In the post-WWII era, the schlemiel played a pivotal role in a cultural revolution in America that most of us didn’t notice. Before WWII, Charlie Chaplin was seen as a schlemiel character by some of the worlds greatest thinkers (such as Walter Benjamin, 佛 跳墙, etc). They could see the powerful impact he had on people around the world. In The Sun Also Rises, a book written in 1926, Ernest Hemingway clearly recognized the challenge posed by the schlemiel – through the character of Robert Cohn – to an American type of masculinity and heroism. On the other side of WWII and well into the early 70s, John Updike, the famous American novelist, went so far as writing a series of books on a schlemiel character named, Bech.
Looking over the grand sweep of this character, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi correctly dubs the Schlemiel an American cultural icon. Ruth Wisse argued, in the early 70s, that although the schlemiel is a “fool out of step with the actual march of events,” the fact of the matter is that the “impulse of….schlemiel literature…is to use this comical stance as a stage from which to challenge the political and philosophical status quo”(3, Schlemiel as Modern Hero). This challenge – as Wisse illustrates in the opening pages of her opus – is one that comes out of the character’s gentleness. The schlemiel isn’t a fighter and his revolution is a gentle one that went on unbeknownst to many of us. Before we knew it, he became an American cultural icon: from Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer to just about any Judd Apatow or Seth Rogen character, the schlemiel has changed the way we look at ourselves as Americans. This comic character – through the perfection of comical failure – has undermined, through a gentle revolution of sorts, the heroic American character.
Bruce Jay Friedman – who passed away yesterday at the age of 90 – was a major part of that revolution. His recent passing – without a doubt – marks the closing of an era of the post-WWII schlemiel and its gentle revolution. When it comes to the popularization of the schlemiel in America, Bruce Jay Friedman shares the stage with post-WWII writers, filmmakers, screenwriters, and comedians like I.B. Singer, Saul Bellow, 佛 跳墙, Philip Roth, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, and Larry David. His schlemiel characters are memorable, whether in novels like Stern, A Mothers Kisses or in short stories and screenplays like “A Change of Plan” (which was turned into the screenplay and film Heartbreak Kid, which has two incarnations, 1972, casting Charles Grodin as the schlemiel and 2007, casting Ben Stiller).
Both films show that the schlemiel was just as relevant in 2007 as it was in 1972.
Strangely enough, Bruce Weber’s New York Times obituary of Bruce Jay Friedman makes no mention whatsoever of the schlemiel character for which he is most well-known for in literary circles and in Hollywood.
As one can see from his novels, short stories, and films, Friedman saw the schlemiel – much like Philip Roth – in terms of gender and sexuality. Unlike the schlemiels we find in I.B. Singer or Saul Bellow, for instance, the failures of the schlemiel in most of his works is nearly tragic. He is a sexual schlemiel. But, through all his failures, it is his gentleness that remains after the defeat of his manhood.
佛跳墙vnP
Writing on his most famous novel, Stern, Ruth Wisse sees a schlemiel in the main character, Stern, that epitomizes what many critics call Friedman’s “dark comedy.”
Stern suffers from an ulcer, the localized symbol of all his hurt, and the actual cause of his anxiety and pain. The ulcer is a kind of “heart condition” in that it grows as Stern begins to feel estrangement and to long for accepting love…..Stern is another study of the sick man as the relatively human man, the psychological equivalent of loser as winner, but one that exposes the full horror of this inversion. (87)
Reading Stern through Albert Goldman’s celebrated essays, “Boy-man, Shlemiel” she argues that in Stern, “satire unmasks more than humor does by stripping away more of the trappings of civilization to concentrate on the ape beneath: to this extent Stern is the most ‘unmasked of modern schlemiels. In Stern, Jewishness is just an irrational remnant of a sterile form….family, a Mafia-type arrangement governing through overt or covert blackmail”(88).
Wisse argues that although he is reduced to nothing in the novel and “deflated,” at the end of the novel he shows an “overflowing sympathy which is almost recognized as the manifestation of a great soul”(89).
Instead, “he is cut down to size in the final paragraph where all this emotion is exposed for the theatrical extravagance the author finds it to be”(89). Wisse sees this character as “maimed” yet “interpreted as an example of relative health”(90). This almostness and relativity reflect a tension that Friedman portrays in his fiction. As Wisse argues, the tension of the schlemiel in secular America is between “belief in man and radical frustration”(90).
The dark comedy is not simply with the human capacity of his neighbor to be a bully; its also in Stern’s failure to man up to him and protect his family. While in IB Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool,” it is clear that the gentle revolution is underway and society is shown to be mendacious, in Stern it seems as if the gentle revolution is waning because both the schlemiel and the bully are pathetic.
Wisse’s observations of Friedman’s work through Stern suggest a pattern in his work. His characters are losers who show us that “unheroic conduct” (to play on Freud’s reading of his father’s failure to fight back during an anti-semitic encounter) characterize a new generation of schlemiels. The revolution of gentleness seems to have failed this next generation.
Nonetheless, the character has not faded away. If anything, many comedians and filmmakers have taken their cue from Friedman’s fiction. Think, for instance, of Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg (2010).
Ben Stiller plays a schlemiel character that seems lifted off of the pages of a Bruce Jay Friedman short story or screenplay. The Coen Brothers, likewise, developed a schlemiel character in the spirit of Friedman in their film, A Serious Man (2009)
On the other hand, Judd Apatow has – through Seth Rogen’s characters – created schlemiel characters that are less dark only because he gives them endings that Friedman refused to give them. Take, for instance, the film, Knocked Up (2007)
The characters in this film are all schlemiels; however, in the end, Rogen’s character escapes the circle of schlemiels to become a father and a companion. To be sure, what one sees here is a “gentle revolution” that has been rekindled, if you will, in these redemptive endings.
