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Amy Schumer vs. 'Princesses: Long Island'

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

I had the idea to compare Bravo’s “Princesses: Long Island,” the Jewish-tinged reality show about aspiring Real Housewives, to Amy Schumer, the Long Island-born stand-up comic and star of Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer.” The idea was to talk about how misguided these Princesses were, and about how depressing it is that their goal in life is to marry a banker, lawyer, or doctor — it doesn’t really matter which, so long as he can afford to pay for days and days of shopping at the Americana.

The idea was to cast Amy Schumer as their foil: She was the one who got away. Amy was the one who escaped status anxiety and the need to measure her self-worth by how many men she dated and the shiney presents they give her. I would cast her as somewhere between a refugee and a role model. Look past the surface, young Jewesses and Forward readers! Look past the shock value of her humor. Look past the initial parlor trick of hearing a beautiful, polite-seeming blonde woman tell crude jokes about the most unglamorous parts of sex. Realize that Amy is actually a brilliant, hard-working career woman determined to blaze her own path.

But there are two problems with that review. First, “Princesses: Long Island” is a much sadder, darker show than I thought it ever would be. And second, “Inside Amy Schumer” is the most inventive sketch show on television. It throws all formulas out the window. It keeps sketches going. It allows them to twist and turn into something far richer and deeper. It challenges our impressions of women in comedy and then challenges the challenges to those impressions. It’s also an insightful commentary on dating, technology, and the breakdown of etiquette. (No, really.) “Inside Amy Schumer” is not always funny; sometimes it’s painful. But the effect is always exhilarating.

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Nice Jewish Girls Finish Whole

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:20:00 GMT-5

Kathy Ebel, a first-generation American, was born in Manhattan. Her blog, Fatherland: There’s No Place Like Home, or How and Why a Nice Jewish Girl Asked Germany to Take Her Back, chronicles her quest to have her German citizenship restored. Kathy considers Brooklyn her hometown and currently lives with her family in Los Angeles. “Claudia Silver to the Rescue” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is her first novel. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:

I think of Claudia Silver, the eponymous heroine of my debut novel, “Claudia Silver to the Rescue,” as one in an anxious, spirited line of Nice Jewish Girl protagonists from New York City. This lineage starts with Lily Bart, Edith Wharton’s A-list flibbertigibbet in “The House of Mirth,” then moves on to Herman Wouk’s “Marjorie Morningstar” (who put up with that scoundrel Noel Airman’s hijinks for about 100 riveting pages too long), Gail Parent’s Sheila Levine (if only 30 had been the new 20 in 1972), Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing, and Melissa Bank’s Jane Rosenal. Yes, I know that Lily Bart wasn’t Jewish. But if only she’d married Simon Rosedale! (Sob! Gnashing of teeth! She could’ve given him a make-under!)

Claudia Silver possesses some key traits that connect her to her literary sisters. She’s got a loud speaking voice and wobbly self-worth, she finds comfort in self-destructive habits and relationships, and she’s paralyzed by her own ambivalence. She’s helpful and selfish, fierce and vulnerable. She’s got a keen sense of class and caste, ranking herself ruthlessly in any given social situation. She knows how to dance, and how to accessorize. But unlike Lily and Marjorie, whom I adore, but let’s face it, whether it’s in the back of a hat shop or lower Westchester, they both die from denial, Claudia wakes up. And she does so along a particularly Jewish continuum.

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What Makes a Jewish Private Eye?

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

A Star of David carved into the chest of a murdered journalist signals this is no ordinary crime. Which means Jonah Geller, the world-weary private investigator hired by the victim’s family in “Miss Montreal,” is the right man for the job.

