Emma Seligman is Jewish, Queer, and Figuring Herself Out
Tisch alum and ‘Shiva Baby’ director Emma Seligman talks about Judaism, being queer, sex work, and her time at NYU.
Emma Seligman was not calling out me, an NYU Gallatin student, specifically when she put a bunch of jokes about NYU Gallatin in her 2020 feature film Shiva Baby. At least, that’s what she tells me when I ask her about it. We’re Zooming from opposite sides of the country — Seligman has just recently moved to L.A., and is still getting used to the new time zone — and she laughs as she explains that while yes, the unnamed NYC-based university that her aimless main character attends to make up her own degree is based on the school of individualized study, “pretty much all” of the actual Gallatin students Seligman knew while at NYU were more ambitious and “had much more direction” than the protagonist of the film.
Shiva Baby stars Rachel Sennott as Danielle, a directionless, queer Jewish girl who runs into both her ex-girlfriend and current sugar daddy at a shiva, the week-long mourning period in Judaism after the passing of a first-degree relative. There are several references to Gallatin in the movie, including when Danielle, asked by a relative about what she’s studying at school, explains that she’s creating her own major and mumbles something vague about comedy, politics, and feminism as a lens.
The feature began as a short film, Seligman’s thesis project in her senior year at NYU Tisch. She tells me that she relied on her friends to help make the transition from short to feature film happen.
“My friends from NYU, and Rachel Sennot, were the engine pushing me ahead,” she says. She explains that she’d originally planned to make the film in the summer of 2018, and when summer came and went and the movie hadn’t been made, almost considered pushing it all the way to summer 2020, until Sennott put her foot down. “Rachel was like ‘it’s not going to be 2020. It’s going to be 2019. I’ve told everyone it’s going to be next summer. It has to be,’” she says.
Seligman managed to dodge the Covid bullet with Shiva Baby — production wrapped before the virus hit the U.S. — but, like the rest of us, she spent the last year and a half locked indoors, and that affected her post-Shiva career. She was lucky enough to get representation at the beginning of the pandemic, which allowed her to spend her quarantine months developing story ideas and thinking about what comes next (in the works are a “queer teen fight club” movie with Sennott and a television pilot Seligman is developing for HBO).
“That’s what’s so fun about representation,” she says — that you get to actually pitch your ideas to someone who’ll develop them. “Otherwise I could have developed my ideas separate from having reps, and you know, like, do Shiva again, which, oh my God, God help me. I would rather switch careers than do that process again of raising money on our own.”
She tells me that if she ever did switch careers, she thinks she’d become a rabbi.
“I like diving fully into a thing and immersing myself in it,” she tells me. “becoming an expert in a field is more appealing to me than taking on another role in film. I would want to dive fully into my interest in Judaism.”
Seligman’s connection to her faith is fully present in Shiva Baby. In the film, one of the running through lines for Danielle is the way her bisexuality is treated by the other shiva attendees, especially in relation to her perfect-child star-student ex-girlfriend Maya, played by Molly Gordon.
“You think everyone who’s bi is experimenting. You have zero gaydar,” Danielle says to her mother in one scene, to which her mother, played by Polly Draper, responds, “Excuse me kid, I lived through New York in the 80s. My gaydar is strong as a bull.”
This is a familiar back-and-forth for any queer 20-something who has had to come out to a totally unsuspecting yet otherwise self-proclaimed progressive and gay-friendly family, but to me the discomfort of the scene feels inseparable from the Jewish-ness of it all. Seligman agrees.
“I think a lot of Jews, especially on the East Coast, consider themselves very liberal and progressive, so there’s an idea that everyone supports LGBTQ people,” she says, before clarifying that she can only speak to her own experience of growing up Ashkenazi. “But once it’s actually in your community or your child, that’s a different story. And I think that a lot of older, liberal-ish Jews are not even aware that they have these contradictions where they’re accepting at large but still don’t really understand sexual fluidity and gender fluidity.”
