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      Is It Funny for the Jews?

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In the climactic scene of the musical “Caroline, or Change,” an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Noah, and his African American maid, Caroline, living in the Jim Crow South, get into a heated fight and end up trading ugly insults. Noah says he hopes a bomb kills all Black people, and Caroline responds that all Jews will go to hell.It’s always a charged moment, but there was something peculiarly unsettling about it the night I saw the recent Broadway revival. For while there was silence after Noah’s hateful outburst, what followed Caroline’s comment was something I did not expect: laughter. Nervous giggling in uncomfortable moments can be a coping mechanism. And that wasn’t the audience reaction every night. But in a radio interview, Sharon D Clarke, who played the title character, said that at the majority of shows, there was laughter. She was disturbed by it but couldn’t explain it.I found it jarring because I thought I could. Of course it’s impossible to get inside the heads of theatergoers, but as a Jewish person, I recognized this laughter. Who would buy a ticket to a Broadway show and chuckle at the eternal damnation of Jewish people other than Jews?There is a long, rich Jewish tradition of grappling with antisemitism by laughing at it. This has produced a vast amount of great comedy, from Mel Brooks turning Nazis into musical theater buffoons in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, leading the denizens of a Southern bar in singing, “Throw the Jew down the well.” There is a sensibility behind these jokes that I grew up around and have long embraced.Adam Makké as Noah and Sharon D Clarke as Caroline in the recent Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power. I’ve been persuaded by that idea, and like many secular types, a Jewish sense of humor is more integral to my identity than any religious observance. It’s also a source of pride. A resilient comic sensibility that finds joy in dark places is one of the greatest Jewish legacies — as is an ability to laugh at ourselves.Those hung up on the question of whether the latest news is good for the Jews always seemed not only hopelessly ineffective but also tedious. Scolds from the Anti-Defamation League, alert to the damage done by every Jewish stereotype, will never end an ancient prejudice, but they could ruin a good time. And yet, as a critic engaging with a chaotic and constantly changing culture, in an online world that seems somehow both more outraged by and tolerant of hate speech, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of condescension. It’s too glib. And that has made me look closer at the disturbing rise in antisemitism today, Jewish culture and identity, and the implications of what we find funny.THERE’S BEEN GROWING PUSHBACK in the last year from some Jews about double standards in the cultural conversation. Take the increasingly politicized issue of casting, which has inspired considerable controversy. We have never been more sensitive to issues of whitewashing, appropriation and representation. Think of Scarlett Johansson being hired for an Asian role. But when gentiles are cast as Golda Meir or Mrs. Maisel or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is little blowback. The superb indie comedy “Shiva Baby” tackles explicitly Jewish themes, but the fact that the lead is played by a Catholic stand-up, Rachel Sennott, barely raised an eyebrow.On her podcast, Sarah Silverman has spoken passionately about how Jewish characters are regularly played by gentile actors, specifically lamenting the lack of meaty roles for women. “The pattern in film is just undeniable,” she said, “and the pattern is — if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is never played by a Jew.”Gentile performers playing Jewish characters include, from left, Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby” and Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Photographs by Jonathan Wenk/Focus Features; Utopia; Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Prime VideoShe delivered this sharp monologue with an ambivalence that also resonated with me. Acting requires an empathetic leap of imagination. Like Silverman, I know that great performers of any religion can and have brilliantly played Jews, and it’s easier to pass as Jewish than, say, African American. But is experience as a Jewish person irrelevant to playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (as Alfred Molina, who was raised Catholic, did on Broadway) or to embodying Joan Rivers in a biopic? (Before the project fell apart, the gentile Kathryn Hahn was slated to play her.) I think it matters. When a gentile plays a Jew, the results are often more affected, the mannerisms pronounced, which can often mean the difference between someone playing Jewish vs. inhabiting a Jewish character.In his book “Jews Don’t Count,” the British comic David Baddiel argues that casting is one of many issues in contemporary discourse that illustrate how antisemitism is far more acceptable than other forms of bigotry. One need only point to the career of Mel Gibson to find evidence. Part of the reason, Baddiel explains, is that at a time when we are particularly sensitive to power imbalances, what distinguishes antisemitism is that the bigot imagines Jewish people as both low status (rats, venal) and high status (running the banks, part of a globalist conspiracy).Jewish people have clearly been tremendously successful in Hollywood, on Broadway and in comedy, among other artistic pursuits, but that doesn’t erase the specific discriminatory shadow hovering behind their rise. Silverman points to the number of famous Jews who have changed their names. “If Winona Ryder had stayed Winona Horowitz, would she have starred in ‘The Age of Innocence’?” Silverman has asked. “She wouldn’t.”Behind the discussion of gentiles in Jewish roles is the long history of Hollywood anxiety that a work will be “too Jewish,” words that have haunted Jewish artists for generations. The first time Jerry Seinfeld appeared on a sitcom, on “Benson” in 1980, he played a courier trying to sell a joke for the governor to use in a speech. When one flopped (“Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah”), he asked: “Too Jewish?” Nine years later, a Jewish NBC executive dismissed the pilot for “Seinfeld” as “too New York, too Jewish,” and while it was picked up, the network ordered only four episodes.In the most memorable joke of his breakthrough 1986 Broadway comedy, “The World According to Me,” the comic Jackie Mason said, “You know what’s going to happen after this show: The gentiles are going to say, ‘It’s a hit.’ And the Jews are going to say, ‘Too Jewish.’” Mason delivers this cheerfully, but there’s a bristling undercurrent, a finger wag about self-loathing.Jackie Mason’s accent reflected a bold refusal to assimilate.Mario Ruiz/Getty ImagesMason has always been a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Compared with my favorite comics, he seemed impossibly old-fashioned, not just in his borscht belt rhythms, but also in having bits centered on how fundamentally alien gentiles were to Jews. But listening to him again more recently, I detected a defiance that was, in its own way, radical, even countercultural. His accent itself, which if anything got thicker as he got older, represented a bold refusal to assimilate. The Jewish artists who found mainstream success didn’t sound like him.And when he died last year, with a modest amount of media attention paid to his legacy, it made me wonder about the obstacle course of Jewish success in a country where we are a tiny minority. But I also thought about the role played by Jewish people measuring the degree of acceptable Jewishness, the kind Mason was talking about in his show.WHEN REPRESENTATION IN CULTURE is discussed today, what’s often emphasized is how valuable it can be when children from minority groups see or hear someone like them and how that can expand their horizons. I have never felt this was an issue for me, because there seemed to be an abundance of Jewish people in the arts. Sure, some changed their names or played down their background, but we could tell. I never questioned the idea that Jews had been well represented in popular culture until I read Jeremy Dauber’s book “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” and learned that not one leading character on prime-time television clearly identified as Jewish from 1954 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1987.That came as a surprise and made me reconsider my 1980s childhood diet of pop culture. Back then, this mainly consisted of the offerings of three television networks, along with the occasional PG movie. This was the era of “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” and I couldn’t think of a single Jewish character on a show I watched until I became a teenager. But a major shift for Jewish representation took place in 1989. That’s when “Seinfeld,” “Anything but Love” with Richard Lewis and “Chicken Soup” with Mason all premiered. (It’s also the year of “When Harry Met Sally.”) What’s striking about this influx of Jewish characters is that only one kind was allowed: A male stand-up with a gentile love interest.“Seinfeld,” left, and “When Harry Met Sally” typified the ’80s pairings of Jewish funny guys and gentile women.Monty Brinton/NBC, via Getty Images; Columbia PicturesIn order to not be too Jewish in the popular culture of my youth, you had to be a funny man interested in someone from another background. For a funny Jewish woman, you had to wait until “The Nanny.”How much did it matter that as a boy I saw no Jewish couples on television? I’m not certain — draw your own conclusions about the fact that I married a non-Jew.But one thing I surely developed as a young Jewish culture vulture were the tools to enjoy work by antisemites. The most formative artists I loved as a kid, from Roald Dahl to Ice Cube to H.P. Lovecraft, have track records of hateful comments toward Jews. I knew this even then.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Review: In ‘Prayer for the French Republic,’ Echoes of the Past

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      Joshua Harmon’s ambitious new play toggles between a contemporary Jewish family facing growing antisemitism and their relatives during World War II.The well of naïve young Americans being schooled in life, love, politics and croissants by effortlessly worldly French people is in no danger of running dry. The latest addition to this cohort is 20-year-old Molly, a New Yorker who has just met her distant cousins in Paris.Thankfully it is they, not sweet, passive Molly, who are the subjects of “Prayer for the French Republic,” Joshua Harmon’s ambitious and maddening, thought-provoking and schematic new play, directed by David Cromer at Manhattan Theater Club.At the very beginning, the matriarch, Marcelle Salomon Benhamou (an excellent Betsy Aidem), painstakingly explains her family’s genealogical ties to Molly (Molly Ranson). They are so complicated that Marcelle has to repeat them for the young woman’s benefit, and of course the audience’s as well. Even then, it takes much of the play’s three-hour running time and some toggling between 2016-17 and 1944-46 for the connections and their consequences to sink in.Harmon (“Significant Other,” “Admissions”) has set himself quite a challenge because Molly has arrived at a critical juncture for Marcelle; her husband, Charles (Jeff Seymour); and their 20-something children, Daniel (Yair Ben-Dor) and Elodie (Francis Benhamou). Daniel, who wears a kipa, has come home with a bloodied face after an antisemitic aggression. It is just another example of what Charles feels is an increasingly scary climate for Jews in France, a last straw that makes him want to move to Israel.Betsy Aidem, left, and Richard Topol as siblings in Joshua Harmon’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s the suitcase, or the coffin,” he says, referring to his ancestors’ forced wandering as he may be about to emulate it. (One of the play’s most fascinating aspects, though an underexplored one, is how these characters represent two strands of French Judaism: Marcelle’s Ashkenazi ancestors have been rooted in France for centuries, while Charles’s are Sephardic Jews who lived in North Africa for generations before relocating from Algeria in the 1960s.)The Benhamous have spirited arguments that have the urgency of life-or-death decisions: Should they stay or should they go? What does it mean to be Jewish in France? (The play’s title refers to a prayer that has been said in French synagogues since the early 19th century.)Some of the show’s concerns, including the temptation of appeasement via assimilation — a position embodied by Marcelle’s brother, Patrick (Richard Topol) — echo those Harmon explored, in a much more comic vein, in his blistering debut, “Bad Jews,” from 2012. That show was dominated by a hurricane-like character named Daphna, and she now has a marginally milder-mannered relative in Elodie, who injects volatile energy every time she opens her mouth.Incidentally, Ranson was also in “Bad Jews” and once again finds herself on the receiving end of impassioned, and often wickedly funny, tirades and put-downs that have the biting rhythm of New York Jewish humor rather than a French sensibility. (A faux pas: The Benhamous buy croissants in an American-type cardboard box rather than the paper bags used in French boulangeries.)From left: Nancy Robinette, Kenneth Tigar, Peyton Lusk and Ari Brand in one of the scenes from the end of World War II.