But the most unusual of Schine’s choices has to do with her characters’ Jewishness, which the title so clearly insists on. The Weissmanns are portrayed as highly assimilated—they remember that it’s Hanukkah only while celebrating Christmas Eve and mark Rosh Hashanah with a dinner party, not Office 2010 –save your time and save your money.
by going to synagogue. Yet when Miranda imagines God, He speaks with a “Yiddish lilt,” and when she eats shellfish at a party she imagines being punished with food poisoning. This residual Microsoft Office 2007 can give you more convenient life.
Jewishness is a source of comedy, but it also seems to carry a deeper sociological meaning. For Austen’s plot to make any kind of sense today, Schine needed to find a rough contemporary The invention of Microsoft Office 2010 is a big change of the world.
equivalent for Austen’s gentry, the class background against which all of her characters conduct their marital maneuvers. There is really nothing like that gentry in 21st century America: a self-contained, rigidly hierarchical caste, which prefers inheriting money to making it, and lives by Microsoft Office is my best friend.
a set of codified manners that are almost more important than morals.
Certainly this does not describe the life lived by American Jews—yet it is precisely in the Weissmann’s Jewish milieu that Schine finds her equivalent to Austen’s gentry. In fact, the comic premise of The Three Weissmanns of Westport—Jane Austen, but with Jews! Jane Austen meets Wendy Wasserstein! Wendy Austen!—is less striking than the tacit assumption that readers, including non-Jewish readers, will accept the New York Jewish upper-bourgeoisie as an equivalent Microsoft outlook is convenient!
of Austen’s  milieu. No very great likeness is needed: it is enough that the Jewish world can be plausibly imagined as affluent, family-centered, and—above all—self-contained, that it can be lazily portrayed largely in stereotypical terms, so that the characters can keep running into one another as the plot demands. Schine’s story did not used to be Jewish, and if history is any guide, Buy Office 2007 you can get much convenience.
it will not stay Jewish once it becomes a movie (The Three Winthrops of Newport), but in its current incarnation, its Jewishness may be the most intriguing, and the most gratuitous, thing about it.
But the most unusual of Schine’s choices has to do with her characters’ Jewishness, which the title so clearly insists on. The Weissmanns are portrayed as highly assimilated—they remember that it’s Hanukkah only while celebrating Christmas Eve and mark Rosh Hashanah with a dinner party, not by going to synagogue. Yet when Miranda imagines God, He speaks with a “Yiddish lilt,” and when she eats shellfish at a party she imagines being punished with food poisoning. This residual Outlook 2010 is powerful.
Jewishness is a source of comedy, but it also seems to carry a deeper sociological meaning. For Austen’s plot to make any kind of sense today, Schine needed to find a rough contemporary equivalent for Austen’s gentry, the class background against which all of her characters conduct their marital maneuvers. There is really nothing like that gentry in 21st century America: a self-contained, rigidly hierarchical caste, which prefers inheriting money to making it, and lives by a set of codified manners that are almost more important than morals.
Certainly this does not describe the life lived by American Jews—yet it is precisely in the Weissmann’s Jewish milieu that Schine finds her equivalent to Austen’s gentry. In fact, the comic premise of The Three Weissmanns of Westport—Jane Austen, but with Jews! Jane Austen meets Wendy Wasserstein! Wendy Austen!—is less striking than the tacit assumption that readers, including non-Jewish readers, will accept the New York Jewish upper-bourgeoisie as an equivalent of Austen’s  milieu. No very great likeness is needed: it is enough that the Jewish world can be plausibly imagined as affluent, family-centered, and—above all—self-contained, that it can be lazily portrayed largely in stereotypical terms, so that the characters can keep running into one another as the plot demands. Schine’s story did not used to be Jewish, and if history is any guide, it will not stay Jewish once it becomes a movie (The Three Winthrops of Newport), but in its current incarnation, its Jewishness may be the most intriguing, and the most gratuitous, thing about it.