What happens to the schlemiel when the world that created him disappears?

Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” poses this question with extraordinary comic cruelty. Its central character, Edelshtein, is an aging Yiddish poet living in America, surrounded by a language that increasingly cannot hear him. He writes. He complains. He envies. He dreams of recognition. But almost no one reads him.

His great rival, Ostrover, has escaped this fate. Ostrover has been translated into English and has become famous. He has crossed over.

Edelshtein has not.

And therein lies the joke—and the wound.

A Writer Without Readers

The tragedy of Edelshtein is not simply that he is unsuccessful. Writers have always been jealous of successful writers. Ozick is interested in something much more disturbing.

Edelshtein belongs to a language whose readership is disappearing.

This changes the meaning of literary failure. If a poet writes a great poem and nobody appreciates it, he can blame his readers. But what if the readers themselves are disappearing? What if the language in which one has formed one’s deepest thoughts, memories, jokes, rhythms, and desires is becoming inaccessible to the next generation?

Edelshtein does not simply fear that he will be forgotten.

He fears that the world capable of remembering him is disappearing.

This is why translation becomes almost messianic in the story. Edelshtein wants to be translated into English because English promises resurrection. Translation might carry him across the boundary separating the Yiddish past from the American future.

But there is a terrible paradox here.

To survive as a Yiddish writer, Edelshtein must cease to be read in Yiddish.

The Comedy of Envy

Ozick refuses to turn Edelshtein into a noble martyr.

This is crucial.

He is jealous, vain, bitter, obsessive, self-important, and frequently ridiculous. He cannot stop measuring himself against Ostrover. Ostrover’s success becomes an insult that Edelshtein experiences almost metaphysically.

Why him?

Why not me?

Why should he become the representative of Yiddish literature to America?

This is where Ozick’s story becomes a story about the schlemiel.

The schlemiel traditionally inhabits the distance between what he imagines himself to be and what the world allows him to become. He wants dignity and encounters humiliation. He wants recognition and encounters indifference. He attempts to act upon history and discovers that history is acting upon him.

Edelshtein inhabits precisely this gap.

But Ozick gives the schlemiel’s comedy a historical dimension.

Edelshtein is not merely unlucky.

History itself has made him ridiculous.

When History Outruns the Schlemiel

This is one of the deepest problems raised by modern Jewish comedy.

The traditional schlemiel can stumble through the world because, somewhere behind him, there remains a community capable of understanding the joke. His failures take place within a shared language, tradition, and cultural memory.

But what happens when that community disappears?

After the Holocaust and the massive assimilation of American Jews into English-speaking American culture, Yiddish entered a radically different historical situation. The schlemiel could survive—but increasingly in translation.

Tevye could become Fiddler on the Roof.

Yiddish stories could become Jewish-American literature.

And eventually the schlemiel could appear in American fiction, television, stand-up comedy, and film without speaking a word of Yiddish.

Something survives.

But something has also been lost.

Edelshtein stands precisely at this threshold.

He is a schlemiel who knows that the joke may continue after him—but perhaps in another language.

Translation as Resurrection

This is why Edelshtein’s obsession with translation should not be dismissed as simple vanity.

He understands something.

Translation is power.

Ostrover has not merely acquired readers. He has acquired an afterlife.

English allows him to enter another cultural world. He can circulate among people who have never lived within Yiddish culture. His work can become “literature” rather than merely “Yiddish literature.”

Edelshtein wants the same transformation.

But translation presents an impossible question:

What exactly survives when a Jewish story leaves the language that created it?

The plot may survive.

The character may survive.

The joke may survive.

But does the world survive?

Yiddish is not simply a collection of words that can be exchanged for English words. It carries gestures, ironies, biblical echoes, rabbinic rhythms, curses, diminutives, exaggerations, historical memories, and forms of intimacy.

The schlemiel emerges from this linguistic world.

Translate him into English and something extraordinary happens.

He becomes universal.

But perhaps he becomes universal precisely by becoming less particular.

From Sholem Aleichem to America

This problem becomes especially interesting when Ozick is placed alongside Sholem Aleichem.

Sholem Aleichem’s characters inhabit a Jewish world even when that world is collapsing around them. Tevye argues with God through biblical quotations. His misunderstandings are funny precisely because his language is saturated with tradition.

The schlemiel does not stand outside Judaism.

He trips over its words.

By the time we reach Ozick’s America, however, the problem has changed.

The question is no longer simply how the Jew survives modernity.

It is how Jewish language survives the Jew’s successful entry into modernity.

