Television’s small pantheon of animated Jewish characters just got a bit bigger: On Sunday night’s episode, entitled “Family Goy,” Lois Griffin, the matriarch on Seth MacFarlane’s Fox hit Family Guy, learned that she was Jewish. She should have seen it coming: her maternal grandmother’s maiden name, her mother tells her in one of the episode’s many uncouth moments, was Hebrewberg, which was the Ellis Island version of Hebrewbergmoneygrabber.
Lois’s husband, the loudobese blowhard Peter, is ecstatic at first about his wife’s newfound status as a member of the chosen people—briefly, he’s an enthusiastic attendee at synagogue, and puts the kids in Jewish day school—but he soon remembers his Catholicism and confronts his wife. “I’m a Catholic,” he tells her, “and I want to live in a Catholic house.”