As the crisis in the Ukraine has grown, I – like millions of other people – have become very interested in the meaning of Volodmir Zelensky’s journey to becoming the hero of the West in the drama of war. What interests me most, as a scholar of the schlemiel and a schlemiel theorist, is the […]
The Mazsihisz Magyar Zsido Museum is not far from where I am staying in Budapest. (I am giving a Graduate Seminar on the Schlemiel here.) It claims to be one of the first Jewish Museums in Europe. One of the things I came across there was an embroidery of the four sons from the Hagaddah. […]
Writing of Kafka’s short stories and parables (which include all kinds of animals from mice and apes to dogs and moles), Walter Benjamin takes note of the reader’s experience as an angle for understanding them: “the reader follows these animal tales for a fair distance without even noticing that they do not deal with human […]
Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche are often seen by academics as figures of modernity. Their thoughts and writings have touched countless scholars who have seen the Modern world through their lenses. One can also read the schlemiel and this characters Jewishness through them, even if it is – as is the case with all of them […]
Following WWII and well into the 80s and 90s – when films like Rambo and Top Gun were blockbusters – America was deeply invested in masculine images. Many of its fantasies were framed in terms of weak and strong. But following 9/11 all of that seemed to change. America became more vulnerable and fluid. And […]
In the wake of rapid changes in technology, media, industry, communications, and transportation, many modernist thinkers and artists – from Freud to the Futurists – were obsessed with the meaning of shock. They were afraid of the consequences. What – they wondered – will be lost that needs to be saved? This is still with […]
Joseph Chaim Brenner’s writings on Zionism in the early 20th century are of great interest to scholars of early Zionist ideology. As I have noted elsewhere, Brenner took a strong stance against the schlemiel character. In his essay entitled “Self-Criticism” he takes the Yiddish writer Mendel Mocher Sforim and the schlemiel character to task. He […]
One of my favorite scenes in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1976) is near the end, when Alvy Singer flies out to Los Angeles from New York City to see Annie Hall. The plot twists when Alvy Singer meets Tony Lacey (played by Paul Simon), a music star, at his party. People are flocked around Tony, […]
In his book, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Male Daniel Boyarin argues that the Jewish male, throughout the Middle Ages, was more effeminate than masculine. In contrast to the its masculine gentile counterpart (which Boyarin finds in Rashi’s description of the “knight” and in figurations of the “evil […]
Ruth Wisse calls the schlemiel a “modern hero.” But the term is ironic. The schlemiel cannot be a typical modern hero who, like many a western hero, does something courageous and saves the day. The schlemiel’s victories are ironic because they arise out of failure. Moreover, the schlemiel’s conduct is what Daniel Boyarin would call […]
Schlemiel Theory 