America offers extraordinary possibilities. Jews can enter universities, professions, publishing, entertainment, politics, and the arts.

But cultural success creates its own paradox.

The Jew enters America.

English enters the Jew.

And Yiddish slowly becomes memory.

Edelshtein therefore represents a strange historical figure: the schlemiel produced not by exclusion from modernity but by Jewish integration into it.

The Schlemiel After Yiddish

This helps explain why the American schlemiel becomes so important.

The figure does not disappear when Yiddish disappears from everyday Jewish life.

He migrates.

One can trace something of this migration from Sholem Aleichem through American Jewish literature and eventually into American comedy.

Woody Allen does not need to speak Yiddish to inherit something from the schlemiel.

Neither does Larry David.

Nor do the countless anxious, socially maladroit, overly intellectual, self-defeating Jewish characters who populate American comedy.

But Ozick forces us to ask what happened during this migration.

What was gained?

What was lost?

Perhaps Edelshtein stands at the border crossing.

Behind him lies the Yiddish world.

Ahead of him lies American Jewish comedy.

And Edelshtein cannot quite cross.

That is why he is funny.

That is why he is unbearable.

And that is why he is tragic.

The Schlemiel as a Witness

There is another possibility.

Perhaps Edelshtein’s failure is itself a form of testimony.

The schlemiel has always possessed a peculiar relationship to history. He rarely conquers history. He doesn’t resemble the epic hero who imposes himself upon the world through strength, courage, or political power.

The schlemiel persists.

He remains after humiliation.

He continues speaking when speaking seems pointless.

And this may be Edelshtein’s deepest significance.

He keeps writing Yiddish poetry in a world that increasingly has no use for Yiddish poetry.

From one perspective, this is absurd.

From another, it is an extraordinary refusal.

The world tells him that his language has become obsolete.

He answers by speaking it again.

And again.

And again.

His failure therefore contains a strange dignity.

Not the dignity of the hero who defeats history, but the dignity of the person who refuses to allow history to have the final word.

Who Gets the Last Laugh?

Ozick leaves us with an uncomfortable question.

Who is the real schlemiel?

Is it Edelshtein, stubbornly writing for readers who no longer exist?

Or is it the American Jewish world that believes it can abandon the language of its ancestors without losing anything essential?

Perhaps the joke turns back upon us.

We laugh at Edelshtein because he cannot accept reality.

But Edelshtein may understand something that everyone around him has forgotten.

A language is not merely a tool.

It is a world.

And when a language disappears, a particular way of laughing, suffering, remembering, arguing, and speaking to the dead disappears with it.

The schlemiel survives.

He crosses into English.

He becomes American.

He becomes famous.

But Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” asks us to look back for a moment at the figure who did not make the crossing.

Edelshtein remains standing on the other side, still talking.

Perhaps nobody is listening.

But he keeps talking anyway.

And what could be more schlemiel-like than that?

I grew up in a small town in the Adirondacks. We lived on a few acres of land. We had a pond, a stream, and a marsh in back of our house. In back of my house, I could see the mountains. Since we lived in a valley, I would see the weather come in from the mountains, slowly passing over my house. I lived in a kind of slow solitude, outside of history. To be sure, many Americans growing up in the 80s and 90s lived in a space outside history. But some theorists see this as a result of the burgeoning of mass media and capitalism. Entertainment keeps historical rupture at arms length.

Fredric Jameson – the celebrated theorist of postmodernism – saw America as post-historical, epitomized by artists such as Andy Warhol, whose art was focused much more on pop culture, pastiche, and irony. While we know him for his colorful variations of celebrities, soup cans, and cleaning supplies, he also depicted accidents, electric chairs, and tragic sensationalism.

Warhol could only hint about this. He was more interested in how we were distracted by celebrity, glamour, and American products. History was not his concern. Pop art demonstrates a kind of historical amnesia. Today, with Tik Tok, Instagram, etc we see how far distraction can go to displace history. For the majority of the world, there is no deep thought about historical things. There are memes. Happiness may or may not come out of one’s daily death scrolling.

In contrast to all this, Milan Kundera lived and breathed history and experienced the horrors of communism. He was a Czech-born French novelist and went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His books were censored by the Communists in Czechoslovakia

His literature opened my eyes – as an American – to things I never thought about. What is the relationship of literature to history? What is the meaning and purpose of comedy? How can history, war, and politics ruin lives and thwart growth and flourishing as a human being?

