I will love Sex And The City’s Charlotte forever

I treasured the scene when Charlotte turns up at a New York rabbi’s house for Friday night dinner announcing her desire to join the tribe.

The door was slammed in her face repeatedly, but her persistence in the face of constant rejection was evidence that she had what it takes to be Jewish.

It was a bumpy start, but the fact she stayed committed to the faith when she and Harry split up led to her becoming a Jewish girl any mother-in-law would be proud of. She was never short of invitations to “meet my son the doctor” from hopeful middle-aged women at shul socials.

Like the rest of the army of SATC fans across the planet, I awaited the reboot And Just Like That... with almost uncontrollable excitement.

And I had the same verdict as almost all those other fans when it finally arrived: to call it a disappointment would have been a gross understatement.

It was awful. From the erasure of Samantha (how very dare they!), to desperate attempts to correct its past failures on representation, I cringed at almost every moment.  

To see Cynthia Nixon’s character Miranda – for many the most likeable of the quartet in the original – turn into a bumbling lawyer devoid of any reasonable intellect was a sight to behold.

Carrie responding to Big’s heart attack on a Peloton bike by wilting into the ground in her designer heels instead of calling an ambulance was another scandal. Almost everything was wrong. Though I must confess I did watch every single minute of all 10 episodes.

But there was one saving grace: Charlotte. There are few Jewish mothers who have never experienced the despairing moment in the final episode when Charlotte says she feels she has “failed as a mom and failed as a Jew”. She had become the entirely loving parent, doing all she could to successfully navigate and support her child’s journey with gender identity. When her daughter Rose decided that she would like to be known as Rock and preferred the pronouns they and them, Charlotte dedicated herself to finding a trans rabbi who could perform the “they mitzvah.”

“Who better to lead a ‘they’ mitzvah than a trans rabbi?” Charlotte chimed. “It’s bashert.” Sadly for Charlotte, it eventually turned out that Rock didn’t want to identify as any religion, never mind as a traditional gender. But the lavish Simcha, boasting rainbow kippahs, didn’t go to waste, as Charlotte at last had her own bat mitzvah. When the rabbi invited Harry and the rest of the family up to join Charlotte on the bimah, it was a proud moment, one she thoroughly deserved.

In the grand tradition of the best of the original series of SATC, Charlotte’s scenes teased current fashion trends. Take the episode in which Harry expressed his displeasure over the sourdough challah. And they also touched upon all-too-relatable outrage. I laughed out loud when Charlotte’s gay best friend Anthony discovered the awful truth about the man he had brought along to a Friday night dinner.

When the date learned that it was a Jewish dinner, he burst out: “Is this a Jewish dinner? You know the Holocaust is a hoax, right?”

“Get out,” screamed Anthony.

Who hasn’t been there when a dinner guest reveals themself to be an antisemite?