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      in Music

      Review: Jews Flee to China in New York Philharmonic’s ‘Émigré’

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      “Émigré,” a bland oratorio about brothers who flee to China to escape Nazi persecution, was given its American premiere by the New York Philharmonic.In Handel’s oratorio “Israel in Egypt,” which the New York Philharmonic performed in October, Jews are living in captivity across the Red Sea from their ancient homeland. In “Émigré,” a new oratorio that was given its American premiere by the Philharmonic on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, they’ve gone a lot farther: to Shanghai, where thousands fled Nazi persecution.Few milieus could be as seductively dramatic as that Chinese city in the 1930s, with its cosmopolitan glamour and wartime danger. But “Émigré” evokes none of this theatrical allure, failing to grab the ear or the heart.With music by Aaron Zigman (known primarily for films like “The Notebook” and “Sex and the City”) and a libretto by Mark Campbell with contributions by Brock Walsh, the piece sketches the historical situation through the story of two German Jewish brothers who settle in Shanghai, which was appealing for its open immigration policies. One of the brothers falls in love with a Chinese woman; her father and the other brother object to the match; amid the violence of the Japanese occupation, tragedy ensues.It’s a promisingly sturdy plot. But the 95-minute score is so blandly cloying, the rhymed-couplets text so stiff and the characters so cardboard, that not a moment ends up surprising or moving.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Ally,’ a Play About Israel and Free Speech, Tackles Big Issues

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      Itamar Moses wrote a drama of ideas about Israel and antisemitism. Then Oct. 7 happened.Before his audition for “The Ally,” a new play by Itamar Moses, the actor Michael Khalid Karadsheh printed out the monologue that his character, Farid, a Palestinian student at an American university, would give in the second act.The speech cites both the Mideast conflict’s specific history and Farid’s personal testimony of, he says, “the experience of moving through the world as the threat of violence incarnate.” Karadsheh — who booked the part — was bowled over.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Karadsheh, whose parents are from Jordan and who has ancestors who were from Birzeit in the West Bank.Farid’s speech sits alongside others, though, in Moses’s play: one delivered by an observant Jew branding much criticism of Israel as antisemitic; another by a Black lawyer connecting Israel’s policies toward Palestinians to police brutality in the United States; another by a Korean American bemoaning the mainstream’s overlooking of East Asians. These speeches are invariably answered by rebuttals, which are answered by their own counter-rebuttals, all by characters who feel they have skin in the game.In other words, “The Ally,” which opens Tuesday at the Public Theater in a production directed by Lila Neugebauer and starring Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”), is a not abstract and none too brief chronicle of our times, a minestrone of hot-button issues: Israelis and Palestinians, racism and antisemitism, free speech and campus politics, housing and gentrification, the excesses of progressivism — even the tenuous employment of adjunct professors.“I don’t think anyone has said these words about Palestine on a stage in New York in such a clear, concise, beautiful, poetic way,” said Michael Khalid Karadsheh, who plays Farid.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Menachem Daum, Filmmaker Who Explored the World of Hasidim, Dies at 77

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      His acclaimed documentary “A Life Apart” presented a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable.Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.His death was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a friend and the author of a book about Christian rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. She said Mr. Daum had been treated for congestive heart failure.What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television sets to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable; here it offered scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.That achievement was not a given. Mr. Daum, though ultra-Orthodox, was not Hasidic himself. And although he had earlier made a film about caregivers for the aged, he was scarcely a seasoned filmmaker.But he was well versed in the Torah, the Talmud and the intricacies of Orthodox Jewish observance. He spoke Yiddish — the Hasidic lingua franca — and lived in a Hasidic neighborhood. He teamed with an experienced filmmaker, Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi, to produce and direct the documentary.The Hasidic movement was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov, who felt that Judaism had overemphasized intellectual qualities to the detriment of spiritual fervor and sincerity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Theater

