Dress British Think Yiddish: culture

culture

Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

I have what my girlfriend calls a "Jewish bucket list," which consists entirely of Jewish cultural activities that I want to do, but haven't been able to due to problems with timing or location: Either it is done anymore, or it isn't done where I am.

Now, I've been to a sauna before, and that's really all a shvitz is -- it's Yiddish for sweat, short for shvitzbod, which means sweatbath. I'm from Minnesota, and, thanks to its Scandinavian heritage, there are saunas everywhere, including one that just roams around the city like a food truck full of semi-naked humans. I've even lived in apartments that had saunas in them.

But there are difference between the moderately heated, wood-lined Northern Europeans and the sweat-drenched, highly social Russian baths beloved by old Jews. I had never been to a Russian or Turkish bath, and, by God, I planned to do so.

There is a place that has both, appropriately called the Russian and Turkish Baths, also known as the 10th Street Baths, in Greenwich Village, which dates back to 1892, as the sign boasts. The place is the stuff of legend, some old, such as the popular rumor that Jewish gangsters used to meet here and so the attendants were dead mutes (seemingly confirmed by this New York Times story).

There are newer legends as well, such as the fact that the baths are owned by two men, Boris and David, and the two have nothing to do with each other. You can buy cards to attend the bath, but David's cards will not be honored on Boris' weeks and vice versa. David caters to a younger hispter crowd, and Boris caters to an older immigrant crowd, and the experience must be very different from one week to another, based on Yelp reviews. Those who go on Boris weeks uniformly describe the place as unkempt and the staff rude, but I suppose if you are looking for authenticity, that's going to be an example of it.

There is a documentary about the whole shvitz experience made in 1993 by Jonathan Berman that captures the flavor of the places at the time, mostly focusing on a Coney Island bathhouse but also with a section set in the 10th street structure. The bathhouses were then in decline, hugely reduced in number by indoor plumbing and further suffering from the AIDS epidemic, which had killed or scared away the gay clientèle. (The film makes it abundantly clear that while there were explicitly gay bathhouses, gay men also cruised Jewish bathhouses, and nobody seemed to mind.)

But the few that are left in the film are beaten-up old places filled with corpulent, naked, hugely chummy old Jewish men, who start the experience with a shot of vodka, end it by sleeping on wooden chaise longues and nibbling on Russian food (made in house), kibbutz an awful lot, and otherwise just sweat, or lie back and get rubbed by an even older naked man with oak branches, a massage called platza, the Yiddish word for upper back.

Some of it is still available. You can't start your bath with a shot of vodka at the 10th Street Baths, unless you bring your own, and on co-ed days, when I went, people are younger and in bathing suits, rather than naked. But there are the saunas -- four of them in increasing temperature, including a dry Norther Euopean sauna, a steam-filled aromatherapy bath, a very hot Turkish bath, and an inferno-like Russian bath.

The difference between the baths seems to be the materials used to make them, the amount of steam, and the amount of heat. Some shvitzes also have rooms made of salt. The Russian bath, also called a banya, is essentially a rock cave where the stones are superheated overnight and radiate scorching levels of hear throughout the day. The heat can exceed 199 degree F, and in old pictures you see people wearing wool sauna hats to protect their heads. Nobody wore these when I went in, or, if they did, I didn't see it -- my girlfriend insists attendants in there looked like executioners with hoods on their heads, so perhaps they had hats like that.

They spoke only Russian and so mostly communicated by shoving their clients into position, and paused frequently to dump massive buckets of ice water over themselves. There baths also have an ice cold pool that most waded into, yelped for a few seconds, and then ran out of. This is what I did. And it is what I wanted -- a proper cultural experience should be a little bit of a shock to the system.

The attendants provided platza massages, which are very soapy and use bound leafy branches to scrub the body. I had considered doing so, but instead I watched and generally got the idea. The bath was simply too hot for me to consider lying there for 15 minutes to get massaged with branches. Perhaps in the future, although both the sauna hat and the platza branches (called veniks) are available for purchase online, and I have a shower that gets extremely hot, so I may simply DIY this particular experience.

The 10th Street Baths also have a dining area with Russian food. I ordered red borscht, which is hot and oniony and delicious, and pelmeni, or Russian dumplings, like little peirgoies. The food was uniformly delicious, even if the cook seemed to have wandered over from Boris week and interjected with everyone with a gruff irritability that is either charming or appalling, depending on what you want or expect from food service.

All told, I probably spent about two and a half hours there. There baths used to be relatively cheap, but now charge day spa prices, but even still it seemed a pretty good deal for the amount of time I spent (and the food is cheap). I'll probably try another shvitz when I got to New York -- there's one in Coney Island, just blocks from where my mother grew up and probably studiously avoided. Add that to the bucket list.

That's the secret to this bucket list, by the way. For everything that gets crossed off, something new gets added, sometimes several new things. Culture isn't something you do once and then mark it done. It's something you keep doing, and do more of, and try doing in new ways, and more, and longer.

There is a real possibility I will be living in a Russian baths with three years. I wouldn't put it past myself.

I'm not sure that being mortified by previous generation's tastes is a specifically American Jewish phenomenon. There is, after all, a Yiddish phrase for the phenomenon, mayn bubbe's tam, meaning "my grandmother's taste," which hints that in the old world people were similarly aghast at the tackiness of their ancestors.

In fact, it is possible to argue that the Reform movement was, in part, rooted in aesthetic repulsion at a previous generation's taste -- the early movement sought to remove elements they viewed as "Oriental," included modes of dress, religious melody, synagogue design, and even the form of the service. Tangentially, this is almost a perfect mirror image to the Hasidic movement, whose traditional dress of bekishe coat, halbe-hoyzn knee-breeches, and shtibblat slippers looks deliberately to the East, to Babylon, by way of Turkey.

Come to think of it, the discussion of Hasidic dress is not so tangential, because it demonstrates that Judaism has a long history of both rejecting the past and borrowing from it, and these two histories seem closely bound up with a desire for assimilation and a rejection of it.

I was raised Reform, and am now happily secular, but there is something about assimilation that I find nettlesome. I suppose it is the fact that it always insists on masking or eliminating those things that make someone visibly Jewish -- that we cannot be accepted into mainstream society unless we make Judaism invisible. I also think that this is a strange bargain. We're supposed to get something specific from it -- access to privilege -- and yet Jewish access to privilege is fraught and frequently short-lived, and antisemitism has a long history of punishing Jews for their privilege.

I did an interview on a podcast a few weeks ago. The podcast is called Race Invaders, and I like it very much. The two hosts are Asian American, and struggle with a lot of the same sort of questions I struggle with; there are some surprising parallels between the Jewish and the Asian American experience.

Among them is the risk of buying into whiteness, of becoming a model minority, a phrase originally invented to describe Japanese Americans and later expanded to include Jews, as well as other Asian groups. On a recent episode, the hosts discussed the fact that there are Asian American who resist this model minority status, resist buying into the privilege (and problems) that comes with honorary whiteness.

According to the podcast hosts, as they reject this sort of assimilation, these Asian Americans find themselves looking for an alternative model. And since race in America is so often defined by whiteness and blackness, they end up adopting a lot of black culture. One of the hosts, Alok Desai, pointed out that this raises issues of cultural appropriation, but many Asian Americans are disconnected enough from their own cultural heritage not to be able to use it as a model.

I think American Jews often likewise don't have a model. They especially don't have a secular model. Or they do, but they are embarrassed by it.

There was a recent article in Forward that collected what the author considered to be the worst Jewish album covers of all time. I am not sure what the criteria was in picking these, except that the author found them funny. Some of them are harmless (such as The Jewish Cowboy, an actual and fascinating interview with Harold Stern who ran a Texas ranch, and is only funny if you don't know how common Jews were in the west).

Many are deliberately funny, including Mrs. Portnoy's Retort by the great Mae Questel, a comic answer album to Philip Roth, and several albums featuring the superb comic actor Lou Jacobi. The fact that we still find these album covers funny is a testament to good design, not to terribleness.

The author also seemed to especially have it in for jazz flutist Herbie Mann, whose album design was admittedly a little outre (particular his unclothed and sweaty torso on "Push Push.") But Mann created deeply funky tracks (such as his chart-topping "Hijack"), so not only are his album covers entirely consistent with his style of music, but, honestly, anyone who created a soft jazz version of "Hatikva" (called ""Man's Hope") gets a pass from me for almost anything.

Honestly, I think the sense that these albums are hilarious comes from a combination unfamiliarity and embarrassment over a previous generation's tastes. But when we abandon the previous generation, we assimilate into one of two worlds: An ahistoric one, where there are only contemporary tastes and the past is only worthwhile when it dovetails with modern tastes; or a world of hidden privilege, where the dominant taste is allowed to remain contemporary while minority tastes are left behind.

I think the embarrassment of a lot of the albums listed is the latter: It's not simply that the albums seem out of date, it's that they are so Jewish. The Mae Questel one literally has her surrounded by Jewish food, and there is an album by Theodore Bikel that is entirely unremarkable, except that he is playing Jewish music and his face is lit with red lights.

