Cahan, 48, grew up speaking Yiddish in Antwerp, Belgium, and is determined to save the language from extinction in the Jewish state, where he has lived for the past 30 years. He’s the first to concede he is not the best administrator: He owes roughly $40,000 to city hall for overdue property taxes, he smokes Camel cigarettes inside his library of 40,000 old books, and his meager budget provides the collection with no protection from Tel Aviv’s oppressive summer humidity.

But Cahan, who speaks Hebrew and English as well, also bears a quixotic passion for fully living in the half-dead language he loves. In summer he teaches Yiddish and performs musicals in his native tongue in Lithuania and Poland. He is also the lead singer in the band Mendy Cahan & Der Yiddish Express. On their 2005 album Yiddish Fever he sings translations of “Summertime” and “Fever,” along with other Yiddish classics and his own compositions. He whispers, sighs, and languorously wanders through the words, evoking the full range of emotion in a language often confined to old folk songs.

“After having paved the way through hundreds of years to build Jewish identity, finally we build our homeland,” he told me in English. “I find it unacceptable and wrong if Yiddish would not find its respectful, loving space.”

***

The first time I met Cahan, he was declaiming a poem by I.L. Peretz for a Russian television segment, which happened to be filming at the height of the summer’s protests in Tel Aviv. “Man!” he shouted in Yiddish, while piano accompanist Amnon Fischer read out the Hebrew translation. “Do not think life is a saloon, where everyone can push his way forward with his shoulders and eat and drink while others are watching from afar with glassy eyes and empty stomachs.”

Cahan’s receding mane of gray hair matched his bushy gray eyebrows and piercing blue eyes as he paced the stage. Behind him was a wall of books, the duplicates of works in Yiddish that he did not have the heart to throw away. At the other end of the library was a plastic pool with “a few fishelach,” as he called the fish he had brought to lighten the dusty mood. Three chairs stood together near the stage, their backs each sewn in the images of the greats of Yiddish literature: the gray-bearded Mendele Mocher Sforim, the redhead Sholom Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz, with a black tuft of hair to match his thick moustache. “We are friends, the books and I,” Cahan said. “I think they are in a better place than in a paper mill.”

A walking monument to gathering scattered pieces of a whole, Cahan wore a brown vest whose pockets bulged with two passports, four notebooks, a wallet, a yellow box of cigarettes, a city tax bill, vitamins, reading glasses, a USB drive, a mobile flip phone, tissues, a crumpled 20-shekel note, a lighter, and keys. Cahan said that when he immigrated to Israel from Belgium in 1980, he was surprised to see how sidelined his native tongue had become there.

“Many people spoke Yiddish,” Cahan said of the Israel he encountered. “They would read and meet in clubs, but it seemed as if it wasn’t a part of the whole Israeli experience.” In 1990, he started collecting books. At first, Cahan housed his collection in a dilapidated building in an industrial zone in Jerusalem. He then opened a second library in Tel Aviv. He named the organization overseeing the two libraries “Yung YiDish” in an effort to expand the Yiddish circle beyond the elderly. Yung YiDish is one of several Tel Aviv institutions—some 80 years old, and some open less than a decade—that are doing what they can to revive and preserve the tongue that once united the Jews of Eastern Europe, by teaching the language, offering theater, and printing books.

Cahan said it costs $150,000 to $200,000 to properly run Yung YiDish, but private donors provide only half of that. For the rest, he lives by the seat of his pants, begging city hall for a break on his taxes and meeting with the Ministry of Culture to ask for government funding. Cahan spreads word of his center while teaching in Eastern Europe and performing in cities around the world with significant Jewish populations. He dreams of holding Yiddish-cuisine cooking lessons. And he hopes to eventually sponsor translations of Yiddish classics into English, French, and Chinese and continue to promote Yiddish music and film. “Yiddish is more than just the shtetl,” he said.

***

Yiddish, an amalgam of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic written in Hebrew characters, was once the main Jewish dialect in Eastern Europe. But in Israel it was seen as the prime competition to the revival of Hebrew, according to Avraham Novershtern, the director of the Beth Shalom Aleichem Yiddish cultural center in Tel Aviv. “There was a conscious decision which began in early 20th century that Hebrew would be the language of the new state, and in that decision, there was violence against Yiddish,” said Novershtern. He described incidents of kiosks being burnt for selling Yiddish papers. In the 1930s and ’40s, Yiddish movies were sometimes kept from screens. Fights broke out on the streets over the public use of Yiddish.

Continue reading: Israel’s cosmopolitan heart

Wendy Wasserstein may not belong in the ranks of the greatest American Jewish writers, but like Neil Simon before her, she helped popularize the Jewish family romance by making it a subject for heartfelt and accessible comedy. And whether the characters in her plays are explicitly Jewish, as in The Sisters Rosensweig, or atmospherically so, like the heroine of her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein left no doubt that it was her personal experience she was dramatizing.

Indeed, as Julie Salamon makes clear in Wendy and the Lost Boys (The Penguin Press, $29.95), her rather breathless new biography, Wasserstein was her own most popular creation. Fans reacted to her more like a character in a play or TV show than a mere playwright. “When we walked up the street,” remembered her friend William Finn, the songwriter best known for Falsettos, “all these sixty-five-year-old Jewish ladies would come up to Wendy, and she would talk to them. They’d talk about their husbands and their daughters, and when they left, I’d ask her who was that, and she’d say, ‘I have no idea.’ … People embraced her as if she were going to explain their lives to them.”

The key to Wasserstein’s appeal, however, was not that she had all the answers. Her gift was for tormented ambivalence—about daughterhood and motherhood, feminism, romance, achievement, and not least, body image. It’s rare, and illuminating, to read a literary biography in which so much attention is paid to the subject’s weight. It would never happen with a male writer, and that very fact helps to explain why Wasserstein’s open discussion of weight and food and dieting struck such a chord.

As Salamon shows, Wasserstein was not above using her candor strategically. In 1988, the actress Caroline Aaron, who had played a major part in the out-of-town tryout of The Heidi Chronicles, was replaced for the New York run. Salamon reproduces Wasserstein’s apologetic letter to Aaron, which begins, “Oy Gavalt!! I’ve had a baguette, a Saga Blue Cheese, and a nice bag of Reese pieces before I sat down to write this note.” It was a ritual abasement—a confession of weakness and a plea for sympathy—and it worked: “After reading Wendy’s words, Caroline Aaron had no doubt that she and Wendy would become even better friends.”

This is one of the useful and revealing anecdotes in Wendy and the Lost Boys, showing how Wasserstein could use weakness as a form of power. (There are many others that are much less useful—Salamon often seems to have put in everything her interviewees told her, and there were clearly a lot of people eager to talk about Wendy Wasserstein.) Even the book’s cover makes the point: It features a photograph of a ruefully smiling Wasserstein with her eyes closed and her palm planted on her face, as if she had just made some comical blunder. A born theater person, she had a sure instinct for dramatizing her incompetence: “Sometimes she forgot to wear a sanitary pad when she had her period and then walked around with stains on her dress,” Salamon writes.

Salamon tells us enough about Wasserstein’s childhood to make clear that her performance of helplessness was, at bottom, a defense mechanism. It may not be literally true that, when she won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize, her mother Lola went around bragging that her daughter had gotten the Nobel—this is one of many too-good-to-check stories that Wasserstein told in several versions (like the one about the time Joseph Heller introduced her as “the funniest girl in New York” and she promptly vomited). But Lola does seem to have been a world-class neurosis-inducer, a mother who set the bar for her children so high that even a Pulitzer seemed like a B-plus. She was also largely to blame for her daughter’s lifelong weight issues: In a horrifying detail, Salamon writes that Lola would walk down the street with the teenaged Wendy and tell her, “They are all looking at you and thinking, ‘Look at that fat girl.’ ”

From one point of view, this technique worked, since the Wasserstein children grew up to be very high achievers. Sandra became a pioneering female corporate executive, Bruce became a Wall Street billionaire, and Wendy became Wendy. (A third sister, Georgette, led a more normal life as a mother and innkeeper in New England.) Lola went around the house singing “There’s no children like my children,” to the tune of “There’s No Business Like Show Business”—one of many Mama Rose-like details in Salamon’s portrait—and she might well have felt justified. When Bruce was born on December 25, it was the set-up for a lifelong joke: “Bruce and Jesus Christ—the Messiahs, holy Jewish sons—shared a birthday.”

