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Actor Danny Burstein dishes on his latest Jewish role on Broadway
(New York Jewish Week) – In “Pictures from Home,” a new Broadway play, a photographer takes on a nearly 10-year project to chronicle the lives of his aging parents. As the son snaps pictures and interrogates his parents in their Southern California home, the three offer very different versions of their shared past and spar about the very meaning of “truth.”
“Loads of emotions came up during the show,” said Broadway veteran Danny Burstein, who plays the son, Larry. “Larry’s desire and passion to know more and to not just look at others critically but himself critically as well is inspiring to me. It’s a beautiful story.”
Written by Sharr White and directed by Bartlett Sherr, the play is based on the 1992 photo-memoir by Larry Sultan, an acclaimed photographer who died in 2009. Nathan Lane plays the father, Irving, a Brooklyn-born Jew who struggled as a salesman but eventually became a vice president at Schick, the razor company. Acclaimed British actress Zoë Wanamaker plays the mom, a real estate agent who sometimes feels underappreciated as a breadwinner following Irving’s early (or was it forced?) retirement. Irving, raised in part in a Jewish orphanage, bitterly recalls the antisemitism he faced – and swallowed – on his way up the shaky ladder of success.
And father and son clash not only over the project, but Larry’s career. Irv can’t quite understand how his son actually makes a living as a photographer and asks: “Where’s the rigor?”
Throughout the play, real recordings, home videos and the blown-up photos of his parents that appeared in Sultan’s photo-memoir are projected on the set behind the actors.
Burstein, 58, was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Tevye in the most recent Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof.” A week after the opening of “Pictures,” he spoke to the New York Jewish Week about the Jewishness of the show and how it has impacted him so far.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Danny Burstein, who plays photographer Larry Sultan, won the 2020 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for his role at Harold Zilder in “Moulin Rouge!” (Courtesy)
New York Jewish Week: The concept of the show is a bit challenging to describe — it’s a play based on a memoir based on a series of photographs. How would you describe what the play is about?
Danny Burstein: It’s based on the beautiful book by the same title, which has incredible pictures in it but also contains the memoir of his time with his parents. It’s all a bit convoluted, but it comes together in a beautiful way. A play has not been told in this particular way before and it is quite unique. So it’s different, and you have to let people know that it is different from anything they’ve ever seen before, as far as the storytelling goes. It is a story of family and it’s also the story of the creation of art — sometimes it’s quiet, sometimes it’s passionate and volatile. Sometimes it’s extremely funny. It’s all those things when you’re making a piece of art.
You “feel all the feels” in other words. That’s the beautiful thing about the play. Larry winds up discovering things about himself and about his history and his parents.
Were you familiar with Larry’s work before the show or did playing him bring you closer to who he was?
I was not familiar with his work at all before the play, but at the same time now I feel very, very connected to the work and to who he was. One of the things that I’m very grateful for is that Larry’s [widow], Kelly, provided us with some of the actual tapes and recordings of conversations with his parents, so I got to listen to them actually talking. It was all of a sudden a very different kind of animal.
It’s dramatized for our show and there was sometimes volatility, but mostly it was a lot of the two of them just sitting down and loving one another and chatting and reminiscing and hearing their origin stories, like how the family got to California from Brooklyn. It’s really a beautiful story and there’s a lot of love in the family. I also love Larry’s artistic pursuits and his artistic sensibility in finding several different meanings in one picture, maybe hundreds of meanings. He believed each person subjectively finds their own meaning in a piece of art and I love that about him.
Nathan Lane (Irving Sultan) and Danny Burstein (Larry Sultan) in “Pictures From Home.” (Julieta Cervantes)
How do you think the family’s Jewishness impacted the way they interacted with the world and with each other?
It [their Jewishness] absolutely affects the way they exist in the world. I always think of [Larry’s] artistic journey as being very Talmudic — it seems to me that he’s constantly asking questions and trying to get to the heart of the matter. That’s fundamentally Jewish. That practice of always questioning, and bringing that questioning not just to religion but to everyday life and to art is also fundamentally Jewish. I don’t want to make it sound like only Jews are exceptional intellectually, but that that level of intellectual pursuit is part of the Jewish culture.
So Larry’s Jewishness certainly informed his intellectual and artistic pursuits. How do you think your Jewish background informed the way you approached this character and characters you’ve played in the past?
