There are many portrayals of the schlemiel in literature, film, TV, and theater. But what Saul Bellow did with his portrayal of Moses Herzog – in his book Herzog – was to give the schlemiel a unique American face and literary treatment.   To understand the meaning of the novel, one must, to be sure, make a close reading of Herzog so as to assemble a picture of the schlemiel.   To do this, one must, with the narrator and Herzog, be a traveler of sorts.

Since Herzog’s thoughts go back and forth between the past and the present, between one world and another, and from one letter and another (he writes countless letters he never sends but carries along with him), one must read (travel) between the lines (memories, letters, and worlds) if one is to gather the pieces of the schlemiel puzzle.

First of all, the metaphor of traveling fast and trying to keep up with everything as it passes is central to the novel. Herzog’s motion prompts his mind to be here and…elsewhere. The schlemiel is, in this sense, excited, restless, out of place, and (un)timely:

In the cab through the hot streets of where brick and brownstone buildings were crowded, Herzog held the strap and his large brown eyes were fixed on the sights of New York. The square shapes were vivid, not inert, they have him a sense of fateful motion, almost of intimacy. Somehow he felt himself part of it all – in the rooms, the stores, cellars – and at the same time he sensed the danger of these multiple excitements. But he’d be all right. He was overstimulated. He had to calm down these overstrained galloping nerves, put out this murky fire inside. He yearned for the Atlantic….He knew he would think better, clearer thoughts after bathing in the sea. His mother had believed in the good effects of bathing. But she had died so young. (27)

After reflecting on his mother’s early death, he reflects on his own death and, in doing so, we see that he isn’t a Heideggarian subject. His death is not his own; in a Levinasian sense, he lives for the other. Herzog sees his death in terms of his children:

He could not allow himself to die yet. The children needed him. His duty was to live. (27)

Reflecting on this, which, as we have seen, emerged out of traveling through New York and reflecting on this mother, Herzog lists his priorities:

To be sane, and to live, and to look after his kids.(27)

Even though, at the beginning of the novel, he notes that he is going mad and that it’s ok (“If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.”), we see, here, that there is more than madness on his mind. There is responsibility and being a good father to his kids.

In fact, the narrator tells us that “this” confluence of life, sanity, and responsibility, “was why he was running from the city now, overheated, eyes smarting.”

All of his flights from one place to another are a part of his schlemiel character:

Although he didn’t know what lay ahead except the confining train that would impose rest on him (you can’t run in a train) through Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusets…his reasoning was sound. Seashores are good for madmen – provided they’re not to man. He was ready. (ibid)

…ready to move. But then we learn that he is not in a train but in a cab in New York City. And this makes him want to write letters, which give him yet another form of transport:

But all at once, the seat of the cab heating in the sun, he was aware that his angry spirit had stolen forward again, and that he was about to write letters. (ibid)

According to the narrator, the letter is about how uncomfortable he is about stuck in one place, at a meeting. He becomes self-conscious and, like a schlemiel, he tells us how he spills soup over everyone: “I try to look right an proper but my face turns dead with boredom, my fantasy spills soup and gravy on everybody, and I want to scream out or fade away”(ibid).

To take his mind off of being a sedentary schlemiel, Herzog thinks about himself in a comical manner. But then his mind drifts back to the bad state of the world when he thinks about how mad post-WWII America is. This realism juxtaposes with his schlemiel-like optimism:

Think what America could mean to the world. Then see what it is. What a breed it might have produced. But look at us – at you, at me. Read the paper, if you can bear it. (28)

But before he can settle in to this cynical view of things, he is distracted by places he sees in Manhattan which evoke childhood memories. He remembers his aunt Tennie and her husband, Pontritter, who she divorced. But he is less interested in Pontritter (Pon) who is a WASP – “he was burly, masterful, there was a certain peevish power and intelligence in his dark face…Powerful, isolated” – than he is in the divorce lawyer, Simkin.

What he remembers about Simkin is his humanity. Simkin cares for Tennie since he says that her “feelings are hurt.” Recalling Simkin, Herzog remembers how, although Simkin had a head that “was shaggy and aggressive,” when he spoke with Herzog he took on a “diffident, almost meek tone”(29). What attracts Herzog is the fact that, with Simkin, he can see the effect of his humility. That it is real. And this is a place that, unlike meetings or places that were sedentary, Herzog can be or stay.

The narrator tells us why Simkin respected Herzog. But this respect is mixed with pity. Nonetheless, Simkin is smart enough to see that the schlemiel tries to “keep his dignity,” that is, his humanity, and that is worthy of respect:

Though Simkin was a clever lawyer, very rich, he respected Herzog. He had a weakness for confused high-minded people, for people with moral impulses like Moses. Hopeless! Very likely he looked at Moses and saw a grieving childish man, trying to keep his dignity. (29)

The juxtaposition of Simkin’s voice – with his secretary as opposed to Herzog – demonstrates humanity and its effacement. With Herzog, Simkin’s voice is “very small, meek, almost faint,” but when he answers his secretary it “expands” and is “loud” and “stern.”   Simkin is Herzog’s “reality instructor.” Herzog “brings” such instructors “our” (30). But reality is not a lesson that Herzog is crazy about since it is so cruel and deceptive.

Bellow is telling us, via Herzog, that kindness and humanity is not to be found in business, American style; it is not worldly. It is other-worldly. And this, it seems, is what prompts Herzog to want to always be elsewhere.   Regardless, he sticks around this or that place because he wants to spread humility and goodness.

He sticks around because he is moral, but he also leaves because he is moral.

When he snaps out of this memory, he is in a cab in the midst of a Manhattan (a world) that is mad and even poisonous. He is stuck in it. And he wants to get out and be somewhere else…by the seashore “where he could breath.” But he’s not there, he’s in the city, in the real (violent) world:

Crashing, stamping pile-driving below, and higher, structural steel, interminably and hungrily going up into the cooler, more delicate blue…But down in the street where buses were spurting the poisonous exhaust of the cheap fuel, and the cars crammed together, it was stifling, grinding the racket of machinery and the desperately purposeful crowds – horrible! He had to get out the seashore where he could breath. He ought to have booked a flight. But he had enough of planes…(32)

….to be continued….