Seligman doesn’t identify as trans or nonbinary, she says, but she does consider herself somewhere on the gender spectrum, and that can often be treated as “just “experimenting” or “a phase,” by even well-meaning family members.
“They think it’s sort of like, well, you’re really just gay, unless it’s a phase, or you’re really just fully trans — they don’t understand the idea of being nonbinary. That’s sort of the hill I haven’t crossed yet with a lot of my family members.”
We spend a while talking about coming out to our respective families — as it happens, I got to spend the last year-and-a-half coming out as trans and nonbinary one-by-one to my totally unsuspecting yet otherwise self-proclaimed progressive and gay-friendly Jewish relatives. We both agree that growing up Reform can often feel like there are two sides to being Jewish, the cultural half and the religious half, and those two sides don’t always get equal amounts of attention, or mesh well together. Seligman grew up in Canada, where, she says, people don’t move around as much as they do in the States, which can lead to closer-knit communities.
“We never talked about God growing up, which, like, is fine, but at least twice a month there was either a holiday or a bar mitzvah or, you know, a shiva, or a wedding, or a bris, so my association with Judaism is about community and tradition and just being really tight with a group of people.”
She tells me that when she came to the States for school, she realized that Judaism meant lots of different things for lots of different people, something that could at times feel isolating.
“I love Bronfman,” she says, referring to the NYU Hillel center, “and I took one of those free classes that was taught by Rabbi Nikki, who I think is incredible, and I went to her Queer Seder. Like, I tried to engage. But when I took that class, I remember feeling like a lot of the kids that were there grew up in a slightly more religious background. I felt like if you were going to be interested in Judaism, it seemed like it always came from a place of just growing up slightly more religious, or learning prayers or songs that I just didn’t understand. So I was trying to engage, but also felt a little bit alienated.”
It was also hard, she says, to realize that basically “every Jewish institution is pretty Zionist, even the reformed progressive ones.” Even when the institution didn’t actively push a political message, it was a contradiction of values that didn’t sit well with her.
“My Jewish upbringing was extremely Zionist,” she tells me, “so I feel like I have a lot of resentment toward that being a sort of expectation of being a member of the Jewish community when it felt really uncomfortable for me. I feel like I’m still trying to reconcile with that.” We’re speaking on Thursday, May 6, just four days before an Israeli police raid on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem injured hundreds of Palestinians and escalated existing tensions into something much larger.
Part of the way she works to reconcile the contradictory feelings is by exploring just how many different things Judaism can mean to someone.
“I’ve tried to meet more Jews who have also questioned their upbringing in terms of political thought, who were also told ‘This is the way you’re going to think about something, full stop, no questions asked.’” she says.
She’s also begun to explore the religious half of the religion. Her family never kept kosher growing up — though these days Seligman is kosher in all but name by virtue of being vegetarian — and she credits that in part to internalized antisemitism.
“The more interested I get in Judaism as a religion, the more they’re like, that’s weird,” she tells me. “And I’m like, is it weird? This was such a huge part of our lives growing up — why is it weird that I’m interested in the basis of where it comes from?”
“That’s why I love the show Ramy so much,” she says, referring to Ramy Youssef’s 2019 series about a 20-something second-generation immigrant exploring his relationship to Islam, “because I feel like our generation is really lucky in that we get to sort of rediscover our roots without so much discomfort and internalized antisemitism, or internalized whatever it is that your parents might have had. I really relate to that show in terms of like, is this going to make me a better person? Is this going to solve my millennial twenty five year old quarter-life crisis? Like, probably not.”
“And now,” she says excitedly, “I’ve met so many young Jews who are like me and who are queer and who have interests in Judaism, but look and sound and talk like me.” She says that growing up the idea of what a religious Jew could look like was very black and white — picture an Orthodox man with payos and a big hat — so she’s grateful now to be a part of a community that accepts all parts of her, queerness included.
“I think that exploring parts of your queerness, whether it be through queer theory and study or just through understanding the world and your options a little more broadly than what you were taught growing up, is so important,” she says. “And I think for me, my relationship to Judaism, exploring it further has meant seeing how so much of it is is quite modern and transcends time and overlaps with queer theory.”
