From Sholem Aleichem to Step Brothers: Why the return of the Jewish schlemiel matters in an age of rising antisemitism.

There is something wonderfully ironic about the announcement that Steve Carell and John C. Reilly will star in a new Broadway production of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple in 2027. For those who have followed the history of the schlemiel in Jewish and American comedy, the casting is almost too perfect.

Carell, who immortalized the awkward, emotionally needy Michael Scott in The Office, will play Felix Ungar. Reilly, who played the lovable, immature Dale Doback opposite Will Ferrell in Step Brothers (2008), will play Oscar Madison. The production, directed by Thomas Kail, will coincide with the centennial of Neil Simon’s birth.

But why return to The Odd Couple now? Is this simply Broadway capitalizing on nostalgia and celebrity, or is something more significant happening?

I would suggest that this revival brings together two generations of the schlemiel: the Jewish-American schlemiel of the postwar period and the American man-child of contemporary popular culture. But it also raises a more troubling question. At a moment when Jewish-American comedy is being celebrated on Broadway, antisemitism remains a serious problem in New York City, the very place that helped transform Jewish comedy into American comedy.

America loves the Jewish schlemiel. But does it love the Jews?

Neil Simon and the Jewish-American Schlemiel

When Neil Simon passed away in 2018, I wrote an essay entitled Neil Simon – an American Master of Schlemiel Comedy – Passes⁠. I suggested that Simon was not simply one of America’s greatest comic playwrights. He was also one of its greatest interpreters of the Jewish-American schlemiel.

I recalled how Simon’s plays were performed not only on Broadway but also in Jewish community centers throughout America. My mother had acted in some of these productions in our local Jewish community in upstate New York. Simon’s comedy was not simply something Jews watched. It was something they performed, inhabited, and recognized as part of their own lives.

Simon’s comedy emerged from a particular Jewish-American historical experience. The children and grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants were becoming Americans, moving into the middle class, acquiring professional identities, and participating in the institutions of American success. But this movement toward assimilation was accompanied by anxiety, disappointment, and the persistent feeling that something did not quite fit.

The schlemiel embodied this tension. He wanted to belong, but his awkwardness, emotional vulnerability, and inability to control his circumstances continually exposed the fragility of that belonging.

Simon’s characters belong to a literary tradition stretching back through Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, and the Yiddish comic imagination. In this tradition, the schlemiel is not simply an incompetent person. He is someone whose inability to master the world raises questions about power, success, suffering, and laughter.

Consider Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye. He repeatedly attempts to understand his changing world through Jewish texts, inherited wisdom, and conversations with God. His interpretations are often comic, but his foolishness is inseparable from his faith, his love of family, and his stubborn attachment to Jewish life.

Simon inherits this tradition but transforms it. His characters inhabit New York apartments rather than the Eastern European shtetl. Their conflicts revolve around marriage, divorce, professional success, and the anxieties of American domestic life. Yet something of the older Jewish comic sensibility remains.

Felix and Oscar are exemplary. Felix is obsessive, anxious, and incapable of accepting disorder. Oscar is irresponsible, disorganized, and seemingly indifferent to respectable adulthood.

Both are failures. But they fail in opposite directions.

Felix wants too much order. Oscar wants too little. Felix cannot stop caring. Oscar cannot seem to care enough. And the comedy emerges from the fact that neither can live with the other, but neither can quite live without him.

This is more than a conflict between personalities. It is a Jewish-American comedy about the impossibility of becoming the self-sufficient American man.

From The Odd Couple to Step Brothers: The Americanization of the Schlemiel

In my 2013 essay Girshkin and Rybakov: Gary Shteyngart’s Comic Duo⁠, I discussed the significance of comic pairings. From Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to Laurel and Hardy, from Felix and Oscar to Harry and Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber, comic duos reveal tensions that structure human existence.

What makes these pairings so interesting is that each character exposes something the other cannot see. The schlemiel needs the other. Without the other, his foolishness might remain invisible.

In that essay, I also discussed Step Brothers, starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. The connection to the Broadway revival is striking.

In Step Brothers, Brennan Huff and Dale Doback are middle-aged men who behave like children. They live with their parents, resist responsibility, and turn the demands of adulthood into absurd confrontations. Beneath the vulgarity and physical comedy is a question Neil Simon had explored decades earlier:

What happens when men cannot become adults?