To be sure, Americans don’t have the same legacy as Europeans do for literature. We have – in many ways – inherited it from them. What Kundera did is noteworthy in this sense. In his amazing book, the Art of the Novel, he provides a powerful genealogy of the modern novel, staring with Don Quixote.

In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera argues that comedy changed everything.  According to Kundera, comedy announces the death of tradition, certainty, and religion.   But, at the same time, it announces a new tradition which is born in the wake of death.  For Kundera, the origin of this new tradition, which bears witness to the death of the old tradition, has a proper name.

Kundera names the herald of death and the father of a new tradition: Don Quixote.

As I note elsewhere, Kundera’s read on literature is apocalyptic.

The new message is Apocalyptic and Kundera is describing it for us. The herald of this message is Kafka.  Now the land Surveyor lives in a world which is not simply ambiguous; it is dangerous.  The world may kill this comic character! It deprives the fool of his freedom.  Perhaps Kafka’s Land Surveyor (from The Castle) marks the death of a legacy?

After Kafka, Kundera wonders: is the novel dead?

But if Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era, then the end of his legacy ought to signify more than a mere stage in the history of literary forms; it would herald the end of the Modern Era.  That is why the blissful smile that accompanies those obituaries of the novel strike me is frivolous.  Frivolous because I have already seen and lived through the death of the novel, a violent death (inflicted by bans, censorship, and ideological pressure) in the world where I spent much of my life and which is usually called totalitarian.

In effect, Kundera is telling us, by virtue of his own personal witness, that the novel was killed by the Totalitarian world.  This world, in contrast to the novel, lives in accordance with “one single Truth.”

But this is not enough of a death sentence. Kundera says that the novel is a “cemetery of missed opportunities.”  They include four appeals: to play, to the dream, to thought, and to time.

Kundera notes authors for each appeal.  They include, respectively, Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot (appeal to play); Franz Kafka and the Surrealists (appeal to dream); Musil and Broch (the appeal to thought); and Proust (the appeal to time).

In an Apocalyptic tone, he notes that they all belong to a “cemetery of missed opportunities.”  Milan Kundera has personally witnessed their death.  He has witnessed the political death of the novel and the death of all of these appeals.  However, at this moment of description, in the face of this death, Kundera pronounces a new life for the novel. He pronounces a new purpose in the post-totalitarian era.

In a world in which everything is caught up in a “veritable whirlpool of reduction” the novel’s raison d’etre is to “keep the ‘world of life’ under a permanent light and to protect us from the ‘forgetting of being.’”

The brilliance of Kundera’s work, especially in his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, is to challenge a kind of comedy that emerges out of politics; a kind of laughter, that creates a forgetfulness of history, of being, and weight.

In this novel, he takes aim at the “magical ring” of activism.

“A magazine photograph: a row of men in uniforms, bearing rifles and in helmets with protective plastic visors, watch a group of young people in jeans and T-shirts, hand in hand in a ring, dance in front of them…..I think I understand them: they have the impression that the circle they are describing on the ground is a magical circle uniting them like a ring. And their chests swell with an intense feeling of innocence: they are united not by marching, like soldiers or fascists formations, but by dancing, like children. What they are trying to spit in the cops’ faces is their innocence.

That is how the photographer saw them, and he brought out an eloquent contrast: on one side, the police and the false unity (imposed, commanded) of the row, on the other, the young people in the true unity (sincere and natural) of the circle; on this side the police in the sullen posture of lying in wait, and on the that one, those who are delighting in play.

Dancing in a ring is magic; a ring dance speaks to us from the ancient depths of our memories”( 88-89)

Kundera goes on to describe the laughter that comes out of people who revel in this kind of circle which puts sensuality and childish innocence into a mystical plane. He sees this by way of a teacher who indoctrinates her students into her mystical ring:

“Madame Raphael, the teacher” who “clipped that photo from the magazine and gazed at it dreamily. She too wished to dance in a ring. All her life she looked for a circle of men and women with whom she could hold hands and ring dance, at first in the Methodist Church (her father was a religious fanatic), then in the Communist Party, then in the Trotskyist Party, then in a Trotskyist splinter party….then she looked for it in Marxists, in psychoanalysts, in structuralists, looked for it in Lenin, in Zen Buddhism, in Mao Tse-Tung…she wishes at least to be in perfect harmony with her students, to be at one with them, meaning that she always compels them to thing and say the same things she does, to merge with her into a single body and a sing soul in the same circle and the same dance”(89)

Recalling a moment when two of her students – Gabrielle and Michelle – were “bent over an Ionesco play,” the narrator points out their passionate reading of this absurdist play. While reading they come across a passage about a cat who has “six paws.” They struggle with its meaning. But then Michelle has an aha moment: “This dialogue is certainly intended to create a comic effect”(90).

