Features
David Steinberg speaks fondly of his Winnipeg roots in autobiography
By MARTIN ZEILIG When asked why he decided to write this entertaining and insightful book comedian/director/writer/producer/actor David Steinberg provides a concise and reasonable response.
“Money,” Steinberg said in an email response to a series of questions sent to him by this reporter.
He seems to be following, at least in part, the wise words of Samuel Johnson (Dr. Johnson) the 18th century English writer, moralist, critic, editor and lexicographer who famously said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
David as a youngster in Winnipeg
Left: David (right) with his older brother Fishy, in 1946
Top right: David in Israel while on a scholarship to the Hebrew University
Bottom right: David playing basketball at the YMHA on Hargrave, 1953
But, to be fair, there was more to Steinberg’s reply: “And I have a lot of memories and information about comedy and comedians I wanted to share.”Steinberg grew up in Winnipeg, where he studied theology at yeshiva at the age of fifteen, and went to the University of Chicago, leaving to become a member of Second City, notes his bio.
He appeared on Broadway with Elliot Gould in Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders and Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, directed by Sidney Poitier. During Steinberg’s almost three decades as a stand-up comedian, beginning at the Bitter End, he released four comedy albums and received two Grammy nominations. Steinberg has directed many TV shows, among them Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Designing Women, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Golden Girls. He lives in Los Angeles and New York with his wife, Robyn.
This writer has known David “Duddi” Steinberg for decades. His sister, Tammy Lazer, and her (late) husband, Harry, and their two children, Hart and Shelley, lived next door to the Zeilig family in Garden City for a number of years.
I have vivid memories of Hart and me playing football catch on Primrose Crescent with “Uncle Duddi” whenever he used to come visit the family. David drove a blue 1959 Plymouth Valiant.
On at least one occasion, he even visited my parents, Lillian and Morrey, and played his guitar and sang a folk song while sitting on the orange shag carpeted living room floor of our five room blue bungalow.
While watching David on a television comedy special from Hollywood many years later, my mother reminisced about that special time when the young “still undiscovered” Duddi Steinberg had serenaded her.
I recall a standup comedy show Steinberg gave at the Centennial Concert Hall back in the late 1970s. Afterwards, he invited some friends, including my mother, and family members backstage to visit him in his dressing room for a while.
As someone said afterwards, “Fame and success hasn’t changed him. Duddi Steinberg is still a real down-to-earth mentsch.”
My late brother, Ken, worked as a radio arts correspondent for CBC in London, England for many years back in the 1960s and ‘70s. I recall him telling me that he and his first wife, Gillian, saw a play in the west end, which had first appeared on Broadway, starring Steinberg.
“The play wasn’t memorable,” Ken said. “But, David is an engaging actor. He’s very good.”
Steinberg writes that it took him a few years to write the book—all the stories, reminiscences, tales of directing, performing and related anecdotes and incidents—to get it “where I wanted it.”
The list of comedians in the book seems endless, from Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks, to Don Rickles, Lucille Ball, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Lily Tomlin, Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Martin Short, Steve Martin and so many more.
“We didn’t have TV in Winnipeg while I was growing up,” the author writes.
“I watched every movie as a kid and listened to every radio show. Radio was so exciting. It was all about your imagination. You were creating pictures in your head from what you were hearing. I always applied that to my stand up. Second City (the Chicago comedy and improvisational troupe) was one of the best things that happened to me early on.
“I learned from seeing Lenny Bruce perform at the Gate of Horn that a comedian could be dapper and still be funny (rare for the time). Lenny was a genius. He was soft-spoken and never pandered to the audience. He was never afraid of being controversial. He was my comedic hero. He was everyone’s comedic hero.”
He also considers being on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson for over 30 years as a major highlight of his career.
“Johnny asked me to host it when I was 26,” Steinberg says. “Looking back, being on that show with Johnny was everything to me. I love comedians and I love my life in comedy. I loved directing all the shows from Bob Newhart to Curb Your Enthusiasm. And I’m so proud of this book.”
Yet, in looking back at his long and illustrious career, Steinberg says that “Getting the Order of Canada (presented by former Governor General Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette) was one of the most important moments in my life. Remember, my father (a rabbi/grocer) and mother were Russian immigrants, with very little. My only regret is that they were not there to see me get one of the highest honors of my beloved country.”
Some notable excerpts: “Insecurity combined with arrogance is good DNA for a comedian. So is anger, aggression, and sadness. If you’ve had a great life and a wonderful bar mitzvah and you’ve been given a lot of money, you’d make a lousy comedian. You’re better off being the comedian’s lawyer.
