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      in Television

      Dave Chappelle Laments ‘Nightmare’ Facing Israelis and Palestinians

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      The comedian, whose remarks about the Israel-Hamas war last week made headlines, returned to the subject at a show in North Carolina.Dave Chappelle was about 24 minutes into his set on Wednesday night in Raleigh, N.C., when he briefly touched on remarks he had made about the Israel-Hamas conflict at a show in Boston last week that had led to cheers, some walkouts and headlines.“Right now, I’m in trouble because the Jewish community is upset,” Mr. Chappelle told a packed crowd of more than 20,000 people at PNC Arena. “But I cannot express this enough: No matter what you read about that show in Boston, you will never see quotation marks around anything I said. They don’t know what I said.”“It’s all hearsay,” said the comedian, who, like many others, requires audience members to surrender their smartphones at shows.Mr. Chappelle, a satirist whose reputation for diving into polarizing topics has increased in the latter stages of his comedic career, returned to the Israel-Hamas conflict near the end of his set Wednesday.“The other night, I said something about Palestine in Boston and got misquoted all over the world,” Mr. Chappelle said. “And I will not repeat what I said.”A woman in the crowd responded by shouting, “Free Palestine.”“Please, please, miss,” Mr. Chappelle responded. “Listen. Don’t start it up or I’m going to be in the news cycle for another week. This thing that’s happening in the Middle East is bigger than everybody.”“This is what’s happening and, believe me, I understand what’s happening in Israel is a nightmare,” Mr. Chappelle said. “What’s happening in Palestine is a nightmare.”He continued: “There’s only two kinds of people in the world: people who love other people and the people that have things to make them afraid to love other people. Pray for everyone in Israel. Pray for everyone in Palestine.”“And remember that every dead person is a dead person,” he said, calling the situation a “tragedy.”At the show last Thursday in Boston’s TD Garden, Mr. Chappelle was drawn into speaking about the conflict by members of the audience. He raised concerns about how a group of Harvard students had been treated since signing an anti-Israel letter, condemned the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and criticized Israel for its role in causing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, according to remarks first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The Los Angeles Times reported that perhaps 200 people in the roughly 17,000-person audience in Boston had departed toward the end of the show.A few minutes after initially discussing the interaction on Wednesday, Mr. Chappelle noticed a commotion stemming from the arena’s upper level. “That still might be the Jews coming for me,” said Mr. Chappelle, who has often used his penchant for causing offense as fodder for jokes.He urged for someone in the crowd to call emergency medical responders before being reminded that audience members did not have their phones. He said he had never thought about what would happen without them in an emergency.“Sorry,” Mr. Chappelle said, stretching out the word. “I don’t want the Jews to know what I said.”On Wednesday night, Mr. Chappelle, wearing a red, black and gray flannel shirt with cutoff sleeves and taking frequent drags from a cigarette, filled his set with jokes about Madison Cawthorn, a pro-Trump former North Carolina congressman and material about transgender people that has drawn widespread criticism. He also joked about being attacked onstage last year by an armed man while performing at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.The audience cheered him loudly, and the hour-and-15-minute set did not appear to have caused the kind of walkouts that marked the Boston show. More

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      in Movies

      After Outcry, Writers Guild Tries to Explain Silence on Hamas Attack

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      Facing mounting pressure from more than 300 Hollywood screenwriters questioning why it had not publicly condemned the Hamas attack on Israel this month, the Writers Guild of America West sent a letter to its members on Tuesday that sought to explain its silence while also calling the attack “an abomination.”The letter, signed by the guild’s leadership and viewed by The New York Times, said the reason the union had not issued a statement after the attack on Oct. 7 was not “because we are paralyzed by factionalism or masking hateful views” but rather because “we are American labor leaders, aware of our limitations and humbled by the magnitude of this conflict.”The guild’s letter acknowledged that it had publicly commented on other situations “which could be characterized as beyond our scope,” but that it had not made any statement following, for instance, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“It can be an imprecise science for a labor union to pick and choose where it weighs in on both domestic and world affairs,” said the letter, which was signed by the president, Meredith Stiehm; the vice president, Michele Mulroney; and Betsy Thomas, the secretary-treasurer.Still, they added, “We understand this has caused tremendous pain and for that we are truly sorry.”(The west and east branches of the W.G.A. are affiliated unions with separate leadership that together represent more than 11,000 writers.)On Oct. 15, a group of screenwriters sent an open letter to the guild asking why it had not publicly denounced the attack on Israel, noting the union had made public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo reckoning. They also noted that other major Hollywood unions had issued statements condemning the attack.The letter has now been signed by more than 300 writers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Eric Roth (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”). Some Jewish screenwriters had begun to question whether they should remain part of an organization that they felt did not support them.Ms. Stiehm’s initial reply to the open letter was an email to inquiring members saying that the lack of response was because “the board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach.”The letter on Tuesday, which said the guild’s leadership was “horrified by the atrocities committed by Hamas,” was an attempt to stem the outrage. “I really appreciate this statement,” said the screenwriter Howard Gordon (“24” and “Homeland”), who added in an interview that the silence from the guild had prompted responses from both Jewish and non-Jewish members ranging from rage to fear to the desire to resign from the organization.“I hope this letter goes a long way to sort of calming some of it down,” said Mr. Gordon, who signed the open letter to the guild. “Hopefully something constructive comes out of this, which is an acknowledgment of how we combat and confront and talk about antisemitism.”For Dan Gordon, however, the apology came too late. Mr. Gordon, 76, sent a letter Tuesday morning resigning his membership in the organization, calling its silence “appalling.”“It is corrosive to me as a writer and repugnant to every fiber of my being as a person of conscience,” wrote Mr. Gordon, who has no relation to Howard Gordon and is best known for “The Hurricane” and “Wyatt Earp.” “I am resigning my membership not because I wish to work on nonunion projects, nor cross any picket line, but because I no longer wish to be a fellow traveler with those who hide behind the fetid veil of a morally bankrupt wokeism and stand silent in the face of unadulterated evil.”Mr. Gordon’s latest film, “Irena’s Vow” — about a young Polish-Catholic woman during World War II who hid 12 Jews in the basement of a German officer’s house without his knowledge for almost a year — debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.He will change his guild membership status to “financial core,” according to his letter. Under that designation, he will still receive the contract benefits earned by the guild but he will no longer be able to vote or attend any guild meetings. The designation is irreversible and viewed by the guild as an act of disloyalty. The W.G.A. maintains an online list of members who have chosen this status, with a reminder that “Fi-Core is forever.”Mr. Gordon called Tuesday’s letter from the guild “pusillanimous” and faulted it for not calling for a release of the hostages.“I don’t retract anything I said,” he added in an interview. “If one cannot condemn, clearly, and without reservation, what Hamas perpetrated, one’s moral compass is absent, not broken.” More

