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How New Yorker writer Ariel Levy adapted Philip Roth’s filthiest book for the stage
(JTA) — A scruffy, bearded Jewish man in his mid-60s — distressed, disheveled but wickedly self-satisfied — is invited to spend the night at the Manhattan apartment of an old friend and benefactor. Put up in the bedroom of the man’s college-age daughter, he slips a pair of her panties over his head and searches her drawers in hopes of finding nude Polaroids.
That’s a scene from Philip Roth’s 1995 novel “Sabbath’s Theater” and now a stage adaptation by the actor John Turturro and the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy. Turturro also stars as Sabbath, a washed-up artist best known for his transgressive puppet theater in the ’60s — and best known to readers, perhaps, as Roth’s most repellant character. Drenched, sometimes literally, in sex, the play begins with a riotous bout of intercourse and climaxes, as it were, with two old lovers remembering their kinks.
But if the book were only about sex it might not have earned its National Book Award. It is also a tender meditation on mourning: Sabbath’s Croatian mistress, Drenka Balich, is dead, as are his mother, his brother and his career. “And there are other kinds of love and loss: about mourning his family and his health and his youth and his virility,” Levy told me when we spoke earlier this week.
As a journalist, Levy often delves into the way sex and gender shape the lives of both celebrities and people on the margins. Her 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” began life as an award-winning essay on her miscarriage in a hotel room while on assignment in Mongolia, when she was 19 weeks pregnant, and expanded into a rumination on her dissolving marriage and roads not taken.
The New Group’s adaptation of “Sabbath’s Theater” opened Wednesday night and runs through Dec. 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan. Turturro (who played another Roth character, the craven Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, in the HBO adaptation of “The Plot Against America”) inhabits Mickey’s filthy, seductive charm. Elizabeth Marvel plays Drenka and other women in his life, and Jason Kravits plays the men. The play is as dirty as Mickey’s torn carpenter’s pants, but also poignant: When Sabbath cradles the belongings of his dead brother, lost in battle during World War II, it’s an echo of the violence and loss that have become overwhelming in recent weeks.
Levy and I spoke about adapting a quintessentially Jewish writer like Roth, the appeal of flawed protagonists and how an Italian actor like Turturro captures the Jewish soul of yet another Roth alter ego.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
With very few exceptions, adaptations of Roth’s work haven’t been all that successful. Do you agree and were thinking about how you might approach the material differently?
Well, I mean, I’d never adapted anything. Adapting Roth properly was like only one of many potentials for crises. Roth is my literary God. I like the way he uses language the most. He might not have liked me saying this because he was obviously very insistent on being an American writer, not a Jewish writer, but nobody captures the rhythm of the language of people whose first language is Yiddish and then move over to English. The way he uses those rhythms, that humor. The cultural familiarity is a powerful addition to my appreciation for his mastery of language and plot, irony and the level of his imagination, the level of his sense of play and his appreciation for what he calls, in ”Sabbath’s Theater,” the “nasty side of existence.”
John Turturro came to you through a recommendation by Hilton Als, a fellow writer at The New Yorker. Tell me about your writing process. What did you both agree on and disagree on — if you disagreed?
Oh, for the first couple of years, we kind of agreed on everything. It was the pandemic so we were going back and forth on Zoom. We had a very, very aligned vision of what the crucial stuff was. You could just tell that certain parts were going to work theatrically and certain parts were not, and then once we started rehearsing, after working on this together for two years and then going on this workshop at the National Theatre in London in January 2023 — once we got through that, we started to have a better sense of what will work theatrically. The unbelievable challenge for John was to be working on his performance and contemplating the script, because every change means a new thing you have to learn [as an actor].
Ariel Levy and John Turturro at the opening night party for The New Group Theater’s new play “Sabbath’s Theater,” at Green Fig Urban Eatery in New York City, Nov. 1, 2023. (Bruce Glikas/Getty Images)
How does a journalist learn to be a playwright? Was there anyone you were taking clues from about how to do this?
