Kiss Me Kosher is a screwball rom-com in the 1940s Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn-Judy Holliday sense—only better, because, in addition to being funny, it provides Jewish food for thought.

The film stars Moran Rosenblatt as Shira. The Ophir-winning actress is best known in North America for her role in Fauda and, more recently, in Hulu’s We Were the Lucky Ones. Shira is a lesbian who, says her Grandma Berta (Rivka Michaeli), replaces “girlfriends as often as I lose my dentures.”

But her latest romance, with Maria (Luise Wolfram), seems to have a longer life expectancy. Maria is on a long-term visit to Israel from her homeland. There lies one of the movie’s conflicts: home is Germany. Shira’s beloved Grandma Berta, a Holocaust survivor haunted by the past, looks at Maria with suspicion.

And there are other conflicts and hijinks aplenty. First, Maria accidentally proposes to Shira. Then, there is Grandma Berta’s secret dalliance with widowed Palestinian Ibrahim, with whom she refuses to be seen in public.

And Shira’s parents have their own issues with their daughter’s potential nuptials. Her American-born dad, Ron (John Caroll Lynch), is fine with his daughter being gay but wants any potential daughter-in-law to be Jewish.

“If she’s not Jewish,” he insists, “she can’t carry my grandchild.”

Meanwhile, Shira’s mom, Ora (Irit Kaplan), is just upset that her daughter wants a private ceremony.

“I’ve been going to weddings for years and paying good money,” she says. “So when my children get married, it’s my turn to collect.”

And of course there is Shira’s younger brother, Liam, who is filming a documentary on Shira and Maria for a school project, causing even more chaos.

This explanation of all the different threads in the film is more complicated—and far drier—than the experience of watching them. Kiss Me Kosher, a debut outing from Shirel Peleg, is a delight. The writer-director displays remarkable maturity and significant comic chops in her exploration of post-Holocaust trauma and German guilt as well as intermarriage and the subtleties of Israeli culture.

For example, Maria, who does not speak Hebrew, asks Shira’s brother to teach her how to say “I am not Jewish” in Hebrew. Instead, she’s taught to say, “I eat pork on Yom Kippur,” which to Shira’s family is almost the same thing.

Maria doesn’t understand the argumentative nature of discussions at Shabbat dinner, or the way Shira’s family is trying subtly to ascertain what Maria’s parents and grandparents did during World War II.

“It’s not fighting,” Shira tells her about the weekend’s debates and arguments. “It’s foreplay.”

 “I can do foreplay,” Maia assures Shira. But can she? Well, it’s a rom-com, so I’d bet on her.

Kiss Me Kosher opened in Israel in 2020 and had been set to come out in the United States in fall 2023, but the premiere was rescheduled after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7.

Before the film’s original United States premiere, Rosenblatt discussed her connection to the film in a Zoom interview. The Israeli actress is herself gay and was 18 when she first came out to her parents. “They were accepting the way the family in the film is,” she said. “My mother—it took her a little bit. In the beginning, she thought it was a phase that would pass. And she wasn’t crazy about my first girlfriend. But time passed, and I had good girlfriends. Now she’s accepting as if I were straight.”

The film is “my first lesbian romantic comedy,” Rosenblatt said. “It’s a comedy with a serious side, and I love that.”

She also related to the movie’s exploration of interfaith relationships,  explaining that she herself is the product of an Israeli version of a mixed marriage—“half Ashkenazi, half Mizrahi.” 

“My mother’s family is Iranian and a little more religiously traditional,” she said. “My father’s family is from Poland and Belgium, and they have nothing to do with religion at all.”

Part of the film’s appeal is the way it sympathetically explores diverse points of view about love, religion and interfaith relationships at its center.

According to Rosenblatt, that’s because the film had a female director. “It’s a little different when movies are made by women,” she said, noting that the director sought to create understanding between the different characters.

Kiss Me Kosher is slated to be released theatrically in select cities in April and shortly after will be available on streaming platforms (see Menemsha Films for details).

In the days after October 7, “we all decided that it was definitely not the time to release a romantic comedy,” said Rosenblatt in a followup email. But now feels like the right moment for the movie.

“The film humorously tells a story of a liberation,” she explained, from our past and the differences that divide us to a present filled with hope and love.

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Curt Schleier, a freelance writer, teaches business writing to corporate executives.