Soap character does tshuvah for YK
Is that allowed?
One of the main characters on “The Young and the Restless” for a Yom Kippur episode on September 21st is going to do tshuvah.
The character, Brad Carlton,who entered the Y&R scene about two decades ago as the gardener to the wealthy Abbott family in the fictional Genoa City, is not what you’d call a saint. He’s a womanizer who worked his way into the social elite in part by marrying a succession of rich women, the first of whom was the insecure Abbott daughter Traci.
But last year the soap dropped a bombshell: The upwardly mobile stud was actually a Hebrew hunk. It turns out that Brad had been hiding his Jewish identity to protect himself and his mother, who had drawn the ire of Nazis because of her work as a Holocaust art restitution investigator.
“For 20 years there was a complete mystery as to Brad’s background,” said Don Diamont, the actor who plays Brad, during a phone interview with JTA. “He knew that he was Jewish, but he lived as someone else a long time.”
Diamont says that in his mind the character had celebrated some Jewish holidays in secret, but this year Brad will have his first opportunity to celebrate one openly — and he will do so on the show’s Sept. 21 episode.
According to Y&R sources, Brad not only will attend services for Yom Kippur, which falls the day after the show airs on CBS, but will openly ask forgiveness from two characters he has wronged during the past year: his daughter Colleen, played by Tammin Sursok, and Genoa City’s wealthiest man, Victor Newman, played by Eric Braeden.
Full story (if it won’t spoil it for you)
Wow! Is this the first mainstream TV show where Judaism means something other than ethnic/cultural identification?
—BZ · September 19th, 2007 at 2:47 am
Well, it was a science fiction program, so it might not qualify as “mainstream” but back in 1994, Babylon 5 did present one of its central characters sitting shiva for her father:
http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/guide/014.html
—IanThal · September 19th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
[...] illuminated Bible in 500 years, Jewschool finds a Yom Kippur and Holocaust restitution angle on “The Young and the Restless”, Marlene Miller shows the “shadow” and “dark” side of religious art, and [...]
—Iconia» Blog Archive » Arts Roundup: A Sexual Jesus and Bubbe the Muse · September 20th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
[...] real reason I was checking my gmail was to look at this which my friend Hanvnah sent me: One of the main characters on “The Young and the Restless� for [...]
—Her History » still random · September 30th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Why not? Judiasm is a beautiful faith full of celebrations and traditions. Christianity grew out of this faith and should be honered at least equally. It is a shame that this world has created such a hateful environment that people should feel compelled to disguize or worse, deny their foundations.
—Margaret Heekin · October 9th, 2009 at 2:31 pm