But there is an important difference. Felix and Oscar have already entered adulthood. They have married, worked, and participated in American middle-class life. Their marriages have failed, but they are not outsiders to the adult world.

Brennan and Dale, by contrast, have never quite left childhood. Adulthood itself has become something to resist.

There is also a specifically Jewish difference. The Jewish schlemiel’s vulnerability emerges from a history of minority existence, displacement, and the struggle for recognition. His failure often challenges the dominant culture’s ideals. The American man-child, by contrast, frequently enjoys the privileges of belonging to that culture while refusing its demands.

The Jewish schlemiel’s weakness can challenge the authority of the powerful. The American man-child’s weakness can become an excuse for avoiding responsibility.

This makes Reilly’s casting especially interesting. The man who played Dale Doback is now playing one of the characters who helped establish the modern American comedy of male inadequacy.

The schlemiel has come full circle. But has he lost something Jewish along the way?

The End of Adulthood—or the Triumph of the Schlemiel?

In 2014, responding to A.O. Scott’s reflections on the decline of adulthood in American culture, I wrote The End of Adulthood or the Dawn of the American-Schlemiel? A.O. Scott’s Kvetch About America’s “Devolution”⁠.

Scott worried that American popular culture had become fascinated with men who refused to grow up. Films such as Step Brothers, Knocked Up, and Billy Madison seemed to celebrate immaturity rather than condemn it.

But perhaps this development should be understood differently. Rather than evidence of cultural decline, it might represent the transformation of the Jewish schlemiel into an American cultural icon.

As Ruth Wisse argued in The Schlemiel as Modern Hero, the schlemiel reverses traditional heroism. He does not triumph through strength, mastery, or domination. His failures become the source of his peculiar power.

The schlemiel wins by losing.

This reversal has a Jewish history. In a world where Jews were frequently excluded from political and military power, the schlemiel offered an alternative kind of heroism. He survived through wit, endurance, imagination, and a refusal to accept the world’s definition of success.

By the twenty-first century, however, the schlemiel had become mainstream. From Woody Allen and Larry David to Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, Steve Carell, and John C. Reilly, the awkward, emotionally excessive male had become a defining figure of American comedy.

Carell’s Michael Scott illustrates this transformation. He occupies a position of authority as a regional manager, yet his desperate need for affection continually undermines that authority. The schlemiel is no longer outside the institutions of American success. He is inside them.

He is the boss. And yet, he remains a fool.

But what happens when everybody becomes a schlemiel? Can he still challenge American ideals when his inadequacies have become the substance of American popular culture? And what happens to the Jewish history of vulnerability when vulnerability becomes an American entertainment commodity?

The Jewish Schlemiel Returns to New York in an Age of Antisemitism

There is a historical irony here that deserves particular attention. The Odd Couple is returning to Broadway at a time when antisemitism remains a serious problem in New York City, the very place where Jewish-American comedy achieved some of its greatest successes.

According to the NYPD, 279 confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes occurred during the first ten months of 2026, accounting for more than half of the city’s confirmed hate crimes. The ADL’s 2025 audit documented a decline in overall antisemitic incidents in New York State from the previous year, but also an increase in physical assaults, many targeting visibly Orthodox Jews.

These figures reveal a disturbing contradiction. New York celebrates Jewish comedians, playwrights, intellectuals, and cultural achievements. Yet Jews in the same city continue to face hostility directed at their religious practices, communal identities, and Jewishness itself.

The irony becomes especially sharp when we consider the difference between the Americanized schlemiel and the visibly Orthodox Jew.

The schlemiel is often welcomed because his Jewishness has become culturally familiar, entertaining, and sometimes nearly invisible. The visibly Orthodox Jew, by contrast, cannot so easily disappear into the American mainstream. His clothing, religious practices, and communal identity mark him as different.

Has American culture learned to embrace Jewish comic difference while remaining uncomfortable with Jewish religious and communal difference?

This is not to suggest that the popularity of Jewish comedy causes antisemitism. Rather, it reveals a limit to cultural acceptance. A society can celebrate the cultural achievements of a minority without fully accepting the minority itself.