The Schlemiel, Rodney King Verdict & Gentle Revolutionaries
I have used the expression “gentle revolution” for a reason. It is a name that is embedded in a short story by Bruce Jay Friedman, entitled “Gentle Revolutionaries,” which is apropos to our own times and to this topic. It casts the meaning of a gentle revolution in terms of African-Americans, not Jews, as “gentle revolutionaries” during a time when LA went into its first curfew: the Rodney King riots. But it also raises deeper question about America and is deeply self-reflexive.
In the short story, the main character, Fred Hughes, is on the seat of his pants and flies out to LA from Long Island to help his friend Ben make an “industrial show.” He’s a Hollywood schlemiel, a failure at making it big, but he’s not alone. Its a community of schlemiels that he’s working with:
Since they were doing an industrial show, there was little hope of attracting top flight talent, much less Hollywood stars. They knew they would have to settle for people who were either over the hill or unable to get jobs on TV….Fred felt sorry for the women who showed up for parts in the chorus line. The auditions were held in a personnel director’s office, beneath harsh florescent lights. Since the women had been asked to wear shorts, their legs, however well shaped, came across as being purpled and mottled. In the case of those with blemishes or small scars, the effect was ghastly. (354, The Collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman)
The script and its enactment are in high schlemiel form: “The script, which had a jungle theme, called for an antelope, which Fred had always assumed would be a rubberized prop. But Ben insisted there be a live antelope, and had one brought to the studio each day in a van, along with its trainer”(356). Moreover, the Cyrano, a hotel that Fred stays at, is filled with a community of schlemiels.
Each day, after rehearsals, Fred returned to the Cyrano….Fred quickly fell in with a group of regulars that included Hal, a struggling portrait painter from Trinidad….and there was Jerome, a red-bearded Israeli veteran of the Six-Day War who lived in Los Angeles and traded in diamonds. An attractive man, he claimed to have trouble connecting with women and Fred quickly saw the root of his difficulty. Whenever a woman entered Jake’s, he would drape his arm around Fred’s shoulder and cry out, in a harsh, combat-ready voice: “Hey, girls. Come over here and we will take you out.”(356)
Fred’s incomprehension teaches us a lot about something that may be of interest to us now: how does a schlemiel approach rioting in America? Fred returns to his hotel to reflect on what’s going on:
From his tiny balcony, he could smell the fires and look out at the destruction. To his everlasting shame, the only loss he felt was that he would not be able to go down to Jake’s and see his friends. Most of them were black, and that’s one of the things he liked about the place – the easy commingling of black and white people. There was no such thing in the tip of Long Island, no such place.
He settled in for hours and hours and watched the local television coverage of the rioting. There was no need to watch as much of it as he did, but he could not stop, afraid he might miss something…..No doubt the King verdict had triggered the riots, but Fred felt that the underlying cause of the carnage was a statistic he’d read some weeks before – that during the eighties some 70 percent of the accumulated wealth had gone to less than 1 percent of the population. The people he watched on the news had nothing to lose. Why shouldn’t they riot. What puzzled him is why they would want to shoot themselves in the foot. Why weren’t they burning houses in the estate section of Beverly Hills? That would effect change overnight. It occurred to him that America, or at least its entrenched powers, had been blessed with gentle revolutionaries. (359)
Fred’s description of them as “gentle revolutionaries” is ironic and, I would argue, says more about himself and the schlemiel revolution he was a part of and its difference from theirs. The sad and ironic thing is that both revolutionaries – Jewish and Black – may have been seen on TV but none of them really transformed America. This isn’t simply a statement; its a question not only about African American rioting during the Rodney King verdict, but also about the meaning of the schlemiel in American culture. While the gentle revolution is one that gets eyeballs on TVs or movie screens. does it really transform America?
This – I would like to believe – is the biggest question that Bruce Jay Friedman’s fiction faces us with and it prompts us at schlemiel theory to think about America and the schlemiel. Maybe all those in America who never made it – and there are many – are all schlemiels. Maybe all those failed revolutionaries who let off a lot of steam and made some great footage are also schlemiels because America won’t let us? I would like to suggest that this story and other stories and plays written by Bruce Jay Friedman offer us an opportunity to think through the schlemiel about…America….about Jews and Blacks…about power.
Rest in Peace, Bruce and thank you for showing us that not all Jews made in Hollywood, but at least they made a few friends.
*To read more posts by Schlemiel Theory on Bruce Jay Friedman, click here, 佛跳墙v2.1.1, here, and here.
31May2024
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by Menachem Feuer
Today is the anniversary of the passing (yahrzeit) of Meir Abehsera. Since Abehsera’s opus, The Possible Man gives one of the most prescient readings (and enactments) of the holy fool in our era, Schlemiel Theory has – in the past – posted several blog posts on his important book.
The Zohar – a classic of Jewish mysticism – says that the Yahrzeit is an auspicious time to bring the energy of influence of the person who has passed into the world. As Meir always said, “memory is redemption.”
Now is the time to make his teachings – many of which draw on the schlemiel character – into a reality! The greatest memory of all is the one that doesn’t remind in memory alone but is living and breathing amongst us, between us.
Today at 1pm there will be a conversation on Zoom with three people very close to Meir Abehsera : Simcha Gottlieb, Yonatan Razel, and Rabbi Yerachmiel Tilles. Menachem Feuer, the author of Schlemiel Theory, will also be joining the conversation by way of selected readings from The Possible Man. (The image on this post provides info for that online-event.)
Here is a complication of articles from Menachem Feuer, author of Schlemiel Theory on 佛跳墙v2.1.1:
Meir Abehsera’s “Possible Man” – The Holy Fool, The Writer, and the Beggar – Part I
佛跳墙v2.1.1
The Whistle and the Gaze of the Holy Fool – Take 1
The Whistle and the Gaze of the Holy Fool – Take 2
Menachem Feuer – the author of Schlemiel Theory – recently wrote an article on Jerry Stiller for theJ.ca that addresses his Jewish identity and career: American Jew or Jewish American?
