How Old Jewish Men Became the Viral Sensation of 2021

Perhaps the strangest thing in a year full of strangeness: you can almost set your watch to a Jewish man of a certain age going viral on the Internet. This year, the man has more often than not been Larry David. You’ll remember that photo of David drinking espresso martinis with Timothée Chalamet, and perhaps also the news of David chewing out Alan Dershowitz in a Martha’s Vineyard grocery store. You almost certainly recall the Curb Your Enthusiasm star trying to take a phone call while sitting front row at the Staud show during New York Fashion Week. But the year of Old Jews Going Viral isn’t just Larry. It’s also the 1.5 million people following Mandy Patinkin and his wife Kathryn Grody on TikTok, and the 305k following them on Instagram. It’s Twitter having a collective freakout over the news that 95-year-old Mel Brooks is finally delivering History of the World II; it’s a new photo of Elliott Gould going viral every other week; it’s stanning Bob Balaban or Richard Lewis. It’s the evolving philosophy that Adam Sandler has been a sartorial savant all along, and it’s James Caan’s incredible, somewhat intimidating Twitter account that signs off every tweet with his signature: “End of Tweet.”

But if 2021 truly is the year of the old Jewish man, it’s thanks to Bernie Sanders. The famously cranky senator from Vermont got the ball rolling in January simply by sitting in his parka and mittens at the presidential inauguration. All the guy had to do was sit there and look unimpressed and that somehow turned into the meme of 2021. And just when that picture was starting to run out of steam, writer Shawn McCreesh snapped a pic of Sanders, shirt sleeves rolled up, a plate of half-eaten diner food in front of him, a single piece of notebook paper in his hand. “I call the picture ‘The Man and his $6 Trillion Dollar Plan,’” McCreesh says of the photo, which of course immediately went viral. “It captured a thing that people love about him—there was something so charmingly lo-tech about that piece of paper,” McCreesh says. “His loopy scrawl represented trillions of dollars in government spending and he turned up to that diner, disheveled and sans any press flack or aides, with it crumpled in his pocket.”

Sanders is beloved by some, but he’s also famously divisive among people on both sides of the political spectrum. Yet we can’t seem to get enough of images of Sanders—or shots of David looking out of place, and Sandler in his gigantic basketball shorts. Why are we so in love with old Jewish men?

One word sticks out in McCreesh’s retelling: disheveled. Sanders famously doesn’t care about what the public thinks about him or the way he looks—this is a guy who has no problem talking about how he doesn’t call people to wish them happy birthday. But in our image-is-everything culture, we love to look at him. Like David, who occasionally plays Sanders on SNL, the thing that makes the old Jewish man so appealing is how little he cares what any of us think of him.

“The laissez-faire nature of Larry David is stylish,” says Noah Rinsky, proprietor of the Old Jewish Men Instagram account. The account began when Rinsky started taking funny videos of his dad just hanging around the house. At the time, he was living on the Lower East Side, and while in the neighborhood would notice a particular style of some of the older men shuffling out of little synagogues or eating a bialy as they walked quickly to nowhere in particular. In the last few years, he’s noticed that the way his old men look is almost...trendy. “With Covid, people are more relaxed with style, more forgiving,” he says. We all kind of want to dress like old Jewish men now. And while Rinsky typically documents the 55-and-over crowd, he’s quick to point out that what he’s doing is more about a vibe than anything. He says you don’t necessarily need to be old or Jewish to be an old Jewish man, that kvetching without fear and clashing patterns is something any of us can do, regardless of our bar mitzvah status. “It’s a lifestyle,” he says.

Older people being stylish is not exactly new. Iris Apfel is an icon at 100, while photographers like Mordechai Rubinstein and Ari Seth Cohen are quite good at understanding that with age comes a better sense of understanding what works for individual style. Brands from Ralph Lauren to Aimé Leon Dore have never been shy about using the AARP crowd as inspiration or models. But fashion is one thing; what OJM does is totally different. It shines a spotlight on something that, for a long time, was sort of cultural inside baseball. If you’re Jewish, you likely know that older Jewish people have this quality: they give a fuck, often deeply, but express this intensity primarily through a noted lack of fucks. In other words: they might or might not be stylish, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re comfortable with who they are, and fuhget you if you’re not. Similarly, the account Chinatown Pretty has shown the effortless looks of older folks who live in Chinatowns. It should be said that the beauty, style, and sense of earned cool of seniors isn’t just relegated to one or two cultures—but it’s undeniable that the popularity of accounts like OJM and Chinatown Pretty come at a time when crimes targeting Jews and Asians have spiked across the U.S. These accounts are successful because they lean into what makes their subjects interesting, and not parody. They celebrate what makes older people special. Rinsky, for instance, has made news a number of times for staging “protests” with some of the characters he’s featured, holding signs outside of places demanding more public toilets, or cheaper pastrami. It’s a bit, but it’s also not: there aren’t enough public restrooms and a sandwich at Katz’s will set you back 25 bucks.

Earlier this summer, Rinsky decided to take the party offline, literally. He threw the first OJM pop up party at an old suit shop on the Lower East Side. There was a jazz duo, a guy selling hand-customized Nikes, and a nice spread with bagels, lox, black and white cookies and a cooler stocked with beer and hard cider. Everyone was dressed really well. (Among the attendees, I noticed the jewelry designer Susan Alexandra, Vogue writer Liana Satenstein, Interview Editor in Chief Mel Ottenberg, designer Batsheva Hay, several Hasidic men, a guy dressed like he’d just popped out of P.G. Wodehouse’s fictional Drones Club and a 70-something who I talked to for five minutes about how Katz’s Deli was just too expensive.) The invite promised air conditioning, pickles, and unlimited toilet access; the party delivered two out of three.

That was the end of July. The way trends come and go, you’d think everybody would have moved onto something else by now. Yet a few months later it seems we still can’t get enough of old Jewish guys. Rowing Blazers tapped Uncut Gems star Wayne Diamond for a recent campaign; the brand Hamsa Club started selling a shirt paying tribute to the famous 1996 Vibe magazine Death Row cover, but instead of Suge, Dre, Snoop and Tupac you got Adam Sandler, Jon Stewart, Jerry Seinfeld and, of course, Larry David. Speaking of LD: he’s really solidified his place as the undisputed king of the old Jewish men. A figure so big that Kith did a collection inspired for Curb Your Enthusiasm that sold out in minutes the same week David went on a sports talk show to make a surprisingly compelling case for getting rid of goal posts. “They’re not football players,” he said on The Rich Eisen Show. “I’m sure they’re wonderful people, but they’re not football players!” The line between pure bit and deeply held belief remains vanishingly thin.

The clip is a perfect example of why David’s popularity has stayed steady for over 20 years since his show first debuted on HBO, but also why we can’t get enough of other old, possibly less famous Jewish men. The David on Curb Your Enthusiasm is just an exaggerated version of the man himself: he’s a guy who thinks a certain way, dresses a certain way and acts a certain way, and if people don’t like that, then that’s their problem. That’s really the lifestyle Rinsky talks about with regard to his Instagram account, and it’s why pictures of Bernie Sanders often turn into memes. It doesn’t matter if it’s old Jewish men or the older folks from Chinatown documented by Chinatown Pretty, or seniors from any other background for that matter; there’s a kind of cool you develop with age, one that you can only gain with hard-earned experience. It’s the antidote to our overly “on” times when everybody is looking for attention and taking 50 of the same shots to get one good fit pic up on Instagram. We care about these people, most of all, because they don’t care what we think.