But this tiger-mothering (or is a more passive-aggressive animal called for?) exacted a high price. Its most dramatic casualty, Salamon writes, was Abner Wasserstein, who was born in 1940 and began to suffer from seizures and mental retardation at the age of 5. By the time Wendy was born, in 1950, Abner had been sent to a “home,” and she grew up unaware of his existence. She was also unaware that her older sister, Sandra, was actually Lola’s child by her first husband, George—the brother of her own father Morris. Parents of that generation believed in keeping secrets more than we do today, but by any standard, Wendy Wasserstein grew up in a family with a problematic relationship to the truth. And that’s not counting the more innocent, eccentric lies Lola indulged in—like cutting the line at Radio City Music Hall by telling people she was visiting from out of town.

It was all perfect training for a playwright, and Salamon shows that Wasserstein never stopped writing about, or mythologizing, her parents and siblings. In 1973, her early play Any Woman Can’t (already a characteristic title) dissected her brother Bruce’s marriage—so successfully that, after seeing it, his wife, Lynne, filed for divorce. Twenty-seven years later, Old Money was a thinly veiled commentary on Bruce’s plutocratic milieu and his relationship with his son. And the three sisters Rosensweig are clearly versions of Sandra, Georgette, and Wendy Wasserstein—the corporate conquistador, the homemaker, and the commitmentphobe.

The most intimate sections of Wendy and the Lost Boys show how Wasserstein’s ambivalence about romantic commitment played out in real life. The title refers, of course, to Peter Pan—Wasserstein was “one among the many babies [in the Baby Boom years] named for Peter’s beloved friend Wendy Darling”—and the “lost boys” in question are the gay men with whom Wasserstein had her closest relationships. The allusion is in poor taste and sets an unfortunately whimsical tone for a story that is actually quite sad.

Wasserstein repeatedly fell in love with openly gay men she met in the theater world, a distinguished list that included Christopher Durang, Andre Bishop, Terrence McNally, and Nicholas Hytner. In each case friendship turned into a quasi-romantic, quasi-sexual bond: “Wendy always tried to say, ‘Oh, let’s get married, let’s have children, and be sort of lovey-dovey,’ said Andre [Bishop]. I think she thought, ‘At some point he’ll marry me and we’ll have a strange but happy relationship.’ I thought it too. Seriously. I had nothing else in my life.” But inevitably, these relationships foundered on the bedrock of sexual incompatibility, and the men found love with other men—as happens to Pfeni, the Wendy figure in The Sisters Rosensweig.

Salamon doesn’t venture a direct psychological explanation for all this, but after reading her portrait of Wendy Wasserstein, it isn’t hard to imagine one. Convinced of her unattractiveness, still under the sway of her parents and siblings, Wasserstein shielded herself from romantic intimacy by falling in love with men she knew would not respond to her sexually. Not until the very last minute, at age 48, did she become a mother through artificial insemination, keeping the identity of her child’s father a closely guarded secret. Salamon does not reveal it, but she does show that Wasserstein tried for a long time to have a baby with the costume designer William Ivey Long—a failed effort that ended in bad feelings. “I don’t feel defined by being gay,” Long told Salamon. “Michelangelo wasn’t a gay artist. I have never felt I am a gay designer. But with Wendy I felt I was part of a big group of gay men, part of the people who had disappointed her. I kept thinking, ‘Why didn’t you go after straight men if we were going to fail you as a group?’ ”

It is an unusually candid moment in this usually fulsome biography, and it hints at the deep tensions in Wasserstein’s glitzy circle of friends. After reading Wendy and the Lost Boys, it’s easy to feel that the best play about her life has yet to be written—and that it wouldn’t be a comedy.

And I cast myself as Rizzo. I knew I couldn’t be the ingénue. I was two heads taller than the other girls in my class. I had no idea how to be cute and flirty. I didn’t have gorgeous, long-lashed blue eyes like Laura Page. I was bossy—hence my forcing the entire neighborhood to fulfill my artistic vision. I wasn’t leading lady material, and I knew it even then.

Part of me was sorry. But most of me embraced being Rizzo. The tough and sarcastic leader of the Pink Ladies, played by Stockard Channing in the film, Rizzo was blustery but vulnerable, someone who knew she wasn’t the prettiest girl in school but found power and agency anyway. Rizzo didn’t have nearly as many songs as Sandy, but she got to sing the excellent, snarky “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee.” I had no idea what “lousy with virginity” meant, but it was obviously something to roll one’s eyes about. And Rizzo had a wounded heart under all that cheap pink satin. Another of her songs, “There Are Worse Things I Could Do,” was about being perceived as a slut when she really wasn’t and refusing to give anyone the satisfaction of knowing they’ve hurt her with name-calling. The sexual references went right over my head, but I completely understood the emotions fueling the song. Rizzo was a much more nuanced character than Sandy, the star.

I kept doing plays (and eventually became the lead drama counselor at two Jewish camps), but I played exactly two leading roles in my entire theatrical life: a chain-smoking, mentally ill, Russian would-be assassin in a pretentious Harvard black-box production, and Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web in fifth grade.

But I learned so much playing small parts. I learned to create a character and be a team player, and I swear I became less bossy as I got older. I learned to see myself as part of an ensemble. My dad once sent a letter to the director of Camp Ramah in New England asking why I always seemed to play whores, but I liked playing whores. (My dad said he just wondered whether the camp was trying to tell him anything.) I learned that small parts can be memorable parts. Ado Annie gets more laughs in Oklahoma! than Laurey.

But I worry that our culture now tells kids they shouldn’t accept anything less than top billing. Nowadays, after all, almost every tween TV show is about kids becoming stars. We adulate celebrities even if they don’t do anything. The Real Housewives are famous for screaming at each other. Kim Kardashian became famous for making a sex tape, then morphed into being polymorphously famous for being famous. Now she has her own shoe collection, her own fitness DVD, and her own perfume. (“It probably smells like Taco Bell and Valtrex,” says a friend of a friend.)

I’m not going to join in the mocking of Rebecca Black, the 13-year-old girl who made a vanity video called “Friday” (her mom paid $4,000 to a production company that specializes in such things) that went viral on YouTube and has been derided as “the worst song ever.” Granted, the song—about a Friday in the life of a teenager—is moronic: “Gotta go downstairs/gotta have my bowl/gotta have cereal,” go the lyrics, and “Partyin’, partyin’/partyin’, partyin’/fun fun fun fun/lookin’ forward to the weekend.” But it’s not fair to make fun of a 13-year-old, talented or not, for wanting to be a star. We live in a world in which that’s the message that fuels every medium. And in fact, it’s sort of fascinating to watch a video of a song that glorifies what every kid does every day in every suburb across our fair land: Eat a bowl of cereal, wait for the bus, try to decide where to sit—these things become deserving of fame because the person doing them has been packaged by a company that packages pretend-fame to anyone with $4,000. The head, it spins.

Commenting is disabled on the video; people said nasty things, as people do on the Internet. But here’s the thing: Black has become an actual star; the TV show Glee recently covered “Friday.” She does have a relationship with fame; it doesn’t matter whether it’s a love-hate relationship. It doesn’t matter that she’s a placeholder around whom a cheesy production swirls. It’s what she wanted. Now she can star in bigger productions in which she’s an object.

As a moral lesson, this is cruddy. The educator Alfie Kohn wrote a book called Punished by Rewards in which he argued that kids should be intrinsically motivated to succeed. Some of Kohn’s ideas are too radical for me, but not this. Stardom is not in itself a worthy goal. Yet too many kids are told that every painting they make is a Picasso, that they should be in the starting lineup, even if it is only their first year on the team, that the only reason they didn’t get an A is that the teacher is lame.