There is a long history to this contradiction. European societies frequently admired Jewish writers, musicians, and intellectuals while maintaining forms of antisemitism. Cultural achievement did not guarantee belonging.

The American Jewish experience has been different, shaped by greater opportunities for citizenship, religious freedom, and cultural integration. Nevertheless, contemporary antisemitism raises unsettling questions about the security of that integration.

When Simon’s The Odd Couple premiered in 1965, Jewish comedy was becoming American comedy. The awkwardness and vulnerability of the Jewish schlemiel were being transformed into sources of national affection.

But what happens when the historical vulnerability of Jews, which helped shape this comic sensibility, returns in a more threatening form?

What happens when the Jewish schlemiel is welcomed back to Broadway while Jews themselves are increasingly made to feel unwelcome in the streets of New York?

Perhaps this is the most significant irony surrounding the revival.

Comic Timing, Jewish Vulnerability, and the Ethics of the Other

In my 2013 essay The Odd Couple: Kairos and Masochism⁠, I explored the relationship between comic timing, contingency, and the schlemiel.

Drawing on Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze, I suggested that schlemiel comedy might be understood through the tension between the desire to master the world and the experience of being unable to do so.

The schlemiel is often someone who finds himself at odds with time. He arrives too late, says the wrong thing, or acts when he should remain silent. His failure is not merely practical. It is temporal.

He cannot master the moment.

Felix attempts to control everything: the apartment, the food, the schedule, and Oscar’s behavior. Oscar, meanwhile, seems to accept disorder as a condition of life. But Oscar’s apparent freedom is also a failure. He cannot organize his life or escape the consequences of his irresponsibility.

Felix cannot accept contingency. Oscar cannot escape it.

Their relationship also raises a specifically Jewish ethical question. If the American ideal of adulthood is independence and self-sufficiency, The Odd Couple suggests that human existence is fundamentally relational.

Felix needs Oscar. Oscar needs Felix. Their need for one another is precisely what makes their relationship so difficult.

One might approach this through Emmanuel Levinas, who understood ethics as beginning not with the autonomous self but with the demands of the other person. The other interrupts my world, disturbs my plans, and refuses to behave as I would like. Yet I remain responsible to him.

Jewish concepts such as chesed (loving-kindness) and rachamim (compassion) illuminate this relationship. They suggest that responsibility cannot be reduced to affection for people who are agreeable. Sometimes care is required precisely because another person is difficult or vulnerable.

Felix and Oscar are hardly models of ethical virtue. Both are selfish, impatient, and insensitive. But their failures make the ethical problem visible.

Can one care for another person without trying to remake him in one’s own image? Can one recognize the other’s vulnerability without reducing him to his inadequacies?

These questions acquire urgency in the context of antisemitism. Antisemitism reduces Jews to collective fantasies, stereotypes, and accusations. It substitutes an imagined Jewish identity for the actual person standing before us.

Levinas’s insistence upon the ethical demand of the other challenges precisely this reduction. The human being exceeds the categories through which we attempt to understand or control him.

Of course, comic vulnerability must be distinguished from actual persecution. The schlemiel’s failures may invite laughter and compassion. Antisemitic violence is not comic, nor should Jewish powerlessness be romanticized.

But the schlemiel can expose the inadequacy of a worldview that measures human beings exclusively through power, mastery, and conformity.

The schlemiel’s vulnerability becomes ethically significant when it calls forth responsibility from another person.

Is the Schlemiel Back? Or Has America Forgotten His Jewishness?

We live in a culture increasingly fascinated by competence, optimization, efficiency, and control. Artificial intelligence promises to anticipate our needs, eliminate mistakes, and make our lives more productive. In such a world, what place is there for the schlemiel?

The schlemiel is inefficient. He misunderstands situations, fails to anticipate consequences, and cannot control the relationships that give his life meaning.

The schlemiel reminds us that human beings are not machines.

But the Jewish schlemiel reminds us of something more. Human vulnerability is not simply an individual defect to be corrected. It is part of a shared condition that demands an ethical response.

This does not mean that Jewish tradition celebrates incompetence. Rather, the schlemiel’s failures can expose the limits of a world organized exclusively around power, achievement, and self-sufficiency.

The return of The Odd Couple brings this history into focus. The schlemiel never really disappeared. He migrated from the Jewish-American family into the American workplace, from the postwar apartment into the suburban home, from Felix and Oscar to Brennan and Dale.