I never heard laughter as loud as I did (on the other side of intimacy) that Kol Nidrai on the bima in front of 1500 congregants, as when I launched into the final words of the infamous Buddy Hackett yarn about the retired rabbi caught at a Catskills Hotel by his congregants as his order of a baked pig arrives, allowing him fulfill his life-long dream of eating trayf— “This place is amazing,” retorts the rabbi. “You order a baked apple and look whatchya get!”

I have wondered (not too often) after a decade serving as rabbi in an affluent traditional-egalitarian, Conservative Jewish community in Westchester, New York, that after all the Talmud torah opportunities I afforded my congregants, why it is that time and time again, the Torah they recalled most vividly were jokes like this. It always struck me how congregants were drawn to teachings and lectures I would give on the great assimilated American Jewish writers, like Phillip Roth, or a panel discussion of a Coen brothers’ film, and yet how challenging, if not downright unappealing for this flock to delve into mystical treasures of the tradition seen through a contemporary lens.

I have learned an immense amount from the Shlemiel par excellence of this very blog as he envisioned and then solicited my essay as a contribution to his forthcoming collection on Levinas and humor—a real game changer! Perhaps, in the catharsis of laughter, every one of those thousands in the pews was able to reconcile their heartfelt dissonance in confronting their ideality of kashruth and their reality of a trayf lifestyle, or their ideality of fostering a “community of commitment” and the reality of enabling a “lifestyle enclave”. When I invited the Chancellor elect of JTSA to come and share this vision of shedding the “lifestyle enclave” and embracing a “community of commitment” what sounds from the hundreds filling the sanctuary then could be heard? Laughter, as Levinas alludes, is a moment of catharsis that opens to a deeper othering of self, allowing for a vulnerability to the other normally not present. There is something profoundly humanizing about this experience.

Shakespeare not only invented the human, according to Bloom, but he also makes us appreciate how the comic is inextricably linked to the tragic. I find myself relearning this lesson as I peruse much of the recent spate of OTD literature— at once comic and tragic. Comic— insofar as readers become voyeurs into a world most of us laugh at as outsiders and would likely never chose to enter as insiders. Tragic— because of its portrayal of heartfelt pain in “leaving the path” from which there is no return. In the ultra-orthodox world, this ultimatum works. After all, if there is only one line along which everyone’s convictions must fall into alignment with, then there are those on and those off that line.

But growing up in a nominally Conservative household, I experienced the best of heterodoxy first hand. My parents kept a kosher home with three sets of dishes as they migrated from shul to shul about every five years—continually in search of their emesdichkeyt, their authentic path of Limmud, Torah and Tefillah. From the world of heterodoxy to orthodoxy, what I find so tragic about much of OTD literature is the lack of holy fools inside of those communities who can model what it means to straddle worlds and cross boundaries. The holy fool is more than the pleasantry of a badkhan at a wedding, but a necessary carnivalesque elixir to nomian reification! What the holy fool teaches us is that there really is only one path—as Elliot Wolfson calls it—the path of no-path. Upon taking leave of our local community Jewish day school, my wife was understandably distraught, but I lamented the state of heterodoxy is alarmingly similar to what the Kotzker rebbe decried in his day: “I’d rather have shtarker mitnaggedim than pareve Hasidim!”

The other tragedy intertwined within the holy fool is now being rediscovered in the teachings of Reb Nahman of Bratzlav—outside the Bratzlav communities. After Zvi Mark’s magisterial study of the holy fool in his Mysticism and madness: The religious thought of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (2009) as a necessary component to Reb Nahman’s mystical quest, it is no longer feasible to merely see his journey as one of a tormented master. Madness is the signature of the holy fool and that shtut d’qedushah is what allows for a more expansive elevation of consciousness after falling into yeridat ha’mohkin. Sure the NA-NAH-NAHMAN Breslovers have that holy foolishness about them in their ecstatic dancing, but it is in Marks’ critical edition of Bratzlav Sippurai Ma’asiyot Kol sipure Rabi Naḥman mi-Braslav : ha-maʻaśiyot, ha-sipurim ha-sodiyim, ha-ḥalomot ṿeha-ḥezyonot : liḳuṭ ha-nusaḥim mi-kitve yad nedirim umi-mikhlol ha-sifrut ha-Braslavit be-tosefet pirḳe mavo ṿe-heḳshere ha-sipurim (2014) as well as numerous anthologies on the stories published by secular presses like Yediʻot aḥaronot who are interested in publishing eclectic anthologies like Roee Horen’s Ha-ḥayim Ke-Gaʻaguʻa: Ḳeriʼot Ḥadashot Be-Sipure Ha-Maʻaśiyot Shel R. Naḥman Mi-Breslev : Asupat Maʼamarim (2010) where the transgressive line between artist and academic, between the tragic and the comic is blurred. The perennial need for the holy fool remains as urgent as ever—especially in Israel, after the latest election performances! It is that seventh beggar who never appears that is the beggar with no feet. Yet it is precisely this beggar, the holiest of fools, who can show us the way to dance the path of no-path.

In a world gone mad, only a fool could think there is a future, never mind a Torah of the future!?! But that is precisely what Reb Nahman bequeathed as a holy fool to this generation. Ours is the time described in Reb Nahman’s tiny tale of the king and his viceroy who must mark their foreheads while eating the tainted grain; for in a world gone mad only the holy fool is sane. Such a Torah of the future, as I have been learning from my planetary gnostic rebbe, Miles Krassen, is one of the many fruits of the supernal overflow, one of many that makes this planet flourish. In his tall tale, “Losing the Princess”, Reb Nahman recounts the only way to free the lost princess is for the viceroy to veer off the derekh, to find a path from the side, an um-wege. Tragic-comic poets like Paul Celan see that all poetry after Auschwitz is about finding the um-wege—it is precisely from that different vantage point where I encounter the other and see myself differently.