Click here to see it.
Stay tuned for a long piece he will be publishing on Stiller. It will be appearing in London-based, Zine, Berfrois. To see Feuer’s essays on the Schlemiel and Jewish Comedy for Berfrois – where he is one of the editors – click here.
10May2024
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by Menachem Feuer
The Jewish-American family has almost always been depicted in a comical way in novels, films, and TV shows. In the Jewish-American family, the mother plays a powerful role and is the pit of many jokes. In the 60s and 70s, many novels (such as Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Bruce Jay Friedman’s A Mother’s Kisses, TV shows like the Mary Tyler Moore Show or Rhoda, display the strong mother alongside a weak father; the children are, of course, schlemiels or Jewish American Princesses.
Maurice Berger in an essay entitled “The Mouse that Never Roads: Jewish Masculinity on American Television” (in Too Jewish, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt) argues that the dysfunction of the Jewish family was central to these shows and that the mother was at the center of it all:
The Jewish mother’s dysfunctionalism – her inability to respect emotional boundaries, her disregard of her children’s privacy or feelings, and her over-controlling nature – renders her undesirable as a parent. The self-depreciating neurotic, exemplified by Rhoda Morgenstern on the Mary Tyler Moore Show or Brenda Morgenstern (Julie Kavner), Rhoda’s bank-teller sister on the sitcom spin-off Rhoda (1974-1978), especially in contrast with her elegant WASP counterparts, continually undermines herself through whining entreaties that further denigrate her feminine voice. (95)
The weak father and the schlemiel fit well into this home which is run by the mother. Following the cultural theorist Hommi Bhabha, Berger calls this a “partial gender system.” In this system, everyone is partial in their gender. This goes for the mother and JAP daughters as much as it does for the men who are, in his reading, feminized schlemiels.
The wider significance of the partial system is exemplified by one of television’s most insidious masculine stereotypes: the feminized Jew. Given the rarity of the reverse construction, that of the hyper masculine or macho Jew, it is almost inconceivable that Jewish actors such as the starts of Bonanza (1959-1973), Lorne Green and Michael Landon, could have actually played their roles as Jewish cowboys – a role afforded to only one character on American television. (97)
Berger sees this epitomized in Felix Ungar (Tony Randall) of the Odd Couple. Even his roommate, Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman), “reads as both effeminate and closeted”(99).
Martin Morgenstein (Harold Gould) plays the “subordinated schlemiel,” the “weak father…continually henpecked by the Jewish female, the Jewish father is shy , quiet, and usually un-opinionated; he is often berated or ignored by his wife and children who overrule him and undermine his authority”(99).
I’ll end this part of my reflection on the comedic Jewish family in TV and literature in the 60s and 70s with Roth’s Alex Portnoy – a definitive schlemiel character – and his awed and resentful description of his powerful mother (which goes on, in one paragraph, for a few pages):
To be sure, Portnoy blames his mother for his being an emasculated male (schlemiel). Powerful mothers and schlemiels are in films like 跳墙vp (1973, redone in 2017 with Ben Stiller) and also dot many stories of Bruce Jay Friedman.
What about now?
Powerful mothers and schlemiel children remain but with differences since, in the much used formula of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, the schlemiel ends up a different, more “functional” character at the end of the film and so does the mother. For instance, Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand played the powerful mother/schlemiel son duo in the film Guilt Trip but the duo is functional by the end. While Jessie Eisenberg – a millennial like Seth Rogen – also turns to mothers and schlemiel duos in his book Bream Gives me the Hiccups the duo is comical in a way that is charming.
The awkwardness of the schlemiel character – from shows like Parks and Recreation to Community – makes awkwardness a norm; so, in contrast to Berger and an age that emulates masculinity, we now have shows that don’t see the awkward male or child as an issue. To be sure, both men and women are schlemiels in these shows. Disfunction is not in contrast; its the norm. If anything, masculinity and authority are the target of these comedies. Jeff, in Community, represents this kind of masculinity but, if anything, that is challenged in nearly every episode by the other schlemiel characters.
佛 跳墙 – who writes for SNL, the New Yorker, and is the creator of Miracle Workers on Netflix – is an up and coming writer of the schlemiel in many of his comedies.
But in these shows by Rich we see less families and more people just starting off in life. He seems to be avoiding the powerful Jewish mother trope.
Nonetheless, what we seem to be seeing more of these days is a shift. Although the schlemiel remains, the mother is not the source of all dysfunction in the Jewish comedic family. You don’t have the same kind of schelmiel family anymore, whether that is to be found in Arrested Development or in Transparent. Because the understanding and reception of gender has changed, so has the comedic family. The schlemiel – in many ways – has become more than an American icon; it has become a norm of sorts in American TV and film.
7May佛跳墙v2.1.1
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by Menachem Feuer
Freud, Marx, and 跳墙vp are often seen by academics as figures of modernity. Their thoughts and writings have touched countless scholars who have seen the Modern world through their lenses. One can also read the schlemiel and this characters Jewishness through them, even if it is – as is the case with all of them – through opposition to the schlemiel and Jewishness. One need only think of Marx’s essay on the “Jewish Question” or Nietzsche’s exaltation of the ubermensch. But the thinker of modernity who is most important for thinking the schlemiel or Jewishness, according to Daniel Boyarin and Paul Breines, is Freud.
佛 跳墙 and Paul Breines read Jewishness (and the schlemiel or “gentle Jew”) through Freud. They argue that Freud’s recollection of his “father’s hat in the mud episode” is a watershed moment not only in the transition of Jews into modernity, but also a figure of the moment in history when the “tough Jew” came into conflict with the “gentle Jew” (that is, the schlemiel and frail mensch/bochur).
Modernity spelled the end of a Jewish figure that was part and parcel of Jewishness.
