Is Seth Rogen giving the schlemiel a bad name or…another name? To be sure, I’ve written several blog-entries on Rogen-as-Schlemiel. Before I saw Rogen and Franco’s parody of Kanye West’s Latest video, I was already on Rogen’s trail. And, to my understanding, he, along with Judd Apatow and others, were looking to revise the schlemiel […]
Seth Rogen is often cast as a schlemiel in many Hollywood films. We can see this in films like Knocked Up (2007), Superbad (2007), and Pineapple Express (2008). But in films like Knocked Up we start seeing the transformation of Rogen’s character. In that film, Rogen goes from a pot-smoking “lord of dreams” to a […]
Don’t you love those moments when you can’t tell if something is serious or a joke? I had one of them yesterday and it created a delicious ambiguity around how the schlemiel may get lost in translation. While walking through Manhattan yesterday, I stumbled across a poster that caught my eye. On the front of […]
I’m happy to see that yesterday’s blog post on the Rogen/Franco Parody of Kanye West’s “Bound Two” video has prompted some response. What I’d like to do in this blog entry is address the questions and concerns of some readers regarding the post. First of all, in my blog entry I acknowledged that this video […]
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 […]
Yesterday I was taking a stroll in Central Park when – out of nowhere – a group of young French tourists came up to me and asked if they could take a photo with me. I asked them why and they told me that I “looked like a New Yorker.” What does a New […]
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. […]
For a long time, I’ve been thinking about how to read photographs of schlemiels like Woody Allen, Seth Rogen, Charlie Chaplin, etc. What function do they serve? How do we identify with them? How do they relate to the lives of Americans and Jewish Americans? What categories do we use to read them? But when […]
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. […]
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 […]