At this moment, they have a kind of mystical revelation about comedy that, as the narrator shows, is deluded and actually contrary to what Ionesco was trying to get across:

“The two girls look into each other’s eyes, their lips quiver with something like pride, and finally their mouths let out some short, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of their vocal range. Then the same sounds again and again. “A forced laugh. A laughable laugh. A laugh so laughable they can do nothing but laugh. Then comes real laughter. Bursts of repeated, rushing, unbridled laughter…They laugh their laughter until the infinity of their laughter…O laughter! Laughter of sensual pleasure, sensual pleasure of laughter”(90)

At this moment, the narrator evokes the “nearby people…holding hands and dancing in a ring”(91) yet for some reason, there is a void in the middle of this circle. “Madame Raphael, oddly anguished and unsatisfied, made her way home…”(91).

Following this, the narrator recalls his own memory of dancing in a ring: “I too once danced in a ring. It was in 1948. In my country, the Communists had taken power…and I took other Communist students by the hands or shoulders and we took two steps in place, one step forward, raised the left leg to one side, then the right to the other, and we did this nearly every month, because we always had something to celebrate…old injustices were redressed, new injustices were perpetrated, factories were nationalized, thousands of people went to prison…Then one day I said something I should not have said, was expelled from the party, and had to leave the ring dance. Then I understood the magical meaning of the circle”(92).

What did Kundera teach us? He taught us how when we are high on ourselves and our fantasies – when we are floating away in the dance, laughing – history will remind us about the meaning of the circle. Modernist literature – I learned from Kundera – is a balance between laughter and the weight of being.

Some laugh to remember, some laugh to forget. This reminds me of the Samuel Beckett line – often noted by Theodor Adorno – that is the subtitle of this blog: “the laugh that laughs at the laugh.”

That is the kind of laughter we hear in these passages. It is a heavy kind of laughter that has learned from history. Today, we need to take this to heart. But we are only capable of this laughter if we learn how to read again. In our age of TikTok and rapid-fire social media, we may all get caught up in the mystical ring of this or that movement only to wake up and realize that we’ve been duped.

Rest in peace, Milan Kundera.

Al Jaffee – who was at the inception of Mad Magazine in 1952, and returned in 1964 and stayed until it folded in 2019 – died today, at the age of 102.

Known primarily for his “fold-in” for Mad Magazine, in his last interview, for New York Magazine’s Culture blog, Vulture, he talks about his Jewish roots in Lithuania, and much else. Apparently, he was raised in an observant home and, like many Jews he took to humor. He saw all things oddly, including his own Jewishness:

But you weren’t born in Lithuania?
No, I was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1921. But both of my parents were from Lithuania. My mother was very religious, and she wanted to go back to a place where she felt comfortable. She moved back, and brought me and my three brothers with her. This was in 1927.

How did those six years in Lithuania affect your comic sensibility?
My father remained in America through those six years, and I made him promise to send me American comic strips. Every few months or so, my brothers and I would receive a package of rolled-up Sunday color comics and daily comics. We would just sit there and read them for days and days. My brother Harry, who was also artistic, would take these Sunday comic pages, and we’d cut them up and turn them into little books. We would provide our own dialogue, maybe with a Lithuanian joke or two.

Most of the comics we received were humorous. Some were adventurous, in the “Little Orphan Annie” mold. There was no TV or radio, so that was pretty much it for us. But I would see humor in everything, even in the religious practices, which didn’t quite register with me.

I found religion sort of funny. There was something that just didn’t make sense about not being able to play ball or not being able to walk too far on the Sabbath. These very strict religious prohibitions against any kind of enjoyment just struck me as being very old-fashioned and strange. Maybe I was bringing my Savannah influence with me; I don’t know. I was sort of straddling these two cultures: the New World and the Old World.

He also discusses humor in relation to anti-Semitism and saw it – like Charlie Chaplin and others – as ridiculous:

It is also really telling that one of his first ideas to come into the comic scene was to do a parody of Superman. It is fascinating because, as Hannah Arendt argues in her seminal essay on the schlemiel, “The Jew as Pariah,” that Charlie Chaplin had failed to laugh Hitler out of office with his film, The Great Dictator (1940); and for that reason, the schlemiel, as an American icon (as found in Chaplin) was displaced, according to Arendt, by Superman.

Jaffee parodied that displacement:

What was your first comic-book sale? How old were you?