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      in Movies

      What Hollywood Gets Right and Wrong About B’nai Mitzvah

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      The Jewish ceremony can be the setting for a sharp look at growing up. But it has too often been used for glosses that ignore the rite’s deeper meaning.In the Jewish faith you become an adult at the most awkward possible moment: when you turn 13. Sure, in the eyes of God and your Hebrew school, you are mature enough to read from the Torah and embrace the responsibilities of grown-up life. But in reality you’re probably a scared kid for whom true maturity is far off, despite all those uncomfortable hormones.That was the case when I was bat mitzvahed in 2013 — mortifyingly (but also with a hint of pride) getting my first period shortly before the event — and that’s the case in the new Netflix film “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” based on the 2005 young adult novel by Fiona Rosenbloom.The movie, directed by Sammi Cohen, is the story of Stacy Friedman, played by Sunny Sandler. (Sunny is the daughter of Adam Sandler, who plays her dad in the film. Her real life-sister, Sadie, has been cast as her movie sibling, Ronnie. Their mother, Jackie Sandler, also in the cast, portrays a different girl’s mom — the role of Stacy’s mom went to Idina Menzel, who played Adam’s wife in “Uncut Gems.” Got all that?)Stacy has long dreamed of a blowout bat mitzvah alongside her best friend, Lydia Rodriguez Katz (Samantha Lorraine), but the messy realities of middle school meddle with their party plans. There are ill-advised crushes, moments of embarrassing flirtation and the kind of humiliating cruelty that only a 13-year-old with a grudge can muster. Eventually, Stacy takes the bimah at her bat mitzvah to read her Torah portion, and she learns the kinds of life lessons that come when you’ve emerged from the navel-gazing cocoon of youth.Sunny Sandler in “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.” The film is based on the novel by Fiona Rosenbloom.Netflix“You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” proves, as other movies and shows have before it, that when a bar or bat mitzvah is depicted onscreen, it can often be a savvy vessel for exploring the funny, strange or even traumatic transition from childhood to teenagedom.“Figuring out, who am I, who I want to be — such a Jewish experience,” Cohen, who uses they/them pronouns, told me in an interview, adding that it’s “also just a human experience.”“We don’t all have a bat mitzvah,” she continued, “but we all feel awkward when we have to step out in front of our friends and family and try not to make a mistake.”At the same time, Hollywood can get too caught up in the lavish spectacle of these affairs, with depictions that sap them of their cultural or emotional significance in favor of gags about the superficiality of the post-service party. The spoiled bar or bat mitzvah boy or girl is a trope that comes up repeatedly. In a 2000 “Sex and the City” episode, Samantha (Kim Cattrall) faces off against a rich brat (Kat Dennings) who is hiring a publicist for her bat mitzvah party. “I want it all, I want it now, and I want you to get it for me,” the girl says.During a 2012 episode of “30 Rock,” Tracy (Tracy Morgan) and Jenna (Jane Krakowski) humiliate themselves at a bar mitzvah playing Transformer robots for the demanding son of their accountant. The films “Starsky & Hutch” (2004) and “Safe Men” (1998) found gags in criminals attending bat and bar mitzvahs.From left, Jami Gertz, Jeremy Piven and Daryl Sabara in “Keeping Up With the Steins” (2006). Financial anxiety is a common theme of bar or bat mitzvah movies.Eric McCandless/Miramax FilmsThe b’nai mitzvah party gone wild — celebrating a bat or bar mitzvah — is another staple of the genre. “Keeping Up With the Steins” (2006), directed by Scott Marshall, starts from a place of absurdity with an outlandish “Titanic” movie-themed soirée attended by the Fiedler family. The dad, an “Entourage”-era Jeremy Piven essentially playing a flavor of Ari Gold, does all he can to match the grandiosity of that event for his son. In the process he reconnects with his own father (Garry Marshall), a reunion facilitated by his child (Daryl Sabara). It’s a thin narrative that uses the hook of the over-the-top bar mitzvah for a trite family tale.Financial anxiety is a feature of similar narratives, and it is possible to find nuance in the strange mix of faith and capitalism that b’nai mitzvah spur in Jewish American culture — mostly when the writers, directors and performers lean into what a confusing time it is for the teenagers for whom these