In the post-WWII era, the schlemiel played a pivotal role in a cultural revolution in America that most of us didn’t notice. Before WWII, Charlie Chaplin was seen as a schlemiel character by some of the worlds greatest thinkers (such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, etc). They could see the powerful impact he had on […]
The Jewish-American family has almost always been depicted in a comical way in novels, films, and TV shows. In the Jewish-American family, the mother plays a powerful role and is the pit of many jokes. In the 60s and 70s, many novels (such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Bruce Jay Friedman’s A Mother’s Kisses, […]
In 2009, New York Magazine published a special issue on Larry David with a cover that featured Woody Allen and Larry David, entitled “Last of the Schlemiels: Notes on the end of Jewish Humor (may it rest in peace), and the beginning of something Nu.” The irony of this article and the cover title is […]
Cynthia Ozick argued that hidden inside of John Updike’s Bech trilogy there is a theological reading of Jews. In 1965, Updike, the award-winning American WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) writer – Pulitzer Prizes in 1982 and 1991, National Book Award in 1964, PEN/Malamud Award 1988, etc – addressed what one could call his Jewish question: […]
It was with great sadness that I learned this morning of the passing of Aharon Appelfeld. He is one of my favorite Israeli novelists and some of his novels have, literally, changed the way I think about the novel and its relationship to history. It also changed the way I looked at the schlemiel character. […]
After learning that Jim Nabors died yesterday, a flood of impressions I held within me – from many years watching re-runs of The Andy Griffith Show – washed over me. Like many Americans, I used to come home and watch reruns of shows that had comic figures – ranging from Leave it to Beaver, Little […]
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 […]
Books give me ideas. I love to be between one book and another. It’s like being between one place and another. I’m always walking – it seems – from one idea to another. I like to retrace my steps because I might stumble – like a schlemiel – across something. Wandering around New York […]
Woody Allen’s Zelig character showed American audiences that schlemiels come in all sizes, shapes, and colors. The schlemiel is a chamelon. His Jewishness – argues Daniel Itzkovitz – demonstrates the fact that the essence of the schlemiel character is non-essence. The schlemiel is constantly adapting and changing. And this – argues Itzkovitz, drawing on […]
Anyone who has attempted to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am knows that it is an arduous task. To finish it and understand the novel, one has to connect a lot of threads. The book explores the family dynamics of the Bloch family and situates it within multiple contexts that span the Holocaust, a […]