A Jewish atheist as tough as he’s sharp, Geller is the creation of Howard Shrier, a Montreal-born, Toronto-based writer who shares more than a little of Jonah’s DNA. After forays to Chicago and Boston, the third Jonah Geller mystery takes the investigator to Montreal, where a childhood friend has been brutally slain. The city’s French/English and Arab/Jewish tensions take center stage in the book, which beautifully evokes Montreal’s complex cultural textures — and nails the city through deeply etched characters and locations.

Shrier, who now teaches writing at University of Toronto, spoke to The Arty Semite from his home.

Michael Kaminer: What does a Jewish private investigator bring to the genre that, say, a Presbyterian PI wouldn’t?

Howard Shrier: Were I Presbyterian, I’d be writing books from that point of view. Were I Irish Catholic, like Dennis Lehane or Ken Bruen, I might have made my PI a tortured drinker. But my world view, my voice — Jonah’s voice — are what I have to offer. I don’t think a non-Jewish hero would have a voice like his, and I doubt a non-Jewish writer could create a consistent Jewish hero like him.

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Author Blog: Crossing Delancey

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:20:00 GMT-5

Earlier this week, Royal Young discussed his decision to change his name, interviewed his grandparents, and wrote about his parents’ reaction to his debut memoir, “Fame Shark.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:

My father’s artwork was always how I made sense of the world around me. The sometimes scary, ghetto Lower East Side I grew up in was beautiful, interesting and safe when shaded by his paints. His devotion to his artwork, but also creative, compassionate parenting, inspired me early on to pursue my own artistic passions. I would sit in Dad’s sun drenched studio dictating stories about suicidal whales before I could write.

Dad encouraged my taste for tragedy and drama by reading me bedtime stories beyond my years. With me in the cozy crook of his flannel arm, under soft yellow lamps he turned the pages and read 10-year-old me Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” “Of Human Bondage” by Somerset Maugham, Dickens’s “Great Expectations” and “Mildred Pierce” by James M. Cain. These guilty, lonely, decadent, sexual stories were a dazzling escape from the Lower East Side of the early ‘90s. They infuse my writing to this day.

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Was Superman a Frat Boy?

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:35:00 GMT-5

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Beta-Sigma-Rho Man?

The recent discovery of a 75-year-old pencil sketch by Superman creator Joe Shuster hints that Man of Steel’s origins have roots in a Toronto fraternity.

The Ontario Jewish Archives in Toronto recently released an image of the circa-1937 drawing, which depicts a familiar caped figure with a “BSR” logo emblazoned across his chest in place of the more recognizable “S.”

“This superhero is not saving the citizens of the fictitious Metropolis from evildoers,” the OJA said in a tongue-in-cheek press release. “Rather, he is a mascot for the University of Toronto’s Beta Sigma Rho fraternity.”

While Joe Shuster wasn’t a member of the frat, whose Toronto chapter launched in 1930, his first cousin Frank, a University of Toronto student, did belong. Joe Shuster would leave Cleveland often to visit his Toronto cousin; the two would spend days watching movies in downtown theaters. Frank Shuster would go on to form the legendary Canadian comedy duo Wayne & Shuster with Johnny Wayne.

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Victor Navasky Knows an Anti-Semitic Cartoon

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

On the back flap of his new book, Victor Navasky is portrayed in a kinetic caricature by the illustrious Edward Sorel. It’s one clue about Navasky’s deep connection to political cartoons explored in “The Art of Controversy,” a personal history as well as learned survey of the form.

The former editor and publisher of The Nation, Navasky first published political cartoons as editor of Monocle, a “radical sporadical” satirical journal he founded in the late 1950s. More recently, he engaged with the infamous “Muhammad” cartoons that sparked rioting across the Muslim world, choosing not to run them in this very book, a decision he explains at length. With lucid, funny takes on artists from William Hogarth to Ralph Steadman to Doug Marlette — and an entire chapter on Der Sturmer, the Nazi propaganda magazine whose vicious cartoons demonized Jews — Navasky brings the art form’s power to life. The Arty Semite spoke to him from Manhattan.

