Okay so, this is likely not going to be the most formal piece I write, but, I have some thoughts that I want to get down:
Initially we are led to see Stan as this stingy, tricky character obsessed with money. This is played for laughs, and it actually becomes one of his key character quirks early on. To the point that this is how we see him in the intro sequence:
We see this over and over again from the first episodes of the show.
But, as the series progresses, and more of Stan’s backstory is revealed, we learn that that he was forced into that lifestyle and mindset out of a desperate need to save his family, and his brother in particular. In A Tale of Two Stans, he explains:
I couldn’t leave my brother’s house until I figured out how to save him, but I needed to pay his mortgage somehow. For once in my life, people were actually buying what I was selling…By day, I was Stanford Pines: Mr. Mystery. But by night I was down in the basement, trying to bring the real Stanford back.
(Besides which, we learn that those skills originated because he was literally expelled from his home, and was subsequently on the brink of poverty. Sound familiar?)
Crucially, after we learn this about Stan, these behaviors don’t go away. Even though Ford is back, and he no longer needs to “save him”:
But these behaviors are all cast in an entirely different light now. Sometimes they’re still funny…but they’re not only funny.
And, money is not Stan’s top priority (as we now know it never was). This becomes explicit in the last episode. When Stan and Ford tricks Bill into entering Stan’s head so that Ford can erase him, this conversation occurs:
Stan: You’re a real wise guy, but you made one fatal mistake–you messed with my family!
Bill: You’re making a mistake! I’ll give you anything: money, fame, riches, infinite power!
Bill offers, in short, all the things that we might have expected the person we thought Stan was in s1e1 to desire above all else, (all the things that antisemitic stereotypes and tropes say that Jewish people desire above all else.) The only cost for Stanley would be to let Bill go and thereby betray his family.
This is how Stan responds to that offer:
Something that is worth noting is that Stan’s character does not change in this regard throughout the series. He doesn’t lose his stingy tendencies. He doesn’t come to understand that his family is worth more than “money, fame, riches, infinite power.” He’s always known that. It’s our perspective and understanding of those traits in him that change.
That’s why this is effective as a deconstruction. More context shows us that our initial perspective on his character–and therefore that type of character--was incomplete. We see sympathy where we might not have before.
And what do I mean by that type of character? The most frequent place we see this type of character is in the antisemitic trope character of “the Stingy Jew.”
Historically, this trope came out the reality that in medieval Europe, Jews frequently worked as moneylenders (the precursor to modern day bankers), because antisemitic laws prohibited them from working in other other careers. The options were poverty and likely starvation for themselves and their family, or this career path which frequently earned them scorn among their by-and-large Christian neighbors. Ultimately, this reality was weaponized against them; the “Jewish moneylender” became vilified in ways that often led to violence and murder, and “the stingy Jew” became a stock villain in media of the time, and later–sometimes to this day (though in contemporary instances, sometimes the Jewishness is implied.)
Perhaps the most famous English language example of this is the explicitly Jewish moneylender Shylock from Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, pictured here in an artistic rendering by John Hamilton Mortimer:
In this play, Shylock is about as villainous at they come, (even though Shakespeare fleshes him out a bit more than many of his contemporaries.)
I won’t give a whole plot summary about him or what he does in the play, but I would like to draw attention to one line of his in particular. At one point in the play, Shylock’s daughter Jessica, the only family he has, runs away and steals a great deal of money and jewels from her father when she does. When Shylock finds out, he reacts like this:
I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats [money] in her coffin! (Merchant of Venice III.i)
There’s obviously a lot to unpack there, and none of it is good. But what I want to focus on for our purposes is the fact that Shylock here is literally saying that he would trade his daughter’s life in this moment for wealth. For “money” and “riches.” I bring this up, because to me it seems apparent that, intentionally or not, Stan’s conversation with Bill in Weirdmaggedon is in dialogue with this moment.
Shylock is obsessed with money as an ends to itself, over everything, including his daughter. He makes it clear that he would choose money over his only family member’s life.
Stan is obsessed with saving his family and sees money as means to that end. Bill offers to trade money for his family’s lives, and Stan responds by punching him in the face.
The obvious reality is that the vast majority of Jews, including and perhaps especially the historical Jewish moneylenders, are, like all people, much more like Stan than like Shylock. Stan’s character helps us see that, and helps us deconstruct those very harmful tropes that still unfortunately continue to exist.
One more thing I’d like to touch on. If Stan Pines is going to function as an effective deconstruction of harmful tropes, it’s important that he doesn’t fall into those same tropes himself. And this is why I actually think it’s important that his own explicit Jewishness isn’t mentioned in first level canon, by which I mean the show itself. (I know, Alex Hirsch, the show creator who is himself Jewish, has noted that Stan is Jewish, and Journal 3 mentions that Stan had a Bar Mitzvah, but this is all at the very least second-level canon and word-of-God type stuff, and the average viewer of the show is not necessarily familiar with Alex Hirsch’s twitter account, nor have they necessarily read tie-in material.)
To understand the reason why I think this is a good thing, we have to remember that Gravity Falls originally aired in 2012, well before streaming was a thing. Whole seasons weren’t released at once, and in fact gaps between episodes were so large that each new episode premier was treated as an event. A Tale of Two Stans, the episode in which we learn about Stan’s backstory, was the 32nd episode of the show, and didn’t air until July 13, 2015–over three years since the show began.
Before that, before we have all the context from that episode, we don’t know that Stan’s supposed stinginess comes from any other source than an obsession with money for 30+ episodes…which was 3+ years in real time. If Stan had been explicitly acknowledged as Jewish in that time, what evidence would we have had that he wasn’t just another example of a “greedy Jew” archetype? He wouldn’t have been a deconstruction; he would have been part of the problem.
I don’t think it’s incidental, then, that the only hint we get in the show itself that Stan is Jewish comes in the same episode when we get his backstory, all that crucial context, in the moment in which he’s being expelled from his home:
A mezuzah on the doorframe.