ceremonies are ostensibly intended.Sami Rappoport as Becca, a popular girl entering her bat mitzvah reception on “Pen15.” The episode focuses on a gentile’s experience of the event. HuluThe Hulu series “Pen15” is a masterpiece of discomfort — augmented by the fact that its creators and stars, Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, are 30-something actors playing 13-year-olds in middle school. Their characters are not Jewish, but the gawky unease they cultivate is on full display during the episode chronicling the bat mitzvah of a popular girl named Becca (Sami Rappoport), a moment that coincides with their class learning about the Holocaust. The lesson about genocide makes Anna (Konkle) contemplate the very existence of God. The occasion brings on a different kind of unease for Maya (Erskine), who is desperate to impress Becca with a fancy gift despite the fact that it’s a stretch for her parents. “Pen15,” which takes place in the early 2000s, nails the cringe-worthy elements of bat mitzvah-going, whether it’s Becca entering her party belting a song from “Damn Yankees” or the mechanical slow dancing. But at the same time it explores how fraught the tradition can be when it comes to social class.Still, the episode focuses on an outsider’s experience of a bat mitzvah, not an actual Jew’s. So does Cooper Raiff’s 2022 directorial effort, “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” in which he also stars. It’s a bar mitzvah movie with thin acknowledgment of Jewish tradition. Raiff’s aimless college grad Andrew — who is not Jewish — gets a job as a party starter for b’nai mitzvah receptions. It’s a good backdrop for Andrew’s own insecurities; he knows just as little about life as the much younger people around him. But it’s also just that: a backdrop.Cooper Raiff, director and star of “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” another view of the event from an outsider’s perspective. Apple TV+To find a movie that incorporates a bar mitzvah in the fabric of its Jewishness, look to the Coen brothers’ “A Serious Man” (2009), a chronicle of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor in 1967 Minnesota. Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) gets extremely stoned before his bar mitzvah. It’s the kind of stupid thing a little twerp would do, but the disorienting way the Coens film this sequence — with fuzzy visuals and oblique angles — feels like an introduction to a faith of questioning that can itself be disorienting, especially as Danny meets with the aged Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell), who starts reciting Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love” as a prayer.For an even bleaker depiction, there’s Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime” (2010), where the bar mitzvah of Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) coincides with horrific realizations about his father. Timmy’s perception of becoming a man, as he describes in a speech he’s writing for the occasion, is standing up for yourself even if it means getting “just plain tortured.” Solondz’s view is clear: Growing up is pain. There’s less of an engagement with the nature of Judaism here than there is in “A Serious Man,” but Solondz scores sequences with Avinu Malkeinu, a Jewish prayer of repentance usually uttered on the High Holy Days, which serves as a reminder of the human failure on which the director fixates.Aaron Wolff, center, as a bar mitzvah boy who gets stoned before going on the bimah in “A Serious Man.”Wilson Webb/Focus FeaturesIt’s hard to get darker than what Solondz delivers, but even some of the cheeriest b’nai mitzvah stories can have a touch of the grim. In “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” Stacy lashes out at Lydia over a boy, spreading gossip about her and making an embarrassing video that ends up being played on Lydia’s big night. Her petulant acts may seem minor but they have real stakes, as anyone who has ever been betrayed by a friend knows. “Real kids are complicated and messy,” Cohen told me.And it’s true. I have warmly nostalgic memories of my own bat mitzvah that are mixed up with more complicated feelings. I think about a connection to faith that I let lapse and relatives who are no longer alive. I think about the friends with whom I have lost touch. I remember the world in front of me and it being exciting but also so scary. That’s the thematic potential in a b’nai mitzvah, and it’s nice to see that occasionally filmmakers get it right. More

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      in Music

      Leonard Bernstein’s Children Defend Bradley Cooper’s Prosthetic Nose in ‘Maestro’