The message here is that stardom is every child’s God-given right, and being less than No. 1 is unacceptable. But you learn from being on the JV team, playing the second banana, not getting an A. Kids should enjoy performing, playing sports, reading, or playing chess for their own sake, not as tools to get something else.

Last year, when my daughter Josie was cast as the third orphan from the left in Oliver!, she was disappointed. She’d wanted “a part with a name.” But there was a teachable moment there. And guess what: Josie loved being in the chorus. This year, she’s Grandma Tzeitl in Fiddler on the Roof—a larger role, but still a supporting one. Maybe next year she’ll have a bigger part, maybe not. Part of me hopes not. Because the female leads in most mass-market entertainments are mostly objects, more looked at and acted upon than creators of their own destiny. As my girls get older, I’d rather have them play character roles that don’t define them by their looks or desirability.

I say “girls” because Maxie, at 6, loves theater too. She recently wrote at school that she wants to be “an actris.” I asked her, “Maxie, didn’t you say that you wanted to be a writer?” She quickly answered, “I want to be both. I’ll be a playwright and write parts for myself.” I hope those parts will be more fully dimensional than most parts for women now. And if they’re small parts, that’s just fine.

In a part of the world where identities are often dyed in the wool and then waved as political banners, Mer-Khamis refused to choose. If you asked him about his background, he would most likely tell you that he was 100 percent Jewish, like his mother, Arna Mer, the scion of a prominent Zionist family, and also 100 percent Palestinian, like his Israeli Arab father, Saliba Khamis, a prominent Communist politician. Mer-Khamis had served as a combat soldier in the IDF’s paratrooper brigade before becoming an actor. Half of the time, he played a tough Israeli soldier; the other half, a Palestinian extremist. (His most recent film role is as a benevolent sheikh in Julian Schnabel’s Miral.)

I met Mer-Khamis at a few political demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and the West Bank in the 1990s. I never saw him on stage, but it was clear to me from those personal encounters that he was a great actor. He embodied the role of activist perfectly, which is not to say he was in the least insincere in his beliefs. On the contrary: With his self torn between two lands and two cultures, he let the gaping void be filled with equal measures of rage and compassion, the twin engines that drive every pure activist to persevere.

In 2003, he won international acclaim with his documentary film, Arna’s Children. Arna was his mother, and her children were the graduates of a theater group she had founded in the refugee camp in Jenin. Mer-Khamis returned to these children, now adults, in the wake of the second Intifada, and he found some in despair, others enraged, a handful still optimistic. That wasn’t good enough for Mer-Khamis; in 2006, he founded the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, which he imagined would be a place where children and adults alike could escape trauma and tragedy and take solace on the stage.

But Mer-Khamis was always on a collision course with reality. In Israel, the increasingly arid political climate could no longer tolerate his statements about the inherently racist nature of Israeli society. In Palestine, the Islamic fundamentalists were displeased with this half-Jew who presided over a co-ed theater that put on subversive productions like a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Mer-Khamis’ life was threatened, but he wouldn’t budge. He teamed up with Zacharia Zbeidi, the former leader of the Fatah’s military wing, who turned in his gun in a 2007 amnesty deal with Israel and devoted his life since to co-running the theater with Mer-Khamis. But even the former militant couldn’t keep the fanatics at bay: In 2009, someone set the theater’s doors on fire, nearly burning it down.

Yesterday, as Mer-Khamis was about to drive from Jenin back to Israel—to his wife, pregnant with twins—a masked gunman fired seven bullets into him. He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead upon arrival. Palestinian policemen transferred his body across the checkpoint and onto the western side of the Green Line. It was the last time Juliano Mer-Khamis would cross the border he had devoted his life to eradicating.

Now that Mer-Khamis is dead, nothing would be easier than to turn him into what he’d fiercely resisted being in life: a political fable. Some Israeli pundits are already busy telling the story of the kindhearted but misguided humanitarian who wanted to improve the lives of the Palestinians and was rewarded with a bullet to the head. That mustn’t be what we take away from Mer-Khamis’ life or from his death. No matter what one might think of his political persuasions, Mer-Khamis’ legacy speaks for itself. It speaks every time a small child in Jenin takes the stage and plays one of the pigs in Orwell’s famous story, even though local zealots scream that the pig is unholy and that the story is too subversive and critical of Islam. It speaks because the lines of Alice in Wonderland, the theater’s most recent production, drown out the petty politics and the mutual fear. It speaks because Mer-Khamis might be dead, but the idea for which he had died lives on. Plays, he knew, were more potent than politics; they lasted long after the narrow-minded men and the murderous ideologies they served were both long gone.

Night after night, in a cramped space that looked more like a warehouse than a theater, Mer-Khamis and his actors insisted that art can always overcome atrocities and that hope and beauty can trump hate every time. That idea will never die as long as there are decent people who are willing to fight for grace and believe in a better future. One way to support Mer’s legacy would be to make a contribution in support of the Freedom Theatre. If we’re lucky, it will thrive and give us many more human beings as beautiful as Juliano Mer-Khamis.

The show is produced by the National Yiddish Theater, or Folksbiene, and arrives as that 95-year-old troupe faces real competition from the New Yiddish Rep, which started three years ago partly in reaction to what its founders saw as a certain stuffiness in the older company. The New Yiddish Rep has been stealing a good deal of the very small limelight for Yiddish theater, and the companies have had their public spats. But Hershele seems to mark a reconciliation of sorts—New Yiddish Rep director Shane Baker (whom I profiled last year) appears in the new show. And Hershele is silly, but it’s not stuffy.

The Folksbiene’s program describes the Yiddish folk hero Hershele Ostropolyer as a Robin Hood figure, and it’s true that, as played by Broadway actor Mike Burstyn, he spends much of the show stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. But, unlike his noble English counterpart, he’s a mischievous, peripatetic bum, more Merry Prankster than Merry Man.

At the outset of the show, he bumbles into a shtetl controlled by Kalmen, a greedy pawnbroker. Kalmen’s the kind of guy who, when confronted by a sweet young couple begging to get an heirloom ring out of hock so they can get married, tells them they can have it … for 30 gülden! (Apparently, a lot of money.) Hershele, who’s had an unpleasant run-in with Kalmen himself, makes it his business to drive the miser crazy until he parts with some of his own stash of gold. This involves a range of implausible disguises and accents, some vaudevillian swagger, and a lot of singing.

It wasn’t quite Molière (though Hershele’s characters seemed similarly willing to believe that a person wearing a different hat is a different person), but it was energetic and charming and often very funny. One interesting thing: Kalmen, strutting around in his waistcoat singing an ode to his wife—yes, her name is money—sometimes felt a teeny bit uncomfortably like an anti-Semitic caricature. I’m not sure, however, that this was the fault of Itsy Firestone, the actor who played Kalmen, or of the show’s director, Eleanor Reissa. Instead, I’m going to have to blame this one on anti-Semitism itself. Yiddish folklore is rife with cartoonish greedy businessmen. They are known as rich men. Other European folklores are also rife with cartoonish greedy businessmen. They are known as Jews. The problem isn’t that our ancestors made fun of the Kalmens in their midst. The problem is that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.

Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]

Here are lyrics to four songs.

“Some Hebrews”

MOSES
[Spoken.] You just don’t get it, do you, Aaron? Anyone who stays in Egypt is dead! If I die, it won’t be from slaving. It’ll be from fighting, to get up and get out!

Some Hebrews can get a thrill
Hauling stones up a sandy hill
That’s OK for some Hebrews
Who don’t know they’re alive

Some Hebrews can thrive and bloom
Digging pits for some Pharaoh’s tomb
That’s perfect for some Hebrews
For four centuries or five

But I at least gotta try
When I think of all the sights that I gotta see
And all the prayers that I gotta pray
All the tables I gotta eat at
Come on, Aaron, whatta you say?

Some Hebrews can get their kicks
Cutting straw and then making bricks
That’s peachy for some Hebrews
For some weak, dumb Hebrews to be
But some Hebrews ain’t me!

