In Larry David’s commercial promoting FTX Cryptocurrency that aired during the Superbowl, Larry David played the schlemiel character and script, which, to be sure, is his hallmark (whether in Curb Your Enthusiasm or in his writing for Seinfeld). In this commercial, David plays schlemiel characters throughout history who – in the span of one minute […]
Abish is, for me – and several others like John Updike, Harold Bloom, et al, – one of the greatest fiction writers in America in the 20th century…that (not) many people knew about. He is a writer for writers, for those of us who love language. In a truly Derridian sense, Abish was a master […]
Sacha Baron Cohen has, to be sure, played the schlemiel character in nearly every one of his productions. From Ali G to Borat, we see that Cohen prefers to cast and create comical characters with a schlemiel sensibility. To be sure, Cohen has in many ways taken on the legacy of Charlie Chaplin (who Hannah […]
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 […]
I arrived in Budapest last Thursday and on Friday I started my Graduate Seminar on “The Schlemiel in European Literature and Culture” at the Ashkenazium Program (which includes several notable Jewish Studies, Philosophy, and Literature scholars on its faculty such as Elliot Wolfson, Paul Franks, Shaul Magid, Peter Trawny, Susan Handelman, etc.) To give an […]
In classic Yiddish literature, we don’t often learn much about the parents of the schlemiel character (whether in the Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third, “Bontshe Shvayg,” or I.B. Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”. Shalom Aliechem comes close when he tells us that his Motl character (Motl, the Cantor’s Son) was an orphan and that […]
Today is the birthday of Jerry Lewis (Joseph Levich). Like Philip Roth and many other great Jewish writers and actors, he was born and grew up in Newark, NJ. Lewis passed away on August 20th 2017. While there are many arguments about who popularized the schlemiel in America (Hannah Arendt argues that it was Charlie […]
The relationship with things and the loss of those things is something that fascinated great thinkers and writers from Walter Benjamin and Freud to Franz Kafka and Elias Canetti. What is the meaning of loss and how does it relates to the character of the person that constantly loses things as opposed to losing things […]
Today is the 100th year anniversary of Paul Celan’s birth. Celan was very fond of memory and its meaning. He was obsessed with dates. He understood how we all live through these dates and relive them in language. The Holocaust is a date that lives on and through his poetry. Language, he says, in the […]
In the post-WWII era, the schlemiel played a pivotal role in a cultural revolution in America that most of us didn’t notice. Before WWII, Charlie Chaplin was seen as a schlemiel character by some of the worlds greatest thinkers (such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc). They could see the powerful impact he had on […]
Schlemiel Theory 