Without a doubt, Adam Sandler is one of the main four actors and screen writers who, over the last few decades, has popularized a new variety of the American schlemiel. That star-studded list includes Ben Stiller, Seth Rogen, and Judd Apatow who – in nearly every film – have starred (or casted actors) as schlemiels. […]
The events of last week with Harvey Weinstein have prompted many powerful articles (good, in terms of prompting awareness of violent sexual actions that were an “open secret” in Hollywood, and really bad, in terms of prompting anti-Semitic remarks and insane conspiracy theories). After reading Mark Oppenheimer’s controversial Op-Ed piece for Tablet, entitled “The […]
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 […]
I am always on the look out for shrinking people and things. Becoming small is a religious kind of theme. It is also an obsession of secular writers (with a penchant for the mystical) like Franz Kafka and one of his favorite writers, Robert Walser. Many of Kafka’s characters are like humans who have […]
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the schlemiel character is usually located on the edge of the world. Her place is something people overlook. S/he stands at the limit. Whether it is Mendel Mocher Sforim’s Sendrl, Sholem Aleichem’s Motl or Menachem Mendel, I.B. Singer’s Gimpel, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, […]
I wonder if a new trend is developing in the journalistic world in which this or that journalist calls Donald Trump or someone in his administration a schlemiel (see this article – for instance -that calls Sean Spicer a schlemiel character). Mind you – as I’ve said many times on this blog – there are […]
I have written several blog posts on the comedian Louis CK that look into his Jewish jokes, his relationship to things Jewish, and his attitude toward Jewishness. In response to my first query into his Jewishness (July 11, 2013), I recently (just this morning) received a comment by an anti-Semitic troll: Who cares what Jews […]
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 […]
I can remember the first time I ever heard a story about the Jewish fool otherwise known as a schlemiel. What struck me about the story, when I first heard it (when I was six or seven years old), was that the schlemiel wasn’t an independent agent. He lived amidst other schlemiels – in a […]
After the Holocaust, different scholars and journalists have debated over whether the schlemiel is dead or should live on. Regardless of the debate, however, it is evident that the character has lived on whether in literature or film. One need only go to the movie theater to see the film Neighbors to see this or […]
Schlemiel Theory 