I was extremely worried and insecure about it. John knew I’d never written a play. He could have found plenty of playwrights who would have done this, but the way I’ve heard him explain it is that he didn’t want someone who’s gonna come in and say, “I know how to write a play. I’m going to rewrite this.” He wanted to use Roth’s language. We’re barely going to write stage directions, the stage directions are largely lifted from Roth’s writing. The most important thing to John was finding somebody who was Roth-reverent, and then also we just hit it off, we just liked each other. We liked the same parts of the book, and we both felt the book was a love story.
So, how did I learn to do it? I figured out that storytelling is storytelling. And also, I had John guiding me, John knows what a play is, and I had [the director] Jo Bonney guiding me through the process once we were in rehearsal.
You talked about your affinity for Roth. Was there something about “Sabbath’s Theater” that particularly connected to the things you’ve always been writing about and thinking about?
I’ve written a fair amount about the fundamental human drives for domesticity and comfort and kinship and security on the one hand, and adventure and novelty and stimulation on the other — those conflicting poles that human beings stretch between. And that’s very much in there in the realm of Sabbath. And John and I both cared a lot about the depiction of grief and the way the dead can become more real for you than the living sometimes and how, as you age, the accretion of missing people in your life just starts to pile up.
And then there is thinking about — not just sex, but the body. “Sabbath’s Theater” has so many amazing meditations on what it is to live inside a human body. I think we’re both really interested in all of that and the kind of animal reality of being a human who’s alive versus dead.
Were you worried at any point that some of Mickey’s transgressions — he has been tossed from a teaching job at a university after a phone-sex scandal with a student, he visits an old friend and rifles the dresser drawers of his host’s teenage daughter — would make him unredeemable in a post-#Me-Too era? And on the flip side, do you feel the play is pushing back against the #MeToo orthodoxy in some way?
I think that, you know, we didn’t put in every transgression from the book, but we put a lot. There’s a beautiful Garth Greenwell essay in The Yale Review about the book where he talks about how he teaches “Sabbath’s Theater” to undergraduates, and it bothers him when the question becomes whether a protagonist should be an example of moral rectitude. That’s not what art is for. This isn’t meant to be propaganda. This is raw. This is art. In some of my favorite literature of the 20th century, the moral compass, the moral core of the whole thing is reminding us that a human being is more than their worst or most repellent urges and behaviors. A human being contains multitudes. This is Mickey in all his humanity, and we certainly didn’t want to sanitize him. I mean, I think the play is still plenty, plenty dirty.
I’m going to quote your own words to you. I was rereading a profile you wrote about the film director Nicole Holofcener, and you say something about her that made me think, “Oh, this is why Levy wrote ‘Sabbath’s Theater.’” You wrote: “This is the kind of creature Nicole Holofcener is drawn to: weirdly alluring, mangled by life, and unable to resist lashing out against her own best interests.”
That’s so funny. Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s Mickey Sabbath. That’s eerie. That is Mickey Sabbath.
I have to ask you to weigh in on what I think is the world’s most boring debate, which is whether a non-Jewish actor like John Turturro should be playing a Jewish character like Mickey Sabbath written by a Jewish author like Philip Roth. Do you have any qualms about that?
I feel so culturally connected to John Turturro. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we had genetic overlap. I mean, it’s like the food’s different, and the accents are different, but it’s the same shit, you know? John in particular to me is very culturally recognizable. And, you know, he’s married to a Jewish person. He’s raising children with a Jewish person. He’s steeped in it. We are not an exotic.
Also, he’s an actor. It’s like a novelist, which I’m not: They can inhabit other realities. That’s what their job is.
I sometimes feel that the readership for Roth is a men’s club. I’ve rarely come across women who idolized him the way I did. Do you feel that?
I mean, until his mature period, [his] women weren’t as interesting. They didn’t come off the page the way the men did. So I can understand, you know, it’s a drag reading a novel where the women aren’t coming off the page. It doesn’t feel great. But then everything changes: When he grows up he becomes this incredibly sophisticated, nuanced writer who realizes that women are half the human race. “Sabbath’s Theater” is the work that preceded the American trilogy [“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain”]. That’s when everything starts to become like a masterpiece, and that’s when the women get really interesting. I defy anyone to find a richer, more complicated and fascinating and alluring female lead than Drenka. I mean, she’s unbeatable.
