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Professor Sarah Hammerschlag on what Marty Supreme reveals about postwar American Judaism, the limits of meritocracy, and survival. 

What does ping-pong have to do with capitalism, fascism, and the American Dream? The Academy Award-nominated Marty Supreme has some answers.  

Directed and co-written by Josh Safdie and starring Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme employs a familiar character: the American Jew as antihero, hustling for money, legitimacy, and perhaps even salvation.  

Set in post-World War II New York, the viewer follows the titular Marty Mauser from a family-run shoe store to international, high-stakes table tennis venues. Though billed as a thriller, it plays more like a stylized caper, fitting for the thread of duplicity that stitches together Marty’s journey.  

“The movie represents a particular American story and emphasis on American identity, but there is a disjunction between the values associated with that ideal and the Jewish character trying to embody it,” Sarah Hammerschlag, John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism, observed. 

Professor Hammerschlag’s scholarship examines Judaism in postwar European thought. Criteria spoke with her about Marty Supreme in a conversation that showed how the figure of the Jew in postwar cinema can be used to illustrate how racial violence intersects with capitalism’s myth of fair play.

This is an edited Q&A that contains spoilers for the film Marty Supreme. 

Do you think Marty Supreme is ultimately a story about the American Dream? And if so, how does the setting in 1952 New York with a non-religious, Jewish main character add nuance to a viewer’s concept of that “dream?” 

By allowing the Holocaust to be in the background, the filmmakers provide the viewer with a constant point of reference that situates the Americans, capitalists, as the heroes and defeaters of fascism. Marty’s Jewishness reveals the duplicity in the promise of American meritocracy. The concept only works if there are rules, but the movie repeatedly demonstrates that the play is completely ruleless.

Ping-pong, after all, is a game defined by clear rules and visible stakes, a fitting metaphor for the meritocratic fantasy the film ultimately dismantles. It can be hard to watch for viewers who have seen enough sports movies. Our “Cinderella story” expectations remain, as do Marty's. We keep thinking that his scrappiness will get him to the ping-pong championships and he’ll end up on top, despite everything he knows, despite everything we know.

A moment in the film that struck me was the surreal speech delivered by the character Rockwell, a pen industry titan played by real-life venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame. 

Rockwell boasts, “I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire,” evoking the founding of the East India Company and the rise of global capitalism. He threatens Marty with a story echoing the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew, but in this context, the force cursing the Jew to eternal life is capital itself.  

Marty wants to win at almost any cost. How does his participation in this striving, in the continued “playing,” reveal the tension between ideal and reality in postwar America? 

From the opening scene, when a supposed customer of the shoe store where Marty works, and we don’t yet know that she is his lover, the viewer is deceived. It’s an early clue for what’s coming. Every subsequent interaction is layered with deception. And yet the myth remains—that the best man wins.

And then there are all these antisemitic tropes, both obvious and more covert. For instance, Marty is forced to kiss a pig if he loses a ping-pong match, racial slurs are hurled openly, and he is made to wear a ruffled pink shirt during exhibition games played as a sideshow for the Harlem Globetrotters.  

We watch Marty fight against the idea of Jewish clownishness throughout the film, only to find himself placed even more so in that role by virtue of trying to escape it. The viewer sees the two sides of the coin: ethnic pride that cannot be separated from the way in which it's constituted in response to antisemitism.  

In light of that pride, how might we think about Marty’s hubris through Jewish ideas about “chosenness,” especially when the sense of being set apart is no longer tied to covenant, law, or community? 

One of the things I find interesting about Marty as a character is that the way he reclaims his Jewishness is not through religion but by means of race, through the idea of blood.

I’ve been teaching Franz Rosenzweig, who argued that Jews endure not through conquest, but continuity. They stand outside of history by sustaining Jewish lineage. If capitalism distorts “chosenness” into self-authorization, Rosenzweig offers a different vision: eternity secured not through power, but through regeneration.

This blood mythology is all over the movie, particularly given the strained family relationships. There are no moments in the film that depict trust among any blood relatives, yet the idea of lineage is carried through the script. For instance, when he hands his mother the rock he chiseled from an Egyptian pyramid, he says, “We built this.”  

At what level did “we” build this? The character has to have an idea of peoplehood, an idea of blood, for that to be a coherent statement. 

What does the movie have to say about blood in that case? Particularly given the bookend motifs related to human reproduction. 

This is why Rosenzweig comes up for me, here. Because on the one hand, I tend to think of this racialized blood language as problematic, and yet, for him, it is the way in which one escapes the violence of history—by retreating to the family and regeneration. If we look at postwar debates about Judaism, it goes back to survival, and everything becomes about Jewish reproduction. The American Jewish establishment also embraced this idea of continuity, which is visible in debates about intermarriage and programs like Birthright.  

Marty Supreme doesn't pass judgment on this impulse toward blood, peoplehood, and reproduction. If anything, the film suggests, maybe ironically, maybe not, it is a means of escape from the violence of history and the ruthlessness of capitalism. 

Pop Religion is a new series from the Divinity School asking scholars to respond to both overt and subtle religious currents in popular culture. 

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