I suppose I'm a little surprised that these albums provide an aesthetic shock, as they are not mayn bubbe's tam, but my parent's tam -- the albums are mostly from the 50s - 70s, and were in the record collections of many of my friends' parents. More than that, many the comedy albums existed as a sort of monetizing of Jewish embarrassment about the previous generation -- Mae Questel enjoyed a late career revival playing overbearing Jewish mothers, while Lou Jacobi specialized in playing irritable, avuncular older Jewish men.

I'd like to argue against this sort of knee-jerk mortification at a previous generations tastes, especially when those tastes were explicitly Jewish. Now, I'm not arguing for an equally knee-jerk acceptance of it, as I think a sort of uncritical nostalgia can actually be harmful.

I am saying that somewhere in there we can find tools for self-identification that assimilation has buffed away, and shouldn't have.

I'd like to suggest that when we respond to the past with embarrassment, it is sometimes not that the past is embarrassing, but because it represents something that the dominant culture would like us to think is embarrassing. It is embarrassing because it represents nonmainstream tastes or experiences, and one of the ways that privilege protects itself is by declaring challenges to be tacky.

I'd like to dare us to be tacky. I'd like it if we revisited mayn bubbe's tam for the things we thoughtlessly abandoned, and try celebrating them rather than dismissing them.

Because how many photos were taken in the 1970s of shirtless, sweaty musicians? I'm going to go ahead and just guess at a number, and that number is 100 percent. Every single musician on every single album cover in the 1970s was shirtless and sweaty.

So why is Herbie Mann's sweaty shirtlessness especially notable? He's not unhandsome, at least not mores o than everybody in the band SOS, and they are all shirtless on their album cover. The band Orleans basically looks like a group of cavemen, and here they all are, shirtless. Iggy Pop always looked like someone put makeup on a cadaver, and here he is, shirtless. David Bowie isn't just shirtless on the cover of Diamond Dogs, he's half dog.

I suspect the issue is that Herbie Mann is so obviously Jewish, and has a body we associate more with middle-aged Jewish men taking a shvitz than sex symbols, despite the fact that Mann made music that made people make love. But who says middle-aged balding Jewish men are embarrassing, rather than sexy? I ask this as a middle-aged, balding Jewish man.

If grandma found Herbie Mann sexy, maybe grandma was on to something.

I am going to tackle an essay now that made the rounds a few years ago and originally dates back to 1939, so I'm not exactly treading new ground here. The article is titled "I Married a Jew" and was published in the Atlantic, which put its archives online in 2008, leading to the rediscovery.

I think it enjoyed attention a few years back because the author, a liberal-minded young woman, manages nonetheless to be spectacularly wrong about just about everything. She's even wrong about Hitler, lecturing her Jewish husband that there is nothing especially notable or unique about the man, and that Jews are just being oversensitive about the subject.

Indeed, the whole essay is essentially one long harangue about the failings of Jews, so much so that New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait called her "the world’s first recorded Shiksplainer."

The story became popular enough that The Atlantic itself felt a need to respond, in the form of a column by staff writer Olga Khazan that essentially treats the whole article as a bizarre artifact of an ancient time. "It’s now basically an after-midnight SNL sketch in magazine-article form," she wrote, later adding that the story is a "a powerful remembrance of how much more hateful our world was just a few generations ago."

Faraway and alien

And the original story does seem faraway and alien, despite having been written not-so-very-long ago -- it was authored a year after my father was born. And yest, especially in the past few weeks, it does not seem so very, very faraway or alien. It's an essay that just reeks with privilege, and I don't think privilege has gone away. If anything, I think the past election, in which a candidate pushing a white nationalist worldview was elected president, shows that not only is this sort of privilege still around, but it can decide the fate of nations.

What strikes me now upon reading the essay are not the things that seem different, although they are worth noting. She is adamant that Jews are a different race, which her Jewish husband agrees with. In general, this is not a widely held worldview anymore, except among rabid antisemites. She quotes her mother's concerns that her marriage to a Jew will bar her from certain circles, but that isn't so much the case anymore. The mother also declares Jews to be Oriental, and not only has the meaning of the word changed quite a bit (at the time it included the near Middle East), but the word has fallen out of popular uses except to refer to rugs.

She also declares Picasso a Jew, for some reason, and doesn't think much of him. She calls a synagogue a Jewish church, which is crazy. She seems to think it is literally impossible for someone from China to assimilate into American society, which was then a popular stereotype that doesn't get applied to the Chinese as much nowadays; no, instead we hear it is Muslims who are incapable of assimilating.

And, finally, as mentioned, she minimizes the threat of Hitler, who on January 30th of 1939 had announced his intention to annihilate the Jewish race in Europe. Writing the same year, the author of "I Married a Jew" tells her husband that "a hundred years hence the world will no more call Hitler a swine for expelling the Jews than it does Edward I of England, who did the same thing in the thirteenth century." In the entire history of predicting things, this may the worst prediction anyone has yet managed, and the fact that she had the temerity to lecture a Jew about antisemitism, its risks, and how real its threat is -- well, I just can't. I can't.

But what stands out for me is how little room she makes in her life for Judaism. She boasts that her husband does not look Jewish, does not have a Jewish name, and is not religious. It's the only thing that convinces her nakedly antisemitic mother to approve the marriage. The author learns almost nothing about Judaism, although she boasts that she has read the Old Testament, as though reading a document that is considered sacred to Christians is in some way a favor to the Jews.

There is a moment when she tries to describe the Yiddish used by her husband's family, and she manages two actual Yiddish words -- meshuge, meaning crazy, and tzimmes, a sweet stew. But then she also says chasseh, and I have no clue what she's trying to say, and I grew up with exactly the sort of Yiddish she describes and have studied it as a language for almost a year. In fact, if you do a Google search, the second result for "chasseh" is this article, and the first is for a Jewish history project from Maine that describes a man speaking Yiddish with a thick Mainer accent, so that the word for pig, chazzer, is rendered chasseh. Maybe that's what she's hearing.

Anyway, she doesn't like the Yiddish. Well, not the Yiddish, per se, but instead the fact that the husband's family "make no concession to me as a Gentile." She continues: " They go about their Jewish ways, tales of their Jewish problems, and consider me aloof if I do not enter whole-heartedly into all this and become as one of them."

Let me remind you of the thing that made the husband appealing to her: The fact that he didn't seem especially Jewish. There is no indication that she has made any room for his Jewishness in her life. But, then, it is pretty clear she thinks she shouldn't have to. Here is her harangue on the Jewish character:

Had the Jews seized these opportunities for amalgamation, eventually all the barriers would have been broken down. But the Jews did not seize the opportunity. They chose to retain their identity and remained in intact as before. Today it is America that is offering the children of Israel the greatest opportunity in history for absorption.

This paragraph is not unique. It's a subject she returns to again and again, almost obsessively -- indeed, she refers to her husband as "lapsing" back into Jewishness when he is around his family, which feels alien to her. "Separately I am fond of them; individually I welcome them to my home; but in a large group of them I feel like a fish out of water," she complains.

And this is the crux of it. This is the privilege. She has grown up in a world where she has never been made to feel the outsider, and when she very briefly experiences it, when she very occasionally enters an environment where her concerns, experiences, and worldview are not dominant, she recoils. Never mind that this is how her husband's family feels all the time -- that is their own fault, as they are clannish, foreign interlopers.

She gestures at sympathy at one point, saying that we must meet halfway, that Jews must not be so entirely Jewish and Gentiles must not be so entirely Gentile, but she offers no concessions of her own. Well, one. When her husband irritably reminds her that many Jews have assimilated but been subjected to antisemitism anyway, she allows that this as true. But, when it comes down to it, whose fault was it?

The Jews. The Jews did not seize the opportunity. They chose to retain their identity and remained in intact as before.

Echoes of fascism

It is almost impossible not to hear echoes of fascism in these words. Here are two quotes, and I will not tell you whether they are from the article or from Adolf Hitler. See if you can determine who said what:

"The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine."

"The Hebrew religion must be divorced from the promulgation of that race consciousness which every synagogue and temple considers as important a part of Judaism as prayer; it should be mortified at least to the point where it does not belittle the great ideal of western culture and civilization: Christ."

It's the latter. I know that this is a little unfair, as typically Hitler was a little more blunt about his antisemitism, referring to Jews as vermin and enemies of the state. But both started from the presumption that Jews are interlopers, and that their refusal to assimilate was the crux of the Jewish question -- the difference between Hitler and our more tolerant Gentile wife is that the former did not think Jews could assimilate, by virtue of being a degenerate race, while the author of "I Married a Jew" thinks Jews can assimilate, but choose not to, and therefore encourage institutional antisemtism.