Michael Kaminer: What is it about cartoons that spark such emotional reactions?

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A Jewish Tradition of Changing Names

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:00:00 GMT-5

Earlier this week, Royal Young interviewed his grandparents and wrote about his parents’ reaction to his debut memoir “Fame Shark.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:

I changed my name from Hazak Brozgold to Royal Young when I was 20 years old. I was a drunk college drop-out who had moved back into my parent’s Lower East Side apartment with big, unrealistic dreams and a drinking habit too large for my childhood bedroom. Getting rid of my hard to pronounce Hebrew name felt like a step toward escaping my youth and my disapproving Jewish parents. My moniker had set me apart in classrooms and the ghetto downtown streets I’d grown up in. The Lower East Side of my youth was broken glass on uneven sidewalks, fast domino games, sneakers hanging from streetlights, Hip Hop blasting bass heavy from car windows. My grandparent’s days, when the neighborhood was an Eastern European shtetl transplant, were long gone. My parents had literally missed the boat.

They named me Hazak Brozgold to make up for it. Hazak means “strong” in Hebrew. But I always felt weak. A shy, quiet bookworm I shrank from the rough streets around me, finding escape in making my neuropsychologist mom administer me Rorsach tests instead of going on play dates, or painting crude canvasses with my artist/social worker father in his cluttered studio.

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Bruce Ratner To Head Museum of Jewish Heritage

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:43:00 GMT-5

Bruce Ratner, executive chairman of Forest City Ratner Companies, was elected chairman-elect of the board of trustees of the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, according to a June 12 press release. Ratner is the principle developer of The Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which includes the new Barclays Center arena.

The position of chairman-elect is a new one for the museum, and is intended to ease the process of succession within the board. The current chairman, Robert M. Mogenthau, has served in the position since 1982 and will assume the post of chairman emeritus following a transition period.

“I’m… thrilled that the Board has elected Bruce Ratner as the Chairman-elect,” wrote Morgenthau in a statement. “Bruce has long been a friend to me and the Museum.”

Ratner has been a member of the museum’s board of trustees since 1996. He was also co-chair of its building committee and provided pro-bono project management services through his company during the museum’s expansion in the early 2000s. The Robert M. Morgenthau Wing opened in September 2003.

In a statement provided by the museum, Ratner recalled how his own family was affected by the Holocaust.

“After the war, my mother committed herself to resettling survivors, finding homes and apartments,” he said. “She, most of all, would remind us, ‘Never Forget.’ In that spirit, and her memory, I’m humbled and excited to accept the position of Chairman-elect.”

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Carole King Charms Massachusetts

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

In a reverse case of “Where you lead, I will follow,” a verse from one of Carole King’s countless hit songs, Bostonians trailed the iconic Brooklyn-born songstress around their state last month.

On May 11, along with Willie Nelson and Annie Lennox, King received an honorary degree from Berklee College of Music. That Friday, she spoke about her memoir “A Natural Woman” at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. She took a detour to Washington, D.C. for a May 22 White House ceremony, where she received the Library of Congress’ annual Gershwin Prize for Popular Song and where President Obama called King, the first female recipient of the award, “a living legend.” Then she was back in Beantown, on the bill of megastars performing in the May 30 “Boston Strong” benefit concert for the Marathon bombing victims.

King could rest right there on her laurels, but the longtime environmental activist and politically active citizen is neither a secluded celebrity nor a passive observer. During May she also made several campaign appearances on behalf of Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey, at venues like Zaftig’s Delicatessen in Brookline, private homes in Lexington and Wellesley, The Center for Arts at the Armory in Somerville, and Lyndell’s Bakery in Cambridge.

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Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg Kill Their Friends

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 19:20:00 GMT-5

Actor Seth Rogen and writer-producer Evan Goldberg, known for R-rated stoner comedies such as “Superbad” and “Pineapple Express,” make their debut as directors this week with “This Is the End.”