And along the way, something changed. The schlemiel became less visibly Jewish, but his comic challenge to the ideals of mastery and masculinity remained.

Yet there is a significant difference between celebrating immaturity and recognizing vulnerability. Step Brothers turns the refusal of adulthood into an exuberant comic fantasy. The Odd Couple begins with the painful recognition that adulthood has already failed.

Felix and Oscar are not children refusing to grow up. They are adults who discover that growing up has not saved them from disappointment, loneliness, and emotional dependency.

And yet, despite everything, they remain friends.

Perhaps this is the enduring significance of Simon’s comedy. The schlemiel is not simply someone who fails. He is someone whose failures make visible the possibility of affection, friendship, and a shared life.

When Carell and Reilly take the stage in 2027, they will bring the history of the American schlemiel into conversation with itself. The American man-child will meet his Jewish-American ancestor.

But the historical context makes this reunion more than a matter of theatrical nostalgia. The city that helped transform Jewish comedy into American comedy is confronting renewed antisemitism. Jewish-American culture is celebrated onstage while Jewish identity remains vulnerable in the streets.

This juxtaposition should trouble us.

It suggests that cultural acceptance is not the same as ethical recognition. Americans may embrace Jewish comedy while failing to recognize the dignity and particularity of Jewish lives.

The schlemiel was never simply a man who could not grow up. He was a figure through whom Jewish writers explored power and powerlessness, belonging and exile, suffering and laughter, and the possibility of living ethically in a world that cannot be mastered.

Perhaps the schlemiel has returned to Broadway not simply to remind America how to laugh, but to remind it of the Jewish history that made this laughter possible.

America has learned to laugh with the Jewish schlemiel. But has it learned to live with Jewish difference?

That may be the real question posed by Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple in 2027.

And that, as they say in comedy, is all in the timing.

What happens when a person loses the ability to hope? What happens when cynicism becomes so deeply ingrained in one’s understanding of the world that even love, religion, and freedom cease to have any meaning? And what happens when the desire to escape the burdens of freedom becomes more powerful than the desire to be free?

These questions are central to Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (Soumission, 2015). But they also raise another question that has occupied me for years in my reflections on the schlemiel: What happens to comedy when hope disappears?

The schlemiel is often characterized by his inability to understand the world as it is. He dreams, hopes, and acts in ways that frequently contradict reality. His aspirations exceed his circumstances, and his failures expose the distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

But the schlemiel’s failure does not necessarily destroy his hope.

Indeed, one could argue that the schlemiel’s greatest virtue is his refusal to surrender hope, even when reality gives him every reason to do so.

Houellebecq’s characters, by contrast, often seem to have surrendered hope before they have even begun to act. They are not naïve. They are not dreamers. They know too much about the world, or at least believe that they do.

And their knowledge has become a kind of prison.

This is why I want to suggest that François, the protagonist of Submission, is a kind of anti-schlemiel.

Where the schlemiel believes too much, François believes too little. Where the schlemiel’s failures expose the limits of reality, François’s cynicism exposes the limits of a life without hope. And where the schlemiel’s vulnerability can open him to others, François’s vulnerability drives him toward isolation.

Yet the anti-schlemiel is not simply the opposite of the schlemiel. Both are comic figures, both are vulnerable, and both are unable to reconcile themselves with the world. The difference lies in how they respond to this predicament.

The schlemiel continues to dream.

The anti-schlemiel seeks a way to stop dreaming altogether.

And in Submission, Houellebecq imagines a world in which this desire might finally be satisfied.

What makes this novel especially interesting is that François is offered three possibilities for escaping his loneliness: religious transcendence, love, and finally political and religious submission. Each possibility involves a different relationship to the self and to others. And each reveals something about his inability—or unwillingness—to change.

From the Sexual Revolution to the Anti-Schlemiel

In my earlier essays on Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles, I explored the relationship between cynicism, sexuality, loneliness, and the failure of modern freedom.

In “Cynical, Middle-Aged, Oversexed, and Alone After the Sexual Revolution — Part I”⁠, I considered how Houellebecq depicts the modern individual as someone who has inherited the promises of sexual liberation but finds himself increasingly isolated.