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of this would be enough to pack any story, but Harmon also transports us to the end of World War II for several scenes with Marcelle and Patrick’s older relatives — their grandparents, Irma and Adolphe Salomon (Nancy Robinette and Kenneth Tigar, both heart-wrenching), have somehow managed to survive in occupied Paris and held on to their piano store.The two narratives progressively start bleeding into each other, with Marcelle and Patrick’s father, Pierre (Peyton Lusk in the 1940s, Pierre Epstein in the 2010s), embodying the link, both literal and metaphorical, between past and present.Cromer, a technically astute and emotionally sensitive director, handles the back and forth as well as you might expect — he puts a stage turntable to evocative, if perhaps a little clichéd, use, for example. Still, it’s not hard to feel the show’s tension slacken when we leave the Benhamous. The play’s finale aims for the lofty and falls terribly short, but it does represent the family’s tragedy: they want to be part of a country that may never fully accept them.Prayer for the French RepublicThrough Feb. 27 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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      in Television

      Whoopi Goldberg Apologizes for Saying Holocaust Was ‘Not About Race’

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      Ms. Goldberg’s comments, on Monday’s episode of “The View,” came amid growing ignorance about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism.Whoopi Goldberg, the comedian and actress who is also a co-host of the ABC talk show “The View,” said repeatedly during an episode of the show that aired on Monday that the Holocaust was not about race, comments that come at a time of rising antisemitism globally. She later apologized.In the episode, Ms. Goldberg said the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When one of her co-hosts challenged that assertion, saying the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, Ms. Goldberg said: “But these are two white groups of people.”She added, “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.” As she continued to speak, music came on, indicating a commercial break.There was a fierce backlash. Jewish groups said Ms. Goldberg’s comments were dangerous and the latest example of growing ignorance about the Nazi genocide. During World War II, under a policy of mass extermination, the Nazis killed six million Jews — about a third of the world’s Jewish population at the time — because they believed Jews were an inferior race.Later Monday, Ms. Goldberg appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” where she apologized, explaining that, as a Black person, she thinks of racism as being based on skin color but that she realized not everyone sees it that way. “I get it. Folks are angry,” she said. “I accept that, and I did it to myself.”She apologized again on Tuesday at the start of “The View.” She expressed remorse over her remarks, saying she realized that they were misinformed and that she had misspoken.“I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention,” Ms. Goldberg said. “And I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.”On Monday, Ms. Goldberg had been discussing a Tennessee school district’s recent decision to remove a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from its curriculum when she made her initial comments on Monday’s episode. On Monday night, she released a statement apologizing for them. On Tuesday, she said that she had learned from the experience.“It is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said. “Now, words matter, and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people, as they know and y’all know because I’ve always done that.”During an appearance on the show on Tuesday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said it was critical to combat hate and misinformation about the Holocaust.“The Holocaust happened and we need to learn from this genocide if we want to prevent future tragedies from happening,” Mr. Greenblatt said.Mr. Greenblatt suggested that “The View” should consider adding a Jewish host to its panel.“Think about having a Jewish host on this show who can bring these issues of antisemitism, who can bring these issues of representation to ‘The View’ every single day,” he said.Ms. Goldberg, 66, did not mention having a Jewish background, as she has in the past. She has said in interviews that she does not practice any religion but identifies as Jewish and adopted her distinctive stage name partly because of that. She was born Caryn Johnson.In 1994, Ms. Goldberg mentioned her ties to Judaism in an interview with The Orlando Sentinel, after the Anti-Defamation League criticized a recipe that she contributed to a charity cookbook for “Jewish American princess fried chicken.” The title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, she said.“I am a Jewish-American princess,” she told the newspaper. “That’s probably what bothers people most. It’s not my problem people are uncomfortable with the fact that I’m Jewish.”This week, the criticism of Ms. Goldberg’s remarks was intense. Before he was invited onto “The View,” Mr. Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League wrote on Twitter: “No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race. They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”And Mrs. Goldberg’s former co-host, Meghan McCain, said on Twitter on Monday that antisemitism was “a poison that is increasingly excused in our culture and television — and permeates in spaces that should shock us all.”According to a 2014 report by the Anti-Defamation League, more than one billion people globally hold antisemitic views. More than a third of people in the 102 countries polled had never heard of the Holocaust, the report found.Jewish communities around the world have indicated an increase in annual antisemitic incidents, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League. That feeling is pronounced in Europe, where 89 percent of Jews felt that antisemitism in their countries had increased between 2013 and 2018, according to a 2018 European Union survey of about 16,500 Jewish people.The survey also found that 40 percent of European Jews worried about being physically attacked, and across 12 E.U. countries where Jews have been living for centuries, more than a third said they were considering emigrating because they no longer felt safe as Jews.Last month, the United Nations adopted a resolution that condemns denial and distortion of the Holocaust. Ms. Goldberg’s comments also came weeks after a gunman held several people hostage at a Texas synagogue for 11 hours.David Baddiel, a British comedian and the author of the book “Jews Don’t Count,” said in an interview that antisemitism has very little to do with religion itself — descendants of Jewish people who had converted to Christianity were also killed in the Holocaust because they were viewed as members of the Jewish race.“If you are a race, an ethnicity, as Jews are, that have suffered persecution over many, many centuries, principally because that happens to be who you are, happens to be who your parents are, happens to be who your ancestors are, then that is racism,” Mr. Baddiel said.“There is no other word for it.” More

