Mad Men 1x06 Reaction

Really enjoying your thoughtful discussions here. I feel like I am in a good "therapy session". It is so "healing" to hear a good discussion about "life issues". It is like "eavesdropping" on two good friends navigating life :)

MWD

this is israeli propaganda at best lol

Brakthir

hello from Israel, I find this subject really difficult to talk about these days, but I will say this, "Zionism" in this country is not a thing really. the political opinions in Israel are as wide ranging as in the us or Europe, from a communist party to nationalist parties, religious Muslim parties to rightwing Jewish national religious parties. even within the Jewish sector the views are as divided or more then conservatives and liberals in the us. there is no "ideology of Zionism", if you have criticism about the occupation(as any decent person should) then that's one thing, but if you want to tell me Jews don't have the right for self determination then surely no other people have that right, there is a difference between saying "Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state" and "Israel should end the occupation so that Palestinians can have a state of their own" and non of this as to do with "Zionism".

shir maman

Should I read this comment section ?

cheech

I'm not one to leave a long comment or anything so I'll just say that this was a good episode

TeaDrinker3000

Rachel is an American and the Idea of a Jewish State had to be sold to her. Remember that Don described himself as Moses in a previous episode, but he wants to stay in exile. Betty thinks she's in an Ibsen play while Joan gets a birdcage from Roger. Freddy is an old-fashioned ad man who instantly recognizes a catchy phrase, but he can't quite believe where he head it from. Well-done Pride parade in Budapest; who isn't an Abba fan?

Thomas Fahey

"The show pretends like it’s telling a complex story about Israel but the two stories it tells are ones that make the case for zionism" - Thank you! I hope everyone going on about "nuance" reads this. There was NO nuance whatsoever in this episode's full-throated advocacy for Zionism.

Julien

What are other people getting wrong in these comments exactly? Israel is a genocidal apartheid ethnostate. Zionism is the movement and ideology which promotes and justifies this ethnostate. Israel has been violent since its incursion, and has been propped up and funded by the west in order for them to further their interests in the region and have a level of influence over Middle Eastern affairs. I haven’t seen anyone argue otherwise.

Darrach

Zionism gets thrown around a lot without being used properly, and it’s happening quite a few times in this comment section. Zionism’s core ideas are that Jews are a people with a right to national self-determination in their historic homeland (the Land of Israel). This idea didn’t emerge in a vacuum, it was a reaction to centuries of persecution, culminating in genocide. It was not inherently about erasing Palestinians, establishing apartheid, or enforcing supremacism. It was about escaping annihilation and regaining sovereignty after statelessness and repeated ethnic cleansing. But from the start, it operated under a contradiction: the land was already populated. And whether Zionists acknowledged that fact or not, the movement advanced through processes, land acquisition, separate institutions, demographic engineering, that replicated colonial structures, even if it wasn’t classic colonialism. Yes, Israel today functions as a Jewish ethnostate in practice, and yes, many of Zionism’s early proponents saw the danger of this, which is why the movement was internally divided: Revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky, Likud roots): militaristic, exclusivist, focused on security and dominance. Labor/Binational Zionism (Buber, Arendt, Magnes): pluralistic, socialist, sometimes utopian, imagined a shared Jewish-Arab future. But let’s be honest: those pluralistic voices lost. The dominant form of Zionism was always the one that prioritized sovereignty and control, not coexistence. Using the existence of dissenting voices doesn’t absolve the mainstream trajectory. You cannot flatten all Zionism to one monolithic ethno-supremacist ideology, but you also cannot pretend its implementation has been ideologically neutral. The logic of dominance and demographic control was embedded early, not out of malice, but out of fear. And fear, when institutionalized, becomes violence. Obviously, Zionism isn’t “innocent.” But it’s also not inherently genocidal or colonial in the same sense as European imperialism. That binary framing erases complexity, but complexity should not be an excuse for impunity. The events of 1948, the ongoing occupation, the refusal of the right of return, and the entrenchment of military control over millions of Palestinians are not random “corruptions.” They are the logical outgrowth of a national movement seeking demographic dominance in a contested land. Ideology and implementation are not twins, but they are cousins. And in Israel/Palestine, the ideology of Zionism has been shaped, deformed, and ultimately defined by its implementation. What began as a movement for safety has, through power and fear, become a system that denies others the same.

