It goes without saying that dialogue is a symbol of progress and understanding in the West. Whether it is the Martin Buber or Emmanuel Levinas, the principle players in the discourse are “I” and “you” (or “me” and the “other”). For Buber, the task is not to turn the other into an “it.” In the […]
One of the most interesting questions that the Kabbalah addresses deals with how one is to imagine God’s relationship to Creation. The models that were sketched out to address this question have affected how Kabbalists have envisioned not just God but their experience of God in the world. Is the relationship straightforward and simple or […]
Kafka read the Hasidic masters by way of Martin Buber’s translations. And of the Hasidic masters he read, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was, without a doubt, the most literary. As Ruth Wisse and David Roskies point out, he made the Hasidic story (or parable) into something literary rather than something merely anecdotal. To be sure, […]
What happens when a schlemiel has been offended and made into a fool? When they are duped, I.B. Singer’s Gimpel doesn’t get heated up and neither does Aleichem’s Menachem Mendel or Motl. Mendel Mocher Sforim’s Benjamin the IIIrd and Senderl and I.L. Peretz’s Bontshe Shvayg opt out of action altogether and choose, in the face […]
Ruth Wisse calls the schlemiel a “modern hero.” But the term is ironic. The schlemiel cannot be a typical modern hero who, like many a western hero, does something courageous and saves the day. The schlemiel’s victories are ironic because they arise out of failure. Moreover, the schlemiel’s conduct is what Daniel Boyarin would call […]
Comedy is full of surprises. But that’s not always the case. More often than not, we get the same types of stock characters who do what…they always do. However, sometimes a stock comic character may surprise us. And since Hollywood is full of actors who play the same types of comic roles, the same can […]
Today is Schlemiel-in-Theory’s Birthday!!! It turns two years old today. The blog has, in the time of a year, gone from one thousand to nearly four thousand followers! And, as with any birthday, I would like to make a resolution that this year I will redouble my efforts to find and write on new and […]
Very few scholars have addressed the appropriation of the schlemiel by Zionist thinkers and critics. Daniel Boyarin has suggested the contrast between the less masculine, Medieval model for the Jew (which, to be sure, is a humble simpleton who bears many of the more feminine qualities that are associated with the schlemiel) and the more […]
Writing on Bernard Malamud, Sanford Pinsker argues that with his work we have something fundamentally different from what we find in I.B. Singer. As Pinsker notes, I.B. Singer “had to face the agonizing problem of re-creating a ghetto experience that had been too short lived”(77, The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in Yiddish and American Jewish […]
David Heti is an (un)timely comedian. His comedy speaks to a time that is becoming more and more unhappy with itself. (And I mean this in a good way since I believe that such unhappiness will prompt us to come out of our dogmatic slumber…and think.) Unlike many comedians whose jokes are purely scatological and […]
Schlemiel Theory 