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      Review: ‘Just for Us’ Reaches Across the Chasm

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      The return of this brisk, smart provocation of a monologue is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show.On a narrow, curving street in the West Village of Manhattan, a sign of hope: A production that went dark just before Christmas, as the Omicron variant descended on the city, has opened back up at the Cherry Lane Theater.Sure, that’s what the comedian Alex Edelman’s publicists said would happen when his solo show, “Just for Us,” abruptly cut short its run there in December, promising a Jan. 24 return. But when a production goes into pandemic hibernation, it’s easy to worry that it won’t emerge again.The return of “Just for Us,” then, is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show. A brisk, smart provocation of a monologue, it’s about race and identity in American culture, and about the tantalizing impulse to reach across the chasm to the hard-core bigots among us.Such as the white supremacists who, Edelman tells us, tweeted a public invitation to a meeting they were having in Queens — though when he took them up on it, he went as an infiltrator. Hoping that no one would realize he was Jewish, he didn’t exactly have unity on his mind. But then he spied an attractive woman he calls Chelsea, and decided to chat her up.“I thought to myself, with no irony: You never know,” he says, and widens his eyes at his own idiocy.He twines the story of that prepandemic gathering, which began with the assembled racists grousing about the then-recent wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with a recollection from his early childhood: the time his mother, seeking to comfort a bereaved friend, decided that their Orthodox Jewish family would host a Christmas celebration for her, complete with presents and a tree. With a dreidel on top.Is the dreidel detail true? An embellishment? Either way, it works. Tom Stoppard makes a similar joke in his recent epic play “Leopoldstadt,” only there the tree topper is a Star of David. The two shows are apples and oranges, but antisemitism and assimilation are major themes in both. Stoppard is writing about historical Nazis, while Edelman disparages the 21st-century bigots as “Nerf Nazis”: pathetic wannabes. “These are not life’s winners,” he says.Directed by Adam Brace, “Just for Us” is an inherently political piece from a comedian who says he has tended to avoid talking politics onstage. (“Because it bums everybody out!” Edelman booms near the start.) It’s about whiteness, the privileges that accompany it and the hierarchy that — as he saw growing up in Boston — rates Mayflower-descendant types as an aspirational American ideal.More philosophically, the show pokes and prods at empathy and morality, and the ways that othering whole categories of people makes it easy to dehumanize them. Which is a sharply relevant observation in the midst of this ideologically polarized public health crisis.“It’s so hard to hate up close,” Edelman says, but of course that isn’t true for everyone. The white supremacists at the meeting, it turns out, seemed to have no problem with hating him. Which rankled, because part of him wanted them to like him. And yes, he knows that’s absurd.Edelman ends “Just for Us” on a deliciously funny high: by recounting his petty, perfect act of vengeance against the white supremacists. The show itself counts as another revenge — bigger, bolder and with the audience at the Cherry Lane firmly on his side.Just for UsThrough Feb. 19 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Witness,’ Seeking a Haven for Jewish Refugees

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      The experience of Jews who fled Germany in 1939 aboard the St. Louis luxury liner is the subject of a new production from the Arlekin Players Theater.Aboard the luxury liner St. Louis, more than 900 passengers waited helplessly at sea. In May 1939, on the eve of World War II, they were Jewish refugees fleeing post-Kristallnacht Germany. Despite having papers meant to let them into Cuba, they were barred from disembarking once they got there.Hoping for a haven, the boat lingered for a while off the Florida coast, while news stories chronicled the passengers’ increasing desperation. Yet the United States also refused the refugees. As the St. Louis carried them back to Hamburg in early June, The New York Times called it “the saddest ship afloat.”That ship is the setting for “Witness,” a livestreaming documentary theater piece from Arlekin Players Theater in Needham, Mass., where the cast performs in front of green screens. Conceived and directed by Igor Golyak, Arlekin’s artistic director, the production bears witness to stories from wave after wave of Jewish refugees over many decades, and to what it sees as the eternal outsider experience of Jews in the United States.But before its ghostly shipboard vaudeville begins, we watch the Emcee (Gene Ravvin) take a smoke break, venting about the wisdom of presenting this piece in this moment.“The Holocaust, the St. Louis,” he says. “I don’t know if this is my thing. I don’t know if we need to talk about it now. I don’t.”When I watched “Witness” on my laptop Friday night, that bit of fretful grousing had a very different feel than it surely would the next day, when a man in Texas took four hostages during a service at a synagogue, and a nearly 11-hour standoff with state and federal law enforcement officers ensued. Suddenly, once again, the urgency of discussing antisemitism was palpable, and not just to people who feel the menace of that bigotry all the time.Written by Nana Grinstein, with Blair Cadden and Golyak, “Witness” is part variety show, pitting passengers against one another for an unnamed “fabulous prize.” The contest results are decided by the audience members, who vote on their screens after each act. The winner, the night I saw it, was the remarkably graceful “Skating on Glass,” set to voice-over memories of Kristallnacht.With scenography and costumes by Anna Fedorova, virtual design by Daniel Cormino and excellent sound by Viktor Semenov, “Witness” often has the digitally buffed surreality of a video game, which might sound like an insult but is not. Like a lot of online theater, it also has a slight trying-too-hard feel.Before the show starts, audience members are urged repeatedly to allow their computer’s camera to show them onscreen with the rest of the crowd during the performance. (There is no hint that acquiescing is optional, but it is.) When the wall of viewers periodically appeared, though, it often looked like people were reading something on their screens — which they might have been, since “Witness” offers chances to click for more historical context. As a visual, it didn’t exactly foster a feeling of connection.“Witness” is an experimental production, with different energy to each of its three acts, the second of which is all audio, like a radio play. Where this multilayered show loses dramatic potency is in the last act, when contemporary characters take over. They talk about antisemitism in the 21st-century United States, but without depth, and only barely connect it to the hatred against other marginalized groups.Even so, this piece does indeed bear witness to what happens when danger threatens Jews for being Jewish, and the culture shrugs.“It was supposed to be different in America,” the Emcee says. “And now look.”WitnessLivestreaming through Jan. 23; zerogravity.art. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      in Television

