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This Jewish actor plays Richard Dreyfuss in Broadway’s ‘The Shark Is Broken’
(New York Jewish Week) — In 1974, three men — Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw — spent countless hours together aboard the Orca, a converted fishing boat docked in the open ocean east of Martha’s Vineyard. The trio, all actors, were filming “Jaws,” the Steven Spielberg-directed blockbuster whose filming schedule famously went 100 days over schedule.
The Orca is also the setting, and the men the cast of characters, of the play “The Shark Is Broken,” now playing at Broadway’s Golden Theatre. The play chronicles the tense relationships between the actors as they sit onboard, day after day, waiting — with decreasing amounts of patience — for the film’s mechanical shark (nicknamed “Bruce”) to be repaired so filming can continue. Like any group of near-strangers forced together in close proximity for a prolonged period of time, they bicker, bare their souls and play mindless games to pass the time.
Alex Brightman, 36, a Tony-nominated actor best known for originating leading roles in “Beetlejuice” and “School of Rock,” plays Dreyfuss, the Jewish actor who himself played the movie’s earnest marine biologist, Matt Hooper.
“The Shark Is Broken” keeps its three-person cast onstage for nearly the entire 90-minute show, and much of it centers around Shaw’s distaste for Dreyfuss. (Shaw is played by his son, Ian Shaw, who co-wrote the play based, in part, on his father’s drinking diary from his time on set.) Shaw — embittered, ill-tempered and frequently drunk— has no patience for Dreyfuss, a Brooklyn native who is anxious, eager and, according to the script, caught the acting bug after auditioning for a play at Los Angeles’ Westside JCC.
Dreyfuss’ Jewish identity is made clear from the play’s start, primarily through his own self-deprecating humor. He jokes about how his skin “bypasses tan and goes directly to sunstroke,” and how Spielberg nearly cast the emphatically non-Jewish looking John Voigt in the role of Hooper. Expressing his dislike for the ocean, Dreyfuss says, “Jews should stay away from water. Nothing good ever happened to any Jews on the water.” (Turns out that’s a sentiment with which Brightman, not a huge fan of the ocean himself, wholeheartedly agrees.) Later, as the characters dive into their childhoods, Dreyfuss reveals how his “typical Jewish father” wanted him to become either a lawyer or a doctor; this sliver of backstory helps the viewer to understand the anxiety Dreyfuss is feeling about achieving success as an actor.
Like Dreyfuss, Brightman is Jewish. He approaches his character with a fast-talking vulnerability, throwing his full physicality into the role. The New York Jewish Week caught up with Brightman in between shows to hear about his own Jewish identity, what it’s like playing a real person and how he relates to Dreyfuss’ Jewishness.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Actor Alex Brightman at the opening night of “The Shark Is Broken” on Aug. 10, 2023. (Michaelah Reynolds, Courtesy Polk & Co.)
You’re playing Richard Dreyfuss, who’s a real actor, and who’s also still living. What was it like preparing for this role?
I think I was ignorant to the idea that it was strange when I was first auditioning for it, which I guess is a good thing. But as it’s gone forward, the pressure started to build a little bit because he’s alive and probably knows about it. I watched interviews of him, pretty much only from the year or two surrounding the filming of “Jaws,” because that’s before he was the Academy Award winner [in 1977, for “The Goodbye Girl”]. He was nervous, he had imposter syndrome, and he had this huge ambition to be not only a successful actor, but to be famous. I can empathize with so many things that he went through. But it was really the voice, the mannerism work and the posture. It’s been really fun for me to figure out that real human beings can also be characters to inhabit.
There are so many jokes throughout the play about Richard Dreyfuss’ Jewishness. Does that help you feel a sense of kinship with him?
As he says in the show, “The people of Martha’s Vineyard, they look at me like they’ve never seen a Jew before.” I think it’s about the ostracizing, or even the sort of loneliness or isolation that comes from being something a lot of people didn’t, and really don’t, understand. I can relate to his anxiety about being someone that doesn’t inherently belong, or has been persecuted in the past. He has his walls up. And I think that was an interesting thing to play, because being in theater is about being vulnerable. And he isn’t, until he has to be. He’s full of loudness and bravado, but I think only later on does he feel comfortable enough to be vulnerable around strangers. And I totally understand that as a Jewish person.
Can you tell me a bit about your own Jewish upbringing and sense of Jewish identity?
I’m Jewish by genetics. My mom is Jewish, my dad is Jewish, and so I am. I never went to Hebrew school, mainly because I didn’t love regular school. My parents both had bar and bat mitzvahs, and I think they got something out of it; they definitely have some culture still ingrained. But they didn’t want to press that upon me or my brother, mainly because it wasn’t a daily practice for them.