Rogen, 31, and Goldberg, 30, said that they wanted to push the boundaries of comedy by having actors play themselves dealing with an apocalypse in the film, which will be released in North America on Wednesday.

“It always seemed weird for all of us to all be in a movie and not acknowledge that we all somehow know each other, because we’ve been in so many movies together already. To me it was almost distracting that we didn’t play ourselves,” Rogen said.

“We’ve never seen it in a movie done like this, so it was exciting,” he added.

In the film, a group of Hollywood’s top young comedy actors including Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Mindy Kaling, Jason Segel, Michael Cera, Emma Watson and Danny McBride come together at a wild party at James Franco’s house.

The revelers are interrupted by the apocalypse. Fireballs ravage the Hollywood Hills, leaving a trail of destruction and a giant fire pit that swallows up many celebrity guests, including pop singer Rihanna, in front of Franco’s house.

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An Interview With My Babbi and Zayde

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 11:45:00 GMT-5

Earlier this week, Royal Young wrote about his parents’ reaction to his debut memoir, “Fame Shark.” His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:

My maternal grandmother fought to escape her Lower East Side. My Babbi was born in 1932 and raised on Pitt Street and Houston, a few blocks from where I would grow up years later. She was the daughter of Orthodox Austrian immigrants who came through Ellis Island in 1919 with thousands of other displaced Jews, gazing in awe at the Statue of Liberty from the steerage deck of a third-class freighter.

The Lower East Side of the ’30s was an Eastern European shtetl transplant, an unruly Jewish village struggling through the end of the Depression. Its tenements teemed with immigrants who practiced wild customs — matchmaking, interpreting prophesies from dreams — that they’d imported with silver menorahs hidden under rags during the ocean passage.

My handsome grandfather had a bachelor pad on Henry Street before he was a Zayde. They met when he taught my Babbi art and their hearts filled over many hours developing photographs in dim darkrooms. Images of her from that time are coy and striking, he bold and laughing. Their eyes gleam for adventure, conquest, love, glory, knowledge.

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'Wolfenstein' Returns

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:10:00 GMT-5

Remember “Wolfenstein”?

Those of us who grew up playing computer games in the ‘90s certainly will. You know, the one where you ran around in a castle shooting Nazis. The first version, “Castle Wolfenstein,” was released in 1981, but for those of us a little bit younger, the main version was “Wolfenstein 3D,” from 1992.

Since then there have been five more Wolfensteins, the most recent from 2009, though they seem to have escaped my notice. Maybe that’s because I don’t play video games much, but I also didn’t hear about them from anyone who does.

Now a new Wolfenstein, titled “Wolfenstein: The New Order,” is about to be launched, and it’s actually getting some buzz. A trailer for the game was released June 6, which happens to be anniversary of D-Day, though a representative of Bethesda Softworks told Kotaku that the timing was unintentional.

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I.B. Singer and the Problem of Surviving

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

Herman Broder is a gangly loser who’s won the biggest prize of all: his life. After surviving the Nazi onslaught in Poland by hiding in a haystack, he emigrates to America — specifically, Coney Island — with the gentile Polish woman who hid him, and who is now his wife. This is the setting of “Enemies: A Love Story,” a play performed for four nights last week by the Gesher Theater Company at the Frederick P. Rose Theater in New York.

This adaptation of a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer (published serially in the Forverts in 1966) unfolds as Herman reels from one agitation to another. It seems his one noble act — protecting his savior, who endangered her own life by saving his — is all he’s got. Now he is hurled between his wife Yadwiga and his mistress Masha on bumpy inter-borough subway rides that, amid the atmospherics of striking lighting and set design, comprise some of the play’s most affecting moments. That’s when actor Israel Demidov embodies the more sympathetic side of his anti-hero. Otherwise, he is an indecisive liar. (And beds ladies with his tie on, twice.)