      Under the Radar at BAM: ‘Our Class’ Review

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      The story of a 1941 massacre is told through the lives of 10 Polish classmates, five Jewish and five Catholic, in this suspenseful but humane play.A simple staging idea can have a devastating affect.As audience members file into BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space and wait for “Our Class” to start, a man can be seen writing names in white chalk on a massive blackboard. It looks like a supersize version of the kind that might be in a classroom, but the list of names here are followed by birth and death dates. We are immediately, chillingly aware of each character’s life expectancy. So when we are introduced to Zygmunt (Elan Zafir), for example, we know that he was born in 1918 and lived to see 1977. On the other hand, Jakub (Stephen Ochsner) will die when he’s about 22, in 1941.That last year is the tragic turning point of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s play, which premiered in London in 2009 and, under the direction of Igor Golyak, is finally making a belated New York debut as part of the Under the Radar festival.Inspired by a real pogrom in Jedwabne, the show pivots on a day in 1941 when inhabitants of a Polish village killed hundreds of Jews. Many of the victims were burned alive in a barn. Afterward, the perpetrators claimed the Nazis were to blame for the massacre, a charade that went on for decades.The play (adapted by Norman Allen from Catherine Grovesnor’s literal translation) follows 10 classmates — five Jewish and five Catholic — through the years. One, Abram (Richard Topol), left in 1937 for New York, where he became a rabbi, but the others stayed put. Slobodzianek skilfully tracks people and events, giving the show a suspenseful but always humane urgency.Friendships ceased to matter during World War II, as classmate turned against classmate. Rysiek (José Espinosa) was among those lending a murderous hand on that fateful day, and he looked on as Jakub’s throat was slit open. “They were my neighbors,” Dora (Gus Birney) said. “I knew them. Just watching. Making jokes.” She and her baby died in the barn. Rachelka (Alexandra Silber) was Jewish and about 21, but, we know from that blackboard, died in 2002. How she made it through is a testament to the grim decisions one has to make in a war.It is tricky to bring this kind of tragic story to the stage, and the well-acted production from the Mart Foundation and Golyak’s Arlekin Players Theater is artistically ambitious. That is not a surprise. Golyak (“The Orchard” at Baryshnikov Arts Center) is among the most inventive directors working in the United States. His problem is one of abundance, though: He can have too many ideas and has a hard time editing them.The excessive stage business in “Our Class” often distracts from the story. Golyak unnecessarily frames the show as a play reading, for instance, with the actors in contemporary clothing, perhaps to suggest the timelessness of the issues. Mercifully he drops that conceit quickly enough.But then some scenes are overloaded with symbolism, as when the dying Jakub perilously and distractingly hangs upside down from a ladder, or when the characters draw faces on balloons, which then float up to the ceiling. Those could be powerful gestures on their own, but collectively they amount to a kind of aesthetic distancing, as if Golyak felt the audience could not withstand the story’s full horror. Tellingly, the most wrenching scenes are the more minimal ones, as when Dora quietly sings to her baby. It’s a lullaby, and a goodbye, the end of two lives and the end of a world.Our ClassThrough Feb. 4 at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space, Brooklyn; bam.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      in Movies

