I Can’t Stop Thinking About the One Jewish Character in ‘Yesteryear’

Everyone is talking about “Yesteryear,” the satirical new novel from podcast host and writer Caro Claire Burke that takes on tradwife influencers. Entertainment reporters are buzzing about the film adaptation, which will both star and be produced by Anne Hathaway. Culture writers are arguing about whether the book is Good For Women.

But no one is talking about the one Jewish character.

Not that anyone should be — she’s mentioned once and takes up exactly three lines of air time. But those three lines were very important to me, personally: They perfectly summed up how I’ve experienced being Jewish online.

In “Yesteryear,” our main character Natalie is trying to cope with the life she’s built for herself. She’s left her sheltered, religious childhood in Idaho to attend Harvard, but finds she can’t fit in with the mostly secular East Coast college experience. 

After dropping out, she marries one of her former Harvard classmates who is — no offense to male lead Caleb — kind of a loser, though he is a rich loser. Caleb is so rich, in fact, that Natalie has used his family’s money to purchase a multi-million dollar ranch, her desperate attempt to help Caleb find something he’s passionate about. But buying the ranch came with secret conditions: Natalie’s father-in-law only agreed to give her the money if she promised to give him grandchildren. Lots of them.

Natalie finds herself pregnant, miserable and in charge of domestic jobs she loathes. She remembers advice her mother gave her after she first married Caleb: Pretend that you have an audience cheering you on.

She decides to stop pretending and become an influencer.

The Jewish character appears in an online workshop for influencers, where Natalie clocks that everyone in the Zoom call looks just like her.

“Nearly everyone had a little cross necklace glistening on their chest, except for one curly-haired woman from New Jersey, Rachel Weissman, who looked increasingly distressed in the opening minutes of the call until finally she turned her video off.”

Rachel is never mentioned again, but I like to think she minimized the Zoom call and listened vaguely as she opened a new tab and started searching furiously. Instagram influencers Christian? Why are all influencers Christian? Jewish instagram influencers? Maybe she questioned her entire sense of taste and style, or even whether creating content online was somehow a Christian activity and she had missed the memo.

This is essentially what I did, 10-15 years earlier, when I noticed that the network of women I followed and emulated online — the ones with Zooey Deschanel bangs and big hats and small dogs wearing bowties — all had one word somewhere in their online presence: believer. I was too blinded by their bookshelves organized in rainbow order and perfect toddlers in yellow galoshes to realize what now seems obvious: I was under the influence of the first wave of Mormon mommy bloggers.

I still remember the vaguely crestfallen feeling of thinking I had found a space where I could fit in, and realizing I was trying to be part of something that would never be for me and that I actually didn’t want to be part of. This wasn’t new — having grown up in Louisiana, I frequently found myself in situations where I wasn’t explicitly forbidden to be, but didn’t fully belong. Skating rinks with bible verses spray painted on the walls, restaurants with framed pictures of Jesus, innocent flirtations with boys in my tenth grade world geography class who thought I was going to hell.

Even though it wasn’t a new feeling, it was still exhausting. And in just three lines with a throwaway character, Caro Claire Burke brought that feeling top of mind. 

I hope the fictional Rachel Weismann turned off her camera, then turned off her computer, walked outside and touched grass. I hope she never looked at social media again. But if she’s still there, perhaps, like me, she’s scrolling through blatantly antisemitic comments on Instagram and realizing that vaguely feeling like she’s in the wrong place might be the least of her worries.