      To Boldly Explore the Jewish Roots of ‘Star Trek’

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      LOS ANGELES — Adam Nimoy gazed across a museum gallery filled with “Star Trek” stage sets, starship replicas, space aliens, fading costumes and props (think phaser, set to stun). The sounds of a beam-me-up transporter wafted across the room. Over his shoulder, a wall was filled with an enormous photograph of his father — Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on the show — dressed in his Starfleet uniform, his fingers splayed in the familiar Vulcan “live long and prosper” greeting.But that gesture, Adam Nimoy noted as he led a visitor through this exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, was more than a symbol of the television series that defined his father’s long career playing the part-Vulcan, part-human Spock. It is derived from part of a Hebrew blessing that Leonard Nimoy first glimpsed at an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Boston as a boy and brought to the role.The prominently displayed photo of that gesture linking Judaism to Star Trek culture helps account for what might seem to be a highly illogical bit of programming: the decision by the Skirball, a Jewish cultural center known mostly for its explorations of Jewish life and history, to bring in an exhibition devoted to one of television’s most celebrated sci-fi shows.But walking through the artifacts Adam Nimoy recalled how his father, the son of Ukrainian Jews who spoke no English when they arrived, had said he identified with Spock, pointing out that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise.”The “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center includes a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode — and tribbles.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesJewish values and traditions were often on the minds of the show’s writers as they dealt with issues of human behavior and morality, said David Gerrold, a writer whose credits include “The Trouble with Tribbles,” one of the most acclaimed “Star Trek” episodes, which introduces the crew to a cute, furry, rapidly reproducing alien life form.“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” Gerrold said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”Adam Nimoy said his father, who played Spock, a part-Vulcan, part-human character, often noted that he was “the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise,” drawing a parallel between his role and his history as the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThat connection was not explicit when the show first aired. And a stroll through the exhibition, which covers the original television show as well as some of the spinoffs and films that came to encompass the “Star Trek” industry, mainly turns up items that are of interest to “Star Trek” fans. There is a navigation console from the U.S.S. Enterprise, the first script from the first episode, a Klingon disrupter from “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and a display of tribbles.The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesA “Star Trek” phaser on display.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesA Klingon mask and costume at the “Star Trek” exhibition.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesTo some extent, the choice of this particular exhibition — “Star Trek: Exploring New Worlds” — to help usher the Skirball back into operation after a Covid shutdown reflects the imperatives museums everywhere are facing as they try to recover from a pandemic that has been so economically damaging. “These days — honestly, especially after the pandemic — museums are looking for ways to get people through the door,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the show for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Museums are struggling to find an audience and are looking for a pop culture hook.”It seems to have worked. The “Star Trek” exhibition has drawn 12,000 attendees in its first two months here, a robust turnout given that the Skirball is limiting sales to 25 percent of capacity.“This has been bringing in new people, no question,” said Sheri Bernstein, the museum director. “Attendance is important for the sake of relevance. It’s important for us to bring in a diverse array of people.”Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said that the center had been drawn by the parallels between Judaism and the television show. “Nimoy’s Jewish identity contributed to a small moment which became a big theme,” she said. “We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said she had been struck by the links between “Star Trek” and Jewish beliefs, especially the importance of inclusivity. Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe intersections between the television series and Judaism begin with its two stars, Nimoy and William Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk. “These are two iconic guys in outer space who are Jewish,” said Adam Nimoy. And it extends to the philosophy that infuses the show, created by Gene Roddenberry, who was raised a Southern Baptist but came to consider himself a humanist, according to his authorized biography.Those underlying connections are unmistakable for people like Nimoy, 65, a television director who is both a devoted “Star Trek” fan and an observant Jew: He and his father often went to services in Los Angeles, and Friday night Sabbath dinners were a regular part of their family life.Nimoy found no shortage of Jewish resonances and echoes in the exhibition, which opened in October and closes on Feb. 20. He stopped at a costume worn by a Gorn, a deadly reptilian extraterrestrial who was in a fight-to-the-death encounter with Kirk.“When he gets the Gorn to the ground, he’s about to kill him,” Nimoy recounted. “The Gorn wants to kill Kirk. But something happens. Instead he shows mercy and restraint and refuses to kill the Gorn.”