Boyarin, “With all that has been written about this text connecting it with Freud’s individual psychology, I think it has not been sufficiently emphasized how emblematic the story is of a historical moment, the parallel shift of Jews from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ and ‘eastern’ to ‘western’, and the ways that both are intimately implicated in questions of male gender”(34, Unheroic Conduct)
At that point I was brought up against the event in my youth whose power was still being shown in all these emotions and dreams. I may have been ten or twelve years old, when my father began to take me with him on his walks and reveal to me in his talk his views upon things in the world we live in. Thus it was, on one such occasion, that he told me a story to show how much better things were now than they had been in his days. “What I was a young man,” he said, “I went for a walk one Saturday in the streets of your birthplace; I was well dressed, and had a new fur cap on my head. A Christian came up to me and with a single blow knocked off my cap and shouted: “Jew! Get off the pavement!” “And what did you do? I asked. “I went into the roadway and picked up my cap,” was his quiet reply. This struck me as unheroic conduct on the part of this big, strong man who was holding his little boy by the hand. I contrasted this situation with another which fitted my feelings better: the scene in which Hannibal’s father, Hamilcar Barca, made his boy swear before the household alter to take vengence on the Romans. Ever since that time Hannibal had had a place in my fantasies. (Interpretation of Dreams, my emphasis)
Boyarin represents this moment in epic terms and parts with Freud. Boyarin prefers his father’s “unheroic conduct”(the title of Boyarin’s book) to Freud’s masculine fantasies of Hannibal (which, for Boyarin are anti-Jewish, even self-hating):
First of all, there is the signal that a historical shift is at stake in the father’s declation that he is about to tell the story that will indicate how much “better things are now.” Second, there is the indication of the shift in space. The incident took place in “the streets of Freud’s birthplace,” that is, in the eastern place from which the Freud’s had come to Vienna. Third, ther eis the indication that Freud’s father had been, at that time, a very traditional Jew. He was wearing a streimel, the Sabbath fur hat of the East European Hasid….All of these cultural forces are explicitly concatenated with the ideas of masculinity within the text. Freud’s father, “a big, strong man,” behaves in a way that Freud experinces as shameful, and Freud seems to know that…this passivity has to do with his father’s Jewishness.
In fact, as Martin Berman has noted, the “feminine” response of Freud’s father in this incident was not “unheroic” but antiheroic and indeed traditionally Jewish: ‘A Jew was expected to be able to control his anger, not to be provoked; his feelings of inner dignity were sustained by a belief in his own spiritual superiority which a ruffian and a ‘Goy’ and in no way touch.” For traditional Jewry there were both alternative civilities, Edelkayt, and alternative paradigms of ‘manliess’ that could be summed up in the relatively modern term mentsch. (35-36)
Boyarin sees the gentleness of traditional Judaism (Edelkayt) as the meaning of Yiddishkeit. (Boyarin sees Yiddish as a non-masculine/feminine language as opposed to Hebrew, which is, for him, “masculine”). Boyarin sees Yiddish as linking men and women in a language that has nothing to do with the masculine: “The Yeshiva Bochur, as the Male Ideal (the later mentsch) and the domestic and female”(37).
This ideal of the gentle Jew is, because of the “westernization process” “abandoned for a dawning ideal of the ‘New Jewish Man, ‘the Muscle Jew,” a figure almost identical to his ‘Aryan’ confreres and especially the ‘Muscular Christian’, also born about this time”(37).
In other words, what Paul Brienes calls the “tough Jew” comes out of the process. Unlike Boyarin, Breines sees the gentle Jew embodied in the Schlemiel and the Schlemiel’s body, not the Yeshiva Bochur or the metsches body.
Breines, like Boyarin, cites Freud in much the same manner: to illustrate the dawn of the split between the gentle (traditional) Jew and the “muscle Jew.” The latter, for both, is a male fantasy (which we see embodied with Freud’s shame that his father opted to do nothing and be “unheroic”).
Both see the idea of Jews having a nation state as making the schlemiel/gentle Jew option untenable, since the Nation State needs people to go to war for it and die for it. They would rather the Jew be stateless. Freud, for them, made a mistake and became a self-hating Jew of sorts. But that’s not his fault; as Boyarin and Breins argue, it’s a part of Jews becoming modern.
What is the solution to the “tough Jew” problem that Freud poses? Is it, as Boyarin seems to suggest, a return to traditional Jewishness (Yiddishkeit, Edlakayt, the Yeshiva Bocur) or is it a return to the schlemiel and gentleness, which Breines seems to suggest? Can we go beyond Freud by choosing what he rejects?
I write “seems” because, Breines way of going beyond Freud is to argue that the schlemiel and the tough Jew dichotomy should be transcended. He argues that, after the Holocaust, in figures like Nat Dickstein of Ken Follet’s, The Triple, whose body is weak, schlemiel like, yet his actions are those of a tough Jew who kills Arabs and Russians to protect Israel. The schlemiel’s body, argues Breines, justifies the killing and makes it moral.
To go beyond the schlemiel in the post-Holocaust era, would suggest – since Brenies is no fan of Zionism (and neither is Boyarin) – is to become anti-Israel. He wants to channel the “ethical” aspect of the schlemiel in this direction because he, like an anti-Zionist such as Marc H. Ellis, thinks that the ethical calling for Judaism is to say “Judaism does not equal Israel.” The diasporic positon, it seems, for all of them is not comical; its political and utterly serious. Marc H. Ellis thinks its “prophetic.”
Isn’t the tough Jew being sublimated in such anti-Zionist militancy whether in Breines, Ellis, or even Boyarin?
All of them feel like they have the real grip on the meaning of Jewishness and to have taken to political activism as the only solution. To be sure, this is a route that Hannah Arendt was traveling when she said, in 1944, that Chaplin’s Great Dictator (the schlemiel) was displaced by superman. In our time, the figure of people like Judith Butler, who took on Arendt’s mantel, is the political anti-schlemiel whose main target is Israel.