Now in all seriousness, one of the first proposals I made to my new community in San Francisco was an urgent need to revisit the minor mystical ritual of Yom Kippur(im) Katan and transform it into Yom K’Purim Katan. Transforming that solemn fast day before each new month into a time to reconnect with the holy fool within, dressing up and distributing food and good cheer is the comedy of the hour—just because! Perhaps it is because my new synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom, in San Francisco is only blocks away from the holy beggars who once lived in the House of Love and Prayer and the Dharma Bums who frequented City Lights Bookstore that this community is really willing to grab onto the Torah concealed in all the laughter and holy foolishness that I continue to share freely.

—————–

Aubrey L. Glazer, Ph.D. (University of Toronto) currently serves as rabbi at Congregation Beth Sholom, San Francisco. Aubrey is in demand in many educational forums, from lay learning to federations, seminaries and colleges across North America, Europe and Israel where he is a passionate and challenging teacher of Jewish Mysticism, Philosophy & Hebrew poetry. Aubrey’s work is published widely in popular and academic forums, including his latest book dedicated to the spiritual renaissance of Hebrew culture in Israel called, Mystical Vertigo: Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Cross the Divide (Academic Studies Press, 2013). Aubrey serves as a consultant and contributor of kavvanot and Israeli prayerful poetry to the Conservative Mahzor and Siddur Lev Shalem. Ordained by JTSA, Aubrey has also completed training courses in kashrut supervision (Rav haMakhshir), Jewish Spirituality (IJS), and Jewish Entrepreneurial Leadership (Kellogg School of Business). In his rabbinic work in diverse communal settings, Aubrey has created award winning programming like Blessing for the Animals and Phat Phriday that draw on the depths of traditional forms in creative ways to promote vibrancy and continuity in-reach and out-reach.

While I was in class this morning teaching, several of my friends sent me personal messages on Facebook telling me that the word “schlemiel” was Dictionary.com’s “word of the day”!

Here’s how they defined it:

Slang. an awkward andunlucky person for whomthings never turn out right.

Hooray! The schlemiel lives!

When it comes to Jewish humor, self-mockery is not new. Sanford Pinsker argues that Ibn Ezra, the 12^th century Rabbi and Torah commentator, used self-mockery to epitomize the comedic state of exile (in general) and the schlemiel (in particular).   Self-mockery is found in the classic joke about the schlemiel, the schlimazel, and the nudnik. One spills the soup (the schlemiel), the other is spilled on (the schlimazel), and the third person asks the schlimazel what kind of soup it is (nudnik).   Self-mockery has been a way for Jews over the centuries to laugh at bad luck and live on with a sense of…self.   Although it might be diminished, it survives. Wit is the power of Jewish humor against powerlessness.

But there is a fine line between self-mockery and self-hatred. And when it moves into the other realm it becomes more sad than funny.

Woody Allen is able to traverse the fine line in many of his movies and in his prose.

For instance, in “The Selections from the Allen Notebooks,” Allen plays on the existential version of the notebook or journal as a space of despair, sickness, and self-hatred:

I believe my consumption has grown worse. Also my asthma. The wheezing comes and goes, and I get dizzy more and more frequently. I have taken to violent choking and fainting. My room is damp and I have perpetual chills and palpitations of the heart. I noticed, too, that I am out of napkins. Will it never stop?

The punch line releases us from the possibility of self-hatred and becomes self-mockery. Gary Shteyngart, in his memoir Little Failure, also tries to tread the same territory as Woody Allen.   However, he comes closer to the first lines of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man (“I am a sick, angry man…”) than Allen.

To be sure, Shteyngart associates the essence of writing – and his project – with a tension between joy and self-hatred. But of the two, he admits that without self-hatred and hatred he could not write. It makes writing not only “possible” but “necessary.”

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal. (149)

Following this, he lists several ideals that fail: “my family – Papa hits me; my religion – children hit me”(148). And this leads him to feel rage and informs his main inspiration in America:

But America/Atlanta is full of power and force and rage, a power of force and rage I can fuel myself with until I find myself zooming for the starts with Flyboy and Saturn and Iadara and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. (148)

The punchline of this joke is that anger and rage are everywhere in “America/Atlanta” (whether it is the rage of the dispossessed or conservative defense ministers).   But the implication is that Shteyngart is parting from Woody Allen’s use of self-mockery. He is not – like many a schlemiel (from Motl to Gimpel or Moses Herzog) a humble and dreamy “little failure” – he is an angry one.   Shteyngart’s rage makes him verge on not just self-hatred but also on hatred of others. And, as he notes, it makes his writing “possible” and “necessary.”

When read against the failures of this or that ideal, I can see that there is more going on here than shoulder shrugging. His failures make him feel rage against all of the ideals he was raised with. Although he mocks them (and nearly all of them deal with Jewishness), what we have here is a deep questioning of Jewishness that is based on his negative experiences with it.

At the end of his book, Shteyngart recounts a trip back to Russia with his parents to visit the grave of his grandfather. He recalls a picture of his father (who is enamored with Jewishness and Israel) and mother. He recalls saying Kaddish and even includes the Hebrew. But he has a much different relationship to the Hebrew and his grandfather than does his father.

I can read the prayer, but I cannot understand it. The words coming out of my mouth are gibberesh to me. And they can only be gibberish to my father’s ear as well. (349)

None of this is funny. In fact, its very sad, angry, and solemn.

Shteyngart’s words suggest that Hebrew and Jewishness are, like many other things, failed ideals that he is leaving behind for other ideals. Like a schlemiel, he trips over the words; but, in the end, the fall is fatal not funny:

I chant the gibberish backwards and forwards, tripping over the words, mangling them, making them sound more Russian, more American, more holy. We haven’t found my grandfather’s name, Isaac, amidst the acres of marble covered with Ivans and Nikolais and Alexanders. (349)

The last words of the memoir are in Russian. His Kaddish ends in a foreign language. Unlike his father, he is a realist and sees that there is no point in returning to or trying to find Jewishness for the sake of one’s identity. He mourns it as he mourns his failure of the ideals his father and mother set forth for him. He becomes, for lack of a better word, post-Jewish. His holy tongue is “more Russian, more American.” It’s not Hebrew.

