Schlemiel Theory

When it first came out, I went with my parents to the legendary Delaware Theater (formerly the Spectrum) in Albany, New York, to see Steven Spielberg’s newest film, The Fabelmans, which takes Spielberg himself—the genealogical story of his love of film and his family—as its subject. What struck me first, even before seeing the film, was the place where I was seeing it and the audience with whom…

“It’s Funny”: Shalom Auslander, Diogenes, and the Cynical Schlemiel After the Holocaust Teaching Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy for a course on the Holocaust was a fascinating educational exercise because I used the novel to prompt my students—and myself—into a dialogue with what I would call anxious American Jewish post-Holocaust cynicism. It is a strange dialogue because Auslander doesn’t…

What happens to the schlemiel when the world that created him disappears? Cynthia Ozick’s “Envy; or, Yiddish in America” poses this question with extraordinary comic cruelty. Its central character, Edelshtein, is an aging Yiddish poet living in America, surrounded by a language that increasingly cannot hear him. He writes. He complains. He envies. He dreams of recognition. But almost no one…

The Three Stooges, trying to fix malfunctioning technologies. One of the greatest scenes in American film history is Charlie Chaplin’s film, Modern Times (1936). Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) is a satirical comedy that critiques the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Chaplin’s iconic Tramp character struggles to survive in a mechanized world, facing assembly-line monotony,…

I want to apologize to all of my subscribers for being off the blog for such a long time. I was literally locked out of my account because my password recovery email changed. After some time and back and forth with WordPress, everything worked out. Here I am! Hi’neni! For my first post in a year and change, I’d like to share a reflection on laughter by Joseph Rosenfeld a friend of mine who is a…

I grew up in a small town in the Adirondacks. We lived on a few acres of land. We had a pond, a stream, and a marsh in back of our house. In back of my house, I could see the mountains. Since we lived in a valley, I would see the weather come in from the mountains, slowly passing over my house. I lived in a kind of slow solitude, outside of history. To be sure, many Americans growing up in the…

Al Jaffee – who was at the inception of Mad Magazine in 1952, and returned in 1964 and stayed until it folded in 2019 – died today, at the age of 102. Known primarily for his “fold-in” for Mad Magazine, in his last interview, for New York Magazine’s Culture blog, Vulture, he talks about his Jewish roots in Lithuania, and much else. Apparently, he was raised in an observant home and, like many…

With the rise of anti-semitism in America – which I have experienced, personally; and see on social media, perpetually – I have been starting to think more about what it is and what we can do to – if possible – counter-act it. One era that I have studied in depth and written on in many essays and book chapters, is the period before, during, and after the Holocaust. German Jewish thinkers like…

One of the most notable losses to the film world of recent note, was the death of Chaim Topol (four days ago). To be sure, Topol received two Golden Globe Awards and was a nominee for both a Tony Award and an Academy Award. He won the most prestigious award in Israel, the Israel Prize, for his performance in Fiddler on the Roof. The play has run 3500 times on the Broadway Stage. Fiddler held the…

I was born and raised in a small town in the Adirondacks called Mayfield. In elementary school, I was the only Jew in my class. When we sang in the school assembly in December, we sang several Christmas carols; but to make sure I didn’t feel like the odd one out, the teachers included two songs about Hannukah. All the students would look at me and smile as we sang. After an anti-semitic incident…

While I was watching the Superbowl half-time show, featuring Rhianna’s performance, I couldn’t help but think that she (or her choreographer) was comically inspired by the penultimate schlemiel-as-sperm moment in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1973)….when all of the sperm are about to depart….

I recently published a piece with White Rose Magazine on what I call “trash culture” entitled, “TRASHED: GARBAGE, BARBARISM + SPECTACLE IN AMERICAN CULTURE.” It is a topic that deeply concerns me and should concern all of you. I enjoyed writing it and articulating what worries me about where America is going based on the proliferation of “trashing” and barbarism going down (24/7) in American…

Once in a while, Mayim Bialik drops a Yiddish word and explains it. Today, the Yiddish word was schlemiel (and schlimazel). Take note that Schlemiel Theory is the biggest repository of scholarship – literary, philosophical, and cultural – on the schlemiel (with over 400 essays/posts and over 6500 followers). Here is a post I did on Mayim back in 2017. Here is the Facebook Post. Enjoy!

“Don’t Be Like Larry?” On the Schlemiel & the FTX Crypto Scam

In Larry David’s commercial promoting FTX Cryptocurrency that aired during the Superbowl, Larry David played the schlemiel character and script, which, to be sure, is his hallmark (whether in Curb Your Enthusiasm or in his writing for Seinfeld). In this commercial, David plays schlemiel characters throughout history who – in the span of one minute – all comically reject the introduction of…

Walter Abish, Haunted, Defamiliarized, Fascinated: A Master of Experimental Fiction Passes into the Dark Night

Abish is, for me – and several others like John Updike, Harold Bloom, et al, – one of the greatest fiction writers in America in the 20th century…that (not) many people knew about. He is a writer for writers, for those of us who love language. In a truly Derridan sense, Abish was a master of the “play of language.” His words are a delightful “double session.” In his book, Alphabetical Africa, he…

On the Schlemiel & Sacha Baron Cohen’s Upcoming HBO Animated Special, “Chelm: The Smartest Place on Earth”

Sacha Baron Cohen has, to be sure, played the schlemiel character in nearly every one of his productions. From Ali G to Borat, we see that Cohen prefers to characters with the schlemiel sensibility. To be sure, Cohen has in many ways taken on the legacy of Charlie Chaplin (who Hannah Arendt, saw as a quintessential schlemiel who changed American and Western Culture). She saw the schlemiel as a…

Notes On Jean-Paul Sartre’s Reading of Jewish Inauthenticity (Self-Hatred), Self-Consciousness & the Jewish Body

In 1946, in the wake of the Holocaust, Jean-Paul Sartre published Reflexions sur la Quesion Juive. The collection of essays was renamed, translated as Anti-Semite and Jew (my edition is from 1965, Schocken Books). Sartre’s book was reprinted over twelve times, and in many languages. The book presents a reading of anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitic character as well as the figure of Jewish…