Under exile, Jews are constantly in flight. Hannah Arendt argues that Charlie Chaplin’s schlemiel exemplifies this flight. He is the innocent “suspect” who is always on the run. He marks a major change in the schlemiel character since Heinrich Heine’s “lord of dreams.” The impudence of Chaplin’s suspect is of the same kind […]
A Baal Teshuva literally means a “master of return.” It is the name for a person who seemingly, out of nowhere (perhaps because he wasn’t raised in Judaism, or had broken away from it, or had no knowledge of it) decides to “return” to God and Judaism (or being Jewish). When I first came across […]
Yasha, the main character of I.B. Singer’s, The Magician of Lublin, lives in two worlds. When he is in front of people and in a social context he is – literally – a great performer. He is a magician, an acrobat, and a lover. Through all of these characters, he makes his audience happy. […]
Sanford Pinsker has argued that the main character of I.B. Singer’s The Magician of Lublin is a schlemiel. But its hard to see how this can be the case. In comparison to I.B. Singer’s Gimpel, Malamud’s Morris Bober, or any Woody Allen schlemiel character, Yasha seems to be the anti-thesis of the schlemiel. He is […]
In a 1968 Paris Review interview with Harold Flender, I.B. Singer, the Nobel Prize winning Yiddish writer, was asked about the schlemiel. However, the name schlemiel wasn’t used in Flender’s question. Rather, Flender uses the word “little man.” His question to Singer and Singer’s response are telling as they suggest a break in the tradition […]
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 […]
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 […]
As Rosh Hashana approaches, Jews from around the world become introspective and start doing what is called, in Hebrew, a Cheshbon Nefesh (“accounting of the soul”). To my surprise and to the surprise of thousands of his social media followers, Seth Rogen decided to cut his hair and shave. He shared this image a few […]
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 […]
We are living in interesting times. In our times, it seems that comedians are in a hard place. Why? Because comedians are the vanguard of free speech. For most Jewish Studies scholars, Lenny Bruce, was hands down, the cutting edge of comedy in general and Jewish comedy in particular in modern post-assimilation America. He breaks […]
Schlemiel Theory 