“…I may be the only comedian to have made Elie Wiesel laugh; that I was admired by the great New Yorker writer S.J. (Sid) Perelman, and by Philip Roth, Kenneth Tynan, and Harold Pinter. And that I was virtually adopted by Groucho Marx and many of the legendary old-timers (such as Jack Benny and George Burns) at Hillcrest Country Club. I also directed Burt Reynolds at the height of his considerable fame, before he self-destructed.
“It’s a funny thing about comedy: when you give your life to it, it can become a serious business. I spent my life in and outside the comedy world, and it is a world, a universe unto itself.
“But this book is not just about my life in comedy—it’s about my life and comedy in the last half century. I lived through a time when stand-up comedy was a poor relation to other forms of entertainment, when being on a successful sitcom was nothing to write home about. But, I think I was one of a group of people—along with Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and a few others—who pushed stand-up forward as an art form and made comedy an important part of the culture.
“Comedians ‘steal’ from each other all the time—not material, but ideas. There’s no good comedian that hasn’t stolen ideas from someone. And you don’t really ‘steal’ material. You do your own version of it. And so that’s a bar code. So Shelley Berman on the phone—I guarantee you Nichols and May had their comedic ‘on the phone’ piece before him. Bob Newhart was on the phone in a way no one else was.”
Then, there was the time Steinberg was best man at the wedding of the notorious Mafia kingpin Joey “Crazy Joe” Gallo.
He writes: “Joey Gallo was about forty years old when we met and about as famous in his own high-visibility field as I was in mine.”
Caption under a photo— one of many photos— in the book: “I hadn’t known Joey Gallo that long, maybe a year or so, but I arrived at Jerry and Marta Orbach’s house for a party, and when I got there, I was told that Joey and Sina were getting married right then.When Joey insisted I be his best man, the priest was so excited I froze, surprised and shocked, as you can imagine. (I thought it should have been Jerry, who had known him for many, many years). And here I am right after the ‘I do’s’ with the happy couple. March 1, 1972.
“I remember, as a child, sitting in my neighborhood Winnipeg movie theatre all day, every weekend, watching the same Marx Brothers movies over and over again, and laughing and laughing and laughing, worshipping this great, odd, funny man with the funnier name, Groucho.
“Cut to eighteen years later, meeting my childhood hero, my new friend, Groucho. He could still make me laugh, but this time I could reciprocate the gift of laughter.”
David Steinberg’s life has, as he admits, been a dream built on laughter.
A legend in his field.
“Inside Comedy: The Soul, Wit, and Bite of Comedy and Comedians of the Last Five Decades”
By David Steinberg
(Knopf 335 pg. $40.00)
Captions for above photos, as supplied by David Steinberg:
Left: “On set with Jordan Peele (left) and Keegan-Michael Key (center). Many years ago, I directed Keegan in the pilot Frangela and subsequently became a big fan of Key & Peele. I was lucky to have Keegan and Jordan on Inside Comedy and to get to know these two amazingly talented people.”
Credit: Ty Watkins
Centre: “On the set of Inside Comedy. These are all people I love. They light up a room. Mel Brooks and Tim Conway are always buoyant, Jon Lovitz is so smart and just finished doing a perfect imitation of Woody Allen’s moose story, which he said inspired him into comedy. And my good friend Alan Zweibel, who is every comedy writer’s matzo brei. (Left to right: Brooks, Lovitz, Zweibel, me, Conway.) “
Credit: © Nicholas Rowan Adams
Right: One of my favorite birthdays with Don Rickles, Marty Short, Bob Newhart, and of course my wife, Robyn, who threw the party at E. Baldi restaurant in Beverly Hills, August 9, 2014.”
Credit: Courtesy of the Author
Captions for above photos:
Left: “Sharing a cigar with Groucho, as we always did. He was reluctant to come on as my co-host, but I’m so glad he did; it really meant everything to me, and the audience loved him.”
Credit: The Music Scene
Centre: “John Candy and his family lived in my guesthouse in Los Angeles for a year while we were writing and shooting the cult classic Going Berserk, circa 1982. John wrote most of the script on a napkin. That should tell you something. That was the whole script.”
Credit: Courtesy of the Author
Right: “This is Kong (short for “King Kong”). Kong was my monologue go-to. Sometimes I would talk about current events, and I also would do a Dietrich-like rendition of “Falling in Love Again.” One of the many places Kong and I went was on The David Steinberg Show, the CBS summer replacement for The Carol Burnett Show, 1972.”