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The post How New Yorker writer Ariel Levy adapted Philip Roth’s filthiest book for the stage appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Clark University Adopting BDS Measures Pushed by Student Government
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone during a demonstration held on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The student government of Clark University in Massachusetts is enacting a series of policies based on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — despite their failing to receive the support of the majority of the student body.
According The Scarlet, the university’s official campus newspaper, the Undergraduate Student Council (CUSC) will enforce student clubs’ “compliance” with BDS, which includes coercing them, under the threat of defunding, into purchasing goods exclusively from vendors the BDS movement deems acceptable. This effort reportedly has the support of the university’s office for Student Leadership and Programming, as it has supplied student clubs with “tax-exempt vouchers” for making purchases while CUSC orders their leaders to “regularly check the BDS Movement’s website to ensure compliance.”
So far, The Scarlet added, only the university’s food vendor, Harvest Table, has resisted CUSC’s edicts, arguing that it has no “political stance” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or any issue. However, it was still forced to go along, The Scarlet said, having agreed to “buying from local vendors and providers to better comply with the movement.” It is not yet clear how the BDS policies have affected the university’s kosher vendors.
BDS proponents in the CUSC await the endorsement of the university administration, but it has not come, The Scarlet reported.
The university’s president, David Fithian, as well as its dean, Kamala Keim, reportedly held a meeting with members of the pro-BDS party during the summer to “begin charting a path toward divestment,” but they have not corresponded with them since. Additionally, Clark University’s board of trustees has declined a formal request for a discussion on BDS — which aims to destroy Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state, by crumbling its national security, alliances, and economy.
The Algemeiner has reached out to Clark University for comment for this story.
Several CUSC Equity and Inclusion Representatives — Molly Joe, Jordan Alexandre, Melissa Bento, and Stephen Gibbons — told The Scarlet in a statement which alluded to conspiracies of Jewish influence and control that their efforts, despite achieving some successes, have been stymied by hidden forces.
“We as representatives have limited power so long as those above us are unwilling to change,” the group said in a statement to the paper. “We, like you, are only students navigating an opaque and bureaucratic system that is designed to protect certain interests. Our goal will only be achieved if enough of us are unwavering and persistent.”
CUSC’s actions were, on paper, mandated by a spring referendum which asked students if they want the university to divest from Israeli companies and those that do business with it and apply BDS to campus dining options. Eighteen percent of the student body, or 772 students, ultimately “participated” in voting, a phrase CUSC has stressed, and of them an average of 658.6 students, just 15.8 percent of students, voted to approve those items. Even fewer students voted to approve two more on mandating clubs to “adhere” to BDS and initiating a boycott of Amazon. However, in its public statements, CUSC has manipulated student enrollment data to describe BDS as the expressing the will of the students, intentionally excluding from its count the number of graduate students who were enrolled at the university during the 2023-2024 academic year.
For months, CUSC has employed double-speaking in discussing the student body’s reaction to the BDS movement, saying at once that enthusiasm for it is “overwhelming” while also acknowledging that the referendum saw “low voter turnout” and “low engagement numbers.” It has never addressed its disenfranchising 84.2 percent of the student body, which includes the Jewish students who will be affected by the imposition of a political movement which is widely denounced for being antisemitic.
Clark University Hillel, a chapter of the largest Jewish campus organization in the world, has already denounced CUSC’s polices.
“While it may not have been the intention of CUSC and the student body, there are serious consequences of adopting this referendum,” the group said in April, following the vote. “BDS referenda claim to be about changing university policy, but they ultimately discourage dialogue, normalize extreme hatred of Israel, and empower the targeting of Israeli students and those for whom Israel holds cultural or personal significance.”
It continued, “We will not allow Israeli-affiliated products to be banned from the Kosher Kitchen and we will not tolerate our funding being bound to BDS Movement principles. We will do everything in our power to ensure that discriminatory practices are not implemented on our campus.”
The BDS movement is threatening to take hold at other universities.
