A few weeks ago I was walking through the streets of New York with a good friend, Jessie Freedman. He’s a young Off Broadway playwright whose new wave Avant Garde theater has been written up in The New York Times and other places. When the topic of what or who I was interested in […]
Comedy opens up our senses. It helps us to see things differently – with new eyes and ears. Sometimes, we laugh so hard that there is a revelation that comes – physically – through tears. In Jewish American comedy, this laughter exposes us to a kind of embodiment. However, its confusing. Is this […]
The schlemiel character often stumbles over the smallest things. While most of us would never pay attention to or miss such little things, they are the cause of his or her bad luck. The response to these little things is what gives the schlemiel its childlike, small character. These little stammer-ings and stumbl-ings are what […]
Most films I have seen on Hasidim – save for the film Ushpizin (2004) – are utterly serious and often tragic. Think, for instance, of The Jazz Singer (1927, 1980), The Chosen (1981) or Amos Gitai’s Kadosh (1999). We rarely see comic films on or about Hasidim. (Woody Allen’s little quips in Bananas (1971) or […]
Who doesn’t love mass culture today? Millions of people watch Netflix, surf the internet, and occasion Facebook and Twitter to experience a daily dose of mass culture. But not all artists agree. While an artist like Andy Warhol embraced mass culture and turned to pop art for meaning, many other artists felt that any […]
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 […]
Kevin Hart is well known for his self-depreciating kind of embodied comedy. His intense facial gestures which come one after another in rapid fire show a person who is struggling not just to articulate himself but to be accepted. He never misses an opportunity to show that although he is the smallest guy in the […]
When Hannah Arendt first discusses the schlemiel in her celebrated essay, “The Jew as Pariah,” she describes the schlemiel as the “Lord of Dreams.” She takes her reading from Heinrich Heine’s poems which address the schlemiel. To be sure, Arendt argues that, for Heine, the schlemiel is the poet. He is the first in a […]
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 […]
Ten years after Seth Rogen appeared in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007) as a stoner schlemiel, Seth Rogen has made this character into his biggest selling point. Here is a list of movies where we see the schlemiel-stoner character: Superbad (2007), Pineapple Express (2008), Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), Funny People (2009), This […]
Schlemiel Theory 