Given what Shteyngart says about writing, one can surmise that what “fuels” the last words of his memoir are hatred and anger.   But this seems to pass the fine line between self-mockery and self-hatred. What we are left with is nothing funny. And with this gesture he seems to go from being a little failure who, like many a schlemiel, remains bound to Jewishness (for better or for worse) to an adult who has left it behind for the language of exile.

The other possibility is that this is another kind of Jewishness, but it’s not funny. It seems that, for Shteyngart, the post-modern Jew must be a realist who mourns Jewishness rather than recover it. And the fuel for this gesture is…as he says…rage.   And despite all of the comical recountings of his “little failures,” we can say that they are really a façade for his mournful and angry realism.  What surprises me most is that I have not found one book review which noticed this. If they did, perhaps his book wouldn’t sell copies.

With this in mind, I’ll leave you with the promotional video for the film which, given this reading, seems to be…besides the point.

This morning Berfrois published an essay I wrote entitled “The Body of Jewish Comedy.”

Here’s the link: http://www.berfrois.com/2015/04/menachem-feuer-body/

Check it out!

Near the end of his book, The Chosen People in America, Arnold Eisen muses on the relationship of language and history to chosenness. Like Ruth Wisse, Cynthia Ozick, and Sidrah Ezrahi, he takes note of the language that was lost when the Jewish people left Europe for America. But much more than language was lost. As Ozick argues, the intimate relationship with God and chosenness was lost in translation. According to Eisen, Ozick “has dealt with this general question” of language and chosenness “more explicitly than any other writer of her generation, both in stories that bemoan the loss of tradition and substance to American vacuity”(167).

Writing in English, Ozick, as a Jew, “feels cramped by it.”   It is not her language. And for her language and history go hand in hand:

A language, like a people, has a history of ideas, but not all ideas: only those known to its experience.

This suggests that with the loss of language there is a loss of a uniquely Jewish experience. And writing stories in English can become, since it constitutes a loss of history, what she calls the “surrendering to the imagination.”   What Eisen wonders about, however, is whether the “light of Jewish experience,” which he calls “chosenness,” has “emerged undistorted from the prism of English language.”

What worries Eisen is that too much abstraction or discussion of chosenness may have “affected the substance of what was thought and said.” And, what’s worse, “one can argue that the manner in which Jews of various sorts conceived and related to their God is not easily rendered into English, which is modeled by the very different perceptions of Christianity”(168).   Eisen brings in Irving Howe’s characterization of the Jewish relationship to God – in his introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Literature – that used to exist in Eastern Europe to illustrate how, without a language and the experiences built into it, American Jews have lost something unique:

Toward Him the Jews could feel a peculiar sense of intimacy: had they not suffered enough on His behalf? In prayer His name could not be spoken, yet in and out of prayer He could always be spoken to…The relation between God and man was social, intimate, critical, seeming at times to follow like a series of rationalistic deductions from the premise of the Chosen People.

Eisen doesn’t disagree with Howe. In fact, he argues, by way of citing several verses from the Torah and Midrash, that the “intimacy of the relationship” was tangible for Jews.   This includes moments when one argues with God, is cranky with God, or close to God. This kind of relationship informs what Cynthia Ozick would call “Jewish literacy.” But how can one have such literacy – which is based on the experience of intimacy and familiarity with God – in America?

Eisen, in response to this question, tells us that the English language and the culture that goes along with it are too polite and distant in their relationship to God:

In English such familiarity tends to be sacrificed to decorum, and irritation with God to be sublimated into reverent praise. (168)

How can one recover such intimacy in English? What do the efforts of people like A.J. Heschel and Zalman Shechter-Shalomi (and the neo-Hasidim) amount to if the language they speak in is devoid of such experiences?

One suspects, writes Eisen, that “the fund of experience available to speakers of English is foreign to the history which elicited and reinforced Jewish notions of chosenness”(169). But the culprit is not just the entry into another language. It is also, and for Eisen more importantly, “American Jews’ own distance from this history…that determined their understandings of their election”(169).

This suggests that if American Jews had more of an intimate relationship with their past then it could be possible that the Eastern European sense of intimacy and chosenness would have lived on. But it has not.

Because Jews were so embraced by the American pubic, avers Eisen, they could abandon their unique and private relationship with God.   If they were at odds with American culture as Eastern Europeans had been at odds with their surrounding cultures, this would not be the case. This suggests that the yearning for intimacy with God can not be had without the cultural and historical experience of otherness in which man must depend on God for help and….not man.   Without being othered by the host culture and without memory of Jewish history and experience, what is left for an American Jew who dwells in English and…after the Holocaust?

I’d like to end with a poem by Paul Celan who felt that, with the Holocaust, he had lost his language. But, in the experience of that loss, the poem seems to suggest that he finds another language that is unique and perhaps…even Jewish. He suggests a kind of intimacy with God even as he “rides” God “into farness – nearness, he sang.” But he wrote the poem in German. What can this mean for an American Jew, such as myself, who reads Celan’s poem in English and in translation? Are we living in a be-imagined language, too? Can I recover a language of intimacy? Or is this simply a fantasy? Perhaps I too have run out of that which intoxicates…perhaps I, too, have even lost…lostness?

OVER WINE AND LOSTNESS, over

the running out of both:

I rode through the snow, do you hear,

I rode God into farness – nearness, he sang,

it was

our last ride over

the human hurdles.

They ducked when

they heard us about their heads, they

wrote, they

lied our whinnying

into one

of their be-imagined languages.