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      A teaser for the Netflix biopic has ignited a new round of criticism that the family described as a misunderstanding.Leonard Bernstein’s three children came to the defense of the actor and director Bradley Cooper on Wednesday after he drew fresh criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of the midcentury American composer and conductor, who was Jewish, in the forthcoming movie “Maestro.”When the makeup was first revealed last year, some questioned the decision by Cooper, who is not Jewish, to play Bernstein, who died in 1990. In the Netflix film, he stars opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein.The debut of a teaser trailer on Tuesday prompted further discussion on social media about both the prosthesis, which critics said played into an antisemitic trope, and about whether an actor who is Jewish should instead have been cast to play Bernstein, the “West Side Story” composer and music director of the New York Philharmonic.David Baddiel, a British comedian and author of the 2021 book “Jews Don’t Count,” cited Cooper as the latest instance of a gentile actor objectionably portraying a real-life Jewish figure. “I’ve talked about authenticity casting not applying to Jews — and what that means — many times,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The only difference here is it’s more — well — on the nose.”In a series of posts on X, the Bernsteins’ three children — Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein — said that Cooper had consulted with them “along every step of his amazing journey.”“It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts,” they said of Cooper. “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”They added, “Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch.”Through a representative, Cooper declined to comment. Netflix did not reply to a request for comment.“Maestro” premieres next month at the Venice Film Festival and, in North America, in October at the New York Film Festival. A theatrical release in the United States will follow in November before a December debut on Netflix.In recent years, the question of which actors are eligible to play certain roles has been a hot-button issue in movies, television and theater, with an increasing consensus against actors’ portraying characters from marginalized groups whose traits they do not share.Tom Hanks told The New York Times Magazine last year that in contemporary times he would correctly not be cast as a gay man with AIDS, as he was in the 1993 drama “Philadelphia.” At the 2016 Emmy Awards, the actor Jeffrey Tambor said he hoped to be the last cisgender man to play a transgender character, as he did in the series “Transparent.”Some critics, like Baddiel, argue that there is a double standard when it comes to casting Jewish characters, whose portrayal by gentiles is widely tolerated.Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, plays the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a biopic coming out this month (even as Liev Schreiber, who is Jewish, plays Henry Kissinger in the film, “Golda”). In the recent biopic “Oppenheimer,” the Jewish title character was played by the non-Jewish actor Cillian Murphy. More

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      in Movies

      Nechama Tec, Polish Holocaust Survivor and Scholar, Dies at 92

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      She wrote about heroic Jewish resisters in her book “Defiance,” which was later made into a film starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber.Nechama Tec in 2018 at her home in Manhattan. A sociologist, she wrote about Jews as resisters of the Nazis and why certain people became rescuersvia Tec familyNechama Tec, a Polish Jew who pretended to be Roman Catholic to survive the Holocaust and then became a Holocaust scholar, writing about Jews as heroic resisters and why certain people, even antisemites, became rescuers, died on Aug. 3 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.Her death was confirmed by her son, Roland.In “Defiance: The Bielski Partisans” (1993), Dr. Tec’s best-known book, she described the courageous actions of Tuvia Bielski, who commanded a resistance group that fought the Germans and, more important, saved some 1,200 Jews. The partisans entered ghettos under siege and brought Jews back to the Belarusian forest, where Mr. Bielski had built a community for them.“Defiance” gave Dr. Tec a platform to show that Jews saved other Jews during the war and were more active in resisting the Nazis than some have commonly believed.When a friend suggested to the filmmaker Edward Zwick that “Defiance” would make a good movie, he was not immediately persuaded.“Not another movie about victims,” he recalled his response when he wrote in The New York Times about directing the film, released in 2008, which starred Daniel Craig as Tuvia Bielski and Liev Schreiber as his brother Zus.“No, this is a story about Jewish heroes,” he said his friend told him. “Like the Maccabees, only better.”As Mr. Zwick put it, “Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns.”By then Dr. Tec had written “When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland” (1986). Her interviews with rescuers for that book yielded a portrait of Christians who hid Jews, despite the likelihood of being imprisoned or killed for providing such aid. They were, she concluded, outsiders who were marginal in their communities; had a history of performing good deeds; did not view their actions as heroic; and did not agonize over being helpful.The cover of Dr. Tec’s book “Defiance.”