I had a dream
A wonderful dream, Aaron
All about God in a bush that was burning
That’s all that it took for the wheels to start turning

I had a dream
Just as real as can be, Aaron
There I was in Mr. Almighty’s office
And he was saying to me, “Mose,
Turn your old staff into a serpent
Plagues of frogs and blood in the river
Send a cloud of locusts to Egypt
Boils and hail and death to the firstborn
Go to Pharaoh, if he’s in pain then
You’ll be on your way back to Canaan!”

Oh, what a dream!
A wonderful dream, Aaron
And all that I need is 88 bucks, Aaron
That’s what he said, Aaron
Only 88 bucks

AARON
[Spoken.] You ain’t getting 88 cents from me, Moses

MOSES
[Spoken.] Well, I’ll get it some place else! But I’ll get it! And I’ll get my people out!

Goodbye to the Desert Sinai!
Good riddance to all the rocks that I had to carry
All the bricks that I had to cart
All the mummies I had to bury
Hey, Red Sea, get ready to part!

Some Hebrews sit on their butts
Hope for freedom, but got no nuts
That’s living for some Hebrews
For some dumb bum Hebrews I suppose
Well they can stay and rot!
But not Mose!

“Little Pascal Lamb”

YOUNG FIRSTBORN EGYPTIAN CHILD
Little blood, river blood
You left us with nasty mud
Little frog, little frog
Your croaking freaked out my dog
Little louse, little louse
Infected our whole damn house
Little cow, little cow
You’re no longer with us now
Little boil! Little boil!
You’re giving us all the blues
We look in the mirror and recoil
The dermatologists all are Jews
Little hail, burning hail
The firewall did not prevail
Little night, endless night
Will we ever again see light?
Will we ever again see—
[The Young Egyptian Firstborn Child falls down dead.]

“Everything’s Coming Up Moses”

MOSES
[Spoken.] It’s time we show them what Moses is really made of, what I really got inside me. Finished? Ha! This is only the beginning!

I had a dream, a dream about you, Aaron
It’s gonna come true, Aaron
You think that we’re through, but Aaron—

Lift the staff! Part the sea!
We got nothin’ to do but be free
Manna falls from the sky
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses

No more fights, no more fuss!
It’s the number we call Exodus!
Gotta rush, gotta fly
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses!

On to freedom, build your own pyramids
Jews don’t need ’em, they got a prophet to lead ’em!

Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead
We’ll be fine, we’ll be great
We’ll kvell, just you wait
That burning bush will never fade from view!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

We can do it, get to the old Promised Land
We can do it, Moses is gonna see to it!
Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead!
Lift the staff, part the sea
I can tell, we’ll be free
And no one’s gonna stop the freaking Jews!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses and Miriam
Everything’s coming up farfel and matza brei
Everything’s coming up brisket and seder plates
Everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

“You Gotta Make a Living”

WISE SON
You can sing Aleinu
Til they say Dayenu
Bench at the bench til you’re bent
But you gotta make a living
If you wanna make your rent
You can sacrifice a heifer
Ostracize a leper
Spend Yom Kippur on your feet
But you gotta make a living
If you want your kids to eat

You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It ain’t such a draw
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
In my practice of the law
My arguments are thrilling
And I ain’t even billing
I was first in my class at the bar
Make yourself a living
Israelites, and you’ll go far

WICKED SON
You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It won’t make you well
Me I oy’d, and I oy’d
And oy’d, oy’d, oy’d
But I did it at Cornell
Tell me it’s farkakte
I’m still a fancy doctor
And clearing half a million a year
Make yourself a living
You can say goodbye to fear

SIMPLE SON
They can oy, they can oy
They can oy oy oy
That ain’t the golden goose
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
Yep, you guessed it—I produce!
Once I was a failure
Now I’m L.B. Mayer
For everything from films to Broadway
Make yourself a living
If you wanna win the day

ALL
Be a professional
Any old profession’ll
Earn you a house and a car
It’s easy to be giving
When you make a living
Can’t you see how happy we are
Make yourself a living
And you, Jew, can be a star!

Showing Off Their Fringe [Jerusalem Post]
Love in a Warm Climate [New Jersey Jewish News]
Sex On The Fringe: Ironic Twist on Tzitzit [Jewish Week]
Peace Warriors [TNR]

First reported a few weeks ago by the Forward, the battle pits a woman claiming to be the great-granddaughter of Molnar’s half-brother (got all that?), who has actually received the money, some $225,000, against Molnar’s great-grandson, an official heir who receives royalty checks from Molnar’s estate each year. He had never heard of her; she claims, pricelessly, that her side of the family cut ties with Molnar’s after her grandparents were received by Molnar’s wife in her dressing-room in the nude. (Quelle horreur!)

But forget the he said/she said. The real service Molnar’s heirs will have done for their ancestor, and for the rest of us, will be if the publicity their squabbling attracts prompts a rediscovery of this great, lost artist.

A Posthumous Dispute Over a Writer’s Legacy [NYT]
Franz Molnar’s Heirs Fight Over His Bank Account, And Their Identity [Forward]

There’s one problem with this premise. The reason historians don’t publicize the “soap myth,” according to Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, who’s quoted in the trailer, is because it is, in fact, a myth. “There is no evidence that soap was actually manufactured out of human flesh, not because the Nazis were nice guys but because it was not economically feasible,” Berenbaum told Tablet. “We have at times tested soap that has been represented of being made of human fat and found that it was not made of human fat.”

“The Soap Myth” Premieres at Dog Run Rep [BroadwayWorld]
The Soap Myth [YouTube]

The Moscow Yiddish Theater was founded as an actors’ studio in Petrograd in 1919 and moved to the new capital of the Soviet Union a year later. There, under the guidance of director Aleksey Granovsky, it emerged as the shining symbol of a secular Yiddish-speaking culture. The Theater quickly gained an international reputation for modern dramas based—like the paintings of Marc Chagall, who designed sets for its productions—in a mythical Jewish realm. Featuring stars like Solomon Mikhoels and Benjamin Zuskin, it staged productions such as At Night in the Old Marketplace and The Travels of Benjamin The Third until 1949, when it finally closed, a year after Mikhoels was murdered in a Stalinist purge.

In his new history, The Moscow Yiddish Theater, Benjamin Harshav, a professor of comparative literature at Yale who has written two books on Chagall, combines archival photographs with firsthand accounts of the Theater’s heyday from the likes of Chagall, Joseph Roth, Osip Mandelstam, and Viktor Shklovsky. Hashav weaves it all together into a meticulous account of the Theater’s rise and fall under Soviet censorship.

You write that the origins of the Moscow Yiddish Theater lie at the “intersection of two revolutions”: avant-garde theater on the one hand, and Jewish modernity on the other. How exactly was Jewish life changing in Russia?

I talk about this in my book Language in the Time of Revolution. There was a total transformation of Jewish life—professions, language, geography—and that transformation went in two directions: external and internal. The Zionists wanted to go back to the past, the Communists into the

Benjamin Harshav

future . . . but I wouldn’t necessarily lump assimilation and internal secularization together, because many of the people who supported Granovsky and the Yiddish theater, for example, were returning to Jewish life after disillusionment with the assimilated world.

So nostalgia was the price of freedom.

Yes, but whereas the nostalgia on Broadway was sentimental and kitsch, the Moscow Yiddish Theater was an attempt to make an elevated mythology of the fictional Jewish (or Yiddish—the same word is used in Russian) world.

It’s nearly impossible for us now to imagine mass audiences filling a theater to see a play in a language they don’t understand. Why was the theater so successful?

Well, people who didn’t understand the language came later, after the Second World War, when the Theater had become legendary. The original audiences were either themselves from shtetls or largely familiar with Yiddish. Part of the success came from the fact that the performances had a structure that was easily translated through the mass movements of the actors, their choreography, and other nonverbal aspects of the stage. Chagall had a very big impact as a cocreator of the fictional Jewish world reinvented on stage and as a mentor to the actors—especially Mikhoels—but Chagall was capricious and egocentric and so was Granovsky. They often didn’t see eye to eye.