I’m definitely culturally Jewish, even stereotypically. I’m funny. I know that seems odd, it’s not an objective thing, but I think that a lot of Jewish people I know in show business are the funniest people I know. And I know that might be a slight defense mechanism from history. I wasn’t really raised in a way that felt meaningfully Jewish, but I think I feel more Jewish now than ever.
Your character’s Jewishness feels in many ways like a throughline in his tension with Robert Shaw. Do you have a sense of how much that was based on reality?
I can’t speak for how Jewishness played into their feuding. But the reality is that they didn’t get each other — they just fundamentally did not understand each other on a human level, and on a professional level. They couldn’t relate to each other. I think some of it has to be about culture and being Jewish; I think it fuels their misunderstanding. In the show, Richard is persecuted more than anybody else. Richard is beat up, literally. He’s manhandled and thrown around. I can’t help but think under the context of being Jewish, it’s like at this point — then and also now — Jews are kind of through being tortured.
In the play, Dreyfuss is anxious about the impending release of “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” in which he played the titular lead. That means that you are a Jew, playing a Jewish character, who is nervous about playing a Jewish character. Do you ever find yourself getting lost in the layers?
You’ve touched upon something that is a nightly struggle. I feel like I’m in the movie “Inception”: It’s a Jew, playing a Jew, playing a Jew. Where does it end, and where am I in that? Sometimes I do get lost even to the point where when I leave the theater I can’t shake the [Dreyfuss] accent — a sort of Queens, fast-talking, anxious, almost Woody Allen type. I think that might be a big part of who I am. It’s easier to shake off the things that are so anti-you, and I think that sometimes I bring home more of the Jewish anxiety than I anticipated.
“The Shark is Broken” is scheduled to close Nov. 19. What’s next for you after that?
I’m doing “Spamalot” in January on Broadway at the St. James. And I have a lot of writing in the hopper. I wrote a play called “Everything Is Fine” that’s getting a reading this month, and I’m hoping that it will get a production sooner than later. It explores identity, the difference between moving on and moving forward. It’s definitely about trauma but it is a comedy, very pitch black. And other than that, I’m just trying to work on this work-life balance. I’ve done so much work-work, that it’s been really nice to dive back into life-life.
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The post This Jewish actor plays Richard Dreyfuss in Broadway’s ‘The Shark Is Broken’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Law Firm Implores Northwestern University to ‘Nullify’ Deal With Pro-Hamas Group
Northwestern University president Michael Schill looks on during a US House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing on anti-Israel protests on college campuses, on Capitol Hill in Washington, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades
A Jewish civil rights organization has issued a blistering legal letter to Northwestern University, demanding the “nullification” of a series of concessions school president Michael Schill granted a pro-Hamas group to end an illegal occupation of school property.
Northwestern was one of dozens of schools where pro-Hamas Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters set up “encampments” on school property, chanted antisemitic slogans, and vowed not to leave unless administrators agreed to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against the Jewish state.
After hours of negotiating with protesters, Schill agreed to establish a new scholarship for Palestinian undergraduates, contact potential employers of students who caused recent campus disruptions to insist on their being hired, and create a segregated dormitory hall to be occupied exclusively by Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and Muslim students. The university — where protesters shouted “Kill the Jews!” — also agreed to form a new investment committee in which anti-Zionists students and faculty may wield an outsized voice.
Writing on behalf of StandWithUs, a New York City-based law firm — Kasowitz, Benson, and Torres LLP — told the university’s board of trustees on Monday that the agreement violated federal law, as well as its own polices and bylaws.
“This outrageous capitulation to accommodate the demands of antisemitic agitators — who openly espoused vicious antisemitism, assaulted, spat on, and stalked Jewish students and engaged in numerous violations of Northwestern’s codes and policies — only enables and encourages future misconduct,” the letter said. “It is in plain violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, risks triggering state anti-BDS sanctions, and apparently was made without the required approval of the Board of Trustees and in contravention of Northwestern’s bylaws and university statues.”
It added, “Accordingly, this purported agreement not only unlawfully rewards antisemitism but has severely and perhaps irreparably damaged Northwestern’s reputation, but it has also exposed Northwestern to potential liability and jeopardizes it access to federal and state funds.”
Schill was grilled about the deal — which has been referred to as the Deering Meadow Agreement — last month during a hearing held by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) called it a “unilateral capitulation” and accused Schill of failing to protect Jewish students from the violence of the anti-Zionist protesters, incidents of which Schill described as “allegations.” Later, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called for his resignation from office, citing a slew of alleged offenses, including his revealing that no Jewish students or faculty were consulted before he conceded to the protesters’ demands. Schill, the ADL stressed, also confessed to appointing accused antisemites to a task force on antisemitism that ultimately disbanded when its members could not agree on a definition of antisemitism.