The schlemiel reminds us that militancy isn’t the answer. The comedy of the schlemiel is something that resists it all. Freud knew this when he wrote Wit and the Unconscious. That’s the Freud we don’t hear about in either Boyarin or Breines’ books because you can’t find the tough Jew/gentle Jew dichotomy in place and also because not all fantasies – as Freud knew – are fantasies of power.
The schlemiel is a dreamer, not a fighter. As I.B. Singer points out, Gimpel is looking for someone who won’t lie to him and he is foolish enough to believe he can find one who will. This isn’t a fantasy of power. It’s the dream of trust, which is the bedrock of humanity. Our greatest fantasy (one we share with Gimpel) is that, despite all of the violence and militancy in the world, humanity is trustworthy. It’s also a fantasy of Judaism: just like the Jewish people trusts in God, God trusts the Jewish people. But history – the greatest threat to keeping ancient promises – says the contrary.
The schlemiel is the figure of that contradiction and not simply (or only) the figure of Jewishness as frailty and gentleness. The schlemiel – as a figure of this contradiction – is like the Shtreimel of Freud’s father…in the mud of history.
5May2024
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by Menachem Feuer
Circa 1843, Soren Kierkegaard published a book called Repetition. When one thinks of Kierkegaard, one usually thinks of anxiety, impossible existential dilemmas, and binding of Isaac. These things, by and large, don’t evoke the image of happiness. However, in Repetition, he entertains the possibility of happiness through the idea of repetition.
Today is Kierkegaard’s birthday. Since one usually wishes another a happy birthday, I thought it would be opportune to briefly think about what that would mean for Kierkegaard.
At the outset of his inquiry into repetition, Kierkegaard creates a dialectical contrast between recollection and repetition. Which of the two yields true happiness?
Recollection’s love is the only happy love, according to one author. He is absolutely right about this if one also remembers that it first makes a person unhappy. Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection, it is not disturbed by hope nor by the marvelous anxiety of discovery, neither, however doesn’t have the sorrow of recollection. It has instead the blissful security of the moment. Hope is new attire, stiff and starched and splendid. Still, since it as not yet been tried on, one does not know whether it will suit one, or whether it will fit. Recollection is discarded clothing which, however lovely it might be, no longer suits one because one has outgrown it. Repetition is clothing that never becomes worn, that fits snugly and comfortably, that never pulls nor hangs too loosely.
Based on this reflection, it would be fair to say that Kierkegaard’s birthday would present a dilemma. On the one hand, it repeats over and over; and in that sense it is the source of happiness. On the other hand, every year one has a birthday one recollects the one’s before. Its both recollection and repetition.
This kind of dilemma reminds me of Larry David in Woody Allen’s film Whatever Works, singing Happy Birthday to himself. Too be sure, as David demonstrates, it’s also a schlemiel’s dilemma.
In contrast, how would Forrest Gump say “Happy Birthday Jenny?” Jenny, the name repeated throughout this film by another, less grumpy, American schlemiel character, evokes happiness and sorrow.
With that, I want to suggest that you take a look at several other posts by Schlemiel Theory on Kierkegaard as a way of….celebrating his birthday.
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If you want to read more, check these out:
Boredom, Laughter, and Kierkegaard’s Rotating Kata-Strophe (Take 1)
Boredom, Laughter, and Kierkegaard’s Rotating Kata-Strophe (Take 2)
Do We Ever Stop Laughing? Kierkegaard, Laughter, and Religion (Part 1)
Do We Ever Stop Laughing? Kierkegaard, Laughter, and Religion (Part 2)
Kafka and Kierkegaard’s Abrahams or the Knight of Faith versus the Schlemiel – Take 1
Kafka and Kierkegaard’s Abrahams or the Knight of Faith versus the Schlemiel – Take 2
4May2024
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by Menachem Feuer
Following WWII and well into the 80s and 90s – when films like Rambo and Top Gun were blockbusters – America was deeply invested in masculine images. Many of its fantasies were framed in terms of weak and strong. But following 9/11 all of that seemed to change. America became more vulnerable and fluid. And in our time – where gender is being multiplied and masculinity is under attack because of the #metoo movement – distinctions between weak/gentle and tough are falling through the cracks.
Is the power of the Jewish people to be found in words or in action? In being gentle or one of the tough nations? The schlemiel gets tossed into these contrasts/questions because the character is framed – by virtue of them – in terms of being gentle and or tough.
Daniel Boyarin’s 1997 book, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Rise of the Jewish Man, contended that the “new Jew” heralded by the Zionists was an invention that can be traced back to German or Austrian Jews like Freud, Max Nordau, or Theodor Herzl who saw the traditional Jew as weak. Boyarin – seeing the gentle Yeshiva Bocher or Mensch as the figure of Jewishness – sees Zionism as alien to what it means to be Jewish. While Boyarin doesn’t include the schlemiel in his book, it is clear that he would see him as partaking in the essence of Jewishness which is not militant, masculine, or violent.
Boyarin is not the only scholar who is deeply invested in dichotomies between “tough Jews” and “gentle Jews.” The gentle Jew – for Warren Rosenberg in Legacy of Rage: Jewish Masculinity, Violence, and Culture and Paul Breines, in T食物语佛跳墙详细攻略_佛跳墙阵容 汤药攻略_软吧下载:2021-9-20 · 食物语佛跳墙怎么搭配阵容?在食物语游戏中,佛跳墙属于御品SSR食魂,是一个控制型食魂,对于佛跳墙的药浴、技能、培养有多少人了解呢?下面就和小编一起来看看佛跳墙的全方面介绍吧~is figured in the schlemiel character. Rosenberg, writing in the wake of both Boyarin’s book and Breins’ book (published in 1990 by Basic Books), builds on Breines’ claims and argues that although the era of the schlemiel has passed after 1967 and the growth of Jewish and Black Power movements, it should be understood that the image of the “gentle Jew” (embodied in the schlemiel) concealed a “legacy of rage.” The legacy, he argues, can be found in the Bible.