Right. Granovsky was an assimilated, highbrow disciple of Max Reinhardt—the most innovative theater director in Weimar Germany; while Chagall was a sensual bohemian from one of the bigger shtetls.

Granovsky was totally assimilated: he was born in Moscow into the Russian culture, which means his parents were privileged Jews. After the Jews were expelled from Moscow in the 1890s he grew up in Riga, in a Russian and German culture. Then he studied in Germany where he saw German theater. He didn’t know Yiddish—his actors taught him the language—and the actors themselves were mostly from shtetls. Mikhoels, his right-hand man, was born in Dvinsk and grew up in Riga. And Chagall was from Vitebsk, which was quite a large city; not a shtetl. Yet all three were part of this vast movement to build a Jewish nation with all the attributes of a nation and a culture of its own. Theater was the newest component, after literature and music.

It must have been liberating to create a modern Yiddish theater from scratch, so to speak, without major precedents or an extensive history—especially in a new capital city outside the traditional Pale of Settlement.

Petersburg was a failure for the Theater; there was no audience. Petrograd, as it was called then, had only a small Jewish community consisting mostly of Russified Jews who spoke little, if any, Yiddish. When the Soviet capital moved to Moscow in 1920, the Theater was transferred as well. In Moscow the beneficiaries of the New Economic Policy and other privileged people supported theater art and constituted an audience. It wasn’t that the shtetl was so primitive, but rather that the personalities associated with the Theater wanted to strike out in a new direction, without the psychological “Chekhovism” of the Russian stage on the one hand, and the poor exaggerations of the old itinerant Yiddish theater on the other.

Do you think the Theater’s emphasis on the Yiddish language was inseparable from its sociopolitical orientation, which I take to mean secular and left leaning?

Granovsky said the Theater was a temple—“a temple where the prayer is chanted in the Yiddish language.” These were secular Jews and theater was a substitute for religion.

What is the Theater’s place in Yiddish cultural history? Did it have any influence on poetry or literature?

Actually it was the reverse. The Theater was influenced by the classics of Yiddish poetry and literature, the plays based on Sholem Aleichem, Shmuel Halkin—who translated Shakespeare into Yiddish—and Abraham Goldfaden.

Chagall in particular is very important to you—with your wife you have written two books on him. How does his life at the Theater fit into his artistic biography? What does his work represent?

Chagall was already famous in the West when the Theater was founded. He had spent four years in Paris and was influenced by French writers and painters. But after Cubism there was a crisis in painting where many of the old techniques were exhausted. Picasso turned to African masks; Chagall returned to Russia. With him he brought the fame he had accrued in Europe and only then did the Theater begin to gain an international audience, traveling abroad to Germany, where it was treated to rave reviews. Chagall himself popularized the myth of the Jewish fictional world and, rather than submitting Jewish life to modern techniques, derived modern techniques from his experiences and memories: the deformation of figures, the cubist geometry inherent in Jewish religious artifacts like the tallis and tefillin.

You’ve said that Chagall’s Introduction to the Jewish Theater occupies a similar place in his artistic career as Guernica does in Picasso’s.

Yes. Both were murals commissioned by social forces; Picasso’s by the Spanish exhibition in Paris, and Chagall—much earlier—by the Moscow Yiddish Theater. Chagall’s was a kind of summary of his themes and perspectives: carnivalesque Jewish figures floating above Cubist or Suprematist symbols. Picasso’s represents the tragic vision of European modernism, an Aristotelian moment of unity between space, time and action, when everything comes together. Picasso represents tragedy. Chagall represents anecdotes in the spirit of Jewish comedy.

You mention HaBima, another Moscow theater, which staged performances in Hebrew around the same time. Did it share a parallel fate? That is, was it nationalized and censored until its eventual demise?

No, luckily HaBima went on a tour in 1926 and most of those involved stayed in the West, eventually coming to Palestine, where they formed the new Israeli National Theater. Both theaters were originally part of Russian culture. HaBima was directed by Evgeny Vakhtangov, a major disciple of Stanislavsky’s, who trained his performers in precisely the kind of method acting the avant-garde Yiddish Theater was trying to outgrow. The strength of HaBima was its presentation of The Dybbuk—one of the greatest plays in Yiddish—transposed into the modern Hebrew language. Together, the theaters represented the bilingual revival of Jewish culture.

Is there some parable about the Theater’s fate—its ascent and demise? To me it’s symbolic of the death of culture in a Russia without minorities, without Jews.

The Theater died in the 1920s, when it became nationalized. It could still perform Sholem Aleichem, but was increasingly pressured to address Soviet themes. Remember: the Jews who built the Theater and other secular institutions had already abandoned religion almost overnight. The poet Itzik Fefer—who was also shot on the orders of Stalin—wrote how, in the twenties, he traveled through the Ukraine, from shtetl to shtetl, reading his poetry. Of the youth, he said, “They all read Mayakovsky and Blok, but not Izi, Arn, and me”—referring to the Yiddish poets Izi Kharik, Arn Kushnirov, and last, but not least, himself.

Alok Tewari (as the Rabbi) and Paula McGonagle (as Leah) in Betrothed, 2007.

In the early 1900′s, Russian ethnographer S. Ansky ventured into shtetl territory, armed with a wax cylinder recording device and camera, to document a fading, if still vibrant, world. There he discovered the tale of the dybbuk, a wandering soul who can possess the body of a living being.

Ansky went on to write a play about the dybbuk, and that play has since undergone numerous reinterpretations, becoming a legend in its own right.

Arts reporter Eric Molinsky speaks to playwrights Tony Kushner and Rachel Dickstein, as well as historians Gabriella Safran and Joel Berkowitz, about why this play continues to captivate directors, playwrights, and audiences.

Photo from Betrothed: Rachel Dickstein.

The Polish-born Asch, a prolific author of Yiddish novels, plays, and short stories, was by then getting used to such accolades. In 1928, he had been named honorary president of the Yiddish PEN Club; two years later he celebrated his 50th birthday with fanfare at public celebrations in Warsaw and Vienna, receiving congratulatory cables from Einstein and Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization. Asch’s sprawling historical drama Three Cities, published in 1933, earned a front-page rave from The New York Times Book Review. That same year, he was nominated for a Nobel Prize.

By the end of the 1930s, however, the tide turned. Abraham Cahan, the legendary editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, accused Asch of “having gone off the rails.” A fellow writer charged Asch with apostasy. Rabbis inveighed against him from pulpits. Critics devoted entire books to denouncing him.

What set off all this hatred? In 1939, at the height of Hitler’s power, Asch published The Nazarene, a thick historical novel based on the life of Jesus. If that wasn’t enough, Asch went on to pen two other installments; The Apostle, based on the life of Paul, in 1943, followed six years later by Mary.

For Asch’s devoted Yiddish-speaking readers, this literary move constituted nothing less than a betrayal, and their anger surely must have deepened as the books catapulted up the American best-seller lists, helped by praise from Alfred Kazin and other New York intellectuals. An inexhaustible writer with a penchant for the melodramatic, Asch was best-known for his sepia-tinged portrayals of shtetl life, serialized, to popular acclaim, in the Forward. But throughout his career, he had also displayed a provocative streak, a desire to break out of Jewish parochialism.

Born in a Polish shtetl in 1880, Asch moved to Warsaw around the turn of the century and fell under the tutelage of I.L. Peretz, who urged him to write in Yiddish rather than Hebrew. He complied, and in 1908, Cahan began publishing Asch’s work in the Forward, gaining him an international audience.

Asch plumbed the Jewish world he knew so well for material: He translated the Book of Ruth into Yiddish, and one of his first major hits was Reb Shlomo Nagid (1912), a nostalgic novella based loosely on his childhood. Just a few years earlier, though, he had penned God of Vengeance, a play about a Jewish brothel owner whose daughter—his only hope at salvation—embarks on a lesbian affair with one of his prostitutes. “Burn it,” I.L. Peretz reportedly told his protégé. Asch ignored Peretz’s advice and the play went on to successful runs in Europe and America—until it reached Broadway. It was unceremoniously shut down and its producer and lead actor hauled off to jail for mounting “offensive material,” despite Cahan’s vociferous defense.