I was 20. I went to see Will Eisner, who was the creator of a comic strip called “The Spirit,” which was beautifully drawn and very creative. The opening splash pages were all so brilliantly conceived. In the comics field, we all admired this strip tremendously. Will was a genius. He just did beautiful work.

I had created a parody of Superman called “Inferior Man,” and I wanted to show it to Will. It seems so naïve now, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Was this the first parody of Superman? This would have been what, the early ’40s? Superman had only been around a few years at that point.

At that time, there was another character who was called Stuporman — it was published by DC Comics. I don’t know if mine was the first Superman takeoff, but it really doesn’t matter. I came up with mine independently. Since then, I’ve seen a million takeoffs, but, at that time, there weren’t many. When I brought this idea to Will, I had no idea whether I was doing something stupid or not. But Will, who was only a few years older than I was, was already very successful. He hired me on the spot to do “Inferior Man” as a filler for his comic books.

Several years later, Jaffee was asked to create a character for the Chabad Lubavitch’s kids magazine under Tzivos Hashem. He took the task.

In its colorful pages, Al Jaffee reinvented a character called “the Shpy.” Part-fumbling secret agent and part-Torah scholar, “the Shpy,” clad in a trench coat with his hat pulled over his eyes and an attaché case filled with every conceivable gadget, is tasked with doing battle against the Yetzer Hora, the evil inclination.

This character has – without a doubt – some schlemiel characteristics in the way he is playfully portrayed. The Lubavitcher Rebbe commented to Rabbi Pape – whose magazine this character appeared in – about Jaffe’s caricatures:

“We used to send the cover of every issue to the Rebbe,” recalls Pape. “He would look it over and make suggestions—such as making sure girls were represented on every cover.” Other comments from the Rebbe included his belief that caricatures should be avoided in the magazine. In a note to the editors, the Rebbe wrote, “It’s not fitting that people should be drawn with unnaturally oversized bodies and cartoonishly large noses, even though that style is common in comics.” To do so, the Rebbe noted, was a “huge educational mistake.”

“When it came to the cartoonish elements that the Rebbe wanted us to avoid,” says Pape, “I don’t think he wanted children to laugh at how others looked. He was sensitive to those with various defining traits or disabilities and wanted art to reflect that sensitivity.”

Whether it is Inferior Man, Stuporman or Shpy, Jaffe wanted to create a parody of the superhero that was in line with the schlemiel character and its comical adventures in the world. To be sure, the schlemiel character is a Jewish response to the hero. The schlemiel is self-deprecating and, as Ruth Wisse puts it, wins an “ironic victory.”

He may not be superman, but he has the sincerity of Gimpel or Rabbi Nachaman’s humble simpleton who, like many a Jew, finds humor everywhere. Comedy is more in tune with Judaism than tragedy. After all, the Jewish tradition teaches us that the best ending is a divine comedy (albeit, not in Dante’s sense).

The schlemiel stayed with Jaffee, so to speak, throughout his career and marks his mission in life to make people laugh at the powerful and take joy in the power of comedy. In defiance of Arendt’s Superman prediction, the schlemiel lived on in his work.

May his memory be for a blessing!

With the rise of anti-semitism in America – which I have experienced, personally; and see on social media, perpetually – I have been starting to think more about what it is and what we can do to – if possible – counter-act it. One era that I have studied in depth and written on in many essays and book chapters, is the period before, during, and after the Holocaust. German Jewish thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, and Theodor Adorno have been on my radar for some time.

Today, I look to what Adorno’s thoughts were after anti-semitism had its run through Germany, destroyed the country, and annihilated millions of Jews. How did it germinate, so to speak, in Germany? One thought that came to me is that what we are seeing right now with paranoia on social media about this or that group and its power is a symptom of anti-semitism. Adorno, in an essay entitled, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” sees the forces around nationalism as “intentionally self-deluded.” For him, nationalism is the “heritage of barbarically primitive tribal attitudes” that was against anything different. As the nation decayed, so to speak, it became, according to Adorno, “sadistic and destructive.”

Nationalism does not completely believe in itself anymore, and yet it is a political necessity because it is the most effective means of motivating people to insist on conditions that are, viewed objectively, obsolete. This is why, as something ill at ease with itself, intentionally self-deluded, it has taken on grotesque features nowadays. Admittedly nationalism, the heritage of barbarically primitive tribal attitudes, never lacked such traits altogether, but they were reined in as long as liberalism guaranteed the right of the individual—also concretely as the condition of collective prosperity. Only in an age in which it was already toppling has nationalism become completely sadistic and destructive.