“Many were casually antisemitic, but that wasn’t their prime purpose in life,” said Christopher R. Browning, a Holocaust expert who is a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina and who edited, with Dr. Tec and Richard S. Hollander, a collection of letters written by Mr. Hollander’s Polish Jewish family from 1939 to 1942. “Using her skills as a sociologist, she was able to portray a more complex spectrum of interactions than the simplistic ones that people who didn’t collect empirical data as she had.”Nechama Bawnik was born on May 15, 1931, in Lublin, Poland. Her father, Roman, owned a chemical factory. Her mother, Esther (Finkelstein) Bawnik, was a homemaker.Soon after the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, Mr. Bawnik transferred title of his factory, rather than have the Nazis confiscate it, to his foreman, who also gave him a job and a place for the Bawniks, including Nechama’s older sister, Giza, to live on the top floor of the building. Nechama hid in the living quarters, her only link to the outside a hole in a wall that let her look onto the courtyard of a convent school.As conditions for Jews worsened and rumors of deportations frightened them, the family considered relocating to Warsaw but found it too perilous. In mid-1942, Nechama’s parents sent her and Giza to live with a family in Otwock, Poland, a half-hour’s train ride from Warsaw. Nechama had false papers that identified her as Krysia Bloch. To help her play the role, she learned Catholic prayers and a family history.The sisters, who both had blond hair and blue eyes, were able to pass as orphaned nieces of the family they were living with and moved around without hiding. In the summer of 1943, they and their parents moved in with a family in Kielce.When the Bawniks needed money in Kielce, Nechama’s mother baked rolls and sent Nechama to sell them in a local black market. Nechama also sold bottles of vodka that had been distilled by a local farmer, Roland Tec said. Once, he said in a phone interview, a retailer denounced her and the Gestapo chased her away; when she returned, her father told her to run into nearby fields, while her parents hid under floorboards, until it was safe.After the war, the family returned briefly to Lublin and then moved to Berlin. In 1949, Nechama immigrated to Israel, where she met Leon Tec, a Polish-born internist who later became a child psychiatrist. They married in 1950 and moved to the United States two years later.Daniel Craig, left, as Tuvia Bielski and Liev Schreiber as Zus Bielski in the 2008 film “Defiance,” based on Dr. Tec’s book.Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock PhotoNechama studied sociology at Columbia University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1954 and a master’s in 1955.After working at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene, she began teaching sociology in 1957 at Columbia. She then taught at Rutgers University, returned to Columbia and moved to Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., before joining the sociology faculty of the University of Connecticut’s Stamford campus, in 1974. She remained there for 36 years.She earned a Ph.D., also in sociology, from Columbia, in 1965.Dr. Tec said that she had been determined to put her Holocaust past behind her, but that in 1975 her childhood experiences demanded her attention.“When these demands turned into a compelling force,” she wrote in “Defiance,” “I decided to revisit my past by writing an autobiography.”In that autobiography, “Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood” (1982), she recalled the attitude that Helena, the grandmother in the family of rescuers in Kielce, had toward Jews.“I would not harm a Jew,” Dr. Tec recalled Helena saying, “but I see no point in going out of my way to help one.” She added: “You and your family are not like Jews. If they wanted to send you away now, I would not let them.”In another book, “Into the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen” (1990), Dr. Tec explored the life of another Polish Jew, who hid his identity, worked as a translator for the German police and helped save about 200 Jews in the Mir ghetto.“Especially riveting are the details of his translations for his German superiors,” Susan Shapiro wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “in which his careful change of two words could save an entire Jewish community.”After his identity was revealed, Mr. Rufeisen took refuge in a monastery, converted to Catholicism and joined partisan fighters, according to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance and research center in Jerusalem. He became a Catholic priest after the war and moved to Israel, where he joined a monastery on Mount Carmel.In addition to her son, Dr. Tec is survived by her daughter, Leora Tec; two grandsons; one great-grandson; and a half sister, Catharina Knoll. Her husband and her sister, Giza Agmon, both died in 2013.During the filming of “Defiance,” Dr. Tec was pleased to see that the Bielski partisan camp in the Belarusian forest had been faithfully recreated in Lithuania, with a kitchen and workshops to repair shoes and watches and to tan leather.“She was in awe of what they had built; it was really incredible,” said her son, who was a co-producer of the film. He added: “As soon as Daniel Craig saw her on the set, he cornered her and spent an hour or an hour and a half asking her questions. It was wonderful.” More

