Maybe it’s nostalgia, or simply plain recognition, but the 2000s really were a great time for cartoons. Look back a few decades and you’ll find millennial classics like “Teen Titans,” “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends,” “Braceface,” “Totally Spies” and one of my personal favorites: “The Life and Times of Juniper Lee.”
Created by Jewish creator Judd Winnick, the cartoon was said to be inspired by “The Simpsons” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” though for me the show could best be compared to “Kim Possible” and “American Dragon: Jake Long.” The show centers the titular heroine, Juniper Lee, an 11-year-old Chinese American girl who is the defender — or as called in the show Te Xuan Ze — of her home, Orchid Bay City. The city is also home to a mix of humans and magical creatures.
Like many young magical heroines, Juniper strives to figure out how to balance her powers and responsibilities, with figuring out how to also be a teenager, and all the challenges that age entails for her, including homework, catty mean girls, and awkward crushes. Being a teenager is never easy, especially when it involves living a double life. Luckily she has the help of her wise and witty Ah-mah, or grandmother, her rambunctious little brother Ray Ray, and Monroe, her talking pug mentor.
Like many young fans of the show, I loved Juniper Lee for her kick butt personality (both in the literal and figurative sense — the girl could pack a physical and verbal punch) and the show’s fantasy elements. However, looking back, the show strikes me most for its diversity, including featuring Jewish representation.
Among the show’s recurring characters is one of Juniper’s best friends, Jody Irwin, a Jewish girl. As a whole, Jody the character tends to have a Type A personality, is extremely academically driven and hyper-prepared to the point of sometimes being seen as an overachiever. However, as a friend Jody is also incredibly sweet, optimistic, supportive and protective, providing an example of a positive multidimensional Jewish character.
Before shows like “The Ghost and Molly McGee” and “Moongirl” depicted bat mitzvahs for the current generation of Jewish girls coming of age, “The Life and Times of Juniper Lee” featured its own bat mitzvah episode, “There’s No Mitzvah Like Snow Mitzvah.” In that episode, Jody’s sister, Rachel, has her own bat mitzvah with a “Wizard of Oz” theme for the party (which includes a statue of the Cowardly Lion made out of chopped liver) that Juniper and her friends get roped into helping with. Among the standout lines of the episode is when Ray Ray claims to want to have a bat mitzvah, and when told he can’t because a) he’s not Jewish and b) not a girl, laments “Man, why couldn’t I have been born a Jewish girl?” When Ray Ray claims he can’t understand the Torah reading portion of the bat mitzvah, Monroe explains that’s because it’s in Hebrew, “one of the oldest living languages,” written from right to left. Ray Ray responds: “Oh, no wonder it didn’t make sense, ‘cause I’m listening from left to right!”
Beyond the show’s canonical Jewish representation, there are also elements of Juniper’s story that speak to the diasporic sense of balancing responsibility and inheritance. As revealed in the show, the Te Xuan Ze role is handed down from generation to generation; Juniper’s grandmother was the last guardian of Orchid Bay City before the role skipped her son’s generation and landed on Juniper’s young shoulders. Among the nuances of the position, the Te Xuan Ze is physically incapable of leaving the city until their title is transferred to the next generation, meaning that Juniper cannot even leave for vacation while acting as the guardian of her hometown. The stakes are high and painful. Throughout the show, Juniper shares how unfair her position feels, considering she did not even have a choice about accepting the role of Te Xuan Ze or not, and her grandmother agrees.
As a Jewish person from an immigrant family, there’s often a sense of unfairness when it comes to inheriting the heavy mess of intergenerational history and responsibility.
From a very young age, I’ve always been given responsibilities that others my age hadn’t been, like translating for my older relatives at hospitals (even with my imperfect Russian) and trying to figure out mental health issues stemming from inherited genes and cultural trauma.
But like Juniper with her friends and family, there are others in my life who help me carry the weight, doing their best to support and guide me when balancing the magic of our identities, and the responsibilities.
“The Life and Times of Juniper Lee” was a wonder of a show. It showed an average (magical!) preteen American girl trying to figure out her life, while also balancing the weight of the world on her shoulders — and honestly, what diasporic kid can’t relate to that?
Late Take is a series on Hey Alma where we revisit Jewish pop culture of the past for no reason, other than the fact that we can’t stop thinking about it?? If you have a pitch for this column, please e-mail submissions@heyalma.com with “Late Take” in the subject line.