Credit: Courtesy of the Author
Features
Arnold Zeal – the road from Kenora To Jacksonville
By GERRY POSNER For Arnold Allan Zeal, his journey through life, though it officially started in Winnipeg in 1943, really began in Kenora, Ontario. Arnold and his sister Marilyn, children of Charlie and Sula ( Bernstein) Zeal, were raised in their early years in Kenora, where Charlie had set up business as owner of a department store: Zeal and Gold. He later became a hotel proprietor (the Kenricia Hotel, still standing to this day and familiar to readers who know Kenora). When Arnold was 12, the family moved to Winnipeg so that Arnold could have a bar mitzvah there. The family lived on Cordova in River Heights.
Arnold soon integrated into Winnipeg life. Oddly, he did not attend Kelvin, where most Jewish kids in the south end of Winnipeg went to high school at that time – since Grant Park High School was not yet built. Zeal attended Gordon Bell High School across the Assiniboine River. At the time he was one of only five Jewish students there. (The others were: Les Allen, Ivan Brodsky, Larry Leonoff and Allan Berkal.)
After high school, Zeal made his way to the University of Manitoba, where he took Science and graduated – first with a BSc, later a Masters of Science in Microbiology/Biochemistry. Following completion of his Masters degree he was accepted into medical school at the University of Manitoba, graduating in 1970.
In those days, once you finished your formal schooling, you had to do a rotating internship. Arnold did his at the Winnipeg General Hospital (later the Health Sciences Centre). He found himself attracted to neurosurgery, one of the most demanding areas in medicine.
It was then that he came under the tutelage of the renowned Drs. Dwight Parkinson and Rankin Hay, also occasionally another famous doctor, Norman Hill – when he came to HSC to do paediatric cases. Zeal completed his residency in neurosurgery at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, followed up by successfully passing the American Board of Neurological Surgery written examination. He then left to take a research fellowship in Microvascular Neurological Surgery at the University of Florida at Gainesville in 1976.
In 1977, Zeal moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he became acting chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at University Hospital, an affiliate of the University of Florida (now called UF Jacksonville). After 2 1/2 years there, he left to enter private practice in neurological surgery in Jacksonville.
Over the next couple of years, he became qualified to sit for the oral portion of the examination for the American Board of Neurological Surgeons and the result was that Arnold Zeal was then “ Board Certified in Neurological Surgery.” (Just the names of these boards scare me; no wonder I never entered that field.)
Zeal subsequently obtained fellowships from the American College of Surgeons, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, and the American Heart Association. To say Arnold Zeal was well qualified would be an understatement.
Along the way, he took out memberships in various medical associations, including the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, in addition to belonging to multiple regional medical societies in Florida. In 1977, Zeal entered into private practice in Jacksonville, Florida. He became chairman of the Neurosurgery Department in several Jacksonville hospitals, primarily Baptist Center, the largest medical centre hospital in Northeast Florida, where he served as chairman for 15 years. As well, Zeal wrote several prominent papers in peer-reviewed journals. In short, he was a busy guy. Also, something else of interest – starting in 1995, Arnold served as the neurological consultant to the Jacksonville Jaguars of the NFL, filling that role for the first eight years from the team’s inception.
It was during his residency that Arnold married his wife Janet, then a Surgical- ICU Nurse at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. They became the parents of four highly accomplished sons. Given the demands of neurosurgery, Arnold was not able to spend as much time parenting as he might have preferred and he is quick to point out the fact that the boys turned out as well as they did is directly attributable to his wife of 52 years, Janet Zeal. Janet herself managed to obtain an additional college degree, develop her own business, and manage Arnold’s practice, all in addition to raising the four boys and supporting Arnold.
For over 40 years, Arnold was occupied in Jacksonville as a neurosurgeon. With his busy schedule he was often having to perform surgery at late hours for long periods on his feet, all with total concentration. As one can imagine, sometimes those surgeries are complex, requiring careful decisions in advance of and during the surgery, also leading the surgeon to make instant decisions if things changed during the course of the surgery. (I get nervous just writing about that kind of situation.)
Due to a shoulder injury, Arnold retired from operating, but he continued to evaluate office patients. He remained focused on Gamma Knife surgical procedures until his full retirement in late 2017. Even after retiring from the operating room, he remained active in the field, participating in conferences with his partners and colleagues. He says that he has now managed to get used to getting a full night’s sleep without receiving a call to get to the hospital for an emergency operation.