For Adorno, the energy behind nationalism (“nationalism as a paranoid delusion system”) was “paranoia,” which, for the Nazis, was a “persecution mania.” It was “contagious.”

We see something like this today, on social media with anti-semitism in which anti-semites – like Kanye or his white supremecist muse, Nick Fuentes -have the paranoid belief that Jews control everything and are destroying not just the nation but they, themselves, personally.

The rage of Hitler’s world against everything that was different—nationalism as a paranoid delusional system—was already of this caliber. The appeal of precisely these features is hardly any less today. Paranoia, the persecution mania that persecutes those upon whom it projects what it itself desires, is contagious. Collective delusions, like anti-Semitism, confirm the pathology of the individual, who shows that psychologically he is no longer a match for the world and is thrown back upon an illusory inner realm. 

This fascinating part is that the anti-semite is “no longer a match for the world” and, in his retreat to his or her keyboard, is “thrown back upon an illusory inner realm.” In other words, the anti-semite, in taking the world as the enemy of the average American, etc cannot live in this world where it used to dwell so it he/she is thrown back into their private illusory worlds that are supported by other people tweeting, instagraming, etc from their lonely keyboards.

Anti-Semitism is so difficult to refute because the psychic economy of innumerable people needed it and, in an attenuated form, presumably still needs it today. Whatever happens by way of propaganda remains ambiguous.

Anti-semitism, in other words, is a “collective” desire. It is a desire based on paranoia that, because it is needed – due to alienation, loneliness, and confusion – is urgent and pressing. After arriving at this thought, Adorno turns to someone who enjoyed the dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank. What, one may ask, is the connection of this dramatic experience to anti-semitism or persecution mania?

I was told the story of a woman who, upset after seeing a dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank, said: “Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.” To be sure even that was good as a first step toward understanding. But the individual case, which should stand for, and raise awareness about, the terrifying totality, by its very individuation became an alibi for the totality the woman forgot. The perplexing thing about such observations remains that even on their account one cannot advise against productions of the Anne Frank play and the like, because their effect nonetheless feeds into the potential for improvement, however repugnant they also are and however much they seem to be a profanation of the dignity of the dead.

This person, for Adorno, only sees the individual, Anne Frank, she doesn’t see the “terrifying totality,” that made Anne Frank into an animal to be hunted and killed by Nazis. But, notes Adorno, the effect of this play can still “feed the potential for improvement.” While a play like the Diary of Anne Frank, seems to be a “profanation of the dignity of the dead” (something Eli Weisel or Paul Celan might say), it still can bring someone to a potentiality for “improvement.”

But Adorno has his doubts because he does not think the “genuine” anti-semite’s experience of real Jews – not fictional or dramatized ones – can efface his or her anti-semitism. Why? Because this presupposes that an anti-semite has the capacity for experience. On the contrary, writes Adorno, “the genuine anti-Semite is defined far more by his incapacity for any experience whatsoever, by his unresponsiveness.”

All too often the presupposition is that anti-Semitism in some essential way involves the Jews and could be countered through concrete experiences with Jews, whereas the genuine anti-Semite is defined far more by his incapacity for any experience whatsoever, by his unresponsiveness. If anti-Semitism primarily has its foundation in objective society, and only derivatively in anti-Semites, then—as the National Socialist joke has it—if the Jews had not already existed, the anti-Semites would have had to invent them.

For Adorno, the anti-Semite can’t experience the other; s/he cannot be changed. In a Levinasian sense, he cannot be vulnerable to the other and is incapable of experience because he has negated the world and put a paranoid one in its place. Even if s/he meets a real Jew – Kanye met many – this doesn’t change a thing. The anti-Semite is not in the world; he or she is in his or her own world; in that paranoid reality, the Jew is controlling everything. Only by destroying the Jew, taking away Jewish power, will the anti-Semite feel and know that the world he or she has projected on his or her – see below – (paranoid) world.

One of the most notable losses to the film world of recent note was the death of Chaim Topol (four days ago). To be sure, Topol received two Golden Globe Awards and was a nominee for both a Tony Award and an Academy Award. He won the most prestigious award in Israel, the Israel Prize, for his performance in Fiddler on the Roof. The play has run 3500 times on the Broadway Stage. Fiddler held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical for almost 10 years until Grease surpassed its run…and yet, there was no mention whatsoever of his death.