      Jewish Group Assails Film Academy’s Diversity Efforts

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      An open letter signed by notable actors and producers criticized the organization for not including Jews as an underrepresented group as part of a new initiative.More than 260 Jewish entertainment figures — including the actors David Schwimmer, Julianna Margulies and Josh Gad, and the producers Greg Berlanti and Marta Kauffman — signed an open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on Tuesday, criticizing the organization for excluding Jews as an underrepresented group in its diversity efforts.In 2020, the academy issued a set of standards as part of its diversity initiative that recognized a number of identities as “underrepresented,” including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, or those with cognitive or physical disabilities.Religion is not one of the categories considered.These initiatives will become part of the standards required for a film to compete in the best picture category beginning this year. For a film to be eligible, at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. The academy has said that includes actors who are Asian, Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.“An inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both steeped in and misunderstands antisemitism,” said the letter, which was organized by the Hollywood Bureau of the group Jew in the City. “It erases Jewish peoplehood and perpetuates myths of Jewish whiteness, power, and that racism against Jews is not a major issue or that it’s a thing of the past.”The letter added that Judaism was not just an issue of faith, but also an ethnicity.This is not the first time in recent years that the academy has faced criticism from the Jewish community. When the organization opened its long-awaited museum in Los Angeles in 2021, the contributions of Jewish immigrants like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer, who were largely responsible for the founding of the Hollywood studio system, were barely acknowledged. In response, the academy said it would open a permanent exhibition dedicated to the birth of Hollywood and the Jewish filmmakers who established it. Called “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” the exhibit will debut on May 19.According to Allison Josephs, the founder and executive director of Jew in the City, the letter has been in the works since the summer, months before the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, as the new academy standards were being discussed.“It feels like a very big mistake to not recognize that we are maybe the most persecuted group throughout all time,” she said in an interview.The academy declined to comment. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Occupied City’ Review: Mapping the Holocaust, Street by Street

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      In his four-and-half-hour documentary, the British director Steve McQueen charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation.Early in Steve McQueen’s extraordinary documentary “Occupied City,” the film cuts to the interior of the elegant main hall in Amsterdam’s grand Royal Concertgebouw. In World War II, the Nazi-German occupiers held events in the hall, but at some point in 1942 the names of the Jewish composers adorning it were covered. Concerts continued, but without Jewish composers, conductors, orchestra musicians, concertgoers and even names on walls.Not long after this section ends, “Occupied City” shifts to a new location, a nondescript, boarded-up storefront. This, the narrator explains, was the site of a cafe that, in 1940, was among the first in the city to ban Jews. Soon after, the movie cuts to another location and then to another and another. And so it goes in this intense, absorbing and epically scaled chronicle — it runs close to four and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission — that charts the fate of Amsterdam’s Jews during the Nazi occupation, street by street, address by address.In total, the film surveys a staggering 130 addresses, a mapping that McQueen has realized, somewhat surprisingly, without the use of archival imagery. Instead, the director (whose earlier films include “12 Years a Slave”) explores the city’s past exclusively through images of quotidian Amsterdam life today — in and outside homes, in squares, on trams — that he shot over several years beginning in 2019. These 35-millimeter visuals are, in turn, accompanied by sounds that include voices, birdsong and so on recorded during the filming; fragments of music (some composed by Oliver Coates); and the narration (delivered in the English-language version with dry equanimity by Melanie Hyams, a British voice actor).McQueen’s decision to only use images of contemporary Amsterdam in