Script File

Too Jewish

Young, brainy protagonist Bernie Cooper escapes Nazi Germany, ending up in New Orleans, where he finds an entirely new kind of prejudice against Jews—the kind that comes from other Jews. Sadly, they’re his own in-laws.
He has no idea how much hatred his scheming mother-in-law can wring from the situation. She knows, for instance, that he had to leave behind his beloved mother, and she uses his mother’s life and memory as a lever against him, eventually causing him physical and mental problems that threaten his family’s well-being in every possible way and thwart him at every turn.
Thus, Bernie and Letty’s daughter Darby is born into the most peculiar of mixed marriages. Even she, at her tender age, wonders whether Letty’s love--and her own--can save Bernie from the secret pain and guilt of surviving the Holocaust.

  • Patty Friedmann
    Writer
    Novels: The Exact Image of Mother, Eleanor Rushing, Odds, Secondhand Smoke, Side Effects (Pick-Up Line), A Little Bit Ruined, Taken Away, No Takebacks, An Organized Panic, and more
  • Project Type:
    Screenplay
  • Number of Pages:
    117
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Faulkner Conference
    New Orleans
    November 15, 2017
    ALIHOT (A Legend in His/Her Own Time) Medal

  • Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
  • Borders Original Voices
  • Book Sense 76 selection
Writer Biography - Patty Friedmann

Patty is the author of the "perennial Amazon bestseller" Too Jewish and of Secondhand Smoke, cited by Oxford American along with Gone with the Wind and Deliverance as one of the 30 most underrated Southern novels. She's also the author of Eleanor Rushing, The Exact Image of Mother, Side Effects, two YA novels, and several other novels. Patty has reviewed for a number of publications including Publishers Weekly and has had short stories and essays in Short Story, Speakeasy, Newsweek, and more, as well as in several anthologies such as New Orleans Noir and Intersections. Her recent novel was An Organized Panic, and she just released Where Do they All Come From? short story collection.
In 2017 she received the distinguished ALIHOT (A Legend in His/Her Own Time) Medal at the Faulkner Conference. Her novels have been designated Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, Borders Original Voices, and Book Sense 76 selections.

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Writer Statement

I think my finest moment as a writer came when Secondhand Smoke was reviewed as "A Confederacy of Dunces meets The Corrections." I want to be the darkly comic voice of New Orleans. Too Jewish is a tragedy, but I like to think that its having taken place in upside-down New Orleans makes that tragedy almost bearable.