The main character of the movie, whose name escapes me at the moment, is a physics professor who is up for tenure. He’s an intelligent, thoughtful, humble, gentle soul, the kind of person I’ve been raised to admire. I believe I admire people like this because of my Jewish heritage, as these are Jewish values. But our physics professor is up against an American culture that has different ideas of what it means to be a man, and these cultural differences underlie many of the tensions in the movie. Though the viewer is brought to care about the protagonist, he does have one flaw that is stereotypical of Jewish men: their tendency to be passive and accepting of things that happens to him. The events of this movie put pressure on this fault of our protagonist and make us at times feel frustrated with him, and yet his character descends directly from a prescription from Rashi that opens the movie: “Accept with simplicity everything that happens to you in your life.” The physics professor is deeply Jewish and embodies Jewish values.