In Part II of that essay⁠, I continued to explore the relationship between sexuality, aging, cynicism, and the possibility of love.

And in “The Other Side of the Sexual Revolution: Sex, Violence, and History in Michel Houellebecq’s ⁠The Elementary Particles⁠”⁠, I examined the darker historical and psychological implications of sexual liberation.

What interested me most in these essays was not simply Houellebecq’s cynicism, but the way in which his characters struggle with the possibility of love in a world that seems to have lost its moral and spiritual bearings.

In The Elementary Particles, Bruno and Michel represent two different responses to modernity. While Bruno seeks redemption through sexuality, Michel turns away from the body toward science. Both are alienated. Both are incapable, in different ways, of sustaining love.

In Submission, Houellebecq takes this predicament one step further.

François, a middle-aged professor of literature at the Sorbonne, is not simply another lonely intellectual. He represents the exhaustion of the very ideals that were supposed to liberate the modern individual.

Like Bruno, François is sexually preoccupied, cynical, and incapable of sustaining meaningful relationships. But unlike Bruno, who desperately seeks something that continually escapes him, François seems to have lost the ability to desire anything beyond the immediate satisfaction of his needs.

He eats alone. He drinks. He watches pornography. He teaches literature. He has little interest in politics and even less interest in changing the world.

In many respects, François is a successful man. He has an academic career, financial security, and the freedom to pursue his desires.

But what does this freedom amount to?

Not very much.

His freedom is largely negative. He is free from obligations, commitments, and responsibilities. But he is not free for anything. He can pursue pleasure, but he cannot sustain love. He can study religion, but he cannot believe. He can analyze literature, but he cannot find a narrative that gives meaning to his own life.

In the opening portion of the novel, François reflects on his relationships with students. What is striking is the absence of any real sense of romantic adventure. He does not describe himself as a great seducer or a man committed to sexual freedom. Instead, he explains that his relationships often ended because of discouragement and exhaustion.

He describes his condition with the words: “a sense of discouragement, of lassitude”

The phrase is revealing. His relationships end not because he has discovered something better, but because he cannot summon the energy to continue them. Even his desire seems exhausted. This is the predicament of the anti-schlemiel.

The schlemiel’s dreams exceed reality. François’s reality has extinguished his dreams. And this raises a question that runs throughout Houellebecq’s fiction: Is the modern individual unhappy because he cannot satisfy his desires, or because the satisfaction of desire has ceased to provide meaning?

Huysmans, the Black Madonna, and the Failure of Transcendence

One of the most interesting aspects of Submission is François’s relationship to the nineteenth-century French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans began as a writer associated with naturalism and decadence, exploring the aesthetic and sensual possibilities of modern life. But he eventually turned toward Catholicism. For Huysmans, religion offered a way out of decadence. It promised something that pleasure, aesthetic experimentation, and individual freedom could not provide.

François has devoted much of his intellectual life to studying this transformation. Yet he cannot repeat it. This becomes particularly evident in one of the novel’s most important scenes, when François visits the sanctuary of Rocamadour and encounters the Black Madonna.

The setting is significant. Rocamadour is not simply another historical monument. It represents a religious civilization in which faith organized the relationship between the individual, the community, and the sacred.

François sits before the Black Madonna and experiences something that seems to exceed his cynical understanding of the world.He senses a mysterious spiritual power. At one point, he feels as though he has stepped outside ordinary historical time. The statue appears to possess an authority that he cannot explain through his usual categories of understanding.

He describes its power as: “almost terrifying”

For a moment, François encounters something that might interrupt his ordinary existence. But the experience does not last.

The spiritual presence recedes. The Black Madonna becomes increasingly distant, and François finds himself returning to an awareness of his own body, his discomfort, and the material world around him. He cannot sustain the encounter.

The distinction is important. François does not simply reject the religious experience because he believes it is false. Something has happened to him. He has encountered something that he cannot fully explain. But he cannot remain open to it.

This scene becomes even more significant when we consider something Houellebecq said in a 2015 interview with ⁠The Paris Review⁠.

Houellebecq explained that the novel was originally going to be called La Conversion. In that earlier conception, François would have followed Huysmans into Catholicism. But Houellebecq could not make that conversion happen. He identified the encounter with the Black Madonna as the decisive scene in which the possibility of religious transformation disappears. This is extraordinary.