the film is as effective as it is conceptually bold, though it takes time to fully grasp what he’s doing and why. Without ceremony, textual explanation or a flourish of introductory music, he drops you into the city’s gentle and clamorous bustle right from the get go, and there you remain even as the film hopscotches across Amsterdam, covering miles and years. The movie opens, for instance, with a daytime shot of a warmly lit hallway in what looks like an apartment, with a door opened onto a garden. It’s quiet save for the homey sounds of rustling, the metallic tinkling of what seems like silverware and some faintly babbling voices, perhaps from a radio or TV.An unidentified woman enters, and the narration — as it does throughout — begins with a recitation of an address, which grounds you. This was once the office of a printer-publisher who, with his wife and two sisters, died by suicide on May 15, 1940, the day the Netherlands capitulated to Germany. As the woman onscreen opens a trapdoor, the narrator continues, recounting that while many Jews hoped to escape to England, “most could not find a boat willing to take them.” The dead man’s brother did escape, and he transferred the business to an employee, who helped Jews hide in the office. One hid for days “on top of the elevator.”McQueen continues this approach for the remainder of the film, though with striking variations that create linkages, by turns obvious and oblique. In one sunny segment, a cozy spell of pleasure and play becomes a ghost story as you watch people skating on a frozen canal outside a building where a woman sheltered Jewish residents and resistance fighters. Elsewhere, though, McQueen folds in images without commentary, notably in scenes of people protesting against pandemic lockdowns, met by police with water cannons. These images raise the specter of state violence even as the film — with its relentless, harrowing narration — puts the protesters and their freedoms into historical context.As “Occupied City” continues to juxtapose the city’s history with its present — with chronicles of varying length that chart Jewish struggle, resistance, death and survival — the film builds tremendous force. A pilot who shot down German planes before the Netherlands capitulated lived at one address; a 10-month-old baby was taken from another address to a police station; the following year, the baby was murdered at Auschwitz. Amsterdam, McQueen repeatedly reminds you, is occupied by both the living and the dead, an obvious point that takes on specific, deeply profound resonance as the film unfolds. Most of Netherland’s Jewish population, as the narrator reminds you, died in the Holocaust.Among these, alas and of course, was Anne Frank, who’s mentioned a few times in “Occupied City.” It’s notable, I think, that McQueen doesn’t include Prinsengracht 263, the building where her father’s employees kept the business running while she, her family and four others hid in the annex until they were betrayed and eventually deported to Auschwitz. The building is now a tourist attraction, which might be one reason that McQueen avoids it. I imagine that he also wanted to distance the film from the popular, commercially palatable conception of Frank, the one that seizes on her diary’s most famous line — “in spite of everything I still believe people are really good at heart” — and can attenuate the barbarism of her murder.McQueen’s film is “informed,” as the credits put it, by Bianca Stigter’s huge 2019 book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945),” which she described in an interview with the BBC as “a kind of travel guide to the past of Amsterdam.” (Stigter, who’s Dutch, and McQueen, who’s British, are married and live in the Netherlands.) She wrote and helped produce “Occupied City,” and she also directed “A Lengthening: Three Minutes” (2022), a feature-length documentary about a segment of a home movie that an American tourist, David Kurtz, shot in 1938 of a Jewish community in a Polish village. Using only images from this fragment, Stigter movingly reclaims a lost world, face by face, second by second.Time is stretched differently in “Occupied City” and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past. It’s instructive, for one, that he hasn’t shaped the narration chronologically. Instead, as the film shifts from address to address, and as the seasons and people pass by onscreen, the narration skips from 1940 to 1944 and back again, pausing in moments before and after the war. For McQueen, history isn’t a neat little package that can be experienced at a safe remove and then forgotten. Here, history is in every wintry park and sunlit room because it is insistently present and very much alive.Occupied CityRated PG-13. Running time: 4 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Maestro’ and the Fake Nose Hall of Fame