After writing my blog essay on Lena Dunham, which was posted on Facebook, Tweeted, Retweeted, Favorited, and published, again, by Queen Mob’s Tea House, I received some interesting comments that have prompted me to return to what I wrote.   One of the most compelling responses to what I wrote suggested that Lena Dunham doesn’t – as David Remnick suggests – fit within the context of Jewish comedy. And the reason provided by at least one commenter is that, although she is Jewish, Dunham doesn’t have an understanding of what it means to be Jewish.

In response to this, I noted that the reason I quoted Irving Howe’s review of Portnoy’s Complaint (“Portnoy Reconsidered”) was because Howe slighted Roth for writing a novel that reduced and caricatured the complexity of Jewish-American life. I’ll re-quote it here:

It is very hard, I will admit, to be explicit about the concept of vulgarity: people either know what one is referring to, as part of the tacit knowledge that goes to make up a coherent culture, or the effort to explain is probably doomed in advance. Nevertheless, let me try. By vulgarity in a work of literature I am not here talking about the presence of certain kinds of words or the rendering of certain kinds of actions. I have in mind, rather, the impulse to submit the rich substance of human experience, sentiment, value, and aspiration to a radically reductive leveling or simplification; the urge to assault the validity of sustained gradings and discriminations of value, so that in some extreme instances the concept of vulgarity is dismissed as up-tight or a mere mask for repressiveness; the wish to pull down the reader in common with the characters of the work, so that he will not be tempted to suppose that any inclinations he has toward the good, the beautiful, or the ideal merit anything more than a Bronx cheer; and finally, a refusal of that disinterestedness of spirit in the depiction and judgment of other people which seems to me the writer’s ultimate resource.

What Howe is suggesting here, by way of his concept of “vulgarity,” is not that Roth was talking dirty – Howe has no problem with that – but that he submitted the “rich substance of human experience, sentiment, value, and aspiration to a radically reductive leveling or simplification.” And this, to be sure, is the risk one takes when one writes, like Lena Dunham, comedy.

But there is a fundamental difference between Roth and Dunham which speaks to the issue raised by some readers; namely, Roth should have known better since he, unlike Dunham, has a rich understanding of Jewishness and has Jewish literacy. To be sure, this is what Irving Howe makes clear in his first major review essay on Philip Roth (on his book Goodbye, Columbus).

In effect, Howe’s two readings of Roth provide – indirectly – a set of standards that he draws on in reading Jewish American literature and humor. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to call them the three J’s. For the Jewish joke to work, and to avoid becoming what Howe would call “vulgar,” the joke or the writing needs to evince a sense of Jewishness and Jewish literacy that doesn’t absent-mindedly caricature things Jewish.

If one is to tell a Jewish joke that engages in self-mockery, simply being a Jew is not enough these days. Dunham is clearly not an anti-Semite, as several online sites and magazines have claimed; rather, she simply lacks a sense of Jewishness and Jewish literacy. But, then again, many Jewish comedians or Jews who drops a comic line about Jews here and there also don’t seem to be aware. Stereotypes and caricatures of Jews are all over Hollywood but, for some reason, only Lena Dunham is being put up on the stand.

If critics are going to be critical of her Jewish jokes, are they going to apply the same severity with other Jewish popular icons? And is this fair given the fact that many writers and filmmakers also don’t seem to have a sense of Jewish literacy – much like the majority of Jews in America?

This, it seems, is the main issue.

Irving Howe was troubled by the gradual assimilation of Jews into American culture and the attendant loss of Jewish literacy. For Howe, the farther we move away from immigrant Jewishness, the worse the condition becomes. Nonetheless, given what many critics have been saying, both joke writers and the public need to know how to tell a Jewish joke. We may not need to know about Jewish history or Judaism in general; but, still, there is another type of literacy that seems to be called for: the knowledge of Jewish stereotypes and caricatures.

The problem with this kind of reading is that comedians are hard pressed to abandon stereotypes about Jewish mothers, nebbishes, and whiny Jews.   And this kind of scrutiny may go out of control. What, for instance, will critics say of Larry David. Is his New York kind of Jewishness problematic and stereotypical or is it real? Are the caricatures we see in a film like Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg problematic, too? He claims to have read Bellow’s Herzog and Roth’s Porntoy many times before making the movie.   But are his readings just lazy repetitions of old stereotypes that we find in these novels?

What may be called for is also a way of looking for what’s positive in schlemiel humor – or Jewish humor – instead of only what is negative. (Both are necessary, together.) For instance, is there anything special about the absent-mindedness of the schlemiel or schlemiel humor? Does it appeal to hope, optimism, or its failure? How does it relate to being Jewish?

Without doing something like this, instead of laughing at comedians we may shout at them. We will all become comedy-cops on the lookout for bad or suspicious behavior. But, to be sure, isn’t it one of the main tasks of comedy to push the envelope and to play around with lazy stereotypes so as to expose them? Self-mockery is essential to comedy, but where do we draw the line?

Apparently, the line between comedy and what Howe calls “vulgarity” can be drawn by a comedian or writer making it evident, in some way, that they know the stereotype and are playing with it. If they don’t, then, it seems, they are guilty as charged. Jews can’t appeal to self-mockery anymore unless they know what it means to be Jewish and, from that position, are able to tell when Jews are being mocked. But to do that, don’t they need to know what’s Jewish (in a positive sense) and what’s not (in a negative sense)? Or do they just need to know what’s not Jewish?

Ultimately, with Lena Dunham, we have a case of the three J’s: jokes, Jewishness, and Jewish literacy.   But, unfortunately, many cultural critics have not, thus far, been able to articulate it. They are better at calling her out than in explaining what the basis of their criticism is. What standards should a Jewish comedian subscribe to and why? The more people descries the transgressions of Jewish comedy, the more these questions will have to be addressed.

Counsellor at Law is a fantastic and unjustly forgotten film. Curious and rich, it should be appreciated as one of the most original in the history of American Jewish cinema.

Produced in 1933, right on the eve of the adaptation of the “decency code” at Hollywood, Counsellor at Law was the product of collaboration between two central Jewish figures in American theater and movie industry of the era – William Wyler (not to be confused with Billy Wilder) and Elmer Rice.

