I have denounced it, but I have been entirely unable to cease caring about it or concerning myself with the collective present and future impact of the Jewish people. I have not been able to disinvest from my Jewish friends and family, nor from the communal institutions I once proudly called home. I have processed a lot of complicated feelings – betrayal, shame, anger, bitterness – especially since October 7, 2023. In some weird way, attempting to walk away from Judaism on principle and with full integrity has been the most Jewish thing I’ve ever done.
I have chosen to leave the chosen people. I have rejected the tribe. I have sworn against an identity and a peoplehood that seems irrevocably collapsed into a genocidal project of ethnic supremacy. But Marty Supreme revealed that while I can choose not to forgive, I cannot choose to forget. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind isn’t real. You can take the boy out of the Talmud study, but you cant take the Talmud study out of the boy. And it broke my heart. I simply cannot turn off that switch.
I eventually stopped crying and recovered my breath – only to completely lose it again when Marty reclaims a piece of the pyramids his ancestor slaves built under Pharoah.
I believed I could engage with Jewish content merely as a person. As a nonsectarian, uninterested, uninformed observer. I know now that is total nonsense. That is impossible. I may never affirmatively step back into Jewish community, and I may continue to reject any tribe that would commit such unspeakable acts in my name. But I can’t change who I am. I can never unlearn what I know, nor sever myself from my past or my heritage.
I was – and continue to be – humbled by Mr. Safdie and Mr. Bronstein and Mr. Chalamet. In that dark theater I cried at the inhumanity, at the pure evil. At the hatred that would kill me for who I am, whether or not I can successfully kill off that part of my own self first. I cried at the ingenious drive to survive. At the collective will. And I cried at my own mortgaged humanity, come crashing home on a matinee margin call at The Grove AMC 14.
See this one on the big screen. I humbly submit, for your consideration: Marty Supreme.
I found Marty Supreme and Uncut Gems to both be anxiety-producing films. They are both loud and chaotic, and there’s enough loud chaos going on in real life right now. Who needs more?
Phenomenal piece Evan.