Asch and his wife, Matilda, arrived in New York on the eve of World War I, after a two-year stint in Paris. Here he wrote Mottke the Thief, which centered on another Jewish world rarely revealed: the seamy Warsaw criminal network. Asch’s gritty portrayal of a young Jewish man’s rise cemented his literary reputation and made him a household name among American Jews.

In 1925, Asch and his family returned to France. Eventually, they settled in Nice, where he built himself a home called the Villa Shalom and wrote Three Cities, which brought him his widest acclaim. Taking inspiration from the sprawling social novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, Asch’s tome moves from the well-off assimilated Jews of St. Petersburg to the tight quarters of Warsaw’s anti-tsarists and back east to Moscow and the Bolshevik rise to power. “One of the most absorbing, one of the most vital, one of the most richly creative works of fiction that have appeared in our day,” declared Louis Kronenberger in The New York Times.

Buoyed by this success and with the political news darkening, Asch turned to a project he had been mulling over for decades: a novel about the life of Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph, otherwise known as Jesus. As Ben Siegel details in his clear-eyed biography, The Controversial Sholem Asch, Asch made his first attempt at the project after a 1908 trip to Palestine. Dissatisfied with the results, he put it aside but remained haunted by the idea. “Since that time I have never thought of Judaism or Christianity separately,” Asch told a reporter of the New York Herald Tribune. “For me it is one culture and one civilization, on which all our peace, our security and our freedom are dependent.”

Of course, there were other, perhaps less conscious factors at play. As popular as Three Cities had been, Asch yearned for another success, one that would broaden his readership beyond its traditional base. He had long coveted the Nobel Prize, and the universal subject of Jesus might catch the eye of the Nobel committee.

Whatever his motives, Asch’s timing couldn’t have been worse. In the late 1930s, atrocities against the Jews were being committed in the name of a “Christian” nation. His readers wanted an explanation for the unexplainable, not an attempt to bridge gaps between the two religions.

When he sent the first chapter to the Forward in 1938, Cahan responded decisively. Asch should destroy what he had written, the imperious editor told him, and halt work altogether on the project. Asch refused, and Cahan not only rejected The Nazarene for publication, severing a nearly 30-year-old relationship, but embarked on a public campaign to pillory the author. Other Yiddish papers followed suit, and the former honorary chairman of the Yiddish PEN Club found himself without an outlet in the papers that had launched and nurtured his career. Only the Communist Freiheit would run his work; Asch insisted on a disclaimer distancing him from their politics.

The novel that caused such a commotion is itself an oddity. Asch constructed the book in three parts: Pan Viadomsky, a bilious anti-Semitic history professor in pre-Hitler Warsaw, has just hired an unnamed Jewish assistant to help him translate an ancient manuscript. Soon Viadomsky is confiding in the assistant about his, um, past life as the Roman commander Cornelius, Pontius Pilate’s right-hand man. Viadomsky/Cornelius recounts life in Jerusalem at the time of the Second Temple and the appearance of the Rabbi from the Galilee that had everyone talking. The text of the yellowing manuscript, which Viadomsky insists is written by Judah Ish-Kiriot, constitutes the second part of Asch’s novel. Then Asch returns to Viadomsky’s Jewish assistant, who conjures a past life of his own as a student of a rabbi witness to Jesus’ last days.

In rich, dizzying detail, Asch reconstructs ancient Jerusalem chafing under Roman rule, from the gleaming golden towers of the Temple to the spice dealers and money changers of the old city and the poor in the teeming crooked streets below. But his principal goal was to reclaim Jesus—and his earth-bound rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph is unquestionably grounded in his Jewish faith. Asch introduces us to a “lean and hungry-looking” Jesus preaching to the poor fishermen by the harbor, with his dark beard and traditional sidelocks, clad in a tallis with the “ritualistic fringes hanging down almost to the ground.” This is a rabbi who followed Hillel’s teachings, who was well-liked and respected by his fellow clergymen, who declared while speaking from a tiny synagogue pulpit (with his mother, Miriam, proudly watching with the other women in the balcony) that he had come “not to destroy the Law and prophets, but to fulfill them.”

But the attempt to return Yeshua ben Joseph to the people of Israel did little to assuage his critics. Rumors abounded that Asch was on the verge of converting. In the pages of the Forward and in his antagonistic book Sholem Asch’s New Way, Cahan accused Asch of distorting Jewish tradition. The longtime Forward columnist Herman Lieberman published The Christianity of Sholem Asch, a scathing book in which he claimed that The Nazarene “may lure away ignorant Jewish children into worshipping foreign gods.”

Such arguments incensed Asch: “I am a Jewish writer, who has all his life tried to understand the Jewish spirit,” he told The New York Herald Tribune. The American public was firmly on Asch’s side; the book shot up the best-seller lists, securing positive reviews from prominent critics, including several first-generation Jewish Americans who rose to defend Asch’s right to write whatever he pleased.

In The New Republic, Alfred Kazin declared, “Nothing, as it happens, could be more characteristically Yiddish or more imperative in its way than this Gospel according to Chaver Sholem.” Philip Rahv, writing in The Nation, called Asch’s effort “brilliant, convincing and unprecedented in its range.” And Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker in 1943, after the publication of The Apostle: “Let the Nobel Committee convene as soon as may be and award this year’s prize for literature to Sholem Asch.”

The committee never came calling, but the success of The Nazarene gave Asch a financial security he had never known before, which likely incensed his critics further. As the situation in Europe got worse and his detractors more vitriolic, Asch and his wife, who had been living in France, retreated to Stamford, Connecticut, at the urging of friends and family. There he began working on the life of Paul while writing short stories about the dire situation for Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1943, he published The Apostle. Predictably, the Yiddish press lambasted it; this time, however, most mainstream critics were also lukewarm. (Paul is “so complex, mystical, and Christian a matter that Asch misses him,” Kazin concluded.) Nevertheless, Asch’s Christological series continued to rack up sales, and The Apostle became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mary, which appeared in 1949, was the least successful of the three. Asch’s longtime translator, Maurice Samuel—whose English versions Irving Howe preferred to the original—refused to take on the project.

In 1950, the year he turned 70, Asch announced that he would devote himself to Jewish subjects, turning his attention to a long-planned novel about Moses. Still the accusations haunted him. He and Matilda moved to Miami, but after learning of an aborted street assault on him by “Yiddish extremists,” the Asches packed their bags once again, eventually settling in Israel, of all places. He began work on yet another Biblical novel, this one about Rachel and Jacob, but in 1957, during a trip to London, Asch passed away. His wife buried him in the cemetery of the West London Synagogue, noting with bitterness that the English had always been stalwart supporters of her husband’s work.

Certainly there was a degree of hubris in writing the Christological trilogy, egoism mixed with naiveté and no small dose of terrifically poor timing. Asch must have believed that his intentions would be clear no matter what, that his act of mediation between the two religions would somehow be understood and matter in such fraught times. The public became more receptive to such ideas after Geza Vermes published Jesus the Jew in 1973.

But in many ways, Asch’s literary efforts underscore a yearning to taste a dizzying freedom that his peripatetic existence never granted him. Asch considered himself a Jewish writer, but also a man of letters to whom the greater world of European literature mattered immensely. The work of his heroes—Dickens, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky—all grew out of the Christian tradition. Asch badly wanted his writing to be considered part of the larger body of Western literature, and what better way to gain permanent admittance to that literary world than to reclaim Jesus as a Jewish figure and prove that his tradition, the Jewish tradition, had been the basis of all that was to come?

