Amanda Peet on How Being Jewish Helped Her Deal with Her Cancer Diagnosis

In the recently released “Fantasy Life,” Amanda Peet plays Dianne Cohen, a Jewish actress trying to reclaim her career after having kids. She forms a connection with Sam Stein (Matthew Shear), a former paralegal (and a patient of her father-in-law) she hires to babysit her children.

Peet is mesmerizing in this role, as she is in any — utterly believable and natural, and understatedly funny — portraying a person struggling with mental health, career doubts, aging and wanting to recapture life’s spark.

There are a lot of moments — many of them extremely Jewish — to relate to in this quirky and heartfelt movie, but there’s also a lot of relatable, funny banter with Dianne’s Jewish parents, especially dinnertime politics from her father Lenny, played by Bob Balaban.

In real life, Peet recently lost both of her parents while dealing with her own breast cancer diagnosis, an ordeal she recounts beautifully in her recent New Yorker piece “My Season of Ativan.”

In a recent interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Peet, 54, a mother of three with husband and “Game of Thrones” co-creator David Benioff, recounts how being Jewish shaped the way she dealt with that diagnosis, which ended up not as dire as it could have been (Peet is now, pu pu pu, cancer free).

“I didn’t really have that why-me thing. Maybe it’s because I’m Jewish,” she told Gross. “I’m just sort of always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So in this case, it was three shoes… obviously, I had a lot of meltdowns, but I was like, OK. Roll our sleeves up. All hands on deck.”

Many of us can relate to this — being Jewish, and living with generational trauma, means living with constant readiness for disaster and knowing that the most important thing is to keep moving through it and keep your wits about you.

And, like for many of us in this country, the lived reality of being Jewish for Peet is complex. When Gross simply assumed that Peet wasn’t a practicing Jew, the actress corrected her.

“Well, we do Shabbat. And the kids were bat mitzvah-ed, and Henry, we bar mitzvah-ed. But I think it’s not a religious affiliation as much as a cultural one, and, you know, we love the rituals,” she explained to the veteran radio host.

She told Gross that her Jewish mother didn’t believe in the afterlife (her father was a staunch atheist). Her mother’s health had been declining for years, and she said that she considers the 12 days she sat with her sister at her mother’s deathbed, waiting for her to die, as their own form of shiva.

“We sat together for 12 days. We had never spent that much time together since before she left for college, we realized, and it was very beautiful. And we looked at pictures of her and read things that she’d written, and I was writing a lot, and we were laughing a lot. And that was our way of honoring her, I think,” Peet recalled.