But both share a core belief: That the problem is the Jew. That antisemtism isn't a pernicious evil perpetrated by Gentiles upon Jews, but instead a predictable response to the fact of Jews. Particularly, that there is something about the Jewish experience that, by its clannish nature, makes it hard to trust the national identity of the Jew. "A few cultural, intellectual Jews announce they are first Americans and then Jews, but they are voices crying in the wilderness," she complains.

What is the source of her sense that there is something suspicious about the Jewish experience in America, something that might be contradictory to the national interests of the country? She is never especially clear on this, but, based on her essay, I would guess it is this:

She thinks her experience, as a Gentile woman in America, is the American experience. When she is among unassimilated Jews, not only does she encounter an experience that is unlike her own, but one that does not defer to her experience.

It never occurs to her that this is what it is like to live in a multicultural America, because she was not witness to a previous generation's conflict, in which the loyalties of German Americans were seen as suspect, and were suppressed. No, she grew up in an America where German-Americans were comfortably mainstream. As a result, when she finds herself in a situation in which she feels her own experiences being marginalized, she makes an amazing leap: She is not sure she can trust these people as Americans.

But it's not that amazing a leap. The idea that the refusal of Jews to assimilate makes them a suspect people, an invading nation with Jewish loyalties, is a classic antisemitic trope -- it was the very one that Hitler used to justify the Final Solution. Our author grew up with a mother who was nakedly antisemitic ("Jews are sensual, aggressive, ostentatious, cunning—that is a heritage they can never overcome. They accomplish things in business because they are shrewder than Christians and never hesitate to seize an unfair advantage."). More than that, she grew up in an American that was more nakedly antisemitic than now. She absorbed that antisemitism as fact and, amazingly, decided to write an entire column in which she lectures her husband about the problems with Judaism, using these antisemitic arguments.

Not so dominant

With the rise of the belligerently antisemitic so-called alt right, it is tempting to look at how they use these classic antisemitic tropes. But I think most Americans are closer to "I Married a Jew's" author, and I think we're seeing a lot of this same sort of reaction right now. The dominant majority is not so dominant anymore, and soon won't be a majority -- by 2060, it is projected that non-whites will be the majority in this country.

That's still a ways off, but we're certainly seeing the effects of white people no longer feeling like they are being pushed out of the center. It shows itself whenever a minority asserts themselves in any way. "Black Lives Matter" is immediately responded to with "All Lives Matter," which must be understood as saying "How Dare You Craft a Slogan That Doesn't Include White People." Abigail Fisher insists, without evidence, that she was passed over for acceptance into the University of Texas in favor of less qualified black people, and takes the case to the Supreme Court. Pharmacists refuse to provide birth control to patients, and county clerk Kim Davis refuses to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples, and both insist that they are not discriminating, but instead are being discriminated against, because their religion gives them the right to treat other American citizens unequally.

Never mind that it doesn't. But you'll note that, despite the fact that these people are violating the law, nobody ever questions whether or not Christianity is compatible with being American, or demands that Christians assimilate.

When I say Trump ran on a platform of White Nationalism, I mean that his speeches were meant to assuage white Americans that this is a white nation, and inflame their anger than it is becoming increasingly less white. Consistently, he targeted non-whites, particularly (but not exclusively) Mexicans and Muslims.

I won't spend any time on arguments that he reached his audience because he addressed economic insecurities, as he had no actual policies to address this. Instead, he ran on a platform that looked for scapegoats, and found them, and they were almost entirely people of color. He appealed to national humiliation, but his voters weren't economically humiliated -- Trump's supporter had a median income of $72,000, which is $20,000 higher than the national median income and $48,000 higher than the poverty rate for a family of four.

No, they were responding to racial humiliation. Trump painted undocumented Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, despite the fact that these immigrants commit, on average, less crime than American citizens. Trump painted Muslims as either being violent extremists or participating in a support network for violent extremists, despite the fact that your average American is almost totally unlikely to experience political terrorism, and if they do so it will likely be at the hands of a white extremist.

Trump opposed globalism, but he almost exclusively pointed to Mexico and China as places where US manufacturing jobs have gone. But the truth is, while the US did lose about 5 million factory jobs since 2000, most of them didn't go overseas, but instead were lost to increased automization. Brown people didn't take the jobs; robots did.

But white people aren't afraid of robots. Not the way they are afraid of brown people, afraid of being pushed out of the center. And it was a winning strategy -- although Trump did not manage to win the popular vote, the Electoral College, which was designed to protect the interests of slave owners, aligned with white nationalist concerns in this election, a stunning demonstration of both the tenacity of racism and the longterm effectiveness of institutions designed to support racism.

Fragility

I suppose the thing that I find most illuminating about the essay it is fragility. That's a word that's enjoyed a lot of currency lately, and I think it is the right one. She presumes her privileged is somehow natural and earned, and that the experience of white Christians is the American experience. She spends almost all her time luxuriating in this while witnessing the real-world oppression of her husband. He is, as an example, denied the opportunity to join a fraternity due to his religion, and that's just one of the many opportunities that were denied to Jews in the 1930s. And this happens despite the fact that he does not look Jewish, does not have a Jewish name, and is not religious -- for all practical purposes, he has assimilated away his Judaism, to such an extent that the author admits the subject almost never comes up.

And yet, for the very brief moments when she is with his family, and her experiences are no longer assumed to be dominant, she becomes tremendously unhappy. So unhappy that she had to write an entire essay for The Atlantic discussing how Jews desperately need to be less Jewish or antisemtism will continue.

And it is worth reading this essay knowing that the author is still with us, or at least her worldview is. There are a lot of people in America like her, who presume the experience of being white and Christian is the American experience. She couldn't stand hearing a little Yiddish -- imagine how hard it would be for someone like her to be in America that constantly challenges her dominance, her centrality, her status.

And we Jews must be mindful of this, both because we are still not so close to the mainstream, as the brutal antisemtism of the alt right reminds us, but also because we are close enough to the mainstream to likewise be threatened, likewise be fragile.

When we hear our neighbors described as incapable of assimilation, or as having divided loyalties due to their religion, or as being unwelcome interlopers undeserving of the same rights or opportunities, we should remember that the same was said of us.

It was not so long ago. Some say it still.

Here's a fun little experiment: If you're studying Hebrew, try speaking in an Ashkenazi accent and see what happens.

I tried this experiment myself in college. I had left school for a few years and moved to Los Angeles, and, while there, hanging out in the delis and watching the frum Jews in the Fairfax neighborhood, I found myself curious about my own family's background. I developed a terrific interest in the history of the Jews in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe. This is where my grandparents came from, and yet I felt like my education had skipped something, despite my having attended a Jewish high school, Jewish summer camps, and years of religious education through my synagogue.

No, the story of Judaism that I learned basically looked like this: Bible. Destruction of the Second Temple. Babylonian Talmud. Holocaust. Founding of the State of Israel.

There were hints of European history in there -- some mention of the rise of Hasidism, some tellings of the tale of the Golem of Prague, a few other things, atomized moments of history, unmoored in time and unsettled in location.

When I returned to college, it was to pursue a degree in Jewish Studies, and I found myself especially focusing on East European Jewish history. It felt like it was my history, in a way that was more intimate and direct than the ancient Israeli story I mostly grew up with, and the story of modern Israel, which was not my story. I was not an Israeli, ancient or modern. I was an American Jew whose grandparents were Eastern European Jews.

I started taking Hebrew again. The first day of class, students are generally assigned a Hebrew name, or, if you're Jewish, you probably already have one. I was Tzvi in my synagogue's Hebrew school classes, but I had no desire to be Tzvi again. I already had a Jewish name, Max Sparber, and was named after my uncle Max, a dealer in rare books in New York, many of them Yiddish books or books on Judaica. There was no reason for me to trade out my actual Jewish name for an artificial Hebrew name. I don't know why I rankled, but I did. I have a better idea now.

I also insisted on using the Yiddish spelling of my name rather than transliterating it into Hebrew. My teacher fought me on this, but I suppose I gave her the choice of either letting me use the name I wanted and spell it how I wanted or of docking my grade for this odd rebellion. She chose to ignore it.

I had also learned how to read Hebrew using an Askhenazi pronunciation, the pronunciation used by European Jews, which dates back to at least the 11th century, and might be older. It is not the accent preferred by speakers of modern Hebrew. That is the Sephardi pronunciation, associated with the Jews of Spain. It was the accent chosen by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the founder of modern Hebrew, in part because it was the accent used by the Jews in Palestine, and apparently also because he just preferred it, despite hailing from what is now Belarus.

And, with that decision, and with the development of the State of Israel, a modern variant of the Sephardi accent came into prominence. It's the accent I was taught in religious school, it was the accent used in my Jewish high school, and it was the accent used to study Hebrew texts and teach Hebrew in college. I only heard the Ashkenazi accent when I heard my father and grandfather pray.

The accent

About this time, I started to use the Askenazi accent myself when I went to synagogue and used it when reading religious texts at college. And sometimes I would use it in my Hebrew class. I guess I felt about it the same way I felt about my name -- that it was a more authentic expression of my Jewish heritage, and I should be allowed to use it.