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      “Maestro” isn’t the first time a supersize sniffer set off a whiff of controversy. Here’s a look at the most notable schnozzes onscreen.In August, the first trailer for “Maestro,” a biopic of Leonard Bernstein, the composer of “West Side Story” and so much more, set off a backlash almost immediately: Bradley Cooper was wearing a prosthetic nose for the title role.Critics on social media accused the star, who is also the director, of playing into an antisemitic trope with the Size XL prosthesis — and asked whether someone who is Jewish would have been more sensitive about makeup choicesWhile Cooper and Netflix, where “Maestro” will begin streaming on Wednesday, declined to comment. In a statement at the time, Bernstein’s three children, who had been working with Cooper on the film, came to the actor’s defense, noting in a series of posts on X, “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose.” (The family declined to offer additional comment.)It’s hardly the first time an oversize septum has made an onscreen appearance or courted controversy. Here are 12 of the most memorable fake noses in cinematic history, sorted by size from dainty 🥸 to elephantine 🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸.Orson Welles, ‘Touch of Evil’🥸Universal PicturesLike Edmond Rostand’s poet and swordsman, Cyrano de Bergerac, Orson Welles was obsessed with his nose. (He believed his was too small; it was, of course, completely normal.) But instead of channeling his fixation into a healthy pursuit like, say, helping another man win the affections of his own beloved, he sported dozens of fakes over his career. One of the largest was the pugnacious pair of nostrils he wore as the corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan in the 1958 murder mystery “Touch of Evil.”Nicole Kidman, ‘The Hours’🥸Clive Hoote/Paramount PicturesNicole Kidman may have delivered a stirring performance as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours” (2002), but Denzel Washington joked that it was the prosthetic beak she wore that won her the best actress Academy Award. (“The Oscar goes to, by a nose, Nicole Kidman,” he joked when announcing her win.) Kidman wore a fresh one each day on set, though she told The Associated Press that she hung on to a silver one she was given when shooting wrapped.Ralph Fiennes, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2’🥸Warner Bros.Is that thing even functional? Probably not; snakes don’t have noses — just nostrils — and smell with their forked tongues. We wouldn’t be surprised if J.K. Rowling’s reptilian baddie in this 2011 franchise finale had one of those, too. But at least we may finally have an answer as to what Voldemort’s unnaturally long fingers are good for.: Nose-picking.Meryl Streep, ‘The Iron Lady’🥸Alex Bailey/Weinstein CompanyLike Kidman, Meryl Streep rode the prosthetic nose she donned to play the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2011 biopic to an Oscar win (her third). But this time, the transformation’s genius was in its subtlety — when the first photos of Streep on set were released, the press made nary a peep about the nose.Laurence Olivier, ‘Richard III’ 🥸🥸Laurence Olivier as Richard IIILondon Film ProductionsUnlike Welles, Laurence Olivier didn’t habitually don a fake nose for his roles because of a perceived insecurity about the size of his own; rather, it was just one of the suite of theatrical accessories, including masks and wigs, that he, and many other actors, used transform into various characters. In “Richard III” (1955), which Olivier also directed, his character’s nose is, as one blogger put it, “majestically prominent.”Rudolph, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’🥸🥸Rankin/Bass Productions and NBCWith a workshop of Santa’s elves nearby in this 1964 special, the best Rudolph’s dad, Donner, could do to help his son fit in at school was make a fake nose from mud? He won’t be winning any father-of-the-year awards for that effort.Margaret Hamilton, ‘The Wizard of Oz’🥸🥸🥸MGMMargaret Hamilton came by some of the goods to play the Wicked Witch of the West naturally: She was known for her overlarge nose, which her own father had encouraged her to have surgically altered. But she got the last laugh when she landed the role of the now-iconic villain in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) — for which her nose was made even longer (and greener).Matt Damon, ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’🥸🥸🥸Warner Bros., via AlamySure, there are performers with bigger noses on this list, but Matt Damon might be the only one who planned a con around his. In this 2007 sequel, his character, Linus, dons the prosthesis — which Damon nicknamed “The Brody” in a nod to the actor Adrien Brody’s well, you know — in a bid to disguise himself and gain access to a case full of diamonds.Steve Carell, ‘Foxcatcher’🥸🥸🥸Scott Garfield/Sony Pictures ClassicsSteve Carell’s souped-up schnozz in this 2014 true-crime tale may have left some people scratching their heads — the real-life version of his character, John du Pont, the millionaire wrestling enthusiast-turned-murderer, wasn’t well known, so the attention to detail seemed excessive. But the nose did serve another purpose: It made audiences forget they were staring at Carell, who was known mainly for comedies at the time.Alec Guinness, ‘Oliver Twist’🥸🥸🥸🥸United Artists, via Alamy StockCharles Dickens wrote Fagin in “Oliver Twist” as a thoroughly antisemitic villain, and in the 1948 film adaptation, Alec Guinness, the non-Jewish actor who played the character, spoke in a droning lisp and appeared with hooded eyes and an enormous prosthetic hook nose. The nose was deemed “incredibly insensitive,” as The Jewish Chronicle wrote, and it provoked significant anger from Holocaust survivors.Billy Crystal, ‘The Princess Bride’🥸🥸🥸🥸20th Century Fox, via AlamyBilly Crystal was already so funny in “The Princess Bride” (1987) that the director, Rob Reiner, claimed that he had to leave the set during Crystal’s scenes as Miracle Max because he was unable to contain his laughter. Adding a bulbous tomato of a nose took Crystal’s physical comedy over the top. (Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo Montoya, actually bruised a rib trying to stifle his own chuckles.)Steve Martin, ‘Roxanne’🥸🥸🥸🥸🥸Columbia PicturesYou could land a bird on that thing (which the director, Fred Schepisi, did.) Steve Martin’s five-inch appendage for the 1987 film took 90 minutes to apply every day and two minutes to remove. “God how I hated that thing,” he told The Washington Post. More