Early in Shmuel Hasfari’s The Master of the House, an argument begins to boil between Yoel, a middle-aged bear of a journalist, and his attorney wife Nava. Nava would like a top-to-bottom remodel of their crumbling Bauhaus-style apartment; Yoel, who grew up in the apartment, wants nothing touched. Soon the comedy of marital discord turns to tragedy—complete with unraveling secrets, crushing guilt, and a death in the family. Richard Stein, who is directing the play in its American premiere at the Laguna Playhouse, felt as if he’d gotten two plays in a single package. One begins as an updated Honeymooners (“To the moon, Nava!” you can almost hear Yoel thunder). The other is an “unvarnished, unflattering portrayal of Israelis and Israeli life,” as Stein puts it, set in Tel Aviv circa 2001, during the Black March raft of suicide bombings.

At 53, Hasfari is regarded as one of Israel’s finest writer-directors; The Master of The House won the 2003 Israel Theater Academy Award for Best Play (the equivalent of a Tony) and is still running at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theater, after more than 700 performances. The third child of Polish émigrés, Hasfari grew up religious in Ramat Gan, and was studying Jewish philosophy at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University when he found himself spellbound by a play a friend of his had directed. By the next day, Hasfari was making plans to skip town and enroll in theater courses in Tel Aviv. In 1984, the curtain rose on Kiddush, his professional writing-directing debut; the production ran for eight years.

Politically, Hasfari dabbled in far right circles, even briefly befriending Rabbi Meir Kahane. Then, after serving as a combat soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he swung so far in the other direction that his warts-and-all plays about Israelis have sinced caused the occasional uproar. His 1986 satire, The Last Secular Jew, was initially banned by the Israeli Censorship Board, then allowed to run with particular scenes cut. The public protest that followed soon led to the end of such censorship by the Knesset.

For better or worse, the only outcry that The Master of The House has elicited since traveling to California involves its length. The Los Angeles Times called it a “restlessly inquisitive piece,” though at two and a half hours it could have used some trimming. The Orange County Register concluded, “while it’s got its flaws and eccentricities, The Master of the House seems like a newly opened window that reveals a world both familiar and strange.”

Recently, Hasfari, who is married to actress Hana Azulai and has three sons, spoke to Nextbook by telephone from the study of his rented, expensively remodeled Tel Aviv house. Inspiration perhaps? “Yeah,” replied Hasfari, explanation over.

Describe the first time you saw The Master of the House performed entirely in English.

It was so exciting. Everything, the blocking, the reactions of the audience, everything, was exactly the same as the Israeli production—but totally different. The evening before I left for California, I went to see the play here in Tel Aviv. Then, the day after, I met the cast in California. It was during the first week of rehearsals and when I entered the room, I looked at the table and I knew exactly who is who. Then we started reading it. It was unbelievable. It’s the same tune, the same lyrics, but in another language.

Laguna Beach isn’t exactly a Jewish hub. Were you concerned about how an upscale, politically conservative, possibly gentile theatergoer might respond to your depiction of high-decibel Israeli home life?

I think this play is about a family and about a couple trying to cope with their own tragedies. At the end of my career of more than 25 years and more than 20 plays, I’m not a professional writer. You cannot commission a play from me because I write the play for myself. I’m the audience. In Tel Aviv, the Cameri Theater director asked me, “Please can you please sweeten the medicine at the end? Can you please write a happy ending?” But I never did. I’m not able to write the piece that will be able to explain [using an exaggeratedly dramatic narrator's voice] “the beautiful face of Israeli society.” It’s boring…and I don’t know how to do it.

Richard Stein and Shmuel Hasfari

Richard Stein suggested to me that the Nava-Yoel remodeling debate is a metaphor for how Israelis disagree about the occupation, about relinquishing land versus preserving the status quo, about who has the right to decide about that space.

I’m sure everybody can see the political meaning of the play. Of course, Yoel is a writer from Tel Aviv. He’s secular, not Orthodox. He’s not an activist; he’s a pacifist. He’s like a prototype of a left-wing Israeli: If you asked him what he thinks of the Orthodox extremist settlers in the West Bank, Jerusalem, or the territories, or about Rabbi Kahane and about how they explain that there shouldn’t be withdrawing from Hebron or Jerusalem because they’re so connected to old memories and traditions, he would be truly against them. But it’s different when it comes to HIS house, to HIS sofa, to HIS toilet. This is how the right wing criticizes the left in Israel. They are connected only to their own property, to Tel Aviv, to the center of Tel Aviv. That’s it. [laughs] They are even ready to give away the south of Tel Aviv because only poor people live there.

Let’s talk about the gender politics. In Master of the House all the female characters are assertive to the extent of being entirely unsympathetic. Meanwhile, the men in the play are all—

—infantile. In this play, I write about the [Ashekenazim], the monolith of Israeli society—the founders of Israel who came mainly from Europe. Chaya, Yoel’s father, he was a socialist and an idealist. He came from Eastern Europe before the Holocaust because he was a Zionist. [The third Aliyah] wanted to be normal, to be like other people—not all these Jewish professions, being a doctor, a lawyer, and so on. Yoel and his two brothers, I mean, I don’t want to insult you or me, but they are writers. They’re not productive. They build nothing. They’re not farmers or builders. They don’t work in the industry or live on a kibbutz. They just write. One is a sports journalist, another brother is an author, the other is a writer about architecture nostalgia. When you look at them they are like noble families of European royal houses. Blue bloods. They became weak. They are not strong like they used to be.

You’re saying this play is a microcosm of Israeli society?

I can’t tell you that all the women in Israel are so strong and all the men are so weak. But I think, maybe it’s a reflection of my thinking that women are stronger. I mean, I’m not a professor at the university, but this man, Yoel, he lives in the apartment he was born and his study is his childhood room and he behaves like Nava is his mother, not his wife. He’s like identifying with the memory of his child, which is not his child. It’s like the child is him.

You tell a story: On the way to your entrance exams for the theater department at Tel Aviv University, you bumped into your mother and she said she wanted to give you a blessing.

She told me, “I hope you fail.” [laughs] “It’s not enough that you are not a doctor or a lawyer and you went to study philosophy and now you go to study theater to be a clown.”

That sounds like something out of The Big Book of Jewish Mother Jokes.

Not only Jewish. I don’t think anybody in the world, any mother or father, really wants children to be actors. It’s unreliable, this profession. You are willing to admire actors, to love them, to respect them maybe, to pay to watch them. But nobody wants an actor as a son-in-law. One minute you are John or Bob and in a minute, you are Richard III and you kill people. Can you rely on a person that can change identities in a minute, that can lie so beautifully and so truthfully?

Have you had any exchanges that clarify just how many cultural universes Laguna Beach is away from Tel Aviv?

Somebody asked me, “How can you live in Israel?” I told him, “Listen, I understand that in California it’s very quiet, but what about the tectonic situation, the earthquakes and so on?” They looked at me, like, “What are you talking about?” We are reminded every day about our situation, but you’re not. We know it’s possible, but it’s in the back of our minds, not on the surface.

Why do you think The Master of the House has been so successful in Tel Aviv?

Theater is very popular in Israel. That’s why Master of The House, five years after opening night, is still running. We have theaters all over the country, in each town, not only in big cities. One reason theater is so popular is because the Israeli reality is so complicated. There are so many layers, so many questions. There’s a struggle to stay normal amidst this crazy situation. In Master of the House there’s this line where Yoel comes back from a soccer game in Cyprus and says, “Don’t you know that we won?” And Nava says, “I heard people shouting in the streets but I thought maybe it’s another suicide bomber.” Her answer—it’s a huge joke with Israeli audiences. People laugh in Laguna, too, but not as much as in Tel Aviv. This is the line that tells you why people love the play. I think this combination of the danger, the catastrophe, the loss, the tragedy and the grief together with soccer games and remodeling and demolishing, for people in Israel this is life. Because it’s so specific and so detailed and it’s about people, maybe this is why people like it in Israel—and maybe some of the audience in Laguna Playhouse, too.

“I gotta tell you, Rabbi, when you’re a geek, it’s the loneliest thing in the world,” sings Evan, the teenage protagonist of composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown’s new musical, 13. Transplanted from New York City to Indiana in the wake of his parents’ divorce, 13-year-old Evan is anxious to establish a new identity. He’s the only Jew in school, and as far as he’s concerned, the most important detail of his approaching bar mitzvah is whether the popular kids will attend his party.

