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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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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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John Fetterman Signals ‘Enthusiastic’ Support for Pro-Israel Trump Cabinet Picks
US Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) gives an interview in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, Jan. 18, 2024. Photo: Rod Lamkey / CNP/Sipa USA for NY Post via Reuters Connect
US Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) expressed excitement about the incoming Trump administration’s seemingly pro-Israel posture, suggesting that he will seek bipartisan opportunities to advance policies that favor the Jewish state.
During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” with host Shannon Bream, Fetterman reiterated that he wants Israel to continue its ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon until it decimates the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups. The senator also praised the foreign policy selections for US President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet, predicting that the incoming administration will allow Israel to continue its “progress” in thwarting neighboring Iran-backed terrorist groups.
“In terms of the incoming administration, I like what I see in terms of being very, very strong pro-Israel,” Fetterman said.
Fetterman affirmed that he will continue his vocal support for Israel when the Trump administration takes office in January.
“And when the administration will change, my vote and voice won’t change either, and that’s going to follow Israel,” Fetterman said, lauding the “magnificent” efforts of the Jewish state to secure peace in the Middle East by fighting against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
Though Fetterman campaigned as a progressive, he has emerged as a staunch ally of Israel in the year following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. Fetterman has repeatedly condemned anti-Israel voices within his own party in the US Congress, as well as elite universities for tolerating what he has characterized as antisemitic and anti-Israel hate speech on their campuses.
Senator John Fetterman:
“I am really excited that the new Trump administration is strongly pro-Israel, and I will continue to support Israel.”
— Vivid.
(@VividProwess) November 24, 2024
Fetterman praised Trump’s selection of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to serve as the next secretary of state, stating that he will “enthusiastically vote yes” for the Florida Republican. The Pennsylvania Democrat signaled that he’s open to voting for several of Trump’s cabinet picks, claiming that he’s not going to “pre-hate” any of the candidates the president-elect has put forward without engaging in conversation with them.
Fetterman also took a swipe at his Democratic colleagues for expressing an increasingly adversarial stance toward Israel. He asserted that Israels military campaign against Hamas in Gaza was “very just” and touted his repeated refusals to support a “ceasefire” between the Jewish state and the terrorist group, praising Israel for having effectively “eliminated and broken” Hamas, Hezbollah, and their backers in Iran.
“For me it’s about standing on the side of democracy, and I was very supportive about that aid, and I don’t understand [why] the other side would now stop the delivering [of] that kind of aid,” Fetterman said, referencing efforts by some fellow Democrats to cut off US military assistance to Israel.
The senator added that it “was a pleasure” to vote “a big no” on three measures advanced and spearheaded last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to impose an arms embargo on Israel.
“I don;t understand why anybody would bring that to the floor, but hey, if they want to go down you know [81 to 19] that’s up to you,” Fetterman stated.
The post John Fetterman Signals ‘Enthusiastic’ Support for Pro-Israel Trump Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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DePaul University Enabled Violent Attacks and Brain Injury on Jewish Students
DePaul University Law School. Photo: ajay_suresh/Wikimedia Commons.
My name is Brooke Goldstein. I am the founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project, and the founder of the #EndJewHatred civil rights movement. I have dedicated my career to upholding the legal rights of the Jewish people, a fight that is all the more pressing after the wave of Jew-hatred unleashed in America and around the world following the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023.
In 2021, a few years before October 7, a Jewish student identified a major problem at DePaul University. She went public about “a long history of antisemitism on DePaul’s campus … without DePaul doing anything really substantive to address this situation.”
In a clear call for action, she said that, “DePaul, as an administration and as a university, doesn’t fully understand what is required for Jewish students in particular to feel safe in their campus community.”
The unprecedented wave of hatred launched against Jews and Israelis at DePaul University over the past year is a direct result of the administration’s failure — not just to help its Jewish community feel safe, but to actually keep its Jewish students safe.
Jew-hatred has become systematized in higher education, and we are now seeing the consequences playing out on campuses across the country — including at DePaul University.
Radicalized agitators who openly support foreign terrorist organizations target Jewish students with calls for their genocide.
“From the river to the sea” is a call for genocide.
“Globalize the intifada” is a call for worldwide violent attacks on Jews, like we see in the streets of New York City and Amsterdam, and on campus here at DePaul.
Jews are dehumanized, deprived of the right to openly express their identity, and the civil rights of Jewish students are ignored and violated — their minority status disregarded, and the harm and violence they endure is minimized. All of this is unacceptable.
Max Long emigrated to Israel from Boston in 2015. He served in the Israel Defense Forces, and, when he was released from the reserves, enrolled at DePaul University in March of this year. After seeing the pervasive atmosphere of antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric on campus, he was inspired to use his voice and personal experience to empower and educate his classmates about antisemitism, and about the war against Palestinian terrorism in Gaza.
Michael Kaminsky is a junior who came to DePaul from Buffalo Grove, IL. He, too, has been inspired to use his voice and experience to empower and educate the community about antisemitism, and about Jewish identity. He is a founding member of DePaul’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel, a StandWithUs Emerson fellow, and a proud member of AEPi.
Max and Michael are proud and empowered advocates for Jewish civil rights. They are loud voices for the indigenous rights of the Jewish people in their indigenous homeland — Israel.
On November 6, Jew-haters decided to silence their voices. Two masked men violently attacked Max and Michael with such force that Max suffered a brain injury and Michael suffered a fracture and lacerations.
Max and Michael were doing what they have done many times before — exercising their right to peacefully express themselves and their views, and engage with passersby.
This attack happened in the plain sight of a DePaul public safety officer, who did nothing to intervene. The officer had an opportunity to stop the attack, but did nothing to help Max and Michael.
But it gets worse.
The university was well aware of multiple threats against Max and Michael, just as it was aware of the campus climate of hate targeting Jews. But it did nothing. It failed to protect its students, even when a violent attack was unfolding in front of one of its public safety officers. This cannot be tolerated.
We cannot be silent in the face of intolerance and injustice. This is why The Lawfare Project represents Max and Michael — to demand justice, to ensure that their rights are protected, and to make sure that what they experienced is not experienced by any other Jewish student at DePaul University.
Even now, their attackers remain at large. We demand that the Chicago Police Department use every tool at its disposal to arrest those responsible, and that they be prosecuted for the hate crime they committed, to the full extent of the law. We need to impose meaningful consequences on antisemitic hate crimes to deter future attacks, and to send the clear message that our society rejects this extremist hate and violence.
As for the university, our attorneys are reviewing all options, including legal options, to make sure that the school is accountable not just to Max and Michael for this attack, but to all Jewish students who are under daily threat of similar attacks.
We are here to make sure that DePaul does the right thing, and will take whatever action is necessary to do so.
Jew-hatred has no place at DePaul, or on any college campus. We are demanding action from the school — as all decent people should.
Max and Michael are not alone. Our Jewish students on campus are not alone. We are all here for them, and we will make sure that their rights are protected and upheld.
Brooke Goldstein is the founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project and the founder of the End Jew Hatred movement. She is also an author, award-winning, filmmaker, and regular news television commentator.
The post DePaul University Enabled Violent Attacks and Brain Injury on Jewish Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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