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      in Movies

      Dan Greenburg, Who Poked Fun With His Pen, Dies at 87

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      Women, sex and Jewish mothers were just some of the targets of his popular satirical writing in books, essays, screenplays and more.Dan Greenburg, the prolific humorist, best-selling author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter whose satirical prose examined Jewish angst, women and sex, and who later produced a series of humorous children’s books, died on Monday in the Bronx. He was 87.His death, at a hospice facility, was caused by worsening complications of a stroke he had a year ago, his son, Zack O’Malley Greenburg, said.Mr. Greenburg achieved national fame in 1964 with the publication of his “How to Be a Jewish Mother: A Very Lovely Training Manual,” a tongue-firmly-in-cheek assessment of the unique and often baffling qualities of a stereotypical Jewish mother.“Never accept a compliment,” Mr. Greenburg advised. For example: “Irving, tell me, how is the chopped liver?”“Mmmm! Sylvia, it’s delicious!”“I don’t know. First the chicken livers that the butcher gave me were dry. Then the timer on the oven didn’t work. Then, at the last minute, I ran out of onions. Tell me, how could it be good?”Though his own mother didn’t think it was particularly funny, “How to Be a Jewish Mother” sold more than 270,000 copies in its first year alone and opened the door for the 28-year-old Mr. Greenburg to embark on a long career as a writer.He subsequently published more than a dozen books for adults, including “How to Make Yourself Miserable” (1966), “What Do Women Want” (1982) and “Scoring: A Sexual Memoir” (1972), mostly based on his own neurotic and hilarious attempts at connecting with the opposite sex.He branched into other genres as well — horror, the occult and murder mysteries — and he later began writing humorous children’s fiction, turning out numerous volumes of the popular “The Zack Files” series, for which his son was the inspiration.The versatile Mr. Greenburg also acted, did stand-up comedy and wrote plays and movie scripts, including for the hits “Private Lessons” (1981) and “Private School” (1983).Though he was a native Chicagoan, Mr. Greenburg was among the angst-ridden, carnally obsessed Jewish writers, like Woody Allen, Jules Feiffer and Philip Roth, who emerged in New York during the sexually charged 1960s with shocking, comical and explicit explorations of their neurotic sexual fantasies and behaviors.He wrote more than 150 humor pieces for The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, Vanity Fair and other publications. When asked by his Playboy editor over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in 1972 to take part in an orgy in order to write an amusing essay, Mr. Greenburg was flummoxed.Mr. Greenburg’s “How to Be a Jewish Mother” (1964) was an instant success and launched his career. He later wrote a series of children’s books, “The Zack Files,” inspired by his son.“My chopsticks suddenly became too heavy to hold, and I lowered them carefully to the table,” he wrote in Playboy that year. “I should tell you at this point that I am so shy with women that it took me till the age of 23 to lose my virginity, till 30 to get married, and today, at 36, I am still unable to go to an ordinary cocktail party and chitchat with folks like any regular grown-up person. The idea of sending old Greenburg to take part in an orgy was, frankly, tantamount to sending someone with advanced vertigo to do a tap dance on the wing of an airborne 747.”The woman he married at 30, in 1967, was the journalist Nora Ephron, who would find success and fame as a comedy screenwriter and director after their nine-year marriage — the first for both of them — ended in an amicable divorce. They had the friendliest split one could imagine. “When we got the divorce, we kept dating,” Mr. Greenburg said on a podcast in 2021.Mr. Greenburg’s disarming wiseguy prose earned grudging respect from the critics. His examination of the paranormal, “Something’s There” (1976), was praised by John Leonard in The New York Times for its “skeptical, muscular, street-smart in the nether world” look at the occult.