My teacher did not agree and corrected me every time. I understand her viewpoint: She was teaching conversational modern Hebrew, and the Ashkenazi accent is not preferred in modern conversational Hebrew.

I had my own viewpoint, which I didn't then know how to articulate: I was not interested in modern conversational Hebrew. I had no plans to visit Israel, I had almost no interaction with Israeli culture, and I knew almost no Israelis. I was studying Hebrew to study religious texts, and the accent I did this in didn't really matter. Actually, it did matter to me. It mattered that I studied them in the same accent as my family had.

By the way, my teacher was wrong. All teachers who insist the Sephardi accent is the proper modern Hebrew accent are wrong. There is a small but significant number of Israelis who use the Ashkenazi accent, albeit generally these are Haredi Jews or older European Jews. It's a minority accent in Israel, but is used, and the accents are mutually comprehensible, so there is no absolute reason why a modern Jew could not learn an Ashkenazi accent while learning modern conversational Hebrew. We just choose not to, and discourage those who choose to do so.

The negation

This didn't happen by accident, by the way. It is the product of a philosophy that has threaded its way, invisibly and in subterranean ways, throughout much of modern Judaism. It is a philosophy that, appropriately, has a Hebrew name, and that name is shlilat ha'galut. In English, it translates approximately as the Negation of the Diaspora.

I am going to turn to Wikipedia to sum up the philosophy, as I think they do it about as well as I could:

The negation of the Diaspora (Hebrew: שלילת הגלות‎‎, shlilat ha'galut, or Hebrew: שלילת הגולה‎‎, shlilat ha'golah) is a central assumption in many currents of Zionism. The concept encourages the dedication to Zionism and it is used to justify the denial of the feasibility of Jewish emancipation in the Diaspora. Life in the Diaspora would either lead to discrimination and persecution or to national decadence and assimilation. A more moderate formulation says that the Jews as a people have no future without a "spiritual center" in the Land of Israel.

For those of you not familiar with the term, diaspora essentially means "dispersal," and there are a lot of Diasporas in the world -- as an Irish-American, I am also part of the Irish Disapora. Here's what it refers to in this case: The Jews used to have a homeland, the Land of Israel, but were forcibly dispersed in a series of exiles, culminating at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War, when Jerusalem and the Second Temple were destroyed and a significant portion of the population was exiled.

The destruction of the Temple was an extraordinarily traumatizing and transformative event for Jews. It took away the spiritual center of Judaism and forced the development of smaller, community based approaches to Judaism, including the rise of synagogues and rabbis and the codification of Jewish law. Modern Judaism, as we know it, was created in the Diaspora, which, in Yiddish, is called the Galus. It was a religion of exile, a religion that constantly look both back to the Israel that once was, at least in myth, and an Israel that we hoped would one day be, with the arrival of a messiah and a return to the Holy Land.

As you can see, embedded into Judaism was the idea that this exile was temporary -- that Jews are actually displaced Israelis, waiting for the opportunity to return, and if it didn't happen in life, it would happen after death, with something called the quickening of the dead, when all deceased Jews would return to life with the arrival of the Messiah and join him in Jerusalem. Nowadays, this is a largely undiscussed aspect of Jewish philosophy, in part because many modern Jewish movements have replaced the idea of a literal messiah with the hopes for a messianic ideal, a future of justice and peace. And it may go undiscussed because it gets very weird, as ideas about the messiah got wrapped up in Jewish mysticism, and ends up seeming like a collection of oddball folk stories and virtually incomprehensible metaphysical discussions. I mean, in some tellings, the messiah will sacrifice a giant sea-monster, called Leviathan, and a giant land-monster, called Behemoth, and maybe even a giant bird, called Bar Juchne, and then ... well, we just roast them and eat them, like some sort of eschatological barbecue.

If it goes seldom discussed now, I cannot overstate how important the idea of the coming of the messiah and the return of the exiles was to the Jews of the Galus. It was a constant obsession, and that obsession leaked into Zionism. The idea of a literal messiah was replaced with messianic hopes for the reborn land of Israel, but you find many of the same ideas, especially those of the return of exiles and the end of Galus. The Disapora was not merely temporary for many Jews; it was temporary and terrible, a time of poverty and wandering, where everywhere we went we were treated as aliens, and the population inevitably turned hostile and murderous.

Add to that the fact that one particular part of the Galus, the mystical, religious, squabbling, Yiddish-speaking Pale of Settlement, was sometimes treated with contempt and embarrassment by the Jews of Central and Western Europe. Yiddish was seen as not so much a language as a degraded German jargon, and the unassimilated Eastern European Jews were often presented as being uneducated, unwashed, and superstitious. This had particular impact on American Jews, as the major institutions of American Jewry were largely created by assimilationist German Jews who barely had any interest in maintaining their own culture, and positively recoiled at the culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. It wasn't much better in Israel, where there was an unfortunate tendency to see European Jews as somehow being weak for having suffered antisemitism and a Holocaust, which left a strong desire to leave that world behind.

The results are that, with the exception of Haredi communities that basically playact at still be in 18th Century Poland, modern Jews have largely rejected the Galus, even though most of us are still in it. There are almost 6.5 million Jews in Israel. There are seven and a half million Jews in the rest of the world, including almost 5.5 million in the United States alone. The Diaspora experience has proven not to be temporary, but ongoing, and Israel is undeniably a center of the Jewish experience, but is one of many. In fact, there was a Jewish philosophy that developed parallel to Zionism, one that we now call ethnic nationalism or diaspora nationalism, which focused on Jews maintaining a unique identity while still in the diaspora, but while pursuing the same rights and responsibilities of whatever nation they are a part of. It's strange that this approach is currently so neglected, because this is actually the experience of most Jews in the world, as well as prefiguring a lot of modern discussions about race, ethnicity, and religion in a pluralistic world.

The dreidel

If you're a student of Yiddish, you start wondering why American Jewish institutions rejected Yiddish. After all, the Jewish community has been uniquely skilled at maintaining historic languages, teaching Hebrew and Aramaic over periods of thousands of years beyond when those were spoken languages. It was even possible for me to study Syriac in college, and I did so as part of my Jewish Studies program, which did not offer Yiddish.

Jewish things don't fade naturally; we tend to preserve them, even when they weren't originally Jewish. You'll still find Jews playing mahjong, a game they learned in the 1920s, while refusing to speak Yiddish, which survived and actually flourished in the United States until the 1950s. Yiddish did not simply fade. It was deliberately allowed to fade, and, not infrequently, helped along the way. Examples of this erasure abound, but I'll give just one.

On Hanukkah, Jews spin a little top called a dreidel. It is a gambling game: The dreidel has four sides, and each side has a letter on it, and each letter causes a different outcome: You might add to a pot, or take out of a pot. The letters are Hebrew, and they are nun, gimel, hey, and shin. I was taught this was short for a Hebrew phrase, and everybody I know was taught the same: Nes gadol haya sham, "a great miracle happened there," referring to a holiday miracle involving olive oil and a gold candelabra.

But it doesn't mean that, not originally. The letters are short for Yiddish words. Nun means nisht, or none. Gimel means gants, or all. Hey means halb, or half. Shin means shtel ayn, put one in. And that's the way the game is played. It's a European game called teetotum, which is played the same way, and was simply borrowed by the Jews. The whole "great miracle happened there" explanation didn't happen until the dreidel became primarily associated with Hanukkah. I haven't been able to track down precisely when this happened, but I have not been able to find any mention of the toy associated with the holiday from the 19th century, and the first American reference to both dreidels and Hanukkah I find is from December 17, 1916, from the Jewish Daily News of New York. The earliest reference I find to the letters meaning "A Great Miracle Happened There" is much later, in 1951, in an article in Canton, Ohio Repository. The Hebrew translation does not appear in print in a book until later still, in 1978, in "The Jewish Party Book" by MaeShafter Rockland.

(Note: Since writing this, I located a reference to dreidels being used on Hanukkahthat dates back to 1864, from a letter to Leopold Low, saying that the toy, here called a "trendel," was then associated with the holiday, and following this up I discovered an entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia that clarifies the relation between the dreidel and Hanukkah: In the Middle Ages, rabbis passed decrees against gambling games, but these were lifted on intermediate holidays and Hanukkah so long as these games were not played for money.)

Note that these two references come after the creation of the State of Israel. Hanukkah had been a relatively minor holiday, but, because it happens about the same time as Christmas, it grew in popularity as a sort of Jewish alternative to the Christian holiday, especially in America during the 20th century. Parallel with this was the development of Zionism, and while Hanukkah is not an explicitly Zionist holiday, it is one that celebrates the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire's influence on Israel in 167–160 BC. With the rise of Zionism and especially with the formation of the modern state of Israel, Hanukkah took on new significance, and while I can't say with any certainty that the Hebrew version of the letters of the dreidel date from this time, I do find it unsurprising that this is when we find evidence that Hebrew was being favored over Yiddish -- indeed, the Yiddish interpretation of the letters is now entirely absent.