Even the author, it seems, could not make his character believe.

And this raises a question that goes to the heart of the anti-schlemiel. Is François incapable of belief because he is too intelligent, too modern, or too cynical? Or is he incapable of belief because he has lost the willingness to expose himself to something beyond his own desires?

The schlemiel often lives in a world of possibilities that others dismiss as foolish. He sees what is not there, or what is not yet there. François encounters something that may actually be there, but he cannot hold on to it. His problem is not that he cannot recognize transcendence. His problem is that he cannot respond to it. And this is what makes the scene both tragic and comic.

The scholar who has devoted his life to understanding conversion is incapable of converting. He knows the story of conversion, but he cannot inhabit it. His knowledge does not become experience. And his experience does not become faith.

The anti-schlemiel is not defeated by the world. He is defeated by his inability to imagine himself otherwise.

Myriam, Love, and the Refusal of the Other

If the encounter with the Black Madonna represents François’s failed encounter with transcendence, his relationship with Myriam represents his failed encounter with love.

In my earlier discussion of sex, violence, and history in ⁠The Elementary Particles⁠, I considered the relationship between the liberation of desire and the increasingly destructive forms of competition and alienation that accompany it.

In Submission, Houellebecq approaches this problem from another direction.

Myriam, a young Jewish woman and one of François’s former students, seems to offer him something more than another temporary sexual relationship. There is affection between them. There is a possibility, however fragile, of intimacy. But François has difficulty recognizing what this possibility might mean.

Earlier in the novel, reflecting on his relationships, he acknowledges that he and his former partners had pursued sexual encounters without expecting lasting attachment. He recognizes that they have been left similarly disillusioned. This admission is important because it suggests that François is not entirely unaware of his predicament. He knows that something has gone wrong. But knowing is not the same as changing.

As the political situation in France deteriorates, Myriam and her family decide to leave for Israel. François loses her. He does not follow her.

He does not struggle to preserve their relationship.

He remains in France.

What makes this loss significant is not simply that he loses a sexual partner. He loses someone who might have offered him the possibility of a different kind of life. But he is incapable of responding to this possibility. Here, I think, we encounter one of the central tensions of the novel.

François can imagine a future in which women are provided to him through a new social and religious arrangement. But he cannot sustain a relationship with a woman who makes demands upon him as a particular person. The difference is crucial.

Love is not simply the satisfaction of desire. It involves responding to someone who is not reducible to one’s desires.

This brings to mind Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of ethics. For Levinas, the encounter with the Other interrupts the sovereignty of the self. The Other makes a demand upon me that I cannot reduce to my own interests. Ethics begins not with the satisfaction of my desires, but with the recognition that another person places me under an obligation. This is a very different kind of submission.

In Levinas, responsibility to the Other is not a means of securing pleasure. It is an interruption of the self’s freedom. François, however, seems incapable of accepting this interruption. He wants the benefits of relationships without their ethical demands. And the political system that emerges in Submission appears to offer him precisely that.

What he is being offered is not love but an arrangement that may relieve him of the need to confront love’s difficulties. There is also something historically and ethically significant about Myriam’s Jewishness. She leaves France because the political transformation threatens the future she imagines for herself and her family. François, by contrast, remains because he can imagine adapting to the new order.

Their different responses reveal a moral asymmetry.

For Myriam, history makes demands. It requires a decision, a departure, and the acceptance of uncertainty. For François, history becomes another set of circumstances to which he might accommodate himself.

Myriam acts. François adjusts.

And this difference brings us back to the schlemiel.

The schlemiel is often vulnerable because he remains open to others and to the possibilities of history, even when that openness leads to failure.

François seeks to eliminate this vulnerability. His submission is not a response to the Other. It is an escape from the Other. And this, I would suggest, is the ethical significance of the anti-schlemiel.

The Anti-Schlemiel and the Political Fantasy of Submission

The novel takes place in an imagined France in 2022. A fictional Muslim political party, led by Mohammed Ben Abbes, wins the presidency through an electoral alliance formed to prevent the far right from taking power.

The new government begins transforming French institutions, including the university.

The Sorbonne is reorganized under an Islamic framework. Female professors are excluded from teaching, and male professors who wish to remain in their positions must convert to Islam.

