TV Westerns
Although Bonanza is directly implicated, it is the collective entirety of the dramatic genre which most dominated primetime television through the 1950s and 1960s that is the symbol at work here. A rough overview of the dominant recurring theme fueling the weekly plots of these TV shows is provided: white characters must fend off the ever-present looming danger presented by non-whites viewed as an imminent threat to their way of life. TV Westerns are thus implicated as the dominant symbol of aggressive authoritarian response by those in power to even merely presumed threats in the early days of the rise of the most powerful propaganda machine yet invented: the TV.
Judy’s Nose
The teenage daughter of the narrator is desperately seeking rhinoplasty. She hates her nose because of its size and wants to reshape it into something deemed by American men to be more attractive. Setting aside the horrifying implications of butchering your own body parts to satisfy the opinions of men, what amounts to an actual subplot in the story is more directly symbolic as a commentary on the trope of “self-hating Jews” wanting to assimilate into the mainstream by cutting off their connections to Judaic traditions.
The Netanyahu Family
The titular family are from Israel is headed up by a fiery radical Zionist patriarch and a young son who will grow up one day to become Israel’s Donald Trump (the Politics version, not the 1980s Tycoon or Reality TV Host version). They arrive to take up temporary residence with a Jewish family in America doing their best to fully assimilate. The result, of course, is a culture clash of enormous proportions. Although not genetic relatives, the title’s insinuation of family ties rings true as the clash becomes symbolic: no matter how far the Blum family may want to run from the worst of the Jewish experience, there will always be family members showing up to remind them where they came from.
The Spanish Inquisition
At the heart of the story lies Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s lecture on how the Spanish Inquisition was specifically created to oppress the Jewish faith by re-positioning Judaism as a separate race. History suggests that it was designed more for the purpose of expanding the already exceptional power of the Catholic Church by enforcing worldwide conversion. The real-life Ben-Zion actually did believe this theory and Blum uses it to symbolize how the history of oppression of Jewish people inevitably led directly to paranoid conspiracy theories in which everything done in the Gentile world might potentially be disguising another oppressive solution to dealing with “the Jewish problem.”
The Ford
The narrator is only expecting one Netanyahu to his home—Ben-Zion—and so is quite surprised to find the entire family stuffed into the car making its way to his home. He is also expecting something besides a fifteen-year-old car with a body made absurd as a result of a missing grille and dented fender beneath its outdated wide-spaced and high-placed headlights. What the look of the car inspires is pity or something like it which is an emotion unlike anything anyone in the Blum family will be feeling for the Netanyahus by the time they leave. The car is made by a company named after a founder who was a vocal supporter of Hitler at one time, and it is symbol of just how deeply deceptive appearances can actually be.