“Fans of the author of ‘How to Be a Jewish Mother’ and ‘Scoring’ will be pleased to learn that Mr. Greenburg hasn’t lost his sense of humor, even if he has lost a portion of his mind,” Mr. Leonard wrote. “He is still, like Dean Martin, preoccupied with sex.”Daniel Greenburg was born on June 20, 1936, to Samuel and Leah (Rozalsky) Greenburg. His mother was a Hebrew-school teacher, his father an artist. Intending to follow in his father’s footsteps, Mr. Greenburg enrolled in the fine arts program at the University of Illinois but switched to industrial design. He graduated in 1958.Wanting to abandon Chicago’s cold winters, he packed up his secondhand Chevy and drove to Los Angeles. Knowing no one there and having few options, he applied to graduate school at U.C.L.A., where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts.He soon talked his way into a job as an advertising writer with a small agency. When he read J.D. Salinger’s novel “Catcher in the Rye,” he was so moved by it that he decided he should try his hand at mimicking writers like Mr. Salinger.He wrote a satirical version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and, after selling it to Esquire in 1958 for $350, began to envision himself as a satirist. But, by his account, he knew he had a long way to go to become a successful writer.Splitting his focus between advertising and magazine writing, Mr. Greenburg eventually landed in New York, where in the early 1960s he met the editor and publisher Ralph Ginzburg, who was starting Eros, a magazine about erotica. Mr. Ginzburg recruited Mr. Greenburg to be its managing editor. Mr. Ginzburg went on to earn notoriety when he was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws in 1963.Meeting a book publisher at a party, Mr. Greenburg pitched an idea for what he wanted to title “The Snob’s Guide to Status Cars.” The publisher, Roger Price (who was also a humorist), rejected the pitch but suggested that Mr. Greenburg come back to him with another book idea. Over lunch days later, the two lamented how their Jewish mothers had used guilt to get them to eat. As he recalled on the 2021 podcast, Mr. Greenburg wondered: “How do they do this? Do they have a handbook on how to be Jewish mothers?”A lightbulb flashed on, he recalled, and he thought, “I’ll write that.” Mr. Price liked the idea, offered a $500 advance, and “How to Be a Jewish Mother” was published by Price, Stern, Sloan in late 1964. It became a hit and effectively launched Mr. Greenburg’s writing career. It would go on to be published in 24 countries and was made into a musical, which had a brief run on Broadway beginning in December 1967.After divorcing Ms. Ephron, Mr. Greenburg in 1980 married the writer Suzanne O’Malley, with whom he had his son, Zack, his only child. They divorced in the 1990s. In 1998 he married Judith C. Wilson, a writer. In addition to his son, she survives him, along with a granddaughter. Mr. Greenburg lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.Mr. Greenburg outside his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., in 1998. He published more than a dozen books for adults and scores more for children.Librado Romero/The New York TimesA fearful child, Mr. Greenburg undertook a series of hair-raising adventures as an adult while mining material for his children’s books, which he began writing in the mid-1990s. He rode upside-down in an open-cockpit plane over the Pacific with a stunt pilot; was chased by an elephant in Africa; rode with New York City firefighters to fires and with the city’s police in high-speed chases; and visited a tiger ranch in Texas, where he learned to discipline 200-pound tigers.“I visit schools constantly,” he said in an interview for the website of Harcourt Books (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in 2006. “I talk to kids. I try out ideas on them, and I ask them what they like to read. Both boys and girls tell me they love scary stories and funny stories the best, and the boys tell me they love to be grossed out. I’ve tried to put all three things in these books.”In a 1998 interview with The Times, Mr. Greenburg admitted to missing some of the ego rewards of writing adult fiction, but insisted that writing children’s books had been deeply gratifying.“It’s the most fun I ever had in my life,” he said. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing that you’ve turned a kid on to books. That’s enough for a career right there.”Alex Traub More