For the 36-year-old Brown, who created the musical with children’s book author Dan Elish, the themes of 13—the adolescent struggle for self-definition and the competing desire for popularity—were all too easy to recall. “The sense of feeling dislocated, the sense of feeling like I don’t belong…that turns out to be very close and very real,” Brown said in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where 13 is playing at the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum. “And not just from when I was 13—my sense of being dissociated from whatever the larger community is, the ‘popular kids,’ turns out to be very close to what I feel a lot of my life.”

If there are any “popular kids” in the musical theater world, it seems like Brown ought to be one of them. Hailed as a musical theater wunderkind, he won his first Tony, for the Broadway musical Parade, while still in his twenties. With his poppy yet sophisticated music and smart, conversational lyrics, he was one of a handful of composers considered to be heirs to Stephen Sondheim. But in 2003, after a string of his productions succumbed to chilly reviews and quick closings, Brown left New York determined to give up writing for the theater. 13 marks his return to the stage, his first full-length musical in five years.

13 did not start out as an autobiographical project for Brown, who grew up in Rockland County, New York—where Jews are far from exotic—with parents who never divorced. He recalls in his program notes that he skipped ahead a grade when he was ten, “and the social fallout from that was absolutely toxic.” After a few years studying at Eastman School of Music, he left without his degree for New York City, where he performed in piano bars, arranged other composers’ work, and established himself as an up-and-coming composer at a time when musical theater was particularly hungry for new voices. He also developed a reputation for egotism and arrogance among theater insiders, perhaps fueled by his rapid professional rise.

In 1995, an off-Broadway revue of Brown’s work, Songs for a New World—a loosely constructed sequence of ballads, comedy songs and rousing gospel numbers—brought him to the attention of legendary Broadway producer and director Hal Prince, whose daughter, Daisy, had directed the show. Prince was developing a musical for Lincoln Center about the 1913 trial and lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta. Longtime collaborator Stephen Sondheim had been slated to compose the score, but when Sondheim changed his mind, Prince chose the 25-year-old Brown as his replacement—the professional equivalent of skipping a grade.

Brown’s score for Parade is sophisticated and tuneful, drawing on traditional American song forms and featuring his signature piano-driven arrangements. Both lyrics and music establish Leo’s alienation by playing up his Jewish identity: “God—all the noise, and on Yontiff yet,” he grumbles when his work is interrupted by the Confederate Memorial Day parade that gives the show its name. At the musical’s conclusion, noose around his neck, Frank sings a mournful a cappella Shema. “Even popular song of the 20s was very much Jewish/vaudeville-oriented,” Brown points out, explaining why the Jewish content in Parade came easily for him. “Trying to find a sound that was authentically Southern was the harder task.”

Brent Carver (foreground) in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Parade. (Photo: Joan Marcus).

The show had a promising pedigree. Its book was by Alfred Uhry, making Parade the third, after the non-musicals Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo, in his loose trilogy of shows about Atlanta Jews. But the expensive, ambitious “book musicals” (such as Follies, Sweeney Todd, and Evita) Prince was famous for bringing to Broadway were a dying breed by the time Parade opened in 1998. With a large, pricey production and a less-than-cheerful premise, Parade needed serious critical and popular support to survive. The major reviewers were complimentary but unenthusiastic; many complained that the show was too preachy, and the central character of Leo too slow to come alive. Parade‘s handful of awards—including the Tony recognizing Brown’s richly dramatic score—came months after its 84th and final performance.

Brown’s follow-up project, The Last Five Years, an intricately constructed, almost entirely sung-through portrait of a failed marriage, premiered in New York in 2002. With a two-person cast, a contemporary setting and sound, and an intimate off-Broadway production, this solo effort was different from Parade in every way. Cathy and Jamie, the protagonists, tell their stories in opposite directions; Jamie journeys from first date to divorce, while Cathy follows a reverse chronology. During the final number, while Jamie lists his reasons for ending the marriage, Cathy reflects hopefully on their first date. The Last Five Years was inspired by Brown’s own divorce and Jamie, a suburban New York Jew who finds professional and artistic success in his early 20s, is plainly a rough self-portrait of the artist. Originally Jamie is thrilled to have found a “shiksa goddess” in Cathy, but as time passes, the couple’s differences drive them apart. “Don’t we get to be happy, Cathy?” Jamie asks. “Don’t we get to relax / Without some new tsuris / To push me yet further from you?”

Critical response to The Last Five Years was again respectful but lukewarm. Ben Brantley of The New York Times praised Brown’s “sparkling facility as a composer,” but had trouble cozying up to the characters; other critics found the show dull. Brown’s ex-wife, meanwhile, felt the project was too inspired by real events, and threatened to sue to prevent its performance. The show ran for only two months.

In 2003 Brown composed a few songs for the widely ridiculed Broadway flop Urban Cowboy, for which he also served as musical director and orchestrator. Brown had no illusions about the overall quality of the show—”One of the main reasons I signed on to Urban Cowboy, The Musical was the opportunity to work with Jenn Colella,” he writes on his website, before adding gleefully, “(The other main reason was the money.)” After that show closed, with no awards and few laments, Brown left New York and announced that he would no longer write for the theater. “I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say in this form anymore,” he recalls in his program notes for 13. “And I wasn’t sure anyone wanted to hear it.”

Jason Robert Brown at the piano. (Courtesy of Center Theatre Group)

Brown headed off to Europe for nearly a year, and on his return resettled in Southern California. He worked on an assortment of musical projects—from composing industrial shows for State Farm Insurance Company, to recording a solo album (Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes) to creating the choral composition “Chanukah Suite,” a Broadway-style setting of traditional holiday songs.

Meanwhile, his fan base continued to grow. Musical-theater enthusiasts cherished the original cast recordings of Songs for a New World, Parade, and The Last Five Years, finding, in close study of the scores, emotional depth and insight. The shows also found new life and new audiences in regional productions around the country, and individual songs began popping up in cabarets.

Brown was pulled back to the theater by librettist Elish, who approached him with the idea for 13. “There is a huge demographic of kids that age who love musicals,” Brown says, “I wanted to create something that they could feel like they owned.”

Since its January 7 opening in L.A., 13 has met with little resistance from critics, an unusual experience for Brown. A few have been disappointed by its lightweight approach—Charles McNulty of the Los Angeles Times compared it to an “after-school special” and dismissed Brown’s music as “bubblegum rock.” But many reviewers have embraced and endorsed the show (“13 is sheer bliss,” Variety gushed), and performances have been selling out. The show runs through February 18; its life thereafter is still up in the air, but Brown hopes it will eventually be recorded, and perhaps even bring him back to the New York stage. Still, he no longer views theater, or his role in it, with the same intensity he once did: “I’m not sure that I can ever just do theater writing,” he says. “Maybe this show will change it and maybe it won’t, but I’ve always felt that my relationship to the community was very tenuous—that I wasn’t one of the ‘in crowd.’ You know, I keep playing that story throughout my life.”

Theater-goers and makers have long wrestled with Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Depending on who’s doing the interpreting, Shylock is either cruel and vengeful or justice-seeking and heroic.

Even more confounding—theater companies tend to avoid it altogether—is The Jew of Malta, a play by Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe’s protagonist Barabas is so relentlessly blood-thirsty that it’s near impossible to see him as anything but the product of a virulently anti-Semitic imagination.

Enter New York’s Theatre for a New Audience. Artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz has chosen to stage these two provocative plays, along with a third—a particularly dark adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. F. Murray Abraham plays the lead in both Merchant and Malta. It’s a bold undertaking, to say the least.

So why these plays? And why now? As the productions get underway, arts reporter Eric Molinsky puts these questions to Jeffrey Horowitz, F. Murray Abraham, and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro.

Clockwise from top left, Shylocks through the ages: Drawing from 19th century edition of Shakespeare’s Pictures; Jacob Adler in 1903; Dustin Hoffman in 1989; Al Pacino in 2004; Peter O’Toole in 1960; and Zero Mostel in 1977.