Cole

Thank you for acknowledging the Nakba and the absurd portrayal of Israel in this episode. And for folks who are wondering if this episode was pro-zionism. It tells two stories, one about how israel is a land of beautiful hardworking people that made a utopia in what used to be a desert and another story of Rachel who is skeptical that it can be real but absolutely believes that it is necessary — she reminds Don that they “just caught Adolf Eichmen in Argentina”. The show pretends like it’s telling a complex story about Israel but the two stories it tells are ones that make the case for zionism and white wash what was happening to the palestinians.

Mahad Ali

On Zionism, I mostly think this is an incredibly naive episode. It isn’t actively Zionist (or actively anti-Palestine) — it uses Israel and Zionism as a conceptual parallel to forbidden romance and doesn’t ever consider the validity of the cause. Obviously that naivety and ignorance does say something about Israel/Palestine and the writing staff, but I don’t think the *episode* is trying to say anything about. It’s just using Israel as a romantic concept.

Mike

I don't think this episode was Zionist. You can see the perspective of the Jewish people without supporting colonialism and genocide.

Nazım Metin

I mean, outside maybe one person I feel like pretty much all of we agree that criticizing Israel/Zionism and being an anti-Semite are two different things.

Gaboxxy

Nicholas

So many regimes need to fall. They have before. They will again.

Scott

Apparently I hit "enter" while I was typing and I didn't notice it, but the rest of my post continued on this same theme: Can you imagine any of these other guys doing that? Either admitting that a woman secretary had a good idea in the first place, or not trying to steal the credit for it when passing it along? It's a very low bar to cross, but Freddy stepped over it when everybody else would have tripped. Stepping away from the show to real-life, something I say quite often at my own job is that The Work is important, but it's not more important than your Health and Safety. I enjoy your video products, but you take care of yourself and do what you need to do. Be safe, and good luck.

JBK405

Freddy Rumsen has been mentioned in previous episodes, but this is the first time we've seen him on-screen. He's actually one of my favorite characters, because of the simple fact that he gave Peggy the credit. It was surrounded by all sorts of patronizing sexist commentary, but Freddy told Don that it was Pegggy's idea, that it was a good idea, and he wanted to hear more from her.

JBK405

Don't think it's nuanced at all. I think it's showing what the idea of Zionism being adopted into American culture looked like. Any endorsement of Zionism in the episode comes from characters who would undoubtedly be Zionist, which makes sense. There is no nuance to be shown because there was no nuance at that time and place.

Eric Viola

Lots of misconceptions and apologia in these comments about what this episode is saying about Zionism. This episode is a full bore endorsement of Zionism. This episode's commentary on Zionism is exactly the same as the show's commentary on feminism: they are both new and good things that are baffling to many of the main characters - but we the audience OBVIOUSLY know that this new thing is a good thing. The episode is written from the premise that the audience KNOWS Zionism is a good thing but these clowns in 60s need that to be explained to them, the same way they need women rights explained to them. There is no nuance there. The episode is a wholesale endorsement of Zionism and it is immensely frustrating to read well-meaning comments claiming otherwise because the main characters seem to be questioning it. They question women's right too but no one is concluding from this that the show is not taking a stance on feminism. We can all agree that Mad Men is unabashedly feminist. Well, this episode of Mad Men is unabashedly Zionist. Don & co aren't questioning Zionism from the perspective of the people it oppressed and genocides to this day. They are questioning from the perspective of Madison Ave and we the audience are never invited to see the Palestinian perspective. The only story story here is Jewish oppression by "white people" and how strange it now seems to these white people that they have their own country now. This is a perspective entirely meant to validate Zionism - not question the catastrophe that it represents from the indigenous population of that land. And the conclusion the show wants you to draw from this episode is that Zionism is a good and necessary thing. Which to many of us is absolute bullshit. My point isn't that the show shouldn't advocate for Zionism. The entirety of US establishment and Hollywood does. We stew in this shit merely by living in this country. No, what bothers me are the people here claiming that the show is providing some kind of complex, nuanced take on Zionism. It's not. It's a full bore endorsement.

Julien

I doubt anyone during that time and place even knew the word Palestine, so it made sense that there was no recognition of the people that Zionists were ethnically cleansing. I don't think the writers were trying to justify the existence of Israel's settler colonialism. There is a connection Don feels towards the Jewish people I feel that this episode is trying to show, a people who are in exile and "without a home", which is basically Don's perpetual feeling/existence.

Eric Viola

Dogs playing the piano, if you like them wet and sloppy, welcome to the show Freddie Rumsen!