Erasure

So it is. So we find Yiddish being erased, decade by decade, an ongoing negation of the diaspora that, in this instance, replaces Yiddish with Hebrew and turns a European Jewish toy into one celebrating Israel. This has happened subtly, invisibly, for a century or more, and continues to this day, where the experience of Jews in the Galus are invisible or secondary. Here's a quick example:

There are a series of camps in North America called Habonim Dror that have taken steps to develop a gender-neutral form of Hebrew, which is a language that has little flexibility for the nuanced understanding of gender that has developed in the past half century. This is in response to a real need: The camp had campers who did not fit Hebrew's strict binary. This is also a need in the larger American Jewish community, as there are branches of Judaism, particularly Reform, that have taken enormous steps to be as inclusive as possible in their services.

According to the Washington Post, this has received criticism from alumni, who claim the camps are "teaching the children fake Hebrew that they won’t be able to use in the outside world." But of course they can use this Hebrew in the outside world. It's very possible to take the experiments of this camp and apply it to the synagogue. It's a response to a real need experienced by Jews in the Diaspora (and not just in the Diaspora; this discussion has also happened among Israeli Jews.)

I got in an argument about this on a discussion forum with an Israeli. "Your influence on the Hebrew language is directly proportional to the frequency at which you use it to criticize a driver's competence on Ibn Gavirol Street," he told me, which could not be more clear an expression of the Negation of the Diaspora. This wasn't even a real discussion, he argued, because it was happening at some American camps, but he had not yet heard any Israelis call for such a thing.

Let me be clear: I don't care what Israelis think about what American Jews do. If we want to invent our own fake Hebrew so that we don't exclude members of our community, we are free to do so. Not only did we not disappear once Israel became a state, we did not stop mattering once Israel became a state, and Hebrew is does not belong exclusively to Israelis, but is something used by American Jews that sometimes is adapted to American needs. We get to do this.

Our history did not stop mattering. It must be abundantly obvious at this moment that the Negation of the Diaspora was as much a myth as grilling up Leviathan at the end of time was a myth. Not only did the Diaspora not end, but it is entirely possible to maintain a Jewish identity and pursue being an equal member of society outside Israel. It is possible to be a Diaspora Jew and have a Diaspora Jewish identity -- in fact, I would argue it is vital to be able to develop such a thing, because the Diaspora is not going anywhere.

Part of the reason Yiddish appeals to me is that it is one of the languages of Diaspora Jewry. My name is not Tzvi, it is Max Sparber, after a Yiddish bookdealer, from a family of East European Jews, and we did not speak modern Hebrew, and, when we used the language, it was with the wrong accent. And I'm never going to let someone tell me otherwise again.

(If any information on this page is outdated or needs to be updated, or if there are theaters missing from this list, please contact Max Sparber at maxsparber@gmail.com.)

CALIFORNIA

West Coast Jewish Theater

http://www.wcjt.org/

Artistic director: Howard Teichman

History and Mission: Founded in 1993 by Naomi Karz Jacobs

Recent Productions:

Romance.com by Hindi Brooks (2015)

Oh My God by Anat Gov (2015)

The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez (2015)

Contact:

wcjtoffice@gmail.com

West Coast Jewish Theatre

P.O. Box 7097

Beverly Hills, CA 90212

Jewish Women’s Theater

http://jewishwomenstheater.org/

Artistic Director: Ronda Spinak

History and Mission: Founded in 2007 by Ronda Spinak, Ellen Sandler and Deena Novak with the intention of developing stories written by Jewish women about their lives in America today.

Recent Productions:

Plays are collaboratively created or collections of short theatrical pieces by multiple authors.

Contact:

Submissions guidelines posted online at: http://jewishwomenstheater.org/ways-to-give/submit-material/

Theatre Chevruta

http://www.apjcc.org/culturalarts/theatre-at-the-jcc/

Artistic Director: None listed

History and mission: A reader’s theater (no staged productions) founded in 2013 at the Jewish Community Center f Los Gatos, CA.

Recent Productions:

Cantorial by Ira Levin (2016)

The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (2016)

Broken Glass by Arthur Miller (2015)

Contact:

4855 Oka Road

Los Gatos, CA 95032

Theatre Dybbuk

http://www.theatredybbuk.org

Artistic Director: Aaron Henne

History and Mission: Theatre Dybbuk illuminates the universal human experience by creating provocative theatrical presentations and innovative educational opportunities based on Jewish folklore, rituals and history. Plays seem primarily collaboratively created or conceived and directed by artistic director Aaron Henne.

Recent Productions:

Exagoge by Aaron Henne (2016)

Assemble, Conceived by the Center for Jewish Culture and Leichtag Foundation, and created by theatre dybbuk.(2015)

Tefillah by Aaron Henne (2014)

Contact:

info@theatredybbuk.org

PO Box 292576

Los Angeles, California 90029

COLORADO

Theatre Or

http://www.theatreor.com/

Artistic Director: Diane Gilboa

History and Mission: Founded in 2004, Theatre Or is dedicated to the production of innovative, provocative, and entertaining professional theatre that explores topics which are relevant to the Jewish community and also hold universal appeal.

Recent Productions:

My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding by David Hein and and Irene Carl Sankoff (2015)

Kindertransport by Diane Samuels (2014)

Contact:

theatreor@mindspring.com

FLORIDA

National Jewish Theater Foundation

http://www.njtfoundation.org/

Founder and President: Arnold Mittelman

History and Mission: Since 2007, the National Jewish Theater Foundation has presented theatrical works that celebrate the richness of Jewish heritage and culture.

Recent Productions:

The Soap Myth by Jeff Cohen (2016)

Rothschild and Sons by Bock and Harnick (2015)

The Soul of Gershwin by Joseph Vass (2011)

Contact:

arnold@nationaljewishtheater.com

INDIANA

The Jewish Theatre of Bloomington

http://www.jewishtheatrebloomington.org/

Producing Artistic Director: Audrey Heller

History and Mission: Founded in 2003, the Jewish Theatre of Bloomington produces works that arise from or reflect the Jewish experience, but that also focus universal issues of the human condition that are accessible to a diverse audience.

Recent Productions:

Halpern and Johnson by Lionel Goldstein (2016)

Collected Stories by Donald Margulies (2015)

Handle With Care by Jason Odell Williams (2014)

Contact:

contactus@jewishtheatrebloomington.org

ILLINOIS

Continuum Theater

http://continuumtheater.org/

Executive Director: Devorah Richards

History and Mission: Continuum Theater is an arts organization dedicated to sharing a wide range of Jewish theatrical, musical, and dance experiences with a diverse Chicago audience. Our mission is to serve Jewish continuity by preserving our heritage, energizing our evolving culture and building community around a love for Jewish performing arts and Jewish learning.

Recent Productions:

Denial by Peter Sagal (2016)

Bad Jews by Joshua Harmon (2015)

Also responsible for Chicago Jewish Play Reading Festival.

Contact:

devorah@ContinuumTheater.org

Continuum Theater

P.O. Box 1617

Deerfield, IL 60015

KANSAS

White Theatre

http://thejkc.org

Director of Arts + CultureKansas City Jewish Film Festival: Tabitha Schmidt

History and Mission: Arts + Culture at The J features exquisitely-produced in-house productions. Plus, there are visiting artists, music + dance, inventive visual arts + literature presentations, and our new Artist-in-Residence Kinnor Philharmonic. There’s always an exciting choice for you, and your family, to experience and enjoy. Whether you’re Jewish or not, a J Member or not, there are exciting choices for you and your family to experience and enjoy.

Recent Productions:

Becoming Dr. Ruth by Mark St. Germain (2016)

Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon (2016)

Jana Robbins: I’m Still Here by Jana Robbins (2016)

Note: Mix of Jewish and non-Jewish theater content

Contact:

tabithas@thejkc.org

5801 W 115 Street

Overland Park, KS 66211

MICHIGAN

The Jewish Theater of Grand Rapids

http://www.jtgr.org/

Managing Director: Len Robinson

History and Mission: Founded in 1992, Jewish Theatre Grand Rapids is dedicated to presenting quality theatrical productions with Jewish themes that are universal in appeal.

Recent Productions:

Brill by David Wells (2016)

Irena’s Vow by Dan Gordon (2016)

Seniors of the Sahara by Barbara Pease Weber (2016)

Contact:

jtgr.admin@gmail.com

2727 Michigan NE
Grand Rapids, MI 49506

Jewish Ensemble Theatre

http://www.jettheatre.org/

Executive Director: Christopher Bremer

History and Mission: JET is a professional Equity theatre based in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Founded in 1989 by Evelyn Orbach with a group of prestigious theatre and community leaders, JET was established with the mission “to produce theatre of the highest professional standards and to provide a stage for the exploration of ideas that confront issues of humanity and community from a Jewish perspective. Jewish Ensemble Theatre serves as a force for Jewish continuity, a platform for new voices, and a bridge of understanding to the general community."