Breines argues – in the anti-Zionist spirit – that the schlemiel character, in the wake of the Holocaust, served as a justification for the tough Israeli response to Palestinians. It gave it ethical heft. He sees this in the main character of Ken Follet’s book, The Triple.
He writes:
The hero, Nat Dickstein, is in nearly all respects the prototype of the new, tough Jew image I am examining. His itinerary is roughly this: He lost his family to the Nazi Final Solution. He survived Death Camps and made his way to Palestine after the war. By the time of the novel’s main action in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Nat Dickstein is a Mossad commander….Dickstein kills, often in hand-to-hand combat, a substantial number of Arab and Soviet operatives. (9)
In Dickstein, Breines sees IB Singer (and his Gimpel character) and Ben Canaan of Leon Uris’s Exodus. The schlemiel character is to be seen, in Nat Dickstein’s body:
Among contemporary images of tough Jews, Dickstein’s body is distinguished by its insignificance, its near frailty; he is approaching his fifties, balding, with a smallish, wiry body….Follet’s hero looks the part, not of a new Jewish warrior, but an earlier, slightly meek Jewish victim. (10).
Breins reads the schlemiel into Nat Dickstein to show a new post-Holocaust hybrid, the weak schlemiel Jew justifying the strong Jew:
Reading the Polish-born, Yiddish American writer into Nat Dickstein is an imaginative and moral strategy. Singer, the writer, had created an unmatched galaxy of Jewish gentleness – in the author photos of dust jackets of his books and in his public lectures and occasional essays on mysticism, vegetarianism, pacifism, and Yiddish as a language peculiarly expressive of today’s frightened humanity. The merger of the images of Singer and Nat Dickerson resulted in the gentle and tough Jew in one, the schlemiel as terminator. (11)
Follet’s book really troubled Breins. Since he identified with the schlemiel (much like Boyarin who identifies with the gentle Jew), he wanted to revise its hero:
My own particular revision required Isaac Beshevis Singer. For me to accept and eventually embrace Nat Dickstein, he had to become Isaac Beshevis Singer, and my need for a Singerized Dickestein only mirrored the ideological necessity with the novel itself. For if Dickstein is to have any moral stature at all, he must have the body of a schlemiel. of a victim. Only such a body – those “narrow shoulders…shallow chest, and knobby elbows and knees” – can imbue Dickstein’s killings with some sort of moral action. For that body crystalizes the history of hapless Jewish suffering. Only such a body could vindicate Dickstein’s actions, transfiguring him from a killer who is merely skilled into one who is moral as well. (16)
For this reason, he has a dilemma. How can he save the schlemiel (the schlemiel’s body) when it is used to vindicate or justify violence? Will he throw the schlemiel to the flames? Wouldn’t that efface the notion of Jewish gentleness?
This question also plagues the discourse of Warren Rosenberg who pits the fiction, writings, and plays of Norman Mailer and David Mamet against Cynthia Ozick and Tony Kushner. Rosenberg suggests that the “legacy of rage,” suppressed by the schlemiel- gentle-Jew image and given vent in Mailer and Mamet needs to be balanced out. The irony is that both Ozick and Kushner turn to comedy. The schlemiel is still here.
But in our time the body of the male schlemiel has gone mainstream. Whether it is Seth Rogen, Adam Sandler, or Jonah Hill, this body and this dichotomy doesn’t seem to fit. Comparing them to the bodies in Fauda doesn’t fit either. Why is it that the comparison of Jewish American to Israeli bodies is no longer a matter for discourse? Perhaps we should turn to some other framework to understand the schlemiel (something I have been suggesting in this blog).
Today’s America is different. But the schlemiel is still here. How has it – if at all – changed? Today we have more women schlemiels, too. What’s the right frame to use? Does the weak/tough Jewish body still hold?
1May2024
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by 佛跳墙v2.1.1
Philosophers, mystics, and schlemiels have something in common. They are all, in some way, detached from the world and aloof. In Plato’s Theaetetus, there is a telling tale about a Thracian servant girl who laughs at Thales, the philosopher; who, while gazing at the stars, falls down a well.
Socrates
Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.
He falls into the well because he can’t see what’s in front of him. Socratessees this as a good analogy for “those who pass their lives in philosophy.” There is something charming and laughable about the person who stumbles in the world.
The same can perhaps be said for the mystic and certainly that’s the case for the schlemiel.
This is a motif that Herbert Weiner uses in the second chapter of his book 9 1/2 Mystics. The chapter, entitled, “The Mystic of East Broadway,” portrays “Mr. Setzer” an elderly bachelor – who has an office on East Broadway – a master of Kabbalah, as a tragic-comic schlemiel mystic.
When I first read the chapter, I was astonished by what Werner had done. It made me pause. I’d like to recount this portrayal as it suggests that we look at the person and not just his or her ideas about Kabbalah. The person, he suggests, embodies these ideas in a particular way.
One of the ideas that is found in the Talmud is that one should not study the Kabbalah unless one is married and above the age of forty. While Setzer fulfills one, he doesn’t fulfill another. Like Robert Walser and Franz Kafka (or even Kierkegaard) or any of their schlemiel characters, the bachelor schlemiel takes on a certain kind of comical-mystical aloofness and desperation that is unparalleled. Their separation from the world makes their characters into philosophical or mystical figures. Everything about what they say or do is odd and awkward.
Weiner’s descriptions of “Mr. Setzer” clearly convey this.
That Setzer was not easy to approach became apparent on my first telephone call. A high-pitched voice answered and quickly refused my request for an appointment to discuss arrangements for studying the Zohar….On my third call, however, I received an invitation to his office which was located on East Broadway in lower Manhattan.