François initially loses his academic position. But he is eventually offered the opportunity to return under extraordinarily favorable conditions. He will receive a generous salary, professional prestige, and the possibility of several wives.

All he must do is convert.

The offer is almost comical. Here is a man who has spent his life pursuing sexual satisfaction and academic recognition. Suddenly, a religious and political system offers him both. The irony is striking. The modern secular world promised François freedom, but it left him lonely and dissatisfied. The new religious order promises him submission, but it also offers him the very pleasures he had been unable to secure through freedom.

But is this really religion?

Or is it simply another form of hedonism?

Houellebecq seems to suggest that the distinction between religious submission and secular pleasure may collapse when religion is approached primarily as a means of satisfying one’s desires. François does not appear to be attracted to Islam because he has discovered a profound theological truth. He is attracted to the life that conversion would make possible.

The distinction is important. Houellebecq’s fictional political order is not an adequate description of Islam as a lived religious tradition. It is a provocative literary construction through which the novel explores the exhaustion of French secular society and its intellectual elites.

The real object of the satire may not be Islam alone.

It may also be the modern European individual who is willing to exchange his freedom for comfort, sexuality, and security. And this is where the anti-schlemiel becomes a particularly useful figure. The schlemiel often refuses to surrender his dreams, even when reality makes those dreams appear foolish. François, by contrast, is willing to surrender his freedom because he has no dreams worth defending.

He does not resist the new political order because he has no compelling vision of an alternative.

The anti-schlemiel does not struggle against reality.

He adapts to it. And his adaptation may be the most disturbing aspect of his character.

Freud, Cynicism, and the Desire to Escape Freedom

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud suggests that civilization necessarily involves the repression and regulation of human desire. The individual must surrender certain pleasures in order to live with others. But Freud also recognizes that civilization does not necessarily make us happy. Indeed, it may produce new forms of unhappiness. Houellebecq’s fiction seems deeply indebted to this Freudian insight.

As I explored in Part II of my earlier essay on ⁠The Elementary Particles⁠, the sexual revolution promises liberation from traditional moral constraints. Yet the result is not universal happiness but new forms of competition, humiliation, loneliness, and suffering.

In Submission, Houellebecq reverses the problem. What happens when the individual becomes tired of liberation? What happens when freedom itself becomes a burden? François does not seem interested in defending the secular values of French society. He does not care enough about them to resist their transformation. His indifference is not heroic. Nor is it tragic in the conventional sense.

It is banal.

He is more concerned with the arrangements of his daily life than with the political future of France And this banality is central to Houellebecq’s comedy.

The great political transformation of French society is experienced through the perspective of a man who is preoccupied with food, sex, money, and his academic career. The contrast between historical upheaval and personal triviality produces a peculiar kind of humor. One might even call it schlemiel-like.

But there is something deeply unsettling about this comedy.

The traditional schlemiel often fails to understand the historical forces that surround him. His innocence makes him vulnerable to history. François understands enough to recognize what is happening, but he does not care enough to resist it. His vulnerability is not the result of innocence. It is the result of indifference.

This is what distinguishes the anti-schlemiel from the schlemiel.

The schlemiel’s failure often exposes the cruelty or absurdity of the world/ The anti-schlemiel’s failure exposes his own inability to respond to that world. And perhaps this is Houellebecq’s most powerful indictment of modern intellectual life. Knowledge does not necessarily produce responsibility. One can understand history, literature, religion, and politics and still remain incapable of making a meaningful ethical decision.

The Comedy of Conversion: Can the Anti-Schlemiel Become Happy?

The conclusion of Submission brings all these questions together.

After failing to sustain a relationship with Myriam and failing to experience a religious transformation at Rocamadour, François begins to imagine his conversion to Islam.

His new position at the university would restore his professional status and provide considerable financial benefits. His new religious identity would also make possible a domestic and sexual life organized around multiple wives.

The offer appears to resolve many of the difficulties that have defined his existence. He would no longer have to endure the same humiliations of sexual competition. He would no longer have to confront the same professional uncertainties. And perhaps most importantly, he would no longer have to struggle to find a meaningful relationship. But the ending is more ambiguous than it first appears.

Houellebecq does not give us an unequivocal account of François’s completed conversion. Instead, the final pages imagine the life that would follow such a decision.