Recent Productions:

Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar (2017)

Rites of Passage by Kitty Dubin (2016)

Handle with Care by Jason Odell Williams (2016)

Contact:

c.bremer@jettheatre.org

6600 West Maple Rd

West Bloomfield, MI 48322

MINNESOTA

Minnesota Jewish Theater Company

http://mnjewishtheatre.org/about/

Producing Artistic Director: Barbara Brooks

History and Mission: Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company (MJTC) was born in July 1994, shortly after Founder and Producing Artistic Director Barbara Brooks gave birth to her son. Through his infancy, she thought about her identity and how she could continue her Jewish heritage into the next generation. Beyond that, she wondered how her son and his future friends — Jew and non-Jew alike — would learn to share and find richness in each other’s diversity.

Recent Productions:

DAI (Enough) by Iris Bahr (2016)

Aunt Raini by Tom Smith (2016)

The Magic Dreidels by Jenna Zark (2016)

Contact:

info@mnjewishtheatre.org

PO Box 16155

St. Paul, MN 55116

MISSOURI

The New Jewish Theatre

http://newjewishtheatre.org

Artistic Director: Kathleen Sitzer

History and Mission: The New Jewish Theatre is dedicated to the exploration of universal themes and issues and the examination of the full range of the human experience filtered through the lens of the Jewish experience. Through the medium of theatre, we build bridges of multi-cultural understanding, tolerance, communication and education.

Recent Productions:

Golda’s Balcony by William Gibson (2016)

Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry (2016)

Intimate Appareled by Lynn Nottage (2016)

Contact:

ksitzer@jccstl.org

2 Millstone Campus Drive
Creve Coeur, MO 63146

NEW YORK

Jewish Theater of New York

http://www.jewishtheater.org/

Artistic Director: Tuvia Tenenbom

History and Mission: The artists of The Jewish Theater of New York, one of the most open-minded Jewish cultural institutions of our time, define Judaism as a philosophy that cherishes the question and despises the answer. It's their understanding that what makes Judaism survive the test of time is the fact that after thousands of "debating years" Jews have not yet figured out the answers to any of their questions. This never-satisfied thirst for perpetual questioning also drives the 'engine' of their theater. Knowing that (to paraphrase the Bible) "On the day you see me you shall die," they are here to produce theatrical works that defy easy answers. They do their utmost, in every production they mount, to promote equal sympathy for opposing characters, and to present all sides of the issue equally. Routinely they leave it for their audiences to decide who's in the right and who's in the wrong; who's saint and who's villain; and, many a time, who anyone really is... The JTNY provides opportunities for artists of every ethnicity, background and belief to work together and be one very proud family.

Recent Productions:

Because We Can by Tuvia Tenenbom (2016)

Alone Among the Jews by Tuvia Tenenbom (2014)

I Sleep in Hitler’s Room by by Tuvia Tenenbom (2013)

Note: This theater seems to exist exclusively to produce the works of right wing gadfly Tuvia Tenenbom.

National Yiddish Theater

http://nytf.org/

Artistic Director: Zalmen Mlotek

History and Mission: The Award-winning National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene [NYTF] is the longest continuously producing Yiddish theatre company in the world. The company presents plays, musicals, concerts, lectures, interactive educational workshops and community-building activities in English and Yiddish, with English and Russian supertitles accompanying performances. NYTF serves a versatile audience of over 50,000 individuals annually, comprised of performing arts patrons, cultural enthusiasts, Yiddish-language aficionados and the general public, while also using the arts as a vehicle to educate youth and adults about Jewish heritage. The NYTF outreach program takes events around the region, nation and world, bringing programming annually to over 15,000 individuals.

National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s mission is to celebrate the Yiddish experience through the performing arts by transmitting the rich cultural legacy in exciting new ways that bridge social and cultural divides.

Recent Productions:

The Golden Bride by Joseph Rumshinsky (2016)

Contact:

Edmond J. Safra Plaza,

36 Battery Place, NY, NY 10280

24/6 Jewish Theater Company

http://www.246theater.com/

Artistic Director: Yoni Oppenheim and Avi Soroka

History and Mission: 24/6: A Jewish Theater Company was founded five years ago as a home for Sabbath-observant artists in New York. Since then, 24/6 has shown its commitment to cultivating innovative theater grounded in a rigorous engagement with Jewish tradition reinforcing our belief that the performing arts play a critical role in the vitality of American Jewish life.

Recent Productions:

Hand to God by Robert Askins (2015)

A Dybbuk for Two People by Bruce Myers (2014)

Contact:

info@246theater.com

JCC Center Stage

http://www.jccrochester.org/

Artistic Director: Ralph Meranto

History and Mission: CenterStage began in 1977 as the volunteer theatre company at the Rochester Jewish Community Center. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Ralph Meranto since 2005, CenterStage is now a professional theatre utilizing the finest local actors, directors, and designers to present a 5-show subscription series of plays and musicals.

Recent Productions:

Church and State by Jason Odell Williams (2016)

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2016)

Calamari Sisters Kosher Clam Bake (2016)

Contact:

1200 Edgewood Ave

Rochester, NY

Jewish Repertory Theater

http://jewishrepertorytheatre.com/

Artistic Director: Dr. Saul Elkin

History and Mission: The Jewish Repertory Theatre is a program of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Buffalo. Founded in 2002, the JRT is a professional theatre whose mission is to present high quality plays grounded in Jewish life, themes, and values. Through our productions, audiences of diverse beliefs and backgrounds explore both the uniqueness of Jewish heritage and cultural experiences, as well as those that are shared with others. Drama illuminates the human condition, and the JRT strives to bring this into focus through the lens of Jewish theatre. The Jewish Repertory Theatre is theatre for everyone.

Recent Productions:

4000 Miles by Amy Herzog (2016)

The Great God Pan by Amy Herzog (2016)

After the Revolution by Amy Herzog (2017)

Contact:

JRT@jccbuffalo.org

2640 North Forest Rd,

Getzville, NY 14068

Jewish Plays Project

http://www.jewishplaysproject.org/

Founder: David Winitsky

History and Mission: The Jewish Plays Project puts bold, progressive Jewish conversations on world stages. The JPP’s innovative and competitive development vehicle invests emerging artists in their Jewish identity; engages Jewish communities in the vetting, selecting and championing of new voices; and secures mainstream production opportunities for the best new plays.

A revolution is underway in Jewish culture. In music, in books, in film, artists are creating amazing new pathways to Jewish identity. We believe that it is time for theater to join the movement.

Recent Productions:

Coproduced the Festival of New Jewish Theater (2016)

Contact:

david@jewishplaysproject.org

New Worlds Theater Project

http://www.newworldsproject.org/

Founder and Artistic Director: Ellen Perecman

History and Mission: Founded in 2005, New Worlds Theatre Project is a 501(c) 3 nonprofit theatre company committed to giving voice to -- and celebrating -- the legacy of early 20th Century Yiddish culture by making Yiddish plays accessible and exciting to diverse contemporary artists and audiences in English. Our mission is to identify neglected Yiddish plays with literary and artistic merit, translate them into English, craft adaptations that explore them through a contemporary lens and then mount productions that meet the highest standards of artistic excellence. Our goals are to demonstrate to the theatre community how well these plays have stood the test of time and see the plays performed in local languages across the globe.

Recent Productions:

Professor Brenner by David Pinsky (2015)

On the Other Side of the River by Peretz Hirschbein (2014)

Carcass by Peretz Hirschbein (2013)

Contact:

eperecman@newworldsproject.org

670 W End Ave, Ste 16A

New York, NY

OHIO

Interplay Jewish Theatre

http://interplaycleveland.com/

Artistic Director: Faye Sholiton

History and Mission: INTERPLAY JEWISH THEATRE, founded in 2011 by Cleveland playwright Faye Sholiton, produces free staged readings of outstanding plays that view the contemporary world through a Jewish lens.

INTERPLAY is a community-generated effort to revive a century-old tradition, but with a contemporary flavor. Our professional actors and directors bring to life some of the most compelling drama – and raucous comedy – written by today's most gifted writers.

INTERPLAY runs entirely on donations. Patrons are invited to drop cash or checks in our fishbowl to “play it forward” and cover the cost of the next reading.

Recent Productions:

U.S. v Howard Mechanic by Faye Sholiton (2016)

Oh Godby Anat Gov (2016)

A Happy End by Iddo Netanyahu (2015)

Contact:

interplayjewishtheatre@gmail.com

OREGON

Jewish Theatre Collaborative

http://www.jewishtheatrecollaborative.org/

Artistic Director: Sacha Reich

History and Mission: Founded by Sacha Reich in 2008, Jewish Theatre Collaborative's unique strengths as an arts organization have been in creating adaptations, collaborating with community partners, gathering community and catalyzing conversations. At the same time, and as a result of all these strengths, JTC has created high-quality, memorable theatre, produced with and performed by professional Portland theatre artists.