While still thought of as a great director, Wyler’s work has undoubtedly suffered neglect. With his grandiose epics and melodramas, his movies are a hard sell for the audience’s current post-modern tastes. A German-born Jew, Wyler came to Hollywood in 1920s, where his uncle, Carl Laemmle, was a founder and head of Universal Studios. Thus, unlike other German Jews who ended up in Hollywood after being driven from their homeland by Hitler, Wyler had no reason to think of America as the place of exile. In copious literature on the master, his Jewishness is hardly mentioned at all. The two well-known and thematically explicit Jewish films in his body of work are Ben-Hur and Funny Girl. According to Bill Krohn, “Samson and Delilah, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, three of the biggest blockbusters of the post-war era, are all allegories of the Shoah.” Perhaps. Yet is should be kept in mind that Ben-Hur is a clear example of Christian apologetics. Counsellor at Law, Wyler’s first major sound picture, reveals him to be a far more daring director who was supremely concerned with the issues and dilemmas of Jewish diasporic condition. In fact, the only times when Wyler himself openly addresses Jewishness are when he speaks of Counsellor at Law.

Elmer Rice, whose work has long been relegated to the dustbin of history, wrote the film’s script at the height of his fame. Born Elmer Reizenstein in New York, he worked first as a lawyer before turning to writing drama. Many of his plays are thematically Jewish; a few were some of the very first to confront Nazism already in the early 30s. In 1929, Rice became the first Jew to win a Pulitzer price for drama. He wrote Counsellor at Law in 1931, the year it was also first successfully staged on Broadway.

Despite the famous or infamous preponderance of Jews in Hollywood, between The Jazz Singer, produced in 1927, and World War II, there were few films that dealt openly with Jewish themes. The same is true of theater. Counsellor at Law was a rarity in both media. It is thus extraordinary that at the heart of it is the most fundamental question of American Jewish experience, if not modern Jewish history as a whole – that of assimilation. Wyler and Rice’s commentary on assimilation significantly differs from the model resolutions of it in the corpus of American Jewish writing and cinema. Hardly advocating a return to the physical ghetto, the film ultimately celebrates the Jew as an autonomous figure who has no choice but to remain who he is, even after shedding the traditional garb. This condition, the film suggests, must be enjoyed, appreciated and perpetuated.

As one scholar described the situation of the 30s, “Performing oneself as a Jew-without-a-beard is, after all, the first requisite step towards performing oneself as no-Jew-at-all. Indeed, this new type of Jewish body signaled the beginning of an era where ethnic visibility in general and Jewish visibility in particular were no longer desirable. In its place came invisibility, as Jewish characters became less frequently seen on major American stages.” Indeed, an argument can be made that Jewishness is invisible in Counsellor at Law as well – tellingly the word Jewish is mentioned only once in parenthesis in the film’s synopsis which appears on its DVD release – yet to do so would be to crucially misapprehend its very artistic structure and intent. The sense and sensibility of Jewishness and Yiddishkeit act as an organizing principle in the film, permeating its every nook and cranny. I am not speaking so much of the obvious Jewish signs in it: a Yiddish phrase, an occasional Jewish accent, but something that runs much deeper and speaks to its very idea of Jewishness.

The movie’s entire action takes place in a law firm run by the main character, George Simon. Its space, separated from the rest of New York by the majestic looking elevators reminiscent of the sets in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – the link is hardly accidental considering Wyler’s artistic roots – functions as an independent Jewish kingdom, where everything, from Jews to gentiles to objects, is infused with the Jewish spirit. Unquestionably, Counsellor at Law envisions Jewishness in essentialist, rather than specific religious or cultural terms, which one may justifiably find uncomfortable. Yet its presentation of Jewishness is neither contrived nor self-conscious, but unsentimental and at the same time intoxicating. It stands not as an addendum to the story, as would happen so often in later American films, but as its very reason for being.

This ostensibly light and comedic film is a tragedy, whose catharsis results not in punishment, but in the hero’s reclamation of his fundamental nature, in other words Jewishness. This hero – George Simon – is an unusual tragic character. Originally, he was played on Broadway by the famous Paul Muni, a pseudonym of Muni Weisenfreund, whose beginning as an actor was on the Yiddish stage. Rice particularly liked his performance. When Muni declined to be cast in Wyler’s film, the role went to John Barrymore. The legendary film critic Pauline Kael, herself also Jewish, pointed out that his performance in the film was “one of the few screen roles that reveal his measure as an actor. His “presence” is apparent in every scene; so are his restraint, his humor, and his zest.” Wyler’s own later comments on Berrymore’s performance reveal the complexities of his approach to Jewishness. He says in an interview recorded in 1979:

Well, of course that was a very exciting time, because this is when I was at Universal. When they gave me this assignment, I felt, “Jeez, working with Berrymore!”… [Barrymore] said, “Yes, you’ll be able to help me a lot, I need some help. You’ll be able to help me with this part.” And then I realized… I didn’t realize until we started shooting, you know, what he meant. He played the part of this Jewish lawyer, and lots of people thought he was miscast because he didn’t look like a Jew. Well, what does a Jew look like? Some look Jewish and some don’t. So he probably felt he had to do something. Well, the part of the lawyer in this was a man of the world, highly educated, highly articulate. So the first day he plays a scene, he’s supposed to come in, pick up the phone, and talk, that’s all. And he did some peculiar gestures, and here I had to criticize John Berrymore… I thought, “But what he’s trying to do is be Jewish.” I said, “The way you picked up the phone…” He said, “You didn’t’ like that?” I said, “Well, frankly no.”… Well, he was constantly trying, and finally I said… there was a scene in the play when his mother comes to visit him and that’s where you see… that’s when he was to talk to his mother and he’s got some Jewish gestures and a few Jewish expressions, and that’s where the ghetto comes… And that’s the only time, nowhere else. I mean, you see where he was from, the Jewish East Side, but the rest of the time he was a very sophisticated man of the world. He mustn’t act like a Jew from the East Side… Well, I finally got him to cut it out, I wouldn’t stand for it.

