The Place Where the Laugh Laughs at the Laugh
When it first came out, I went with my parents to the legendary Delaware Theater (formerly the Spectrum) in Albany, New York, to see Steven Spielberg’s newest film, The Fabelmans, which takes Spielberg himself—the genealogical story of his love of film and his family—as its subject. What struck me first, even before seeing the film, […]
“It’s Funny”: Shalom Auslander, Diogenes, and the Cynical Schlemiel After the Holocaust Teaching Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy for a course on the Holocaust was a fascinating educational exercise because I used the novel to prompt my students—and myself—into a dialogue with what I would call anxious American Jewish post-Holocaust cynicism. It is a strange […]
What happens to the schlemiel when the world that created him disappears? Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” poses this question with extraordinary comic cruelty. Its central character, Edelshtein, is an aging Yiddish poet living in America, surrounded by a language that increasingly cannot hear him. He writes. He complains. He envies. He dreams […]
One of the greatest scenes in American film history is Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times (1936). Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) is a satirical comedy that critiques the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Chaplin’s iconic Tramp character struggles to survive in a mechanized world, facing assembly-line monotony, unemployment, and the economic hardship of the Great Depression. […]
I want to apologize to all of my subscribers for being off the blog for such a long time. I was literally locked out of my account because my password recovery email changed. After some time and back and forth with WordPress, everything worked out. Here I am! Hi’neni! For my first post in a […]
I grew up in a small town in the Adirondacks. We lived on a few acres of land. We had a pond, a stream, and a marsh in back of our house. In back of my house, I could see the mountains. Since we lived in a valley, I would see the weather come in […]
Al Jaffee – who was at the inception of Mad Magazine in 1952, and returned in 1964 and stayed until it folded in 2019 – died today, at the age of 102. Known primarily for his “fold-in” for Mad Magazine, in his last interview, for New York Magazine’s Culture blog, Vulture, he talks about his […]
With the rise of anti-semitism in America – which I have experienced, personally; and see on social media, perpetually – I have been starting to think more about what it is and what we can do to – if possible – counter-act it. One era that I have studied in depth and written on in […]
One of the most notable losses to the film world of recent note was the death of Chaim Topol (four days ago). To be sure, Topol received two Golden Globe Awards and was a nominee for both a Tony Award and an Academy Award. He won the most prestigious award in Israel, the Israel Prize, […]
I was born and raised in a small town in the Adirondacks called Mayfield. In elementary school, I was the only Jew in my class. When we sang in the school assembly in December, we sang several Christmas carols; but to make sure I didn’t feel like the odd one out, the teachers included two […]