Recent Productions:

Davita’s Harp by Chaim Potok (2016)

The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander (2015)

A Pigeon & A Boy by Meir Shalev (2014)

Contact:

info@jewishtheatrecollaborative.org

PENNSYLVANIA

Theatre Ariel

http://www.theatreariel.org/

Artistic Director: Deborah Baer Mozes

History and Mission: Theatre Ariel is Pennsylvania’s oldest professional theater dedicated to illuminating the rich social, cultural, and spiritual heritage of the Jewish people. Theatre Ariel produces and commissions work that serves as a prism through which we can view the varied colors of the American Jewish experience. Our writers create theater that draws its inspiration from ancient stories, bringing contemporary insight to classic Jewish texts and Jewish literature: reflecting on the past, examining the present and envisioning the future. Theatre Ariel believes that Jewish theater strengthens Jewish identity while also serving as a bridge between people of all cultures.

Recent Productions:

The Blessings of a Broken Heart by Sherri Mandell (2016)

Talley’s Folly by Lanford Wilson (2016)

Contact:

Info@theatreariel.org

WASHINGTON DC

Theater J

http://washingtondcjcc.org/center-for-arts/theater-j/

Artistic Director: Adam Immerwahr

History and Mission: Theater J produces thought-provoking, publicly engaged, personal, passionate and entertaining plays and musicals that celebrate the distinctive urban voice and social vision that are part of the Jewish cultural legacy. Acclaimed as one of the nation’s premier playwrights’ theaters, Theater J presents daring contemporary work alongside spirited revivals and is a nurturing home for the development and production of new work by major writers and emerging artists exploring many of the pressing moral and political issues of our time.

Recent Productions:

The Last Schwartz by Deborah Zoe Laufer (2016)

The Christians by Lucas Hnath (2016)

Oy Vey in a Manger by The Kinsey Sicks (2016)

Contact:

adam@theaterj.org

Aaron & Cecile Goldman Theater

Washington DC Community Center

1529 16th Street NW

Washington DC 20036

As some of you already know, I am a playwright, which can sometimes be a thankless undertaking. It's often an exhausting, frustrating avocation. Except for a tiny percentage of playwrights, it's not the sort of activity that will ever bring fame, and, even for them, it doesn't bring fortune. You're lucky to get a play produced at all, and, if you do, it will probably only ever receive one production, by a small storefront theater, to a dwindling audience of middle-aged and old white people. It will receive lukewarm reviews from a local critic and then pass into posterity, unremembered and unrewarded.

But I can't stop, damn it. I've been writing plays since I was a boy and will so so until I'm very old, because playwright isn't a career or a hobby, it is a compulsion. And, criticisms aside, it's worthwhile. Theater allows an author to write in a way afforded by no other form. It allows ideas to be staged dramatically, and pushes language into the forground, in a way that film and television can't. It exists in a liminal space that, even with realistic plays, allow for abstraction and metaphor, and it provides an audience that appreciates these things. Further, theater is one of the few remaining places where I see dramatic art that surprises me, and I like to be surprised.

I have been working on a Yiddish-themed play, and have been thinking about what to do with the play once it is written.

My first step was putting together a list of theaters that specialize in Jewish-themed plays, which I will publish in the next week or so, when I complete it. But I noticed that very few of them develop new plays, and that, even when they do, regional Jewish theaters don't have a good track record of producing plays that go on to have a long life of additional productions at other theaters.

I decided to take a little time to look at Jewish-themed plays that do have a healthy life. American Theatre puts out an annual list of the most produced plays in America, although it should be noted that this is limited to theaters that are members of the Theatre Communications Group, which represents a specific selection of semi-professional to professional nonprofit theaters. This leaves out amateur companies, of which there are a superabundance (most theater companies her in Omaha, as an example, are amateur companies), as well as many community theaters, which are semi-abundant.There are also a fair number of for-profit theaters left off this list, so, who knows, there might be something called "Yankel's Kishkas" that is making the rounds of these theaters, enjoying hundred of productions per year, and neither I nor American Theatre has ever heard of it.

So take this list for what it is, limitations and all. I was curious to see who is writing the popular American Jewish theater and where the plays are getting their start, because if you're like me and want to write a play that has a life longer than that of a mayfly, you need to pitch to certain theaters. You need to pitch to theaters where plays start their lives, and not end them.

A few notes at the end of the list.

BAD JEWS by Joshua Harmon

Plot: After a beloved grandfather dies in New York, leaving a treasured piece of religious jewelry that he succeeded in hiding even from the Nazis during the Holocaust, cousins fight over not only the family heirloom, but their "religious faith, cultural assimilation, and even the validity of each other's romances.”

The playwright: Joshua Harmon (born 1983) is a New York City-based playwright, whose works include "Bad Jews" and "Significant Other," both produced off-Broadway by Roundabout Theatre Company.

Harmon has also had his plays produced and developed by the Manhattan Theatre Club, Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, NY, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Ars Nova, the O'Neill and Actor's Express. He has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Eudora Welty Foundation.

Production history: The play premiered Off-Broadway in October 2012 at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Black Box Theatre and then transferred to the Rondabout's Laura Pels Theatre. The play opened at the Laura Pels Theatre on October 3, 2013 and closed on December 29, 2013. Directed by Daniel Aukin, the cast for both productions featured Tracee Chimo as Diana, Michael Zegen as Liam, Molly Ranson as Melody, and Philip Ettinger as Jonah.

The UK premiere, directed by Michael Longhurst, was at Bath's Ustinov Studio in August 2014 before transferring in 2015 to the West End at the St. James Theatre and in 2015 at the Arts Theatre, in London. Among regional productions, it played in 2014 and was revived in 2015 at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC and ran at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. It is being revived in 2016 at the Haymarket Theatre.

BUYER AND CELLAR by Jonathan Tollins

Plot: an outrageous new comedy about the oddest of odd jobs: “an underemployed Los Angeles actor going to work in Barbra Streisand’s Malibu basement.”

The Playwright: Jonathan Tollins’ plays include "The Twilight of the Golds" (Broadway, Booth Theatre), "If Memory Serves" (Promenade), "The Last Sunday in June" (Rattlestick, Century Center) and "Secrets of the Trade" (Primary Stages). A collection of his plays has been published by Grove/Atlantic. His film work includes "The Twilight of the Golds" and "Martian Child." For television, he was a writer for “Queer as Folk,” The Academy Awards, The Tony Awards and “Partners.” He was the author of "Pushkin 200: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall," acted as script consultant on "Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular," and co-wrote "The Divine Millennium Tour" and "The Showgirl Must Go On" for Bette Midler. He has written articles for Opera News, Opera Monthly, TheaterWeek, Time magazine and The Huffington Post, and is a panelist on the Metropolitan Opera Radio Quiz. He lives in Fairfield, Connecticut with his husband, the writer and director Robert Cary, and their children, Selina and Henry. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America.

Production History: "Buyer & Cellar" premiered at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in 2013.

Awards:

Winner of the 2014–2015 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show

DISGRACED by Ayad Akhtar

Plot: The play is centered on sociopolitical themes such as Islamophobia and the self-identity of Muslim-American citizens. It focuses on a dinner party between four people with very different backgrounds. n all, the dinner table assembly includes an ex-Muslim, an African-American, a Jew and a WASP dining over the topic of religious faith. As discussion turns to politics and religion, the mood quickly becomes heated. Described as a "combustible powder keg of identity politics," the play depicts racial and ethnic prejudices that "secretly persist in even the most progressive cultural circles." It is also said to depict the challenge for upwardly mobile Muslim Americans in the post-9/11 America.

The Playwright: Akhtar was born in Staten Island, New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Akhtar's interest in writing was initially sparked in high school, when a teacher introduced him to European Modernism. Akhtar later attended Brown University where he majored in theater and began acting in student plays. After graduation he moved to Italy and studied acting with Jerzy Grotowski for a year, eventually becoming his assistant. Upon returning to the United States, Akhtar taught acting classes with Andre Gregory and earn his Master of Fine Arts degree in film directing from Columbia University School of the Arts.

Production history: "Disgraced" was originally scheduled at the American Theater Company in Chicago, Illinois, to run February 3 — March 4, 2012, with an official debut of February 6. Eventually the run was moved forward one week to January 27 — February 26, 2012, with an official January 30 debut. On February 21, its run was extended in Chicago until Mar 11, 2012.

It made its New York debut of its Off-Broadway run at LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater with an October 22, 2012, premiere and was scheduled to run until November 18 before being extended until December 2. Hurricane Sandy caused the cancellation of the October 28 and 29 evening performances but not the October 28 matinee.[29] On November 1, it was extended again until December 23.