What this fascinating recollection exposes is that for Wyler, Jewishness is most definitely not a stereotype, but it is also much more than a place of origin. It is a locus of incredible artistic energy. For, first and foremost, George Simon is an artist at what he does – an artist and, like the clever biblical Jacob, a Jewish trickster. In this is both his moral effrontery and strength.

Counsellor at Law is a supremely socially conscious film. In one scene, Simon speaks to a young Jewish leftist radical, who’s been arrested for participating in a demonstration. He berates him for his behavior and tells to accept a guilt plea at the trial. The young man retorts, “If the Cossacks want to beat me up, let them do it.” Simon is confused, “This is America, not Russia,” he exclaims. “It’s worse than Russia ever was under the Czar” is the reply. In the actual text of the play, the man’s outcry is even more personal – “If the Cossacks want to beat me up, let them do it. They killed my grandfather and my uncle and the only way they can keep me quiet is to kill me, too.”

Apart from being a testament to the political moods of the time, this exchange directly links the social and the Jewish. The young radical thinks solely in the context of Jewish history – for him, it constitutes one continuous opposition between Jews and the rest of the world. Thus, he misplaces countries and eras. Simon, who’s been trying to turn a deaf ear to this Jewish logic with his attempt at shedding his Jewish skin, fails first to grasp his point. How he ultimately gets what the young guy meant is what the film is all about. Wyler mentions in an interview about Counsellor at Law, “I think that was the fist time in a picture where anti-Semitism was touched on a little bit… But it was just gently. You wouldn’t dare say the word, but it was touched upon.” Indeed, it was touched upon gently, as befits a nuanced work of art, but profoundly. What makes Counsellor at Law beautiful is that, despite its very sober eye on assimilation and the Jews’ place among others, it is neither about fear nor martyrdom. It is about survival and doing so with gusto and love. This is what makes it as relevant in 2015 as it was in the ill-fated year of 1933.

———

Marat Grinberg is an associate professor of Russian and Humanities, and chair of the Department of Russian, at Reed College.

Since being published last week, Lena Dunham’s recent “Jewish boyfriend or dog” joke for The New Yorker has received enormous attention and most of it has been negative. The first major hit was an article that came out three days ago by Kveller – a site that is written by Jewish women and is acutely aware of things Jewish.   The title of this article, written by Jordanna Horn, bore the judgment: “Lena Dunham Equated Jews to Dog’s and That’s Not Ok.”   And the first sentence drove in the nail by stating, outright, that the joke is “anti-Semitic.”   (And the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) called out the “anti-Semitic” nature of the joke immediately.) The article goes through and briefly explains several stereotypes which pop up in Dunham’s piece.   The target of Dunham’s joke is not the Jew so much as the Jewish male: it portrays him as a “weak and winy whimp.”

In response to a slew of negative articles and the ADL’s charge against Dunham, David Remnick of The New Yorker asks that we situate Dunham’s humor within the context of Jewish humor which draws on stereotypes vis-à-vis self mockery. He wrote, via Twitter:

The Jewish-comic tradition is rich with the mockery of, and playing with, stereotypes. Anyone who has ever heard Lenny Bruce or Larry David or Sarah Silverman or who has read ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ knows that. Lena Dunham, who is Jewish and hugely talented, is a comic voice working in that vein. Richard Pryor and Chris Rock do the same about black stereotypes; Amy Schumer does it with women and gender. I don’t mind if one reader or another didn’t find the piece funny. People can differ on that. But considering all the real hatred and tragedy in the world, the people getting exercised about the so-called anti-Semitism of this comic piece, like those who railed at Philip Roth a generation or two ago, are, with respect, howling in the wrong direction.

Remnick is correct to situate Dunham’s joke within the context of Jewish humor.   Of all the people mentioned in his Tweet, Philip Roth is the most relevant. His portrayal of the Jewish male as a schlemiel was criticized by many literary and cultural critics including Irving Howe who, in the 1950s wrote a positive and encouraging review of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus. But he changed his mind about Roth when he read Portnoy’s Complaint.  Howe didn’t think this novel was anti-Semitic so much as vulgar. In his 1972 essay for Commentary entitled “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Howe wrote:

The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice. An assemblage of gags strung onto the outcry of an analytic patient, the book thrives best on casual responses; it demands little more from the reader than a nightclub performer demands: a rapid exchange of laugh for punch-line, a breath or two of rest, some variations on the first response, and a quick exit. Such might be the most generous way of discussing Portnoy’s Complaint were it not for the solemn ecstasies the book has elicited, in line with Roth’s own feeling that it constitutes a liberating act for himself, his generation, and maybe the whole culture.

Howe slights Roth for his stereotypes and what he calls a “claustrophobic” view of Jewishness and argues that the denigration of the Jewish male we find in Roth’s book is “vulgar.” And though he would affirm the vulgarity of someone like Lenny Bruce, he draws the line with Roth because Roth doesn’t seem to be drawing on Jewish life at all so much as drawing on a life-already-caricatured:

It is very hard, I will admit, to be explicit about the concept of vulgarity: people either know what one is referring to, as part of the tacit knowledge that goes to make up a coherent culture, or the effort to explain is probably doomed in advance. Nevertheless, let me try. By vulgarity in a work of literature I am not here talking about the presence of certain kinds of words or the rendering of certain kinds of actions. I have in mind, rather, the impulse to submit the rich substance of human experience, sentiment, value, and aspiration to a radically reductive leveling or simplification; the urge to assault the validity of sustained gradings and discriminations of value, so that in some extreme instances the concept of vulgarity is dismissed as up-tight or a mere mask for repressiveness; the wish to pull down the reader in common with the characters of the work, so that he will not be tempted to suppose that any inclinations he has toward the good, the beautiful, or the ideal merit anything more than a Bronx cheer; and finally, a refusal of that disinterestedness of spirit in the depiction and judgment of other people which seems to me the writer’s ultimate resource.