Herman is by turns perplexed, lusty and suicidal. Then his wife Tamara shows up. He thought she was killed in the Holocaust along with their two children. But she reappears in New York, and although they are unnerved by meeting again, it seems there is no great love to rekindle. As the realization that he has two wives and a mistress sinks in for Herman — and eventually for all three of them — he reels ever more out of control, pinging between his home life with a now-pregnant wife so devoted to Herman that she wants to convert; the Bronx apartment where his demanding mistress, another Jewish survivor, lives with her elderly mother; and conversations with his undead wife, who transmits an odd mix of reproach and caring.

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My Family’s Reaction to 'Fame Shark'

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:00:00 GMT-5

Royal Young’s debut memoir “Fame Shark” will be released June 2013 from Heliotrope Books. Young contributes to Interview Magazine, New York Post, BOMB Magazine and The Lo Down. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:

“I sound like a cheap, mean kyke,” my father raged. “I sound like an idiot, a complete non-entity,” my mother was furious too. I had been nervous about them reading my first memoir, “Fame Shark,” but none of my jitters had prepared me for this ballistic reaction. We were sitting down to breakfast at Castillo, a Dominican restaurant in New York’s Lower East Side where I had grown up eating delicious homefries colored orange from Sofrito. Now they stuck in my throat.

For me, the book was a monument to the obvious: I was in love with both my parents. But raised by two Jews who were brilliant psychoanalysts, my love had a darkness, a depth, an introspection I’d learned from them. Wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t that flattering?

“So, it’s basically fiction,” Mom said,”a lot of this stuff never happened.” It was true that I had purposefully pandered to a modern American culture that had the attention span of meth addicts. I’d cut all the “boring” bits out of my life in this telling. But fiction? No way. It had been hard, terrifying and humbling to write truths about myself: I had been bullied to the point of molestation as a kid, I had later exchanged sex for money and movie roles, cultivated friendships with drug dealers, sunk to supreme unhappiness at the altar of celebrity worship. I had begun writing “Fame Shark” still half in the throes of an idiotic, unoriginal fantasy that the book itself would lift me into celebrity. Only the therapeutic writing of it had helped take me out of my own narcissism/self-hatred (a diagnosis my parents had once agreed with, in our darkest conflicts).

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Israeli Author Yoram Kaniuk Dies at 83

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:26:00 GMT-5

Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk died after a long battle with cancer yesterday at Ichilov Hospital, Tel Aviv. The renowned writer was 83.

Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv on May 2, 1930. The list of people associated with his early childhood reads like a who’s who of the early days of Tel Aviv’s cultural life and society. His father, Moshe Kaniuk, was the personal secretary of Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, and became the first curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His godfather was the poet Haim Nahman Bialik; his kindergarten teacher was the wife of pioneer and poet Joseph Haim Brenner; his school doctor was the poet Shaul Tchernichovsky.

In his youth, he was a member of the prestate Jewish underground Palmach, and was part of the Palyam − the Palmach’s naval force. He fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, a time of his life that provided much inspiration for his later work.

Read more at Haaretz.com

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Watch Woody Allen's 'Blue Jasmine' Trailer

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:30:00 GMT-5

Another year, another Woody Allen movie.

Allen’s latest picture, “Blue Jasmine,” is scheduled for a July 26 release, but we can get a sense of it now thanks to a trailer that was released this weekend.

With Cate Blanchett starring as a trophy wife whose husband (Alec Baldwin) turns out to be a Bernie Madoff-esque criminal, it looks like “Blue Jasmine” may be more drama than comedy, returning Allen to mid-career films like “Interiors,” “Another Woman” and “Husbands and Wives.” The fans satirized in Allen’s “Stardust Memories” may have preferred his “early, funny ones,” but given the resounding flop of last year’s “To Rome, With Love,” a return to serious might not be a bad thing.