Shiva Baby has drawn some criticism for its casting of Sennott, a non-Jewish actor, in the lead role. When I ask Seligman about it, she nods thoughtfully.
“With some criticisms,” she says, “I’m like, OK, I don’t agree with that. But this is something that I understand really matters to people.” She explains that when Sennott was cast in the short, she had no idea it was going to become a feature, and that by the time they found out, Sennott was too attached to the project, and to Seligman, to change course.
“The biggest contribution she made to the movie was pushing it ahead and checking in with me constantly and saying, ‘Did I need help?’ and ‘Could she read a draft of the script,’” Seligman says. “She put a ticking time bomb on it. So I really don’t think the movie would have been made without her.” She tells me that her answer feels like a bit of a cop-out, but that she thinks it’s important context for her situation. “I think going forward with more control and more money, ideally, for my projects, I would love to be as authentic as possible.”
Having finally returned to the film I’m supposed to be interviewing her about, I ask Seligman about the eponymous subject matter — sugar babying, or “sugaring,” — and why it’s become such a phenomena, at NYU and at large.
“I’m not an expert, obviously,” she says, laughing, “but at NYU it felt like hookup culture dominated the dating scene.” She tells me that it was an especially frustrating situation for her friends who were women. “I think so many of us wanted the dudes we were hooking up with to want to date us and felt really dehumanized and humiliated and, you know, nothing against them, it just felt like that was the culture,” she says. “And then I remember Tinder got really big my sophomore year, and I think that young people, especially with social media and the crossover of that and online dating, have gotten really comfortable with finding relationships online.” It’s the combination of the two — hookup culture and easy-access online dating — she says, that have led to sugaring.
“For me,” she continues, “when I tried it very briefly, I was really attracted to the consistency, like, I would be seeing someone that was scheduled to see me. That was the arranged agreement. And it felt validating. It just made me feel so much more in control of my sexuality, in control of my self-worth, and I think that in general, when you’re a young woman — it probably applies to so many people.”
“You have this sort of awakening of like, oh my God, I don’t have any power in this world, but I do have my sexual power. And I think sugaring has allowed young women and young people to take hold of that to a higher degree,” she says.
Seligman acknowledges that sugaring, along with all other forms of sex work, still faces a lot of stigmatization. She says that the idea that sex work is something wrong that only desperate people “something our parents’ generation just won’t budge on.” While of course there are sex workers who do what they do because they need the money, there are also plenty of people who enjoy what they do — “It’s just a job,” she says. “But there is a huge stigma that needs to be overcome, so that sex workers can get equal protections and their jobs can be protected and decriminalized.” With Shiva, she says, she tried to walk a fine line between portraying sugaring as something that isn’t always empowering, isn’t always out of desperation, but as something, like everything else in life, with nuance and complexity.
Shiva Baby has been very favorably received by critics — The Hollywood Reporter compared it to a Coen brothers film, and multiple outlets have praised the movie’s representation of bisexuality. Seligman, as mentioned earlier, is already involved with multiple new projects, and she credits some of her success to NYU. “I had a great NYU experience,” she says. “I feel really lucky. I had incredible professors, like Yemane Demissie, Eliza Hitman, and Susan Sandler.”
The year she made Shiva Baby the short, 2016, was the same year Donald Trump was elected as 45th President of the United States. “At the Tisch graduation ceremony,” she says, “everyone who gave a speech, whether it be the head of film or the head of music or the dean, everyone gave the same speech without checking with each other first.” It was a speech about how important art is right now, how much humanity needs artists right now, with the state of the world the way it is. “It was like, no pressure, suddenly we were brain surgeons saving the world.”
Seligman doesn’t think she saved the world, and she’s not even sure she always walked the line of nuance and complexity she was trying to walk with Shiva Baby, but she’s excited to keep making things, and to see what comes next.
Shiva Baby is available to rent or buy on most video-on-demand platforms, including Amazon Video and iTunes.
