“Finding the funny in the sad feels very Jewish to me,” he says.
It’s also a fitting introduction to the realistic Jewishness of Long Story Short’s Schwooper family – their name a portmanteau of Schwartz and Cooper – whose kvetchy, quarrelsome banter and cynical sense of humour are sure to make any Jewish viewer feel right at home.
“I was interested in telling a story about family and I wanted it to be true and specific, and I think for me, that felt like a Jewish family,” says Bob-Waksberg.
Long Story Short is recognisably the brainchild of Bob-Waksberg in that the writing is sharp, funny and slightly melancholic, possessive of the same unflinching quality that fans of his last TV series BoJack Horseman, which ended in 2020, will likely appreciate.
Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of 'BoJack Horseman' and Netflix's new show 'Long Story Short', is getting personal - and Jewish - in this latest TV project. (Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for Netflix)Getty Images for Netflix
Despite the zany synopsis of BoJack – an alcoholic former sitcom star who happens to be an anthropomorphic horse tries to claw his way back to stardom – it is often lauded as one of the greatest shows of all time, largely thanks to Bob-Waksberg's superlative ability to write characters who, four-legged or not, grapple with profound human fallibilities.
The same beating heart leads the way in Long Story Short. But where Jewishness was only implicit in his previous projects, this latest show brings a key piece of Bob-Waksberg’s identity right to the fore.
“There was this whole part of myself that I hadn't really written about, and it’d been percolating in my head for a while,” says Bob-Waksberg, who grew up in a Jewish community of Northern California. “Another big part of it was that I had kids, and having kids makes you think about religion and culture and family and tradition in a different way. What do I want to pass on to my kids, and what do I want to leave behind?”
It’s a key theme in the series, which chronicles the lives of the Schwooper kids – Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson) and Yoshi (Max Greenfield) – in a nonlinear fashion, with episodes jumping between the early 90s to the 2020s, from bar mitzvahs and divorces to childhood vacations and the beach.
Long Story Short (L to R) Abbi Jacobson as Shira Schwooper, Ben Feldman as Avi Schwooper and Max Greenfield as Yoshi Schwooper in Long Story Short. Cr. COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025COURTESY OF NETFLIX
As they grow up, the Schwooper kids wrestle with aspects of their traditional Jewish upbringing that no longer fit the shape of their adult lives, all the while asking what it means to be Jewish if you leave many of the rituals behind.
“One of the things I'm excited to do with this show is to define for myself, and maybe for my audience, what Judaism is about,” Bob-Waksberg says. “I think in America, we have an idea about religion that is really firmly based around the Christian idea of religion, which is that it's about faith - and there are certainly some Jews who feel that way, but the Judaism that I was brought up with and the ways in which I connected to Judaism are actually not about faith at all: they're about tradition, they're about history, and they're about culture.”
The world of the Schwoopers offers a rare glimpse of Jewish diversity – black Jews, queer Jews, Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, and Jews who have left the religion altogether – through which Bob-Waksberg hopes to convey that every Jewish person is entitled to their own version of what it means to live a Jewish life.
“Sometimes we can feel like we’re bad Jews or we're being Jewish the wrong way because we're not doing it like our parents or our teachers or our rabbis or the neighbours down the street, and it was really important to me to show that everybody can find their own way to being Jewish,” he says. “I wanted to make it very clear that there are all kinds of Jews, and these are just some of them.”
(L-R) Abbi Jacobson, Ben Feldman, Angelique Cabral, Nicole Byer, Lisa Edelstein, Michaela Dietz, Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Max Greenfield attend Netflix's 'Long Story Short' Los Angeles Special Screening at Netflix Tudum Theater on August 18, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for Netflix)Getty Images for Netflix
Refreshingly, every actor voicing a member of the Schwooper family is actually Jewish, During BoJack, Bob-Waksberg faced criticism for casting Alison Brie, a white actress, to play the voice of Vietnamese character Diane Nguyen, a mistake he was keen to avoid repeating on Long Story Short.
“I learned a lot from that experience and seeing the challenges that that presented as we were making the show,” he says. “I wanted to be much more thoughtful about casting this time, and there are enough Jewish actors that it was never a problem. It wasn't like, ‘Oh, where are we gonna find these funny Jewish actors?’”
As a fan of BoJack Horseman – an avid re-watcher of the series, in fact – it's easy to assume that any new series written by Bob-Waksberg and animated by BoJack illustrator Lisa Hanawalt will strike a chord. The authenticity so many viewers loved in BoJack, made all the more striking by its juxtapositional cartoon format, is the same quality that is sure to make Long Story Short so compelling.
But with a Jewish family leading the narrative, as meshugana as any flesh-and-blood Jewish family you’ve ever known, Bob-Waksberg's writing cuts even closer to the bone.
“I've said before that asking how being Jewish affects my work is like asking a fish how being in water affects it: it's everything.”
And how does this highly gifted writer elect to illustrate how being Jewish has shaped his entire oeuvre?
With a Nazi joke.
Long Story Short is now streaming on Netflix.