“Very similar to the story of Joseph,” Nimoy said, referring to the way Joseph, in the biblical book of Genesis, declined to seek retribution against his brothers for selling him into slavery.Leonard Nimoy died in 2015 at the age of 83. Shatner, who is 90 and recently became the oldest person to go into space, declined to discuss the exhibition. “Unfortunately Mr. Shatner’s overcommitted production schedule precludes him from taking on any additional interviews,” said his assistant, Kathleen Hays.The Skirball Cultural Center is set on 15 acres, about 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles.The exhibition ran for about two years in Seattle after opening in 2016 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original “Star Trek” TV show’s 1966 debut. (That version was on NBC for three seasons.) The exhibition had been intended to tour, but those plans were cut short when the pandemic began to close museums across the country.“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” said Brooks Peck, who helped create the exhibition for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “Happily it completely worked out.”Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe exhibition was assembled largely from the private collection of Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and founder of the Museum of Pop Culture, who died in 2018.Peck said he wanted to commemorate the anniversary of the series with an exhibition that explored the outsize influence the television show had on American culture. “The answer that I am offering is that ‘Star Trek’ has endured and inspired people because of the optimistic future it presents — the good character of many of its characters,” Peck said. “They are characters that people would like to emulate.”“Skirball faced a bit of a challenge in trying to explain to its audience how ‘Star Trek’ fit in with what they do,” he said. “Happily it completely worked out. I had always hoped that Skirball could take it. Skirball’s values as an institution so align with the values of ‘Star Trek’ and the ‘Star Trek’ community.”Bernstein, the Skirball director, said the exhibition seemed a particularly good way to help bring the museum back to life.“There was never a better time to present this show than now,” she said. “We very much liked the idea of reopening our full museum offerings with a show that was about inspiring hope. A show that promised enjoyment.”By spring, ‘Star Trek’ will step aside for a less surprising offering, an exhibition about Jewish delis, but for now, the museum is filled both with devotees of Jewish culture, admiring a Torah case from China, and Trekkies, snapping pictures of the captain’s chair that Kirk sat in aboard the Enterprise.“There is no such thing as too much ‘Star Trek,’” Scott Mantz, a film critic, said as he began interviewing Adam Nimoy after a recent screening at the museum of “For the Love of Spock,” a 2016 documentary Nimoy had made about his father. A long burst of applause rose from his audience. More

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      ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ Looks at Jewish Life Before Nazi Invasion

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      A documentary based on a home movie shot by an American in 1938 provides a look at the vibrancy of a Jewish community in Europe just before the Holocaust.AMSTERDAM — Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.Fewer than 100 would survive it.Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.“It’s a short piece of footage, but it’s amazing how much it yields,” Stigter said in an interview in Amsterdam recently. “Every time I see it, I see something I haven’t really seen before. I must have seen it thousands and thousands of times, but still, I can always see a detail that has escaped my attention before.”Almost as unusual as the footage is the journey it took before gaining wider exposure. All but forgotten within his family, the videotape was transferred to DVD and sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009.“We knew it was unique,” said Leslie Swift, chief of the film, oral history and recorded sound branch of the museum. “I immediately communicated with him and said, ‘If you have the original film, that’s what we want.’”The Holocaust museum was able to restore and digitize the film, and it posted the footage on its website. At the time, Kurtz didn’t know where it had been shot, nor did he know the names of any of the people in the town square. His grandfather had emigrated from Poland to the United States as a child and had died before he was born.Thus began a four-year process of detective work, which led Kurtz to write an acclaimed book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.Glenn Kurtz, who found the original footage shot by his grandfather in his parents’ closet in Florida, later wrote a book about the significance of the film.Stigter relied on the book in completing the film, which is co-produced by her husband, Steve McQueen, the British artist and Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave,” and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It has garnered attention in documentary circles and has been screened at Giornate degli Autori, an independent film festival held in parallel with the Venice film fest; the Toronto International Film Festival; Telluride Film Festival; the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; and DOC NYC. It was recently selected for this month’s Sundance Film Festival.Nasielsk, which had been home to Jews for centuries, was overtaken on Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the German invasion of Poland. Three months later, on Dec. 3, the entire Jewish population was rounded up and expelled. People were forced into cattle cars, and traveled for days without food and water, to the towns of Lukow and Miedzyrzec, in the Lublin region of Nazi-occupied Poland. From there, they were mostly deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.“When you see it, you want to scream to these people run away, go, go, go,” Stigter said. “We know what happens and they obviously don’t know what starts to happen, just a year later. That puts a tremendous pressure on those images. It is inescapable.”Stigter stumbled across the footage on Facebook in 2014 and found it instantly mesmerizing, especially because much of it was shot in color. “My first idea was just to prolong the experience of seeing these people,” she said. “For me, it was very clear, especially with the children, that they wanted to be seen. They really look at you; they try to stay in the camera’s frame.”A historian, author and film critic for a Dutch national newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, Stigter worked on this film, her directorial debut, for five years. She started it after the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to produce a short video essay for its Critic’s Choice program. Instead of choosing a feature film, she decided to explore this found footage. After making a 25-minute “filmic essay,” shown at the Rotterdam festival in 2015, she received support to expand it into a feature film.