Luis

I think it's apt that this episode spends about as much time talking about Palestinians as much as all Western media does. Joan is incredibly right in how much she knows about men. We see that in Don who goes home to an astonishingly beautiful wife who essentially tells him he has a perpetual green-light with her anytime he'd like (as an aside spousal rape didn't start becoming illegal until the 1970s in the US) but Don seemingly prefers to chase after the two women that are elusive to him. Joan understands this well and is trying to be mysterious to Roger yet we know from her advice to Peggy in the first episode that she would very much like to be out in the country not having to work. Her holding the bird in the final shot of the episode is some type of cruel irony; here is the person with whom all she wants could be granted but instead he gifts her a miniaturized version of a kept life. Freddie Rumsen mentions the features/benefits aspect of advertising and Don spends the episode collecting the features of Israel and ends with the benefit of Israel to Americans still outside his grasp. I'll end with a quote found in the book by the Greek historian Herodotus. It tells of Zopyrus a Persian who self-mutilated in order to trick the Babylonians into trusting him which allowed him to weaken their defenses for their eventual defeat, "And now my coming to you Babylonians, will prove the greatest gain that you could possibly receive, while to Darius and the Persians it will be the severest loss. Verily he by whom I have been so mutilated shall not escape unpunished. And truly all the paths of his counsel are known to me."

Luis

100%. Interesting that Joan acknowledges it (doesn't let herself believe for a second her thing with Roger is anything more than a temporarily fling) whereas Don doesn't seem to (is pitching his lovers, Midge at least, on getting married).

Kara

I liked that this episode used the double meaning of utopia to comment on both Don and Joan and Roger's stories. It's like all of them are wanting to be in the "good place", but they're actually in "the place that cannot be".

Simon M. y Atana Sumi

I guess you wish HItler had finished the job, eh?

BND

Believing and praying for change in your country. Take care of each other, and let no evil find refuge.

SwampFox95

Great point. The conflation of metaphorical and literal is the staple of Mad Men (and most of the good shows like this). Certain people being both victims and perpetrators in a messy, crunchy way. So interesting.

Kara

literally same, I used to binge watch when hungover. its both an easy watch and very deep, a delicious balanced meal that goes great with pounding gatorade/lucozade and crying on the cold bathroom tile floor.

Kara

Fully agree. I think we have to factor in the meta context too - it was written by Jewish people (1 at least) in 2006 or 2007 depending when the writers room wrapped. I think it would be a very different episode written in 2025.

Kara

It should be okay pending what was recorded. Only 1 ep of Monster is delayed atm.

Kara

"if you had a job, what would you do" is soooo funny. don would have ate on 2010s social media

Kara

she did say she liked red heads 💀

Kara

I actually get what Milena is trying to say in the intro. If you have no context for Mad Men other than "its an older show about men in suits smoking and talking" it sounds like the sort of show a certain type of man would love... super self serious, a bit mean, not at all fun. Instead its basically a realistic soap opera about fun characters set in the most interesting (subjective) decade in the 20th century. The show is such a good drama that people don't talk about how Fun it is. That's what turned it into the hit show everyone would yap about the next day in the office. There's a lot I could say but I'll leave it for others. "Dog playing a piano" and Joan reveal got the gasps/gagged reactions I was hoping for. The show isn't capable of making any sort of nuanced pro-Palestinian point because of the time its set, the time it was created in and the people who are writing it... I'm sure the same episode written in 2025 would have textual (or subtextual) references to the genocide. At this point in time, everyone saw the "pictures of skinny people in boats" that Betty references - Jews escaping the horrors to settle elsewhere - and there are/were no widely distributed photos for Palestinian and other victims. The fact Israel has a tourism board in 1960 says it all really, they're already trying to frame it as a beautiful promised land of divine right you'd pay to visit. This is a total aside but at a previous job I worked at, we were approached by the Israeli government to work on a promotional / tourism campaign. They wanted us to market Israel to children as a cool place to learn about / visit. We firmly rejected them but the whole time I was thinking about this episode and how so much has changed but at the same time, so little. For me that's one of the things that makes the show great and timeless.

Kara

I don't think the show is trying to take a political stand on Israel one way or another, but rather just presenting the issue as people saw it at that time. Anti-semitism and Zionism actually go pretty well together, because I'm sure the racists are happy for the Jews to leave and move to a country halfway around the world where they don't have to interact with or live next to them. I don't know how much the average American knew about Palestinians or sympathized with them at that time, but I'm guessing very little. They likely did think of them as barbarians and not much else (I could be wrong though). I think Rachel's comment about utopia is an admission that Zionism, despite sounding like a nice idea, cannot work, or at least the reality on the ground will never live up to the beautiful dream of Zion in their mind. And that line is great because it applies to so many things in the show: not only Don & Rachel's (lack of) relationship, but also Betty who's living the "ideal" life of a 1960's suburban housewife, but finds herself feeling powerless and depressed; Don's also living the perfect "utopian" life as a wealthy man with a beautiful wife and the perfect nuclear family but still feels empty and dissatisfied; even Roger's childish desire to keep Joan all to himself, locked up in a cage, when the reality is, she's not his and he will never be able to own or control her.