I was raised in a certain way: to question things. I can see a lot of my own relationship with my own father in the relationship between Larry and Irv. I’m sure I drove my father crazy. When I told my parents I wanted to be an actor, they were not dismissive of it. They didn’t say, “you’re wasting your life,” but they weren’t exactly supportive, either. They remained very neutral and said: “If this is what you want to do, then you’re going to have to work your ass off in order to make your dream come true.” So it wasn’t so much about the pursuit of financial success, the way Irv says, but it was about them worrying whether I could actually make a living at it and survive.
I guess it’s the same kind of fear that any parent would have. My younger son is a musician and my older son is a first [assistant director] on films. Those are not exactly the kinds of things you’re going to go into to make a lot of money. They’re pursuits of passion. I guess I felt the same way, I was worried for them. But knowing my own journey and knowing my father’s journey, who wanted to be a writer — he studied with Philip Roth at the University of Iowa — and then decided to leave all that to to pursue a career in ancient Greek philosophy. So I guess he understood, too, the way I did. I guess it all comes full circle. So, I did not run up against the kind of wall that Larry ran up against, where basically Irv would call him a loser, as he does in the show, because he was not more of a financial success.
Pictures from Home is currently playing at Studio 54 (254 W. 54th St.) through April 30, 2023. Tickets and informationh here.
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High schoolers’ ‘human swastika’ on football field shakes San Jose Jewish community
(JTA) — The photo spread swiftly after a student posted it on social media: Eight California high schoolers were lying on their school’s football field, their bodies arrayed in the shape of a swastika.
Alongside the picture was a quote from Adolf Hitler, threatening the “annihilation of the Jewish race.”
The incident at Branham High School in San Jose began on Dec. 3 and has roiled the local Jewish community in the days since, as the wrenching saga has ignited suspensions, recriminations and alarm from around the world.
The photograph and the response to it were first reported by J. Jewish News of Northern California.
“We don’t want to see hatred,” Cormac Nolan, a Jewish Branham senior, told the local Jewish newspaper. “We don’t want to see the idolization of one of the most evil men to ever walk the face of the Earth. We don’t want someone who spews out hatred like this on our campus.”
The school’s student newspaper reported that the students involved had been suspended, and that dozens of other students walked out to protest the incident.
The San Jose Police Department told J. that it is investigating the incident, and the school’s principal, Beth Silbergeld, who is Jewish, said the school was working with the Anti-Defamation League and the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, a local antisemitism advocacy group, “to ensure that we receive appropriate support and guidance as we work to repair the harm that’s been done to our community.”
Silbergeld told J. that she felt pressure to learn from the incident.
“I’ve been in education for a long time and have seen, sadly, lots of incidences of oppression and hate toward many groups,” she said. “I think that we always have a responsibility as schools to do what’s right and to take action and learn from the experiences of other other schools and other incidents as a way to hopefully eliminate actions like what we’ve experienced.”
The incident is not the first time Branham High School has faced controversy over antisemitism on its campus. In April, the California Department of Education ruled that the school had discriminated against its Jewish students by presenting “biased” content about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a 12th-grade ethnic literature curriculum.
It is also not the first instance of a “human swastika” roiling a school community. In 2019, nine middle schoolers in Ojai, California, also arranged themselves in a “human swastika” and faced disciplinary measures from the school.
Exactly what possessed the Branham students to do what they did is not clear. But psychologists told the J. that the teen years are a peak moment for transgressive behaviors that may or may not reflect deep-seated biases.
“It’s a developmental time where you’re doing new things, you’re trying new things, you’re making mistakes, you’re trying to fit in, you’re trying to get laughs and likes,” Ellie Pelc, director of clinical services at the Bay Area’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services, told the newspaper. “And you often do so in some hurtful or harmful ways that you don’t always have the capacity to think through in advance.”
The photo was met by condemnation by California State Sens. Scott Wiener, who wrote that antisemitism was “pervasive & growing” in a post on Facebook, and Dave Cortese, who said he was “deeply disturbed” by the incident in a statement.
“What happened at Branham High School was not a joke, not a prank, and not self-expression — it was an act of hatred,” wrote San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan in a post on X. “The fact that this was planned and posted publicly makes it even more disturbing.”
By Tuesday, the uproar had sparked a response from district leaders. In a post on Facebook, Robert Bravo, the superintendent for the Campbell Union High School District, wrote that the district “will respond firmly, thoughtfully, and within the full scope allowed by Board Policy and California law.” (Displaying a Nazi swastika on the property of a school is illegal in California.)