The novel concludes with the words: “I would have nothing to mourn.”

In the French original, the final sentence is Je n’aurais rien à regretter—a conditional formulation that can also be rendered as having nothing to regret. The conditional tense is crucial. François imagines that he would have nothing to mourn or regret.

But has he actually reached this condition? Or is he simply imagining another form of happiness that will ultimately elude him?

This is where the ending becomes particularly interesting in relation to the anti-schlemiel. The schlemiel often imagines possibilities that reality refuses to fulfill. François also imagines a possibility. But unlike the schlemiel, whose imagination often preserves the possibility of hope, François imagines a future in which he will no longer have to hope.

His fantasy is not one of transcendence. It is one of accommodation. And this is what makes the ending so darkly comic.

François may finally become happy.

But his happiness may depend upon the surrender of everything that makes genuine transformation possible. The irony becomes even more striking when we return to the earlier scenes with the Black Madonna and Myriam. In the first, François encounters the possibility of transcendence. In the second, he encounters the possibility of love. In the third, he encounters the possibility of submission.

Only the third seems to offer him a future that he can imagine accepting.

Why?

Because the first two possibilities require him to change. The third promises to change his circumstances without necessarily changing him. The Black Madonna demands an openness to something beyond the self. Myriam demands an openness to another person. The new political and religious order offers François the possibility of satisfying himself. And perhaps this is the fundamental distinction between genuine transformation and the fantasy of submission.

Transformation requires the self to become otherwise.

Submission, as François imagines it, allows the self to remain fundamentally the same.

The Schlemiel, the Anti-Schlemiel, and the End of Hope

In my work on the schlemiel, I have been interested in the relationship between comedy, vulnerability, and hope. The schlemiel is not simply a fool. Nor is he simply an innocent victim of history. He is a figure whose dreams fail to coincide with reality. But this failure does not necessarily destroy his capacity to hope. Indeed, the schlemiel often continues to believe in possibilities that the world has already dismissed. His comedy emerges from this tension.

François represents something different.

He is a man who has surrendered the possibility of hope before he has even begun to act. He does not believe that love can redeem him. He does not believe that politics can transform society. And he does not believe that literature can provide a meaningful response to the crisis of modern life. Yet he remains dissatisfied. His cynicism has not liberated him from suffering. It has merely deprived him of the resources with which to respond to it.

Perhaps this is why Houellebecq’s novels are so difficult to read. They present us with characters who are often repulsive, self-absorbed, and morally compromised. But they also expose forms of suffering that are difficult to dismiss. We recognize something of ourselves in these characters, even as we recoil from them.

This tension between identification and repulsion was central to my earlier reflections on Houellebecq’s cynical characters⁠.

The reader approaches the character, recognizes something familiar, and then withdraws in disgust. This movement produces a kind of literary alienation.

We become, like Houellebecq’s characters, atomized.

But Submission raises another possibility. What if the reader refuses to withdraw? What if, instead of responding to François with disgust or cynicism, we ask what kind of responsibility his suffering places upon us? This is where I would distinguish Houellebecq’s cynicism from the ethical possibilities of the schlemiel.

The schlemiel may be foolish, but his foolishness does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of an encounter.

François’s cynicism, by contrast, threatens to foreclose it entirely.

His submission is not a response to the Other. It is an escape from the Other. And perhaps this is the greatest irony of Houellebecq’s novel.

The man who has spent his life seeking freedom from responsibility finally discovers a system that promises to organize his life for him. He may no longer have to struggle with love, freedom, or the uncertainty of human relationships. He may finally become happy.

But what kind of happiness would this be? Would it be the happiness of a man who has found meaning? Or the happiness of a man who has finally given up looking for it?

Houellebecq leaves us with this possibility, and I think we should resist the temptation to resolve it too quickly. For the schlemiel, failure is not necessarily the end of hope. For François, however, happiness may be the end of hope.

And that, perhaps, is the darkest joke of Submission. The tragedy is not that François fails to become happy. It is that he may become happy without ever learning how to love.

The schlemiel fails because he refuses to surrender his dreams. The anti-schlemiel succeeds because he has surrendered them.

And if that is the case, we are left with one final question:

Is submission the overcoming of modern alienation, or is it simply alienation’s final, most comfortable form?

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.