Last night, before I went to sleep, I noticed that Sarah Silverman had Tweeted something that had schlemiel written all over it. Nap time again. Crazy busy dream life. Very little time for life life — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) August 27, 2013 Why? In Hannah Arendt’s essay, “The Jew as Pariah: The Hidden Tradition,” Arendt […]
One of the things we find in many schlemiels is the character of absent-mindedness. In her essay on the schlemiel (entitled “The Jew as Pariah”), Hannah Arendt (a Jewish-German thinker from the mid-twentieth century) notes that in the “hidden tradition” (of the Pariah/Schlemiel) the first major modern schlemiel witnessed in the west was the 19th […]
Jake Marmer’s poem, “Bathhouse of Dreams,” is an improvised poem which is based – in part – on a Mishnah from the tractate Avoda Zarah 3:4: Proklos, son of Plosphos asked Rabban Gamliel a question in Akko, where he was washing in Aphrodite’s bathhouse. He said to [Rabban Gamliel], “Isn’t it written in your Torah […]
When Hannah Arendt first discusses the schlemiel in her celebrated essay, “The Jew as Pariah,” she describes the schlemiel as the “Lord of Dreams.” She takes her reading from Heinrich Heine’s poems which address the schlemiel. To be sure, Arendt argues that, for Heine, the schlemiel is the poet. He is the first in a […]
Like Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin, from time to time, wrote in very small script. According to the editors of the Walter Benjamin Archive, Benjamin’s “miniaturized script is reminiscent of Robert Walser’s ‘pencil system’, which he used to help him write”(50). But unlike Walser, who “learnt to ‘play and poeticize’, in the small and smallest details, […]
While writing on Franz Kafka, the Jewish-German thinker Walter Benjamin was interested in finding common ground between Jewish and non-Jewish comic characters. We see this project in his notes and in his essay on Kafka’s work. To be sure, the essay starts with a reflection on a Russian fool named Shuvalkin; but it also includes […]
In yesterday’s blog, we learned from the Talmud Baba Batra that once the last prophet died, prophesy was given over to children, fools, and, as I explained, schlemiels. To understand what this meant, I cited Martin Buber’s reading of the prophet. The prophet addresses persons who hear him, who should hear him. He knows himself […]
Sacha Baron Cohen has, to be sure, played the schlemiel character in nearly every one of his productions. From Ali G to Borat, we see that Cohen prefers to cast and create comical characters with a schlemiel sensibility. To be sure, Cohen has in many ways taken on the legacy of Charlie Chaplin (who Hannah […]
Shalom Auslander’s short story, “Somebody Up There Likes You” (in his Beware of God short story collection) opens up a comical side to negative theology and literally turns it inside out. This fictional foray into two realities, one of a schlemiel character (Bloom) who thinks he is saved by God, contrasted with the portrayal of […]
I come from a few generations of New York Jews. My father went to Brooklyn Tech and Columbia University. He was born in the Bronx and raised in Manhattan. My mothers parents moved from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, to Queens, and then to Long Island. But we were the first in the family […]
Schlemiel Theory 