I asked Arnold what the key qualities were to becoming a successful neurosurgeon? He didn’t hesitate in answering, saying you have to be caring and have what he calls the three “A’s”- Availability, Affability and Ability. He added that you must possess lots of stamina, have good hands (I’m eliminated on that count alone), plus be dedicated to your work. He had them all. Ask anyone who knew Arnold Zeal and what you would hear about him was that he was an excellent diagnostician and had great manual dexterity.
Arnold has no lack of activities these days. Janet and Arnold have their four sons living not far away and, with five grandchildren, they are kept occupied. Aside from all that, he loves to come back to Winnipeg when he can – especially for medical reunions. And – he truly treasures the opportunities to return to his youthful days in Kenora. He knows the Lake of the Woods as if it were the inside of a brain. In short, he is quite comfortable operating a boat as well as operating on the brain!
Features
Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats
A police report obtained by the Forward sheds light on the removal of a Chabad rabbi from the campus of Oberlin College last week, after the school administration became aware of a police report that alleged he engaged in sexually explicit conversations online concerning minors.
Rabbi Scott (Shlomo) Elkan, former co-director of Oberlin Chabad, allegedly received sexually explicit texts, photos and videos through the messaging app Kik concerning three young people, ages 7, 12 and 13, according to the report.
In December 2025 messages to an adult on the platform, Elkan allegedly responded to photos of someone giving a child a bath. The person he chatted with alluded to touching the child’s genitals and said he had been aroused when the child was sitting on his lap, the report stated.
According to the Oberlin Police Department report, Elkin shared photos of girls as part of the chat. The department closed the case after a 20-day investigation, with no charges filed.
In a phone interview with the Forward, Elkan said he regretted his participation in the chat, but that his messages were not based on real events. He did not address the photos.
“To be clear, what had happened was an online chat with an anonymous adult on purely fictional, you know, fantastical things that’s not rooted in any kind of reality whatsoever,” Elkan said. “And I entered that, and I should not have, and I take responsibility for that.”
Elkan added that he has been engaged in “professional care and spiritual counseling to deal with all of the stresses and all of the factors that led me to engaging in an unhealthy behavior.”
According to the report, in an interview with police, Elkan confirmed the Kik account belonged to him and said the chats were “escapism” from the stress of his everyday life. He denied ever viewing or possessing child pornography.
Elkan told the Forward that “oftentimes people think of rabbis as godlike and infallible,” and he “made a mistake in one of the weakest few moments of my life.”
“There was no crime. Nothing illegal. Poor judgment, yes,” Elkan said. “And there’s not a victim. The victims here are the Jewish community and my family.”
The fallout on campus
Oberlin president Carmen Twillie Ambar wrote an email last week alerting students and staff of the news that Elkan, who had worked at Oberlin Chabad since 2010, had been banned from campus — without sharing specifics.
“In the police report, Elkan admits to egregious actions in his personal life — including engaging in online sexual conversations concerning children and objectionable behavior,” Ambar wrote. “This behavior violates Oberlin’s values, shocks the conscience, and makes it clear that we cannot allow him continued access to our campus and community.”
Elkan criticized how Oberlin handled the situation, saying the email that the college sent to the community about his departure was vague and allowed speculation to spread. He also said the email was made public during the meeting in which campus officials informed him that he had been banned.
“That’s where my hurt, and I think so much of the hurt of the community lies. Because every time we stuck our neck out for the college, and every time we work for the best interest of them and the community, what feels like the very first opportunity they had to show us that same support, they chose a very different route,” Elkan said. “So I take responsibility for my actions, and I hold the college incredibly responsible for how this has played out.”
Andrea Simakis, a spokesperson for Oberlin, said in a statement that representatives of the college met with Elkan via Zoom just prior to releasing the campus message “to let him know we were going to send it, why we were sending it, and that we were banning him from campus.”
Simakis added that the language in the campuswide email “reflects the information in the police report, which we obtained through a public records request.”
Along with serving as a Chabad rabbi, Elkan also certified Oberlin’s kosher kitchen and sometimes led Passover services and other religious celebrations on campus, according to Ambar’s email.
Chabad rabbis are not typically employed by universities, instead operating independently through the Chabad umbrella, with Chabad functioning as recognized campus religious organizations.
Elkan resigned from his position with Chabad last Friday, a Chabad spokesperson told the Forward. Chabad did not provide further comment.
In the email to the community, Ambar said Oberlin had not previously received reports concerning Elkan’s behavior and was now asking a third party to investigate whether members of the campus community had been affected.
Ambar added that the news would be especially difficult for “those who sought spiritual leadership and guidance from Elkan,” but “the seriousness of this matter requires clear and swift action.” Rabbi Allison Vann, who had led High Holy Day services on campus with Cleveland Hillel, will work with students for the remainder of the semester.