Yale University will soon hold a student referendum on the issue of divestment from Israel, an initiative spearheaded by a pro-Hamas group which calls itself the Sumud Coalition (SC). According to the Yale Daily News, students will consider “three questions” which ask whether Yale should “disclose” its investments in armaments manufacturers — “including those arming Israel” — divest from such holdings, and spend money on “Palestinian scholars and students.”
The paper added that a path for the referendum was cleared when a petition SC circulated amassed some 1,500 signatures, or “roughly 22 percent of the student body.” Despite that over three-fourths of Yale students did not sign the petition, its proponents — including a representative of the Yale College Council (YCC), an ostensibly neutral body — have taken to describing it as “so popular.” The final vote could wind up being even less representative of the opinion of the student body, as it only has to be approved by “50 percent or more of respondents” who constitute “at least one third of the student body.” Should that happen, Sumud Coalition will — as has happened at Clark University — claim victory and forward the results to Yale University president Maurie McInnis, with a note claiming that SC has received a mandate from the people.
Beyond ideological concerns, the BDS movement could wreak havoc on the financial health of the schools which adopt it. JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), published a report in September showing that colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to its demands.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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US Cautions Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire Close but Not Finalized as Truce Announcement Expected Imminently
Israeli tanks are being moved, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, in the Golan Heights, Sept. 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
A ceasefire to halt fighting between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah is close, but an agreement has not yet been achieved, according to the US State Department.
“We don’t believe we have an agreement yet. We believe we’re close to an agreement. We believe that we have narrowed the gaps significantly, but there are still steps that we need to see taken. We hope that we can get there,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters during a press briefing on Monday.
White House national security spokesperson John Kirby expressed similar sentiments.
“We’re close,” he told reporters, but “nothing is done until everything is done.”
Miller and Kirby’s comments came not long after a senior Israeli official told Reuters that Israel’s cabinet would meet on Tuesday to approve a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamist group that wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon.
Reuters also reported on Monday that US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron are expected to announce a ceasefire in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel within 36 hours, citing four senior Lebanese sources. The US and France have been seeking to broker a truce for months.
The news cite Axios reported separately that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to the terms of a deal, citing a senior US official.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has declined to comment on reports that both countries had agreed to the text of a ceasefire agreement.
Hezbollah has been launching barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones at northern Israel from neighboring Lebanon almost daily since Oct. 8 of last year, one day after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of the Jewish state from Gaza to the south.
The relentless attacks from Hezbollah have forced tens of thousands of Israelis to flee their homes in the north, and Israel has pledged to ensure their safe return.
Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah but drastically escalated its military operations over the last two months, seeking to push the terrorist army further away from the border with Lebanon.
Diplomacy has largely focused on restoring and enforcing UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for Hezbollah’s withdrawal to north of the Litani River (around 30 km, or 19 miles, from the Israeli border) and the disarmament of its forces in southern Lebanon, with the buffer zone under the jurisdiction of the Lebanese army and UN peacekeeping forces.
Israel has insisted on retaining the right to conduct military operations against Hezbollah if the group attempts to rearm or rebuild its infrastructure — a stipulation that has met resistance from Lebanese officials, who argue it infringes on national sovereignty. Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon has said Israel would maintain an ability to strike southern Lebanon under any agreement.
Retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Amir Avivi — who leads the Israel Defense and Security Forum, a group of former military commanders — recently warned The Algemeiner that any deal must include Iran’s “full exit” from Lebanon and Israel’s freedom of action to prevent any future build up of Hezbollah. Otherwise, he added, the agreement would be “devastating” for the Jewish state.
Lebanon’s deputy parliament speaker, Elias Bou Saab, told Reuters the proposal under discussion would entail an Israeli military withdrawal from south Lebanon and regular Lebanese army troops deploying in the border region, long a Hezbollah stronghold, within 60 days.
He added that a sticking point over who would monitor compliance with the ceasefire was resolved in the last day, with an agreement to set up a five-country committee, including France and chaired by the United States.
Nabih Berri, the Hezbollah-aligned Lebanese parliamentary speaker, has been leading the Iran-backed terrorist group’s mediation efforts.
Miller told reporters that US officials are pushing hard for a ceasefire but the final steps to reaching a deal can be the toughest.
