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Apple TV’s ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’ just gave us a stunningly authentic Passover episode

18 0
27.04.2026

Matzah is not something I typically give much thought to in the days following Passover. Yet I cannot stop thinking about a piece of shmura matzah I recently encountered.

The encounter came on Apple TV’s “Your Friends & Neighbors,” where the handmade round matzah (that always tastes a little burnt) just had a major cameo — perhaps its debut on a national TV series — in the episode that dropped on Friday.

“Your Friends & Neighbors” stars Jon Hamm as a suburbanite who takes to theft, roiling his community. The entire show is packed with rounds of golf and all-you-can-eat buffets at a WASPy country club — I hadn’t gotten the sense that anyone was Jewish. Until I saw that the fourth episode of the second season was called “The Bread of Affliction.”

Perhaps I should have known: The show is based (and filmed) in Westchester County, just north of New York City, where I work as a rabbi and where many secular families include Jews. And there was a “L’chayim” in the previous episode, but that phrase has practically entered the English lexicon. I never saw the matzah coming.

I’ve carved out a social media niche critiquing portrayals of Judaism in pop culture. So I have to give credit where credit’s due — what transpired on “Your Friends & Neighbors” was no less than a modern miracle: Judaism done right.

I was sold at “Good yontif,” the words recited by Hari Sahni (played by Manu Narayan), one of the hosts, as guests entered his gorgeous, towering home for the seder.

What soon transpired was not your traditional hodgepodge of a Passover table: no scattered Hebrew school projects or random plastic frogs. We viewers got an aspirational seder, with an aesthetic somewhere between........

© The Jewish Week