“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” never steps out of the footage. Viewers never see the town of Nasielsk as it is today, or the faces of the interviewees as talking heads. Stigter tracks out, zooms in, stops, rewinds; she homes in on the cobblestones of a square, on the types of caps worn by the boys, and on the buttons of jackets and shirts, which were made in a nearby factory owned by Jews. She creates still portraits of each of the 150 faces — no matter how vague or blurry — and puts names to some of them.An image from the home movie showing Moszek Tuchendler, 13, on the left, who survived the Holocaust and became Maurice Chandler. He was able to identify many other people in the footage of the town where he grew up.United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumMaurice Chandler, a Nasielsk survivor who is in his 90s, is one of the smiling teenage boys in the footage. He was identified after a granddaughter in Detroit recognized him in a digitized clip on the Holocaust museum’s website.Chandler, who was born Moszek Tuchendler, lost his entire family in the Holocaust; he said the footage helped him recall a lost childhood. He joked that he could finally prove to his children and grandchildren “that I’m not from Mars.” He was also able to help identify seven other people in the film.Kurtz, an author and journalist, had discovered a tremendous amount through his own research, but Stigter helped solve some additional mysteries. He couldn’t decipher the name on a grocery store sign, because it was too blurry to read. Stigter found a Polish researcher who figured out the name, one possible clue to the identity of the woman standing in the doorway.Leslie Swift said that the David Kurtz footage is one of the “more often requested films” from the Holocaust Museum’s moving picture archives, but most often it is used by documentary filmmakers as stock footage, or background imagery, to indicate prewar Jewish life in Poland “in a generic way,” she said.What Kurtz’s book, and Stigter’s documentary do, by contrast, is to explore the material itself to answer the question “What am I seeing?” over and over again, she said. By identifying people and details of the life of this community, they manage to restore humanity and individuality.“We had to work as archaeologists to extract as much information out of this movie as possible,” Stigter said. “What’s interesting is that, at a certain moment you say, ‘we can’t go any further; this is where it stops.’ But then you discover something else.” More

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      Netflix Series Stirs Debate About the Lives of Ultra-Orthodox Women

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      The show, “My Unorthodox Life,” tracks the world of Julia Haart, who fled a religious community she found repressive. But some in the community she left say they feel misrepresented.MONSEY, N.Y. — Even at the most liberal flanks of the ultra-Orthodox community here there are daily moments where women live quite differently from men.At synagogue, they must pray in segregated balconies or curtained-off sections. They are prohibited from becoming rabbis and are cautioned against wearing pants, or singing solo or dancing in front of men, lest they distract the men from Torah values.But do they go to college, have careers, watch television, enjoy their lives?Yes, say women of the Yeshivish community in this suburban hamlet 30 miles north of Manhattan, some of whom are upset by how they are portrayed on Netflix’s popular reality series “My Unorthodox Life.”The nine-episode show tracks the world of Julia Haart, 50, who fled Monsey in 2012 and became a successful fashion and modeling executive. Haart paints a dismal picture of her old ultra-Orthodox life, portraying it as oppressive, suggesting women are deprived of decent educations and are basically allowed just one purpose — to be a “babymaking machine.”In the show, Julia Haart describes her former life in an ultra-Orthodox community as repressive, and rejoices in the freedom she feels now that she has left it behind.   Olivia Galli for The New York Times“The women in my community are second-class citizens,” she says in one episode. “We only exist in relation to a man.”It is an image that is rejected by women like Vivian Schneck-Last, a technology consultant who has an M.B.A. from Columbia University and worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs. She feels Haart diminishes the intellectual and professional strides that women in the community have made.“People in Monsey are upset because she has misrepresented what Orthodox people and particularly Orthodox women are all about,” Schneck-Last said.Roselyn Feinsod, an actuary and partner in the giant accounting firm of Ernst & Young who was once friendly with Haart, said she and her daughter graduated from the same girls high school as Haart, Bais Yaakov of Spring Valley, and that most of its graduates now go on to college. Defying stereotypes of ultra-Orthodox women as unworldly, Feinsod said she has run seven marathons and biked 100 miles around Lake Tahoe.“Monsey is a beautiful community with educated people respectful of each other,” she said.Reactions to the show, both positive and negative, have spread beyond Monsey. The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and lohud.com, which covers an area that includes Monsey, all featured articles about the debate. Critics and supporters of the show have posted videos on YouTube.Under the hashtag #myorthodoxlife, women have described their own successful careers and general satisfaction with the religious life.Roselyn Feinsod, who was once a friend of Julia Haart, said the show misrepresents the career opportunities available to ultra-Orthodox women like herself, a partner at a major accounting firm.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York Times“People were beyond upset, people were personally insulted,” said Allison Josephs, the founder of the Jew in the City website, who said people posted complaints on the site, which she created to change negative perceptions of religious Jews. “Pretty much every Jew I encountered was feeling, ‘Can you believe what they did to us again?’”Haart defends her depiction as accurate and says she has heard from many ultra-Orthodox and formerly ultra-Orthodox women who agree with her that the community represses women.“Everything about your story resonated so deeply with me,” one woman wrote in a message on Haart’s Instagram page. “I too left the Orthodox community and had to start over after struggling for so long with being unhappy.”Several people familiar with the ultra-Orthodox community wrote directly to The Times to express their support for Haart’s perspective, including Tzivya Green, a former member of the same Yeshivish community in Monsey.