To summarize the episode: In Manhattan, a severed hand, and then later the victim’s body are found. The hand had been torn off and then the victim killed, after which the victim got dragged by a tow truck (his body had gotten stuck under an illegally parked car) to the impound lot. At the morgue, the victim is identified as being a cancer patient, and then Sherlock identifies him as an Orthodox Jew, so they make the rounds to all the Orthodox shuls in Manhattan [via TV magic, Sherlock knows offhand, exactly how many there are], where they find Moshe’s brother. He tells them about Moshe’s business, which is a postal service store, where they find a hidden safe and deduce [based on a ledger that they find in the safe, which is written in mostly childish Hebrew lettering and which we find out later has a grease stain from non-kosher food on it] that Moshe was a diamond smuggler. In the end, they find out that Moshe had decided to stop smuggling, and Amit, his employee (and previous smuggling partner), paid someone to kill Moshe because he wanted to keep the enterprise going.

(the ledger; the grease stain is on a different page, not depicted)

Okay, let’s dig in.

One of the things that annoyed me the most was the scene at the morgue where Sherlock identified the man as an Orthodox Jew, but it turns out I misremembered it. I thought he held up a tallis katan sans tzitzis and said they’re tzitzis, or ‘zeetzeet’ as he pronounced them. What actually happened is that he held up the tallis katan sans tzitzis and said, “...these holes are tailored. Sewn in to hold tzitzit, the ritual fringe worn by devout Jewish men.” So all that, other than the horrific pronunciation, is correct. But I don’t see any reason why the tzitzis were actually missing, other than to drive the plot. No ‘devout Jew’ would wear a tallis katan without tzitzis. It literally defeats the purpose. I also don’t think it’s likely that all four of the tzitzis would have been torn out while the holes for the tzitzis remained mostly intact, but that’s what we see when Sherlock holds up the tallis katan.

Right, so now we're at the shul where we meet Moshe’s brother, who according to IMDb is named Josef Shapiro. Josef has a big black yarmulke [on the back of his head rather than the top], Hollywood-curled peyos, longer hair than would usually be seen on someone with the irl version of those peyos in real life, and a decent beard and mustache by Hollywood standards. He’s wearing no tie, a white button up shirt, a sweater or vest, and a black jacket [they don’t show him below the waist so you can’t see the length but from the cut it looks like a long jacket]... and a wedding ring.

The shul they’re in is most likely an actual Orthodox shul, given there are separate men’s and women’s sections. [Josef is sitting in a pew in the men’ section.] The women’s section consists of two balconies that look like they run the length of the room, with a space in the middle so they can look down. There are (short) railings at the top of the (short) balcony walls, which if you want to be generous, could potentially in real life usually have curtains over them, but I’m inclined to think they’re there for safety purposes only.

(I did actually look on Google and then on Google maps to try and find the shul where they filmed to see if I was correct about the railing but I was unable to find it.)

Oof, where to start. So we know by now that Hollywood doesn’t know how to handle hair for Orthodox Jews and/or thinks all Orthodox Jewish men have curled peyos. Ironically, the hair, yarmulke placement, type of shul, and maybe even the ring could all be acceptable if not for the curled peyos. (Josef’s English name could be passable even with the peyos because there are chassidim who use English names in non-Jewish/business settings.) In my previous mentions of this episode, I said that Josef was the rabbi, but there’s actually nothing in the episode transcript to suggest that. The incongruity of the peyos and the shul is more glaring if he were the rabbi, but maybe we can let it slide just a tiny bit if that’s not the case. And if we’re being generous again, maybe he’s sitting in a pew in an otherwise empty shul because davening just ended and everyone else cleared out while he remained to speak to Sherlock and Kitty (Sherlock’s protege). But even with those generous allowances, given the hodgepodge of hair (all inclusive), outfit [none of which has been torn even though he just found out his brother died], and location, plus Josef’s inconsistent and potentially mildly offensive accent [I looked up the actor; he’s Jewish but he doesn’t speak with that accent irl], and his and everyone else’s atrocious pronunciation of Moshe as ‘moh-shee’, all this tells us is that the show couldn’t be bothered to properly research Orthodox Judaism or get the TV equivalent of a sensitivity reader [someone who is/was part of that community, not just a token Jew to sign off on it] to check that they weren’t stereotyping or misrepresenting. And sure, there could be Jews that look and sound like this and attend that kind of shul, but they’re pretty much not the average Orthodox Jew [even given all the different types of Orthodox Jews] anywhere other than in fictional media. [HT to @knaidelmaidel for reminding me that I wanted to include this.]