As Howe also notes, this kind of caricature and vulgarity are a part of a larger context. Unfortunately, Howe spends more time discussing literary and not cultural context. To be sure, Roth’s novel was reflecting cultural trends that had been, for years, active in American popular culture. And it can be argued that Dunham’s humor also be placed in this context. Perhaps it is a symptom rather than an aberration.

In an essay that looks specifically at the emasculation of the Jewish male in Jewish humor in general and schlemiel humor in particular, Maurice Berger argues that Jewish men, for nearly five decades after the advent of TV, have “seen their identities disguised, their mannerisms mocked, and their masculinity voiced as the quiet peeps of a mouse.” Until the early 90s, Jewish men were represented – by way of bodies that were weak – as “mice” rather than “men.” They were “assigned” a negative identity that, he argues, drew on anti-Semitic stereotypes of the male Jewish body.

These stereotypes of the Jewish body were “cynically designed” to “undermine the authority of the Jewish subject”:

Some of the stereotypes that marked Jewish masculinity in nineteenth and early twentieth-century culture and science were also appropriated for TV, and they too fit into distinct categories – the exotic or vulgar ethnic, the subordinated or passive schlemiel, the validated Jew, the neurotic, the inferred Jew, and the feminized Jew – cynically designed to undermine and ameliorate Jewish manhood. (94, Too Jewish)

The passive, “subordinated” schlemiel is intimately related to the feminization of the Jew. And when Jews cross dress on TV, this, according to Berger, perpetuates “longstanding stereotypes” that “feminize” the Jewish body. The Odd Couple, The Jack Benny Program, and The Mary Tyler Moor Show all illustrate the comic “stereotype of the unmanly, powerless Jew.” According to Berger, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Brooklyn Bridge stand out in this regard: “Continually henpecked by the Jewish female, the Jewish father is shy, quiet, and usually unopinionated; he is often berated by his wife and children, who overrule him and undermine his authority.”

He calls this a “stereotype of social obedience – in which minority men must make themselves less threatening in order to assuage the fears of the dominant culture.” The networks didn’t want characters to be “too Jewish”:

These character relationships exploit two stereotypes simultaneously: the undesirability of Jewish women and the need for wimpy schlemiels to be validated by shiksas. The validated Jewish male (that is, the schlemiel) is usually shy, self-deprecating, and generally attractive and sweet –the quintessentially nice Jewish boy. His love interest in most often cool and critical; she demands respect and often makes her partner beg for her affection.

David Biale reads Woody Allen’s earlier schlemiels – which he calls “sexual schlemiels” – in a similar manner. He notes how they neutralize what were originally anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews. These characteristics, with Woody Allen’s films (like Annie Hall) become “charming.” And Biale (and a few other scholars who follow his lead) argue that these characteristic become part and parcel of American comedy. And instead of challenging the status quo, which is what Ruth Wisse said the Yiddish schlemiel did, the American schlemiel is the status quo. The American schlemiel’s self-deprecating non-masculine body becomes an American body.

Whether it is Seth Rogen or Gary Shteyngart, Biale and Berger would read their schlemiel bodies in terms of a new kind of emasculated status quo.   Daniel Itzkovitz calls this kind of schlemiel the “new schlemiel.” And in this status quo, it seems as if the bro and the emasculated Jewish body has become the norm.

Lena Dunham’s “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend” should be seen in this context since it reinforces these kinds of distinctions. The portrait she draws of her “Jewish boyfriend” is that of the nebbish-schlemiel.   He is, like Philip Roth’s Portnoy, Bruce Jay Friedman’s characters (see his novel Stern and A Mother’s Kisses), and countless other schlemiels that we have seen on TV and film, lavished with too much love from his Jewish mother. What Dunham says is merely a reflection of a widely circulated stereotype:

This is because he comes from a culture in which mothers focus every ounce of their attention on their offspring and don’t acknowledge their own need for independence as women. They are sucked dry by their children, who ultimately leave them as soon as they find suitable mates.

Kveller is correct, Dunham  portrays the Jewish male as a “weak and winy whimp.” But this is nothing new in American culture. It is a symptom and not an aberration. Dunham’s is the portrayal of the Jewish male as a schlemiel of the worst sort. Please note that schlemiel theory – this blog – and my own work ventures positive and negative readings of the schlemiel and this is not the one that interests us most.   The schlemiel tradition of humor – and its portrayals of the Jewish male – which we see in writers like Sholom Aleichem, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and I.B. Singer – amongst many others – is much more positive and it has a deeper relationship with what Irving Howe finds most relevant and compelling about being a Jew. These books may include elements of “self-mockery,” which is a key element of Jewish humor, but they do so with a deep sense of what’s important and needs to be remembered. This is much different from the reduction of the Jew to mannerisms and what Cynthia Ozick calls the sociological Jew.

In closing, I just want to note how James Joyce (who was not Jewish like Dunham, Roth et al), in his portrayal of Leopold Bloom, makes a positive relationship between the schlemiel and the feminine. And instead of a dog, he puts the Jewish male in relation to a cat. It is through her eyes that Bloom, at the outset of the novel, sees himself. However, this doesn’t make him into a caricature so much as a character with, as one Joyce commentator notes, a person who is deeply concerned with the other.   That is his comedy and associating his masculinity with a cat poses deeper questions about the comedy of relation.

What’s even more of interest is what happens when a woman is portrayed as a schlemiel. We see this in Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? where the main character, Sheila Heti, in an act of self-mockery portrays herself with all the failings of a male schlemiel. But her representations are endearing and insightful. The mockery has a silver lining. And the biggest irony of all is that Lena Dunham’s name can be found on the front cover of Heti’s book. Dunham characterizes Heti’s book as “a really amazing metafiction-meets-nonfiction-book.”   But what really sticks out most in Heti’s novel is not simply the metafictional and nonfictional element so much as the use of comedy and self-mockery to bring about reflection on the comedy of relation. In Dunham’s piece, we don’t see that. We see the mockery of the other and the other’s failure to meet the standards of a Jewish woman because he is…a schlemiel.    But..so is she.