With all the insanity that unfolds in the finale it’s easy to overlook the scene where Whitney and Asher have dinner and discuss Cara’s decision to quit art. Whitney is jealous that Cara has gotten a NYT write up and Asher says this:

“I know you're just joking about how they said that her selling her art to people was a form of retraumatizing her but I mean, her people have been through a lot. And as an artistic endeavor, I actually get it. We all process tragedy in our own way. Look at Mel Brooks. I mean, when he came out with The Producers, Jews hated that movie. But the film helped us process the Holocaust, you know, because we thought it was a sad thing. And it is a sad thing, but it's also funny, too. Or there's humor that can be found in it. Um... Because art, art is about... Really, art is about... Um... I mean, sometimes you have to go to extreme lengths to make your point is... what I'm saying.”

Asher’s interpretation of The Producer’s here is very interesting. To me (as a Jew), Mel Brook’s experience as an American Jew and Cara’s experience as a Native American are very different. In the Producers, Brooks isn’t trying to find humor in the Holocaust. It barely mentions the Holocaust. The jokes are about how stupid Nazism is. If The Producers has any take on the Holocaust it’s that it’s ok to make fun of its perpetrators, because we won.

Cara’s experience is very different. She’s part of a Native minority in a white dominated America. There’s no victory over her oppressors, they’re the ones that are buying her art. She decides that she doesn’t want to participate in the process that further appropriates her culture, so she quits. Obviously Whitney was directly responsible for this, she was literally paying Cara to absolve her white guilt.

So when Asher tries to compare Cara’s situation to Mel Brooks, he trails off, gets lost in the sauce. The two stories, one of Jews in America and one of Native American people are very different. Explicitly, the Holocaust is something that American Jews got to leave behind when they emigrated from Europe. Asher even follows up, pointing out the population of American Jews and Native Americans is pretty close. What he fails to articulate is how this demonstrates the privilege disparity between the two groups.

I think Fielder and Safdie are doing some really smart self-criticism of Jewish American identity here and this one scene caps off those themes brilliantly.

Edit: fixed some grammatical issues. I’ve really appreciated the discussion in the comments here, thanks everyone for reading.