He added that the school district considered the incident an instance of “hate violence” based on California state education code, which allows for suspension or expulsion in such cases.
“Our response cannot be limited to discipline alone,” continued Bravo. “We are committed to using this incident as an opportunity to deepen education around antisemitism, hate symbols and the historical atrocities associated with them.”
The antisemitic post comes two months after California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill creating a statewide office assigned to combatting antisemitism in California public schools. The office, which is the first of its kind in the country, was met with praise from local Jewish advocacy groups while some critics warned it could chill academic freedoms.
Marc Levine, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Central Pacific region, called the incident “repulsive and unacceptable” in a statement on X. The incident was also condemned by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Bay Area, which wrote in a statement that it had been working with the school about “how to ensure an effective response.”
The Bay Area Jewish Coalition also issued a statement on Tuesday, writing that the antisemitic act had “shaken Jewish families across Northern California and beyond.”
“We hope that what happened at Branham serves as a wake-up call for California and for the rest of the country to take the antisemitism crisis seriously and reverse the trend through real, meaningful action and long-term change,” the statement continued.
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Nashville Jewish community center sues Goyim Defense League over alleged campaign of intimidation
(JTA) —
A Jewish community center in Nashville has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the neo-Nazi group Goyim Defense League and several of its leaders and affiliates, accusing them of orchestrating a campaign of antisemitic intimidation, harassment and trespass aimed at terrorizing the city’s Jewish community.
The lawsuit was filed Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of the Gordon Jewish Community Center, a 120-year-old nonprofit that serves as a major hub for Jewish life in Nashville. The complaint names the Goyim Defense League, its founder and leader Jon Minadeo II, extremist streamer Paul Miller, who is also known as GypsyCrusader, and several associates.
At the center of the case is a January 2025 incident in which Travis Garland, a Tennessee man affiliated with the Goyim Defense League, allegedly disguised himself as an Orthodox Jewish man and infiltrated the Jewish center’s secured campus. According to the lawsuit, Garland livestreamed the intrusion, mocked Jewish customs and the Holocaust, and refused repeated requests to leave before being forcibly escorted off the property by a security guard.
Garland was later arrested and pleaded guilty in state court to trespassing at the Jewish center, receiving a sentence of nearly a year in jail, according to Nashville television station WTVF.
The complaint alleges Garland acted as part of a coordinated effort, receiving guidance and encouragement from Miller and others who followed the incident in real time via video chat and later promoted it online as a “stunt.”
“Using fear and harassment to threaten and intimidate groups is a despicable act that cannot be tolerated in a multicultural society,” Scott McCoy, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s deputy legal director, said in a statement. “This is the second lawsuit the SPLC has brought against the Goyim Defense League for their actions targeting Nashville’s Black and Jewish communities.”
The lawsuit also ties the January incident to a broader campaign by the Goyim Defense League during a 10-day visit to Nashville in the summer of 2024, when members of the group allegedly harassed Jewish and Black residents, assaulted a Jewish man and a biracial man, and intimidated Black children downtown while waving swastika flags. The SPLC previously filed a separate lawsuit on behalf of a biracial man who was assaulted during that tour.
According to the lawsuit, the Jewish center has spent roughly $75,000 on additional security in the wake of the incidents and says staff and members have altered how they use the campus because of heightened fear.
The lawsuit comes as the Goyim Defense League has faced mounting pressure online and in court. Following a recent investigation by Nashville television station WTVF, websites operated by Minadeo were taken offline by their domain registrar, and several of his accounts were suspended from X. Other Goyim Defense League members have been convicted or indicted in connection with violent incidents during the group’s 2024 visit to Nashville, according to local reporting.
The suit invokes the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 and other federal civil rights statutes and seeks court protection as well as financial compensation and punitive damages.
“This lawsuit demonstrates the Nashville Jewish community’s resolve to stand firm in the face of antisemitic intimidation and to hold accountable those who perpetrate it,” said Ben Raybin, an attorney for the Jewish center.
For a time, the Goyim Defense League was among the most prolific distributors of antisemitic propaganda in the United States, with members spreading flyers in Jewish neighborhoods and other public spaces. While the group’s online reach appears to have diminished more recently, Nashville has remained a focal point of its activity.
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Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, beloved Jewish Theological Seminary professor and author, dies at 73
(JTA) — Rabbi Eliezer Diamond, who taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary for over three decades and left an indelible mark on generations of rabbis and Jewish scholars, has died.