On February 6, 2013, the London premiere of the play was announced as an Off West End opening at the Bush Theatre, beginning in May 2013 under the direction of Nadia Fall. Its previews were scheduled to begin on May 17 before opening on May 22 and running until June 15. On March 15, Disgraced was extended until June 22. The play opened as scheduled on May 22. That July, the producer Matthew Rego announced that the show was being considered for a Broadway run during the 2013–14 season. On June 10, 2014, was announced to have a Broadway run starting on October 23, following previews beginning September 27 at the Lyceum Theatre.

Disgraced began its limited run on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre with preview performances on September 27. Opening night was October 23, 2014 with an original announced run lasting until February 15, 2015. In January, the closure of the engagement was announced for March 1. Direction is by Kimberly Senior, sets by John Lee Beatty, costumes by Jennifer von Mayrhauser and lighting by Ken Posner. The cast includes Danny Ashok, Hari Dhillon, Gretchen Mol, Karen Pittman, and Josh Radnor.

Awards:

2012 Joseph Jefferson Award: New Work – Play or Musical

2013 Pulitzer Prize – Drama

2013 Obie Award – Playwrighting

MOONLIGHT AND MAGNOLIAS by Ron Hutchinson

Plot: 1939 Hollywood is abuzz. Legendary producer David O. Selznick has shut down production of his new epic, "Gone with the Wind," a film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's novel. The screenplay, you see, just doesn't work. So what's an all-powerful movie mogul to do? While fending off the film's stars, gossip columnists and his own father-in-law, Selznick sends a car for famed screenwriter Ben Hecht and pulls formidable director Victor Fleming from the set of "The Wizard of Oz." Summoning both to his office, he locks the doors, closes the shades, and on a diet of bananas and peanuts, the three men labor over five days to fashion a screenplay that will become the blueprint for one of the most successful and beloved films of all time.

The Playwright: Ron Hutchinson (born near Lisburn, County Antrim, Northern Ireland) is an Emmy Award winning screenwriter and an Olivier Award nominated playwright, known for writing John Frankenheimer's "Against the Wall," Robert M. Young's "Slave of Dreams," John Frankenheimer's "The Island of Dr. Moreau," "Moonlight and Magnolias" (play), and the 2004 miniseries "Traffic."

"Moonlight & Magnolias" at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois was nominated for the 2004 Joseph Jefferson Award for New Work. "The Irish Play" was performed in a Royal Shakespeare Company production at the Royal Shakespeare Company Warehouse Theatre in London, England with Ron Cook, Brenda Fricker, and P.G. Stephens in the cast. Barry Kyle was director.

Brought up and educated in Coventry, Hutchinson has written stage and radio plays as well as his screenwriting. He now lives in Los Angeles, California with his second wife and adopted daughter.

Production History: Moonlight and Magnolias premiered at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2004.

Manhattan Theatre Club production in 2005.

TRIBES by Nina Raine

The plot: The play focuses on a comically dysfunctional Jewish British family, made up of the parents Beth and Christopher and three grown children living at home, Daniel, Ruth and Billy, the last of whom is deaf, raised to read lips and speak but without knowledge of sign language. When Billy meets Sylvia, a hearing woman born to deaf parents who is now slowly going deaf herself, his interaction with her (including her teaching him sign language) reveals some of the languages, beliefs, and hierarchies of the family and the "extended family" of the deaf community.

The Playwright: Nina Raine is an English theatre director and playwright, and the only daughter of the poet Craig Raine and Ann Pasternak Slater; she is also a grand niece of the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak.

She graduated from Christ Church, Oxford in 1998 with a First in English Literature.

Production History: The play was first staged October 14-November 13, 2010 at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It was directed by Roger Michell and starred Jacob Casseldon, Nina Markham, Michelle Terry, Stanley Townsend, Harry Treadaway, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The play premiered Off-Broadway at the Barrow Street Theatre on March 4, 2012 and closed on January 20, 2013, having been extended twice. Directed by David Cromer, the cast starred Will Brill, Russell Harvard, Susan Pourfar, Gayle Rankin, Jeff Perry, and Mare Winningham. The Scenic Design was by Scott Pask, costumes by Tristan Raines, lights by Keith Parham, sound by Daniel Kluger and projections by Jeff Sugg.

The production had a West Coast transfer after closing in New York and was remounted at the Centre Theater Group, The Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, for a limited run from February 2013 through April 2013, and with most of the original cast (NY replacements Lee Roy Rogers and Jeff Still took over as Beth and Christopher).

It then ran at the La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego, California, in June and July 2013, also directed by David Cromer. The play ran at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from October through November 2013, directed by Wendy C. Goldberg. It was then produced by Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon in February 2015.

The Canadian debut was produced by Theatrefront in association with Canadian Stage and Theatre Aquarius with shows at Toronto's Berkeley Street Theatre. The cast included Stephen Drabicki, Patricia Fagan, Nancy Palk, Joseph Ziegler, Holly Lewis and Dylan Trowbridge, directed by Daryl Cloran.

Awards:

2012 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play

2012 New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Best Foreign Play

2012 Obie Award, Performance, Susan Pourfar

2012 Off-Broadway Alliance Award – Best Play

THE WHIPPING MAN by Matthew Lopez

Plot: It is Passover, 1865. The Civil War has just ended and the annual celebration of freedom from bondage is being observed in Jewish homes across the country. One of these homes, belonging to the DeLeons of Virginia, sits in ruins. Confederate officer Caleb DeLeon has returned from the war to find his family missing and only two former slaves remaining. Caleb is badly wounded and the two men, Simon and John, are forced to care for him.

As the three men wait for the family's return, they wrestle with their shared past as master and slave, digging up long-buried family secrets along the way as well as new ones. Slavery and war, they discover, warp even good men's souls.

The Playwright: Matthew Lopez is the author of "The Whipping Man," one of the most widely produced new American plays of the last several years. The play premiered at Luna Stage in Montclair, NJ and debuted in New York at Manhattan Theatre Club. That production was directed by Doug Hughes and starred Andre Braugher. The sold-out production extended four times, ultimately running 101 performances off-Broadway and garnering Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards. Matthew was awarded the John Gassner New Play Award from the New York Outer Critics Circle for the play. Since then, it has been received over 40 productions worldwide. His play Somewhere has been produced at the Old Globe, TheatreWorks in Palo Alto and most recently at Hartford Stage Company, where his play Reverberation will receive its world premiere in 2015. His newest play, The Legend of Georgia McBride, premiered earlier this year at the Denver Theatre Center for the Performing Arts. His play The Sentinels premiered in London at Headlong Theatre Company in 2011. Matthew currently holds new play commissions from Roundabout Theatre Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, Hartford Stage, and South Coast Rep. Matthew was a staff writer on HBO’s “The Newsroom” and is currently adapting Javier Marias’ trilogy “Your Face Tomorrow” for the screen.

Production History:

April 2006 - World Premiere at Luna Stage Company in Montclair, NJ

February 2009 - Production at Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul, MN

May 2010 - West Coast Premiere at Old Globe in San Diego, CA

June 2010 - New England Premiere at Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, MA

February 2011 - New York Premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, NY

Awards:

Winner of the 2011 John Gassner New Play Award from the NY Outer Critics Circle.

A few notes: Firstly, American theater currently seems to be pretty interested in plays with Jewish themes or Jewish characters. In the past few years, the percentage of most-produced plays that include Jewish subject matter has increased consistently, with two plays this year representing 27 total productions, and three plays the previous year representing 22 productions.

Surprisingly, half of these plays were not written by Jews. Of the six plays listed above, only three -- "Bad Jews," "Buyer and Cellar," and "Tribes" -- were written by authors with significant Jewish heritage. (Lopez, who wrote "The whipping Man," has a Jewish aunt, but was raised Episcopalian and had little familiarity with Judaism before writing the play.) Ayad Akhtar is, of course, Muslim, and his play "Disgraced" is mostly a play about the Muslim experience, although it features a Jewish character.

None of these plays debuted at theaters primarily known for producing Jewish material, and most debuted at theaters with a history of developing new work which then transfers to a larger theater. Two of the plays debuted in New York and two in Chicago, while Tribes debuted in London.

Hearteningly, "The Whipping Man" blazed its own trail, starting in New Jersey and moving to St. Paul, and on for two additional regional productions before making it to New York. So it is not necessary to have your play open at in America's largest cities for them to go on to be widely produced -- although goodness knows it helps.

I should take a moment to discuss the content of these plays. Two of them deal with celebrities: Barbra Streisand in "Buyer and Cellar" and the old Hollywood studio heads of "Moonlight and Magnolias." "Disgraced," "Tribes," and "The Whipping Man" all deal with what could be called "social issues": Islamophobia, disability, and racism. "Bad Jews" is the outlier, in that its primarily about an internecine squabble in a dysfunctional family, although it should be noted that this is tried and true theatrical territory.

None of this is meant to be a prescription for writing a successful Jewish play. I don't know that such a prescription exists, because had somebody suggested a few years ago that one of the most successful American plays the looks at the Jewish experience would be written by a British Muslim or a Puerto Rican Episcopalian writing for a New Jersey heater, I think we all would have been surprised.

I'll be curious to see what surprised me next.