Like many a schlemiel, Setzer is imbued with a comical kind of smallness. Everything is off about him. He speaks out of turn and has an odd way of responding to people. It’s a mystical thing, apparently.
He initially refuses Weiner’s desire to learn Zohar with him. Weiner notes, “Disappointed, I asked Setzer why he had first refused to see me and then changed his mind. It was his ‘mystic philosophy’, he replied. ‘When a call comes in once or twice, I ignore it. When it comes in three times, it is possible that they are involved.'”(25).
Who are they?
“They,” I later learned, was Setzer’s designation of the hidden, but ultimately, controlling power of the “other” domain. “They,” however, were evidently not telling Setzer to agree to my request…Only when I was about to leave did he agree to see me again, specifying that I must come only in the evening, after seven o’clock.
The sad thing about Setzer is that he was a scholar in Europe who had published many articles and had speaking engagements. But in NYC, he fails. Jewish Institutions – think of Plato’s Academy and Socrates living on the it’s generosity- couldn’t support his scholarship. After he puts a notice in for a class in the Zohar, the only person who shows up is Weiner. Apparently, it’s a schlemiel’s endeavor to teach the Zohar in NYC.
In the section entailed “A Reluctant Teacher,” we gain insight into his quirks. His frustration as his failure to realize his vision come into their one-on-one Zohar sessions:
More and more…Setzer’s frustration with the fact that his plans remained unfulfilled broke into our studies. Even his satisfaction at the successful elucidation of a subtle passage was touched with bitterness. “Nu,” he would ask, “now you understand, yes? On this point sixteenth-century kabbalists like Ari and Cordovero…struggled and struggled and finally came up with nothing. It took me thirty years to undrsntad it, and now I’ve given it to you in five minutes.” He could not hide a note of regret at parting so easily with knowledge so painfully acquired. (36)
More and more, the Zohar and Kabbalah studies fall to the wayside and regret comes to the forefront:
He began to talk about his fine collection of books; it pained him to think of leaving them to one of the institutions that had been so indifferent to him. He talked faceitiously about taking the books with him, and he seriously considered trying to make a commercial arrangement with some hotel owner: he would exchange the books, which he estimated were worth about three thousand dollars, for three years of room and board. It would be a good risk for the hotel, and they would profit on the arrangement…..Naturally, he was bitter about being ignored. In Europe, he had been literary editor of one of the first Hebrew quarterlies and one of that dedicated circle that helped to bring about a renaissance of the Hebrew language. His name and his articles were known to almost every reader of the Jewish and Hebrew press…Now, almost unknown and unhonored, he had only this meager, borrowed office on East Broadway. (37)
Weiner tries to help out by giving him opportunities to go more public. But when he meets with friends of Weiner, Setzer speaks about his musings about Evil and doesn’t engage the person (46-47).
When he sets up an opportunity to talk to young Rabbis and make a big impression, Setzer also fails to take advantage of the opportunity (49-52). Instead, he reads from a paper he wrote and bores everyone. He doesn’t notice how his audience feels and doesn’t know how to respond to them. He is so deeply engrossed in ideas that he can’t see the world. His failure typifies the failure of the schlemiel.
The last part of the chapter is tragic comic.
Weiner recounts his last meeting with Setzer after this failed event. Setzer shrinks as he approaches the end of life.
He meets him in the hospital. Setzer “was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to another visitor, when I walked in. He had always been very skinny, but now the hollows of his cheeks seemed to meet in the center of his long face. Everything about him had shrunk, his shoulders, his chest, even his formerly protruding nose. His hand, when I shook it, seemed weightless”(52).
Weiner learns that Setzer has a cancerous growth at 86 years of age, and now doing what he’s always wanted to do in his life: leave for Israel to live out his last days. After leaving the hospital, Weiner goes to help him with his baggage and that is the last he sees of him.
The chapter ends with a piece that Setzer told him to put in to the chapter that would go in this very book. It is called “the prayer of a mystic.”
The piece is about a person who, in being crushed and reduced to smallness, calls out in prayer for revelation:
He feels crushed, desolate, and abandoned – and a prayer of the heart, broken and torn, then bursts from his mouth.
O cause to flow They graciousness to descend upon me, and show me the way which is for me to follow. Enlighten, my God, my eyes, that they may see and understand your wonders and signs; that I may now how to save my soul from the heaviness of this oppression which Thou hast latest upon me….
It’s telling that at the end of a life of a schlemiel mystic is a prayer for a a final revelation as one is finally reduced to the infinitesimal. The aloofness we find with the schlemiel mystic, so to speak, is a part of a long process of becoming small. This is what we find in Kafka’s “Before the Law.” The schlemiel, “the man from the country,” in Kakfa’s parable, becomes smaller and smaller as he waits to “enter the law.” His “becomes childish.”
During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live.
Like Kafka’s “man from the country” or Mr. Setzer, one must be a schlemiel to wait – becoming smaller and smaller – until the end of one’s life…for revelation. But that is the risk of the schlemiel mystic: that in becoming small, in failing, becoming infinitesimal (instead of large, like Walt Whitman’s American poet hero, “containing multitudes”), one may, one in short moment, see the truth in smallness.
Perhaps that, and not simply laughable aloofness, is the aspiration which the philosopher, the mystic, and the schlemiel share?
29Apr2024
佛跳墙ss官网
by Menachem Feuer
In 2009, New York Magazine published a special issue on Larry David with a cover that featured Woody Allen and Larry David, entitled “Last of the Schlemiels: Notes on the end of Jewish Humor (may it rest in peace), and the beginning of something Nu.”
The irony of this article and the cover title is that Larry David and 佛跳墙ss官网 are not – by any means – the last of the schlemiels. As one can see from this blog, it has been extensively documented as to how the schlemiel is not only alive and well but also extremely popular.