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      in Theater

      A Comic With Many Questions About Jews and Whiteness

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      Alex Edelman thrives on doubt in “Just for Us” on Broadway. It’s the result of years of revision and notes from Seinfeld, Birbiglia and the late Adam Brace.When Jerry Seinfeld talked to the comic Alex Edelman after seeing him perform “Just for Us,” his solo show that began previews on Broadway this week, he gave him one note: Don’t acknowledge the audience’s response to a joke onstage.Edelman, 34, took it, even though he has the kind of sensitive, hyperactive mind that can’t help but look past the fourth wall. In an interview recently at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side, he kept peeking at my list of questions, inquiring why I was writing down “L’s” (I wasn’t) and periodically asking me how he was doing (very well). He seemed to answer questions while simultaneously imagining how they were playing, even in emotional moments like discussing his longtime friend, collaborator and director Adam Brace, who tragically died in April at 43 after a stroke.Brace had been critical at every stage of Edelman’s show from its inception in 2018 through hundreds of performances, and after almost all of them the British director gave him notes. “He looked after the flow of the show,” Edelman said, which is why the comic paused in our conversation as he considered a joke he had worked on at the Comedy Cellar the night before, his eyes watering as he said how much he missed having Brace as a sounding board. He then imagined how getting choked up would come off, writing the sentence out loud (“and his eyes fill up”) before quipping: “Don’t overdo it.”During the pandemic, “Just for Us,” a thoughtful, punchline-dense comedy, skipped past downtown hit into the rarefied air of cultural phenomenon. I knew it made the zeitgeist when friends not especially interested in comedy approached me wanting to talk about it. The autobiographical show benefits from a killer elevator pitch: Orthodox Jewish comic gets accidentally invited to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, attends and has a meet-cute flirtation with a racist.When “Just for Us” ran in Washington, D.C., it became the second-highest-grossing show in Woolly Mammoth Theater’s 43-year history. Asked about this success by phone, its artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, recalled telling Jewish staff members: “Y’all show up.”But unlike current Broadway shows that explore antisemitism like “Parade” or “Leopoldstadt,” Edelman isn’t looking back at the past but toward the identity politics of the moment. One reason “Just for Us” has resonated with audiences is that it’s one of the few new shows to dig into the relationship between Jews and whiteness. “Growing up I always wanted to be white,” Edelman says in the show. This gets a laugh because he presents as white, but not all groups see him that way, which he called “almost a founding tension” of the show.After one performance, an audience member told Edelman he always thought Jews were white until he saw the show. Someone behind him responded that they always thought Jews weren’t white. Edelman looked pleased by this exchange. “It’s the induction of doubt,” he explained to me, adding that he told them: “You’re both right.”Edelman at the Comedy Cellar, where he continues to work out jokes.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHis instinct is to question, not answer, to air strong opinions but not settle into them too securely. When Kanye West comes up in our conversation, Edelman described a Jewish friend who resented the expectation that he should be outraged by the rapper’s trafficking in Jewish stereotypes, describing it as “taking our turn on the victim wheel.” In our talk, Edelman articulated this position with passion but didn’t go so far as to agree. His point is that his show aims to “have the conversation about Jews in their place on that spectrum of whiteness without having a conversation about victimhood.”Growing up in Boston, the child of a professor of biomedical engineering and a real estate lawyer, Edelman, who has a slight build and floppy hair, has been doing stand-up since he was a teenager. (He has had long-term romantic relationships with the female comics Katherine Ryan and more recently, Hannah Einbinder, though they broke up a month ago.) He describes his early influences as “not great,” explaining that “if I’m being honest, I saw a lot of racist comedy, self-congratulatory and smug.” He described discovering his voice when he went to London during college, and recalled one key turning point when the British comic Josie Long took him aside and said, “What you’re doing is getting laughs but it’s not who you are.”Even more important, at 23, he met Brace at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s birthday party. They talked comedy and Brace later asked him if he could give him notes. Brace was especially alert to the dramaturgy of a show, insisting on cutting jokes that worked if they weren’t worth the lost momentum. If Edelman riffed too much, Brace told him: You’re on the jazz tonight. Their running conversations continued over the next decade.In early June, I accompanied Edelman to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch old recordings of Broadway performances by artists like Billy Crystal (who also gave him a note after a show) and Eric Bogosian. When a man at the desk told him that he could see “The Producers” only with the approval of its director, Susan Stroman, and she was in London, Edelman looked down at his phone, shot off a text and within a minute had her approval. The man at the desk looked surprised, then added that he also needed the approval of Robin Wagner, the show’s set designer, and he had died the previous week. After a pregnant pause, Edelman deadpanned: “That’s beyond my ability.”When asked about how he seems to know everyone, Edelman said these were all people he approached because he was genuinely curious about them. “The thing everyone says but maybe doesn’t internalize is: You just have to show up,” he explained, before adding that there is privilege in knowing you are able to do so.The previous month, when in Boston, he knocked on the door of the 94-year-old comedy legend Tom Lehrer, whom he did not know, just to talk. “I told him I was a comedian,” Edelman reported. “And he said, ‘What problem do you need solving?’”In a more critical example of showing up, Edelman approached Mike Birbiglia in 2019. “We had an older brother, younger brother relationship,” Birbiglia said by phone. “He’d ask to pick my brain and I’d say I’m very busy.”This time, however, when Edelman described “Just for Us,” Birbiglia heard a surprising, relatable story that had more potential. He told Edelman to keep working on it. After producing one performance, Birbiglia, who is not Jewish, encouraged him to strengthen its spine. With a chuckle, he recalled that one note was to make it more Jewish.Edelman returned to London and he and Brace rebuilt the show as controversy raged in the Labour Party there over its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attitudes toward Jews, which Edelman said informed the writing. After opening Off Broadway in 2021 to rave reviews, “Just for Us” became a hit.With Brace gone, Edelman said he had leaned on Birbiglia more, both for notes and emotional support. When I asked Birbiglia what Edelman was good at besides comedy, he said with a small snort: “Newspaper interviews.” Later that night, he texted me that “one of Alex’s remarkable talents is he’s willing to continue to rewrite and experiment on a show that had already reviewed well” at festivals like the Edinburgh Fringe. “That’s a very rare quality,” the text continued, “and I think it bodes well for whatever he chooses to do next.”That has been on Edelman’s mind. He had planned to make his follow-up about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject he has been fascinated by since he was a kid, but doing so without Brace seemed daunting.And yet, there was something about the cantankerous impossibility of this dispute that clearly appeals to him. One of the first things Edelman told me in our interview was: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”He thought it was from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, but reconsidered, brow furrowed, then looked it up on his phone and realized it was from the poet William Butler Yeats. “I have so much doubt,” he said, “which is why I have so much patience for both sides of the argument.” More