“Oftentimes the very last stages of an agreement are the most difficult because the hardest issues are left to the end,” Miller said. “We are pushing as hard as we can.”
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Palestinian Media Lambast Casting of Israelis in Netflix’s Upcoming Biblical Movie ‘Mary’
Scene from Netflix’s show “Mary.” Photo: Screenshot
Palestinian media outlets have castigated the new biblical epic “Mary” coming to Netflix next month because of the film’s Israeli cast, falsely accusing Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” against Palestinian Christians.
Netflix announced earlier this month the coming release of “Mary,” which according to a synopsis provided by the streaming giant “tells the story of one of history’s most profound figures and the remarkable journey that led to the birth of Jesus.”
Notable in the cast are Noa Cohen in the titular role as Jesus’s mother and Ido Tako as her husband Joseph — two Israeli actors under the spotlight in a large-scale production depicting Jewish life during a period when Jews were the primary ethnic group of the region.
Director DJ Caruso previously defended casting Israeli actors for the roles.
“It was important to us that Mary, along with most of our primary cast, be selected from Israel to ensure authenticity,” he told Entertainment Weekly last month.
Nonetheless, the castings were met with derision among anti-Israel activists on social media and elsewhere upset with the choice of selecting Israeli actors. Critics called for a boycott of the film, claiming that Mary and Joseph were “Palestinian” despite them being Jewish and living in modern-day Israel.
Among those expressing outrage was Quds Media Network, the self-described “largest independent youth Palestinian news network,” which lambasted the production, publishing an article tying “Mary” to what it called the “ongoing genocide of Christians in Palestine.”
The article, quoting Father Abdullah Julio of the Melkite Greek Catholic Monastery in Ramallah, alleged that one of Israel’s goals is “the eradication of Christian presence in the region.”
On Aug. 3, Julio filmed a statement on TRT Arabic mourning Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, calling him “a martyr of our Palestinian people and nation.”
In its recent article, Quds Media Network cited the deaths of Christian residents of Gaza amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war as evidence of “ongoing violence and Christian persecution,” and included a note to readers that “Israelis are not native to Palestine, the birthplace of Jesus.”
Both Jews and Christians boast an age-old presence in the southern Levant — a land sacred to both faiths and central to their peoples’ histories. The early Jewish people underwent an ethnogenesis in the region as a monotheistic people who formed a united kingdom in the late Bronze Age (around 1000 BCE), and remained the primary civilization there until their dwindling numbers under Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic persecution in the early medieval period.
During the Roman period, Jesus — an Aramaic-speaking Jew from the Galilee in modern Israel, then Roman Judea — led a sect of Judaism that would morph into modern Christianity in the decades following his storied execution. Palestinian Christians (culturally Arab local Christians who identify with Palestinian nationalism) likely represent the oldest continuous Christian community, as descendants of the first converts during the Roman occupation.
Genetic studies have confirmed the relationship of both Jewish diaspora groups and Palestinians of all faiths to Iron Age peoples of the region. Likewise, Jews and Palestinian Arabs each claim competing indigenous status, based on a combination of continued settlement and a culture inextricably connected to the Land of Israel.
Critics of “Mary” on social media maintained “Jesus was Palestinian,” or “a Palestinian Jew,” seemingly conflating residency in ancient Judea with Palestinian nationalism — which emerged much later in the early 20th century as a local expression of pan-Arabism and was hostile to local Arabic-speaking Jews (who consequently allied themselves with Zionism) from its outset.
Anti-Israel activists also cited the fair olive complexion of Cohen and Tako as evidence of their foreignness, ignoring that many Palestinians look similar and that skin tone does not necessarily equate to ancestry or claim to territory.
Palestinian Christians’ numbers in the West Bank and Gaza have dwindled in the past decade, from 11 percent of the Palestinian population in 1922 to 1 percent in 2017.
Meanwhile, in Israel proper, where Christians compose 6.9 percent of the Arab minority, they are among the best educated and most successful of Israel’s citizens.
“Mary,” which was shot in Morocco, is set to air on Dec. 6 to a wide audience.
The post Palestinian Media Lambast Casting of Israelis in Netflix’s Upcoming Biblical Movie ‘Mary’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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