“Women are still told to keep quiet and, taught from a young age, that men hold all the power,” Green wrote. “We are taught to never go against a man’s word. Men are everything and women are nothing.”Haart describes the criticism as a personal attack that distracts from the sense of female empowerment she hopes to promote. Since leaving Monsey she has created her own shoe business and is now chief executive of the Elite World Group, among the world’s largest modeling agencies. Her show was just picked up for a second season.Haart agreed to address the debate over her show in an in-person interview if it could be filmed as part of her show. After The Times declined that arrangement, she and The Times were unable to agree on an alternative.Monsey is home to a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThough she did not respond to written questions from The Times, saying she had addressed them in prior interviews, she did provide her perspective by pointing out remarks she has made on social media and also by releasing a statement. It said in part: “My sole purpose in sharing my personal story is to raise awareness about an unquestionably repressive society where women are denied the same opportunities as men, which is why my upcoming book and season 2 of my show will continue to document my personal experience that I hope will allow other women to insist on the precious right to freedom.”There are communal pressures in Monsey against television-watching as a waste of time, as the show depicts. The role of women as mothers and homemakers is prized. Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which men thank God for not making them a woman is recited each morning.Still, several women interviewed in Monsey said the show’s perspective is often dated, sometimes exaggerated and conflates the multiple strains of Orthodox Judaism practiced in Monsey.The hamlet of Monsey derived its name from the Munsee branch of the Lenape Native Americans who populated the area before the arrival of Dutch and British colonists. Monsey has become a metonym for the Orthodox Jews of Rockland County, who represent more than a quarter of its population and gather at more than 200 synagogues and roughly half that many yeshivas. Their arrival converted Monsey, a one-stoplight town with a single yeshiva in 1950, into a place populated by a variety of Orthodox Jews — some modern, some Hasidic and some of the ultra-Orthodox variation that Haart was part of, known as Yeshivish or Litvish (Lithuanian), and within those groupings, several gradations or sects of each.That diversity, perhaps not as multicolored as Joseph’s coat, is nonetheless visible on the streets where thick-bearded men in black silk robes and cylindrical fur hats known as shtreimels mix with clean-shaven men in Polo shirts and chinos, recognizable as observant only by their skullcaps.Haart has spoken in interviews about the gradations of Judaism, but some critics of her show say it does not do enough to depict the variations of Orthodox Judaism.  Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesHaart has acknowledged in media appearances and other settings that there are “gradations of Judaism,” and that others from her community may not share her perspective. At its best, she acknowledged in a TV interview with Tamron Hall, her religion fosters an appreciation of charity, of kindness.But critics say those nuances are not captured on the show, where she uses terms like “brainwashed” and “deprogram” to describe ultra-Orthodox life in Monsey in ways that suggest it is more a cult than a personal choice. They say they worry the show describes strictures more typical of, say, the Brooklyn-based Satmar Hasidim, not the less stringent community of which she was part.For example, while the show accurately presents television as frowned upon in Yeshivish circles, they say it doesn’t make clear that many people, including Haart, owned one. (Haart acknowledged on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” that she had a television in her later years in Monsey and said she lied about it to school officials who otherwise would not have admitted her children.)And yes, as Haart explains on the show, some in the community are not crazy about women riding bikes because the pedaling might expose their knees. But the critics said the show does not make clear that women, including Haart, still rode bikes, in modest attire. (Haart posted about her family bike rides on her Instagram account earlier this month.)Though Haart has said she feels she was deprived of an education by a subpar school system, several women said she was a brilliant, top-notch student who could have attended college without any problem, or stigma, had she decided to.“She was very popular, had every opportunity, a leader in the class, and now she’s turned it into some persecution situation,” said Andrea Jaffe, a certified public accountant and former American Express executive who said that for many years she lived across the street from Haart.Haart, left, reaching out to her daughter Batsheva. Haart has said providing her children with a less restricted way of life was one motivation for her decision to leave Monsey.  NetflixMuch of the Netflix show concerns Haart’s relationship with her four children, three of whom retain various ties to Orthodoxy. (Haart is divorced from their father, but has since remarried. Both men appear on the show.) In Monsey, where religious traditions prescribe the patterns of daily life, her candid discussions with the children about her own sexuality, and theirs, run counter to the norm.Feinsod, a mother of four, said she was offended by what she characterized as Haart’s effort in front of a national audience to draw her children away from an observant life.“It’s fine for her to make choices, but for her to try and force the children’s hand in front of an audience of millions of people is disappointing,” she said.Of course, freeing her children from what she describes as the stifling imprint of ultra-Orthodoxy is exactly what Haart embraces as her mission.“I lived in that world and it’s a very small and sad world, a place where women have one purpose in life and that is to have babies and get married,” she tells her 14-year-old son, Aron, in the second episode.She says that, for her, the low-cut tops she favors are not just gestures of style, but emblems of freedom, of a woman controlling her own body and how it is presented.Netflix declined to comment on reactions to its show, which is at least the third it has presented in recent years about Orthodox life. “Unorthodox,” a mini-series, focused on another woman’s flight from her Brooklyn Hasidic community.The Israeli family drama “Shtisel” has been applauded by many in the Orthodox world for its subtlety, rounded characters and humor.Several women who have lived in Monsey or spent considerable time there said that kind of nuance is missing from Haart’s show, which they said gives no sense that some women cannot only avoid misery, but thrive, while maintaining ultra-Orthodox values.“There’s no monolithic Monsey,” Josephs said.Additional reporting by Colin Moynihan. 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