Taya

Ugh. I actually forgot that this show basically dedicated a whole episode to the genocidal colonialist apartheid ethnostate. Lola's face during these segments was basically mine.

Julien

Glad you're ok Lola. I always liked this episode for the scenes with Rachel, Midge and Roy, as well as Peggy's first steps to 'not just being another colour in a box'. The song at the end is very haunting and beautiful too. Also you might have realised it now but it's Joan, rhymes with alone, not Joanne like Joe Anne. I always binge watch this show too, it's an easy watch and episodes fade into each other easily. At university I used to watch it when I was hungover lmao. Felt fitting.

Mark M

I love this episode. I love how they tie the concept of the Jews getting by in the world without a homeland by ‘thriving doing business with people who hate them’ into the women of this society (particularly Joan and Peggy) having to do the exact same thing.

Jay Craig

Great review. So happy you guys are loving the show. Solidarity. ✊🏼

Eric Viola

never before have we needed the Andor reaction more 😭

Kara

glad youre ok. extending solidarity to you, your people and anyone else resisting these autocrats. so many things feel bleak rn around the world and it feels like anyone with the levers of power are just standing idly or directly abetting these injustices but we have to believe a better world is possible ❤️

Sebastian

No need to apologize. Saying "fuck you" to an authoritarian regime is more important. Here's hoping we'll see the downfall of the authoritarian regimes on both sides of the Atlantic soon.

Damien Fenton

Take good care of yourselves girls. Similar student protests happened in Bangladesh last year. Readers of this comment may look for Bangladesh July revolution on wikipedia. And just as is happening in Serbia, protests Bangladesh were led by students. With every clash with police forces the protest only became bigger and eventually spread throughout the whole country. Eventually people had enough and they started march towards to occupy Prime Miniter's residence. Sheikh Hasina deployed army to quell protests but army did not follow her order and took the side of public. I hope it never comes to this in serbia but if people need to take matter in their own hand to bring meaningful change, then it is what it is.

Vivasvan Gautam

Stay safe. Hopefully change will happen ❤️

Cole

I sometimes fantasize about a timeline where I have a Death Note. Jokes aside, history never remembers these assholes kindly. But it takes the collective effort of unimportant people like all of us here to show up when it matters and deny authoritarians the narrative they are trying to create.

My Toasty Toast

Milena's eyes at 13:57 have me cracking the fuck up lololol

Michael M

You can't win a roast battle against Don LOL. Creativity is his strong suit.

Gaboxxy

i dont think staying with the evil you know is better, you should fight for something better everytime and possibly forever, but i dont think you should ever settle, especially not for this

LM Reactions

So I’m guessing this whole schedule will be all over the place next week lol

Jack SV

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Milosevic remains an incredibly popular figure in Serbia, not just amongst older people, but with younger people as well. Something to do with the fact Serbians didn't like getting bombed by NATO in the 90s, so their resentment against the West is much stronger than the resentment against Milosevic and Milosevic-like figures.

AndyB

As an (unfortunately) American, I share your sentiment. Stay strong, solidarity.

Kevin Frey

Nepotism and corruption on a government level isn't something unique and happens all across the world, not just Serbia. I'm not saying that to downplay your struggle in any way, all I'm saying is: be careful what you wish for. You could "pray for the downfall of this government", but you have no idea what might happen next. Chances are, the people who govern you next will be even worse or they will be the same exact people just holding different briefcases. I'm saying say that as a person who grew up in Eastern Europe in the 90s and saw the post-soviet era first hand. You don't want the evil warmongers in charge of NATO to bomb civilian targets in Belgrade again, trust me.

AndyB

Downfall of this regime is the theme of the year 😓

Nerd Chronic

I understand your anger as a citizen Lola, but think positively because nothing is greater than the strength and will of the people, just as Serbia removed Milošević from power, the fall of Aleksandar Vučić will also come. I really hope that your nation will be free from this evil regime.

Bernardo

That's literally all of us baby dont sweat it. Fuck authoritarianism in all its forms

Kara

You did amazing girl and I'm here praying with you for a brighter future <3

bondbond53