The post Expelled Oberlin Chabad rabbi says he ‘made a mistake’ with explicit social media chats appeared first on The Forward.
This story originally said that Elkan posted images of children in a bath. He was a recipient.Features
A Christian Debate About Israel
By HENRY SREBRNIKThe Western neo-Marxist attacks on Israel, in league with Islamism, are of course a grave political and military danger, but their ideology can be rebuked by anyone with the slightest knowledge of actual history. “Jesus was a Palestinian”? “Israelis are white settler-colonialists”? These are almost jokes.
Such people don’t even know that the Zionist movement in fact rejected what was called “territorialism,” the project to build a Jewish homeland anywhere – in Argentina, western Australia, and elsewhere in the world. This included the so-called “Uganda Proposal” in east Africa, which was voted down at a World Zionist Congress in 1905.
Another territorialist plan, pushed by Communists in the 1920s, was for a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Union known as Birobidzhan. This came to fruition but ended up a complete failure. Jews were not interested in places outside their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.
Antisemitic rhetoric today appears on the progressive left in rhetoric that casts Zionism as malevolence, but also on the populist right in conspiratorial language about hidden power and divided loyalty, some harkening back to religious language we though was long gone.
The left’s arguments are shallow and, while extremely concerning, are fallacious. But the theological debates on the right are more alarming, because they will affect America’s relations with Israel. They go right back to genuine issues regarding the place of Jews and Christians in their respective religious worldviews and interactions. They are at the heart of “everything” in western history.
So-called Christian Zionism, found particularly in Protestant theology, sees the creation of Israel as part of God’s plan to hasten the coming of Jesus as the messiah at end times. Obviously, this is not congruent with our understanding of the messianic age, but politically it has been largely beneficial to Israel.
There is a deeper theological divide separating Catholics and evangelicals, the latter among the Jewish state’s most fervent supporters. Evangelicals tend to see Israel as the fulfillment of God’s pledge to the Jewish people, and they view that fulfillment as intertwined with their own religious identity. In contrast, most Catholics do not believe they have a theological obligation to support Israel.
Classical Christian antisemitism (really, anti-Judaism) is rooted in two propositions: that Jews bear the guilt for Christ’s death, and that when the majority of Jews rejected Jesus (who was a Jew, as were all his early apostles), God replaced the covenant with the children of Abraham with a new covenant, with Christians. This idea of a new bond that excludes the Jewish people is called “supersessionism” or “replacement theology.”
It consists of the claim that the Church has replaced the Jewish people as God’s covenanted, or chosen, people. According to supersessionism, Jesus inaugurated a new conception of “Israel,” one open to all, Gentile as well as Jew, because it was predicated on faith rather than the rejected markers of biological descent and observance of the law.
The Roman Catholic Church modified this stance with its historic document Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965 at the Second Vatican Council. It expressed some recognition of the Jews’ special relationship with the God of Israel. Though the statement recounts the fact that most Jews did not “accept the Gospel,” it also declares that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their fathers.”
This has been further elaborated. Pope John Paul II said that the Catholic Church has “a relationship” with Judaism “which we do not have with any other religion.” He also said that Judaism is “intrinsic” and not “extrinsic” to Christianity, and that Jews were Christians’ “elder brothers” in the faith.
Pope Benedict XVI explicitly rejected the idea that the Jewish people “ceased to be the bearer of the promises of God.” The Catholic Church states that “The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked.”
But now we see some of those earlier positions re-emerging, and not just among antisemites like Tucker Carlson. This is troubling and should not be ignored. On Jan. 17, for example, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches of Jerusalem, an assembly of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders, released a statement referring to Christian Zionism as a “damaging” ideology.
The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a Catholic commentator with more than two million YouTube subscribers, released a video in which he reiterated the older position on Israel: “I don’t think that the Jews are entitled to the Holy Land because of some religious premise. I don’t think that’s true. In fact, being Christian, I believe the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New Testament; Christ is the new covenant.” Catholics are not supposed to believe that Jews have a divine right to the Holy Land because, Knowles stated, Jews do not enjoy God’s favour and are not in fact God’s people any longer.
As Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large for the website Tablet Magazine, cautions, in “Letter to a Catholic Friend,” published Feb. 16, “What happens if good men and women don’t take up the fight and vociferously reject” such comments? “What starts with the fringes soon takes over the supposed mainstream.” For Jews, for Israel, and for America, that would be an unmitigated disaster.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.