With this in mind, a Jewish Telegraph Article (JTA) with the title, “‘Fabelmans’ flops at the Oscars, but Hollywood’s Jewish History Gets a Nod,” caught my eye. The choice of wording is apropos. Jewish films or actors, in seems, are no longer celebrated in Hollywood. They get a “nod” (although Topol didn’t even get that).

The broadcast included a promotional video for the Academy Museum, which opened last year to celebrate the history of Hollywood. In the video, a curator named Dara Jaffe explains that one of the museum’s roles is to “bring important film histories to light, from the Jewish immigrants who founded the Hollywood studios to the early innovators of African-American cinema.” The inclusion is notable because the museum drew steep criticism when it first opened for giving short shrift to the industry’s robust Jewish history; Jaffe was appointed to put together a permanent exhibition about that history in response. The exhibition has not yet opened.

For now on, Jewish history and Jews in Hollywood will only get “nods,” especially the best of them. Just like at the museum in Los Angeles honoring the film industry, where the Jews who founded Hollywood are barely mentioned. David Chappelle and Louis Farakahn think Jews have too much power in Hollywood, so, it’s time to start “nodding” rather than celebrating. That is about all Jews in Hollywood and their history will get. That seems to be the new trajectory.

From recent movies like You People by Jonah Hill, we learn that Jews have too much power and privilege and are no different from spoiled white people with inhereted wealth (more than one generation of wealth, today, is considered a sin by the contemporary race theory ideologues, like Ibram X Kendi).

In this new context, Jews are “white” and don’t deserve anything close to celebration, especially one of America’s top Jewish filmmakers, Steven Spielberg. As the English comedian David Baddiel puts it, today, Jews don’t count. The celebration of Jewish success has been sidelined by the new regime of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The culture industry has moved on to the next “thing.”

An article by Tablet that brought out what this means – in terms of fresh data – is eye opening. It is entitled, “The Vanishing.”

I’ll end with a brief quote from the article which sums up the situation and may help us to understand why Topol wasn’t a focus – since, after all, such a choice may have put too much focus on the Jews and their contributions to American film and theater.

As true believers in the postwar liberal project, American Jews spent decades advocating for tolerance and equality of opportunity, not least because we were the prime beneficiaries. The ADL didn’t fight the quotas in the 1950s so Jews could matriculate in proportion to their percentage of the population. But there’s a tension between meritocracy and representation. The new DEI regime treats any disparity between groups as evidence of unfair advantage—and yet we’re supposed to think it’s a coincidence that Jewish representation plummets at the exact moment America frantically pushes to racially rebalance all high-status industries.

Because what is framed as a backlash against America’s “white” centers of power is in many cases a clever sleight of hand. Jews are being disproportionately purged from liberal institutions because Jews disproportionately exist within those institutions.

When activists and journalists and executives talk about how Broadway or NPR or publishing is “too white,” what they really mean is “too Jewish.” When The New York Times says it wants to make its internal demographics look more like New York City’s (excepting the Hasidim, of course), what this means is “fewer Jews.” Twenty years ago, if Pat Robertson spoke along these lines—making the same complaints about the same people and industries and institutions—there would have been a rush to condemn it as antisemitic. Today it passes for social justice.

In the 1960s and ’70s, facing hard barriers to their professional advancement, Soviet Jews lost the faith. The children and the grandchildren of the revolution tried to emigrate. When the authorities wouldn’t let them, American Jews rallied to their cause, created brand-new communal organizations, petitioned Congress, rallied thousands-strong outside the United Nations. Ours was a community confident in its power and confident in its future.

Asian Americans have the dignity of looking at admissions practices and demanding fair representation. The Jews, as ever, are a people apart. From civil rights to Vietnam to the spectacular bounty of their cultural and political achievements, liberal Jewish boomers always managed to be on the right side of history. It is a supreme irony that they’ve helped empower a movement that now places their children and grandchildren on the wrong side.

If Putin or Orban reduced their universities’ Jewish populations by 50%, the ADL would be howling. But Harvard and Yale can magically lose nearly half their Jewish students in less than a decade and we’ll take it on the chin. That this is occurring with the full acquiescence of a terrified liberal Jewish establishment should tell you just how much power Jews in America still have.

I was born and raised in a small town in the Adirondacks called Mayfield. In elementary school, I was the only Jew in my class. When we sang in the school assembly in December, we sang several Christmas carols; but to make sure I didn’t feel like the odd one out, the teachers included two songs about Hannukah. All the students would look at me and smile as we sang. After an anti-semitic incident in junior high, I transferred to a nearby school, in Gloversville, New York where I went to Hebrew school and was bar-mitzvahed (in that school, I was one of three Jews in my grade).