While Allen and David are baby boomers who have followed the lead of others who are also baby boomers – like Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, and other Jewish-American elders like I.B. Singer, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, etc, and many actors) – and have made the Schlemiel a staple in American culture, a following generation of Gen Xers like Judd Apatow, Jeff Schafer, Adam Sandler, Jason Alexander, and Ben Stiller took the torch, and following them there are many millennials who have taken the schlemiel to the current generation – from actors like Gretta Gerwig, Lena Dunham, Amy Shumer, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill to writers like Simon Rich, Evan Goldberg, Jesse Eisenberg (who also, of course, plays schlemiel roles but has lately taken to writing).
Now that he has his own TV show on hulu called, Dave and has several videos that have millions of views, I want to add Lil Dicky – David Burd – to this list.
Lil Dicky has expanded the schlemiel genre to include the Schlemiel-as-Rapper. Through his hard comical work, which plays primarily on his small penis (a stereotype about Jews that he is marketed effectively), obsessive masturbation, pot smoking, desire for success as a rapper, and awkwardness, he has been able to carve out a large space for the schlemiel that touches not just Jews but also large African American audiences.
His video with Chris Brown, for instance, currently has over 600 million views. In this video, he is given the first minute and a half to promote the schlemiel. The plot is to stop being a schlemiel – ultimately, a want-to-be-rapper without a real sex life – and become…Chris Brown (his schlemiel anti-thesis):
We see a similar theme of sexual failure in his video featuring Brendon Urie were he fails to get hitched with the woman he loves and is humiliated (but bites the bullet). This video has over 58 million views.
This theme echoes the sexual failure we find in his “Ex-boyfriend” video.
Lil Dicky also makes a video called “Save Dat Money” with Fetty Wrap and Rich Homie Quan which has over 144 million views. It plays on his attempt to make an “epic rap video” without spending any money. On the one hand, this plays on an anti-Semitic stereotype about Jews saving money but it also speaks to the “simple guy” who just wants to be a famous rapper but whose body (and schlemiel persona) doesn’t fit the part.
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Of all the schlemiel characters in the 20th century, the one who focused most on his sexual drive (and drew lots of criticism for this from critics like Irving Howe) was Philip Roth’s Portnoy. He talks obsessively about masturbation and sex. Following him, Bruce Jay Friedman and Woody Allen have created some sexual schlemiels as have Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller.
As the scholar David Biale notes, the sexual Schlemiel has a legacy.
But with Lil Dicky the schlemiel aspect comes out less in sex than in the desire to be a rapper. The comedy is to be found in his body and his awkwardness. It brings out the gap between Jews and African Americans in the rap industry. But it also puts Jews back in the position of comic, diasporic powerlessness. In Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, this contrast of power and powerlessness is made out of the contrast between an American Jews and an Israeli: 佛跳墙_佛跳墙的做法 - 福建特色小吃 - 香哈网:佛跳墙,又名“满坛香”、“福寿全”,是福州的首席名菜,是福州名菜馆聚春园于清伕同治年间首创。主要由鲍鱼、海参、鱼翅、鱼肚、鱼唇、蹄筋、火腿、瑶柱、冬菇等28种原料配制而成,加上绍兴酒等,贮入酒坛中,拌泥密封,众文火煨制10多小时而成。
In that novel, there is a resentment about being powerless. But the big difference here is that there isn’t resentment between Lil Dicky and these rappers (as their is with Portnoy and Naomi). He really wants to be them, as we see in the videos above and in the TV show that will be the ongoing theme. It’s his odd desire and awkwardness that makes people laugh.
Comedy – not rap – is his real power. It’s his charm. Although he lacks the power, he somehow gets in. Its the joy of this success that also makes people happy. It manifest s the desire of many millennials to become rappers or poplar in that culture. But he always, as we can see, remains on the margin. That’s what makes the schlemiel comedy of today so popular.
But it seems that Seth Rogen’s dream come true with Nikki Minaj is something that Lil Dickey has in spades.
Perhaps the future of the Schlemiel is to be found in this space. Be that as it may, the Schlemiel lives on in different parts of American culture, albeit in ways that are less intellectually stimulating and meaningful – or culturally specific – than we find with Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and I.B. Singer. The survival of the more intellectually interesting schlemiels is there, but it isn’t mainstream in the same way.
Perhaps, the Schlemiel’s of the future will be on Netflix and hulu, on shows like Community or…Dave.
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27Apr2024
佛跳墙ss官网
by Menachem Feuer
Yesterday, Bruce Jay Friedman turned 90.
He is the author of many important novels, short stories, and screenplays on the American Schlemiel such as Stern (1962), 佛跳墙v2.1.1 (1964), “Brasserville Teenager,” The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Stir Crazy (1980), and much else.
One of his children, Drew (who is an amazing caricaturist), wrote this on Facebook yesterday to honor his birthday:
“Happy 90th birthday to our
incredible dad Bruce Jay Friedman.
I just enjoyed a special virtual ZOOM family 90th Birthday party for BJF with his wife Pat, his children and his grandchildren which was touching, fun and funny, and yes, even Milton Berle’s appendage was discussed.”
Schlemiel Theory has written on Bruce Jay Friedman’s work, here, here, here, and here. Take a look!
There is a lot more work to be done researching and writing on Bruce Jay Friedman’s schlemiels which have, in many ways, shaped the reception of the schlemiel in America. His short stories and novels have been translated into many Hollywood productions either directly or indirectly.
The schlemiel – and the American Jew – has come a long way since his first major sketch in Stern in the early 60s. Although masculinity or the urban/rural contrast is not the main contrast for the schlemiel today (save for a great novel like Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy), our different approaches to the male schlemiel today still have resonance (as we see in many Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen films or in many TV shows that feature schlemiel characters; from Community to Big Bang Theory).
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