I’ve previously said that I think there are two types of not-good Jewish representation in media: bad rep and harmful rep. Up until now, all this has been bad rep. I personally think no rep is better than bad rep, but I’d understand why people would disagree.

Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t stay at just bad rep, it takes a sharp turn into harmful rep, which I strongly believe is significantly worse than no rep at all.

We start with a less-sharp turn with the non-kosher food grease stain that they find on the ledger. After calling Moshe a hypocrite, Sherlock says, “It wouldn't be the first time a man's looming sense of his own mortality had loosened his sense of piety.” Later, Kitty suggests that the food stain was left by Amit, but this is never confirmed. This is another thing that Hollywood likes doing ― portraying Jews as rebelling against their religion, because clearly all religious Jews are all oppressed and want to turn their back on their religion (/s). While we’re on the topic of Amit, when asked if Moshe was a good boss, Amit says, “He was the best. He's really tight with his community and still hired a guy named Amit. He had a big heart.” If we ignore the fact that Amit is also a Hebrew name and the actor who plays Amit is named [I literally cannot make this up] Rafi Silver [though I can’t find any indication online that he is, in fact, Jewish], and presume that Amit Hattengatti, which if you go by Google’s correction of Hattangadi, is an Indian name, why would Moshe not hire an Indian employee? The answer is poor research. Because Jewish stores are full of non-Jewish employees, including South Asians. But this poor research results in the implication that most Jews wouldn’t hire [non-Jewish/Indian/South Asian/fill in the blank because once we’re being antisemitic let’s go all out] employees. Each of the above two aspects on their own might not be too bad, but taken together, they start to paint a picture.

But those two aspects pale in comparison to the rest of the picture, the most harmful aspect of this episode. And that’s Moshe being a diamond smuggler. Oh also not only was he a smuggler, he was also extra-dirty dealing by selling to another smuggler’s customers at lower prices. So we have a stealing, dishonest Jew [Kitty calls him a scoundrel], which welp, yeah, major harmful stereotype, even if by the end of the episode we know that he “regains his virtue” and decided to stop smuggling before he was killed.

And here’s the thing. This isn’t the first time there’s a stealing, dishonest Jew portrayed on Elementary. In Internal Audit (S02E11), we find out that Jacob Weiss, who runs a nonprofit that recovers money/seeks reparations for Holocaust victims and their families, is found to be “embezzling millions from your own charity by filing false claims in the names of survivors who are either dead, or who were simply never informed”. Jacob isn’t identified as a Jew, but that’s a likely assumption that any viewer would make, given the name and the nature of the charity.

Now, you might say two instances is a mere coincidence. And yes, often that is the case. But I don’t think that’s the case here. Because up to this point, out of a total of 53 episodes, there are exactly three that involve Jews in a role that’s more than just a mention. The third of these episodes, The Hound of the Cancer Cells (S02E18) involves Mossad agents [Sherlock and co only interact with one, Dalit Zirin] operating in the US. I’m not going to go into that too much even though I think there are countless other foreign intelligence agencies that they could have used instead of Mossad that wouldn’t reflect poorly on a marginalized, very small group of people, especially because the whole Mossad part isn’t actually super significant to the episode plot. But anyway. Let’s say that the Mossad episode wasn’t negative. So we have three Jewish or Jew-ish episodes out of 53 episodes, and two of them portray Jews as dishonest thieves. So yeah, not a mere coincidence in my opinion, and very much harmful representation.

The sad thing is, all this isn’t even specifically an indictment of Elementary’s writers or directors. Sure, I think they could have done a lot better than relying on harmful and inaccurate stereotypes. [And the show actually hiring Jewish actors to portray those three Jews with speaking roles (Stuart Zagnit, Richard Mansur, and Shiri Appleby) is great in general but doesn’t make up for the harmful representation.] But the fact of the matter is that this all is just a reflection of how Hollywood sees Jews. Which is especially egregious when you consider the fact that the US film industry was largely founded by Jews. [This is further proof that we don’t run Hollywood, because if we did, we’d ensure we had better representation.]