Diamond died Thursday at 73, following several years battling multiple forms of cancer.
Born in 1952, Diamond received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and rabbinical ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University from 1968 to 1977.
But it was at JTS, the Conservative flagship in New York City, where Diamond earned his doctorate in Talmud and was the Rabbi Judah Nadich Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, that his talents for mentorship and teaching flourished.
“My beloved teacher, a precious mentor and friend to countless Jewish leaders, Rabbi Eliezer Diamond z”l, has departed this world for the next,” wrote Rabbi Menachem Creditor, a scholar in residence and rabbi for the UJA-Federation of New York, in a post on Facebook. “His wisdom changed the course of my rabbinate many times over, something I know to be true for many others.”
Over his long career as a highly respected Talmud scholar, Diamond published a chapter on the rabbinic period in the “Schocken Guide to Jewish Books,” as well as entries in the “Reader’s Guide to Judaism” and “The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception.” In 2003, he published his only book, “Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture,” with the Oxford University Press.
Diamond retired from JTS after the fall 2024 semester. In March during the previous semester, his legacy at the school was celebrated in a program titled “Diamonds of Torah: Honoring Rabbi Eliezer Diamond’s Teaching.”
“Generations of students have been profoundly impacted by his teaching, while his writings on prayer, asceticism, and issues of environmental law and ethics have influenced so many in the wider Jewish world as well,” wrote Shuly Rubin Schwartz, the chancellor of JTS, in a statement announcing his retirement.
On Facebook, where Diamond frequently posted photos of his wife, Rabbi Shelley Kniaz, five children and numerous grandchildren, he also documented his health struggles, providing deeply personal and rabbinic testimonies of his experience.
After hearing a grim prognosis in August 2024, Diamond posted, “I am not a statistic; I am a distinct human being, Eliezer Ben-Zion, son of Yehuda Idel and Chaya Golde. No one can know what the Shekhina’s plan is for me. What I do know is that She does not want me to live in the shadow of death but rather to bask in the radiance of life.”
As news of his death spread on Friday, many of Diamond’s former students and friends eulogized him on social media, many of them calling attention to Diamond’s legendary kindness.
Rabbi Ben Goldberg, a former student of Diamond and the rabbi of Congregation KTI in Port Chester, New York, wrote on Facebook that Diamond had “passed on to the supernal yeshiva, where I imagine he will be as beloved as he was in all of the places he taught in this world.” He recalled his time in Diamond’s classes at JTS where, he wrote, it was clear to all that Diamond “cared deeply about his students.”
“More than anything about Talmud, I’ll remember him writing lengthy (and unnecessary) notes of apology for saying something in class that might have been hurtful (which of course, it wasn’t),” Goldberg wrote.
Michael Rosenberg, another former student of Diamond who now serves on the faculty of the Hadar Institute, recalled meeting with Diamond in 2023 where the pair had a conversation that remained with him.
“That conversation was filled with pearl after pearl — about parenting, teaching, being in relationship,” wrote Rosenberg in a post on Facebook. “I am a better parent and teacher because of that conversation, and I am so sad that I will not get to follow up with my teacher and rabbi.”
Beyond his teaching at JTS, Diamond also previously taught at Stern College, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the 92nd Street Y, several Ramah camps and the now-defunct Solomon Schechter High School.
Diamond was also a longtime resident of Teaneck, New Jersey, and congregant of Congregation Beth Sholom, where he regularly held a Torah study session on Shabbat afternoons.
“Rabbi Diamond’s wisdom (and hazzanus [singing]) were matched only by his wit,” wrote David Spielman, who was had Diamond as a high school teacher, in a post on Facebook. “A devout Brooklyn Dodgers fan, he once chastised someone for wearing a Yankees cap, saying it was inappropriate attire for Minyan. He would also say that Ebbets Field would be rebuilt ‘Bimharah b’yamainu.’ Rabbi Diamond will be remembered for that wit, wisdom, and perseverance now that his suffering is finally over.”
Beyond the numerous eulogies that have been written for him on social media, Diamond’s prolific reflections on life and faith endure.
“What draws me back to Hashem, if not to my life as a whole, is Psalm 23 גם כי אלך בגי צלמות לא אירא רע כי אתה עמדי. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil for you are with me,’” wrote Diamond in his last post on Facebook. “Wherever I am, God is there too. I hope that I will return home soon.”
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