Watch the trailer for ‘Blue Jasmine’:

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Maurice Sendak Gets a Google Doodle

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:50:00 GMT-5

Children’s author Maurice Sendak, who died May 8, 2012, would have been 85 today. In his honor, Google has produced a complete animated sequence on its homepage, celebrating Sendak books such as “Where the Wild Things Are,” “In the Night Kitchen” and “Bumble-Ardy.” Head over to Google or watch the whole thing below.

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'Kinky Boots' Wins Six Tonys

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:10:00 GMT-5

“Kinky Boots” won six Tony awards on Sunday including the top award of best musical and a prize for its composer, pop queen Cyndi Lauper, as Broadway presented its top honors.

Lauper won best score for her first Broadway musical, “Kinky Boots,” an adaptation of a British film about a struggling shoe factory reinventing itself by making boots for drag queens.

The hit musical topped the nominations with 13 and also won best actor in a musical for Billy Porter, best choreography, orchestrations and sound design.

A tearful Lauper said “I can’t say I wasn’t practicing in front of the shower curtain for the past couple of days,” and went on to “thank Broadway, for welcoming me.”

Porter, who as the strong, proud drag queen is at the show’s heart, said he first watched the Tony telecast at home at age 11, and recalled a performance from the musical “Dreamgirls” by saying “That moment has changed my life.”

The best play Tony was won by “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” a crowd-pleasing comic riff on Anton Chekhov’s work by veteran playwright Christopher Durang that stars Sigourney Weaver and David Hyde Pierce.

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The Sculptures of Sorel Etrog

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

Sorel Etrog’s sculptures adorn Toronto street corners. He designed the Genie, Canada’s equivalent of an Academy Award. He collaborated with giants of 20th-century culture, from Samuel Beckett to Eugene Ionesco to Marshall McLuhan.

Still, the 79-year-old artist has never won the attention or acclaim of his contemporaries. But a beautifully presented, carefully curated survey at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto makes a case for changing that. With sculptures, paintings, graphic projects, and even a rarely seen film, Sorel Etrog presents the artist as a boundary-breaking thinker and a blazing intellectual foil for his marquee-name collaborators.

“Etrog’s career took off in Toronto, and he found support here, but he never had a breakthrough moment in an art-world center like New York or London,” said AGO curator Greg Humeniuk, who organized the multimedia exhibit – the first comprehensive look at Etrog’s work in a half-century. “And in the 1960s, with pop and minimalism beginning to hold sway, some of Etrog’s work looked not quite ‘with it’.”

But Etrog “is a one-man school, a one-man genre,” Humeniuk said. “As a sculptor, painter, draughtsman, filmmaker, and writer, he’s one of the most multifaceted artists of his generation.” Today, Humeniuk notes, collectors are buying Etrog’s work “avidly,” and younger artists “are looking toward his work as a strong part of the lineage of modern sculpture.”

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Thinking in Aramaic, Writing in English

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:27:00 GMT-5

Earlier this week, Janice Weizman wrote about writing historical fiction and the bildungsroman and the Jewish woman. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:

“Many artists are ‘underground’,” a writing instructor of mine once remarked, “but no one is more underground than writers.” To that I would add that no one is more underground than writers who don’t write in the language of the place they live. It amounts to a sort of double life. On the outside, you function in the same language as everyone around you. But then you have this other world, where you think and create in the tongue of a stranger. Your boss, the next-door neighbors, the mother of your child’s best friend and Moshe from the makolet might be aware that you are working on a novel, but you know, from the very first word you write, that they will probably never read it.

While I was writing “The Wayward Moon,” a novel which takes place in the 9th century Middle East, the situation was even more confusing. I was constantly alert to the fact that rather than Hebrew or English, my characters would have spoken something that sounds like Ha lachma anya di achalu avtania, and dizabin abah bitrei zuzei. If, like me, these phrases from the Haggadah are all the Aramaic you know, then you understand the difficulty.

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