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      in Music

      Ishay Ribo, Religious Pop Star, Is Winning Over Secular Israel

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      The songs of Ishay Ribo, who was raised in a settlement on the West Bank, are a staple of Israeli radio. He is part of a wave of singers from religious backgrounds who are also gaining a wider audience.The singer and his songs were highly religious. His concert venue, on a kibbutz developed by secular leftists, was definitely not. His audience of many hundreds? It was somewhere in between: some secular, some devout, an unusual blending of two sections of a divided Israeli society that rarely otherwise mix.Ishay Ribo, 34, is among a crop of young Israeli pop stars from religious backgrounds, some from Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, whose music is attracting more diverse listeners, and featuring prominently in the soundscape of contemporary Israeli life.This has surprised Mr. Ribo himself.“I never imagined I’d play to this kind of crowd,” he said, backstage after the show earlier this year at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, a town in northern Israel originally founded as a collective farm. A decade ago, he said, “This kind of crowd just didn’t really exist.”In addition to Mr. Ribo, other singers from a religious background — like Nathan Goshen, Hanan Ben-Ari, Akiva Turgeman and Narkis Reuven-Nagar — have also in recent years gained a wider audience. And their popularity reflects a changing Israeli society.Fans of Mr. Ribo at the Jerusalem Theater, where he performed in January. Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesThe religious right has expanded its influence on politics and society, escalating a clash between secular and sacred visions of the country that underlies the country’s ongoing judicial standoff. At the same time, religion has taken on a more prominent, and less contentious, role in the mainstream music scene.In less than two decades, religious singers have moved from the cultural fringe to widespread acclaim, “not only among their people, but in all Israel,” said Yoav Kutner, a leading Israeli music critic and radio presenter.“If you don’t listen to the words,” Mr. Kutner added, “they sound like Israeli pop.”Mr. Ribo is perhaps the clearest example of this shift. Forgoing the erotic and the profane, his wholesome songs are often prayers to God — but sung to pop and rock music played by his band of guitarists. “Cause of causes,” he addresses God in one of his biggest hits. “Only you should be thanked for all the days and nights.”In 2021, that track, “Sibat Hasibot,” was the most played song on Israeli radio stations, religious and secular alike.“It’s part of my duty,” Mr. Ribo said in a recent interview. “To be a bridge between these two worlds.”Mr. Ribo’s journey toward that bridging role began in the early 2000s, on the bus to his religious school.His family had immigrated from France a few years before. They led an ultra-Orthodox and ascetic life on a settlement in the occupied West Bank, just outside Jerusalem.The family did not have a television, and Mr. Ribo attended an ultraconservative Jewish seminary. He listened to music on religious radio stations — often liturgical poems sung in synagogues. He typically heard secular music only on the bus to school, playing from the driver’s radio.“I had this musical ignorance,” Mr. Ribo said.At age 11 or so, he began recording simple songs on a portable cassette player. Then as now, his lyrics were infused with piety, Mr. Ribo said. But the tunes were inspired by the mainstream singer-songwriters he’d heard on the school bus.Some four years later, Mr. Ribo bought a guitar and formed a band with another seminary student. He began to practice and dress as a Modern Orthodox Jew, forgoing the dark coats and wide-brimmed hats of the ultra-Orthodox for jeans and sweaters.But his awareness of contemporary music and its customs was still patchy. At his band’s first gig, Mr. Ribo played with his back to the audience, unaware of the need to engage with the crowd.Unlike many Israelis from ultra-Orthodox Jewish backgrounds, he paused his religious studies at age 22 to serve for two years as a conscript in the army. After finishing service in 2013, he tried to build a hybrid musical career — playing religious music to both secular and devout audiences.Mr. Ribo and his father studying the Torah in Jerusalem.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesHe imagined his melodies might sound like Coldplay, the popular British rock band, but his lyrics, he added, “would be about God and faith.”The challenge was that there were few templates then for such a crossover career.Only a few religious artists, like the folk singer Shlomo Carlebach, had built a secular following. The most successful religious artists were often those, like Etti Ankri and Ehud Banai, who had started out secular, became more devout, and then took their original audiences along with them.Mr. Ribo’s problem, initially, was that the music industry “didn’t understand what I had to offer,” he said.When he sent his music to mainstream record labels, they all turned him down.Mr. Ribo forged ahead, self-releasing the first of five albums in 2014. He hired a secular manager, Or Davidson, who marketed him as if he was a secular client — booking him to play at mainstream venues and securing him airtime on nonreligious radio stations. Gradually, his secular fan base expanded.Mr. Ribo’s 2021 hit, “Sibat Hasibot,” was the most played song on Israeli radio stations, religious and secular alike.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesIt was sometimes a fraught balancing act.Religious Jews criticized him for playing at secular concert halls. Secular Jews opposed his performances at religious venues where men and women sat separately. And when he played to both audiences at secular venues, the staff could not provide kosher food for his religious fans. Even his parents were too religiously observant to attend some of the venues.But the two-pronged approach ultimately worked. Four of his five albums were classified as gold or above — selling more than 15,000 copies in the small Israeli market. Secular pop legends, including Shlomo Artzi, began to perform duets with him, and he began to build an audience among diaspora Jews. Later this year, he is scheduled to headline Madison Square Garden, Mr. Davidson said.To an extent, Mr. Ribo’s appeal is rooted simply in the catchiness of his songs, his clean-cut demeanor and sincere performances.“Even though I’m secular, I came to watch him because he’s lovely,” said Adiva Liberman, 71, a retired teacher attending his concert at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel.“Not everyone is paying attention to the lyrics,” she added. “They’re just attracted to the melody.”The scene after Mr. Ribo’s concert at the Jerusalem Theater. His music attracts a diverse crowd of secular and religious Israelis.Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesMr. Ribo’s rise comes amid not only a political shift rightward in Israel, but demographic changes as well. Religious Israelis, who have more children than secular Israelis, are the fastest-growing part of the population, allowing them to exert greater cultural influence.Daniel Zamir, an Israeli jazz star who turned religious as an adult, said Mr. Ribo’s broad appeal is part of “a bigger process of Israeli society moving toward tradition.”Simultaneously, Mr. Ribo’s rise embodies a converse but complementary trend: greater willingness among some religious musicians to cater to and mix with mainstream audiences, and greater demand among religious audiences for music with a more contemporary sound.It’s “a dual process,” Mr. Zamir said. Mr. Ribo is emblematic of “this new generation that saw that you could be religious and also make great music,” Mr. Zamir added.For some secular consumers, the rise of “pop emuni” — “faith pop” in Hebrew — has been jarring. “I am not interested in hearing prayers on my radio,” wrote Gal Uchovsky, a television presenter, in a 2019 article about the proliferation of Mr. Ribo’s music. “I don’t want them to explain to me, even in songs that brighten my journey, how fun God is.”Mr. Ribo’s latest song, “I Belong to the People,” also caused discomfort among liberal Israelis. Released in early April, it is an attempt to unite Jews at a time of deep political division in Israel. But critics said it unwittingly sounded condescending to people from other faiths, implying they were idolatrous.Mr. Ribo has also caused discomfort within the religious world. Some ultra-Orthodox Jews, particularly their religious leaders, feel he has delved too far into secular society.Early in his career, Mr. Ribo personally felt so conflicted about this that he sought his rabbi’s approval for his work. To avoid alienating his religious base, there are still some lines he refuses to cross.“I’d love to write a classic love song — but I won’t,” Mr. Ribo said. “It’s not my job or duty.”Still, some feel he has already compromised too much. In a popular sketch performed by an ultra-Orthodox comedy duo, an ultra-Orthodox man is asked if he knows any secular singers.The man pauses, then replies: “Ishay Ribo!”“I’d love to write a classic love song — but I won’t,” Mr. Ribo said. “It’s not my job or duty.”Avishag Shaar-Yashuv for The New York TimesGabby Sobelman More