Why do I mention any of this in a reflection on Chaim Topol?

Both of my parents and most of my family are Jews from New York City. But besides Annie Hall (1977), Mad Magazine, and Hebrew School classes after school that I barely focused on (save for the units on the Holocaust), I had little exposure to Jewishness as a child. The movie, Fiddler on the Roof (1971), however, was one of the most Jewish things I ever saw. It was even staged at one of my schools. The songs, the dancing, the story all intrigued me and made me feel ok about being an American Jew. My non-Jewish videographer included parts of the soundtrack in my Bar Mitzvah Video (at the beginning and end). It seemed to have brought me into an appreciation of “tradition” and life.

Later in life, after I was an undergrad, I found out for myself what Judaism was all about by going to Yeshiva and taking on a more observant lifestyle. Be that as it may, it was this film that gave me my first vague sense of what Jewishness I came from…in old Europe. I always wondered what life was like there, before the Holocaust.

I was intrigued with the Tevye character played so wonderfully by Chaim Topol. He was so full of life, so reflective, honest, and self-deprecating. Since Woody Allen’s and Mel Brooks’ films, as well as Mad Magazine, were my pop cultural guides to Jewishness, I always wondered how Tevye measured up. Was he a schlemiel like most characters in these films or caricatures in Mad?

We need to look at the original inspiration for the Broadway / Hollywood character by turning to Shalom Aleichem, who wrote these stories in the wake of pogroms and before the Holocaust.

Ruth Wisse, in The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, doesn’t think so. She contrasts Tevye to the character Menahem Mendel and sees Tevye as the embodiment of a schlemiel (who lacks insight into his condition) and his opposite (who does). Tevye, unlike the schlemiel character, experiences “ironic resignation” while also having an “elemental life instinct”:

I.L. Trunk distinguishes between these two heroes: Menahem Mendl, he says, is pure instinct. Unlike Tevye the Dairyman, he does not experience ironic resignation, or ironic faith: he ‘expresses the elemental life instinct which does not see its tragic perspectives.” But taken together, Menahem Mendl and his wife Sheyne Sheyndl, do create the ironic juxtapositions that Tevye expresses in his own person, allowing the reader to weigh the fierce optimism against a tragic perspective. Together they represent two extremes of faith and failure. (56)

For Sander Pinsker, in his book The Schlemiel as Metaphor, Tevye is a character who “best captures the tragic-comic sprit of the Diaspora”(32) when he says, “With God’s help I starved to death – I and my wife and children – three times a day, not counting supper”(32). Pinsker says – playing on Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy – that Tevye gives “tragic affirmation a new twist.”

For Pinsker, like Wisse, Tevye is a figure of faith:

With the world of the shtetl all but disintegrated and ‘modern children’ threatening to abandon its traditions entirely, Tevye not only continues to pattern his life on the Old Ways, but he also has a perfect faith that the Old Ways will somehow prevail. (36)

But he is a schlimazel because history ruins his life and his family. He loves them all, but he is the last person to preserve faith in the midst of rapid change. Aleichem wrote these tales before the Holocaust. That Europe is gone. But the spirit of Tevye, so beautifully embodied and preserved for the ages by Chaim Topol is with us.

What I loved about Chaim Topol’s performance of faith was how he embodied it through his acting. His joy and his tribulations, embodied through his “tragic affirmation,” gave me hope. One can be bold and Jewish in America, I thought, but how? Through theater? Literature? Film? A religious life?

To be sure, the film and the play are a part of what Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi, in her book, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Jewish Imagination, of a general post-WWII construction of a “virtual shtetl” – as we see with the popularity of I.B. Singer’s fiction, Irving Howe’s World of our Fathers, his Yiddish Anthology, new translations of Yiddish writers, etc – which emerged after the European shtetl and its Jewish culture were obliterated by the Nazis. For her, it is a form of nostalgia since that world is gone for good.

Be that as it may, the film and play touched the hearts of millions of people, Jews and non-Jews. Topol gave it new meaning and purpose. It is a past that means a lot to us insofar as we imagine it to be on the threshold of a rich Yiddish culture and an ancient faith that was challenged by history, pogroms, anti-semitism, etc. The point is to remain strong in the face of it all and to make a “tragic affirmation” of faith when it seems to have run its course.

Rest in peace, Chaim. Baruch Dayin Ha’emes.

You changed the world and gave us an embodiment of Jewish life, faith, and culture that inspired many Jews, like myself, to look deeper into their Jewishness.