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      in Theater

      Micaela Diamond, From Broadway’s ‘Parade,’ Sings Her Favorite Joni Mitchell Song

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      The actor, who learned to love music at her local temple, has developed a different relationship to her Judaism onstage.Micaela Diamond once thought she might make a good cantor. The 23-year-old actor loved singing with the congregation at the conservative synagogue she attended as a child in Margate, N.J., just outside Atlantic City. Much has changed since then, notably that you can now hear Diamond’s powerful soprano on Broadway stages. But she’s still, in a way, performing Jewish music: the songs of Jason Robert Brown’s “Parade,” the Broadway revival of which opens March 16.The musical, which first premiered in 1998 with a book by Alfred Uhry, is based on the life of Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew who in 1915, while imprisoned after the murder of a young girl he employed at a factory, was pulled from jail by a mob and lynched. Diamond was first cast for the revival’s brief run at New York City Center last fall; she stars opposite Ben Platt as Frank’s wife and fiercest advocate, Lucille.It’s an intense role vocally, with forceful numbers like “You Don’t Know This Man” and “Do It Alone,” sung by Carolee Carmello in the original Broadway production before Diamond was even born. But another difficulty is handling the emotional exhaustion that stems from the themes of violence and antisemitism coursing throughout the piece. “Being able to tell this story to other Jews, to non-Jews, to start nuanced discussions … about what it means to be a Jew and how hatred is inherited is what I want my life’s work to be,” Diamond says. “So much of my identity lives in this show.”Diamond grew up steeped in Margate’s large Jewish community, but stopped attending services when she moved to New York City with her mother while in middle school. She later found other ways to explore her religion, like joining fellow classmates in the Jewish community club at Manhattan’s LaGuardia High School, one of the country’s most prominent public training grounds for artists. “I just started asking more questions, which, in the end, is a very Jewish thing to do,” Diamond says. “I think my Judaism is Sarah Silverman and a bagel with schmear.”Diamond had planned to join the musical theater program at Carnegie Mellon University when she got her final callback (while jet-lagged after a Birthright trip to Israel, no less) for her first Broadway production, “The Cher Show,” in which she played a young version of the singer in 2018. That nearly yearlong run was an educational experience of its own — particularly, Diamond says, in learning how to take care of herself while doing eight shows a week. (“Like, does a leading lady have to go to Equinox … every single day?”)For “Parade,” perhaps unsurprisingly, Diamond is prioritizing “more care for my heart than my body” — in part by gathering with other Jewish cast members to pray together backstage before each performance. “It just feels like honoring Leo and Lucille and remembering how lucky we are to be Jews telling this story,” she says. “It does feel like this kind of centering, and a way to connect to them, before we go through some Jewish trauma onstage.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Diamond to sing and discuss one of her favorite songs, Joni Mitchell’s “Cactus Tree” (1968), above. More