Schill, however, has forcefully denied that he acceded to any of SJP’s core demands, including their insistence on boycotting and divesting from Israel and companies that do business with it. His critics, including StandWithUs chief executive officer Roz Rothstein, maintain that he did.
“Northwestern has surrendered to agitators’ unlawful conduct and outrageous demands in a move that threatens to set a national precedent for university leadership, enabling and supporting the complete breakdown of civility, policies, and the law,” Rothstein said on Monday. “At a time when Jewish and Israeli students across the country are under unprecedented attack, Northwestern’s leadership shouldn’t engage in patchwork unlawful actions but instead strive to be a part of the solution.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Mother of Rescued Israeli Hostage Noa Argamani Passes Away After Battling Brain Cancer
Noa and Liora Argamani before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Photo: Screenshot
Liora Argamani, 61, mother of rescued Israeli hostage Noa Argamani, passed away on Tuesday in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital after fighting stage 4 brain cancer.
Noa, an only child, was rescued from Hamas captivity in Gaza in a daring operation from Hamas captivity on June 8. Her mother passed away less than a month later.
The kidnapping of Argamani and her partner Avinatan Or — who still remains in Hamas captivity — at the Nova Music Festival in southern Israel on Oct. 7 was captured in a heartbreaking video, sparking international outcry. Argamani was held hostage by Hamas for eight months before Israeli forces rescued her along with three other hostages: Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv. The commander of Israel’s elite Yamam division who led the mission, Arnon Zamora, was mortally wounded in the operation.
In a video released on Saturday night, before her mother passed away, Argamani recounted how she longed to see her parents while she was kidnapped. “My biggest worry in captivity was for my parents,” she said.
Argamani eulogized her mother at her funeral held on Tuesday. “My mother, the best friend I ever had, the strongest person I have known in my life,” she said. “Thank you for the 26 years I had the privilege of being by your side.”
The official X/Twitter account for the State of Israel also mourned the elder Argamani’s passing, writing, “We are devastated to share that Liora Argamani, mother of rescued hostage Noa Argamani, has passed away following an intensive battle with cancer. Our hearts are with Noa and Yaakov Argamani. May Liora’s memory be a blessing.”
Although Noa Argamani reunited with her mother before her passing, rescued hostage Almog Meir Jan’s father passed away from a heart attack only hours before he was rescued. According to a relative in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Kan, Meir “died of grief” and “a broken heart” over his son’s captivity.
On Oct. 7, thousands of Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded southern Israel from neighboring Gaza, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 others as hostages.
Several hostages were released as part of a temporary truce in November, and others have been rescued, both dead and alive, by Israeli soldiers conducting rescue operations. About 120 hostages remain in Gaza; it is unclear how many are still alive.
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Israel Fights Wars Knowing It Values Life, While Enemies Seek ‘Power Over Death’
Flames seen at the side of a road, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, close to the Israel border with Lebanon, in northern Israel, June 4, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ayal Margolin
Though the most evident source of human governance is power, true power can never stem from war-making stratagems or capacities. In principle, at least, consummate power on planet earth is immortality, but such power is intangible and must be based on faith rather than science. All things considered, the promise of “power over death” holds primary importance in world politics. This is especially the case in the jihadist Middle East.
There are relevant particulars. The consequences of this sort of thinking represent a lethal triumph of anti-Reason over Reason. Such triumph, in turn, expresses the continuing supremacy of primal human satisfactions in war, terrorism and genocide. On this matter of world-historical urgency, scholars and policy-makers should consider the probing observation of Eugene Ionesco in his Journal (1966). Opting to describe killing in general as affirmation of an individual’s “power over death,” the Romanian playwright explains:
I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death … Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.
Whatever the standards of assessment, all individuals and all states coexist in an “asymmetrical” world. Certain state leaderships accept zero-sum linkages between killing and survival (both individual and collective), but others do not. Although this divergence might suggest that some states stand on a higher moral plane than others, it may also place the virtuous state at a grave security disadvantage. As a timely example, this disadvantage describes the growing survival dilemma of Israel, a still-virtuous state that must unceasingly bear the assaults of utterly murderous adversaries.
What should Israel do when it finds itself confronted with faith-driven enemies who abhor Reason and seek personal immortality via “martyrdom?” As an antecedent question, what sort of “faith” can encourage (and cherish) the rape, torture and murder of innocents? Must the virtuous state accept barbarism as its sine qua non to “stay alive”?
There are science-based answers. What is required of still-virtuous states such as Israel is not a replication of enemy crimes, but decent and pragmatic policies that recognize death-avoidance as that enemy’s overriding goal. For Israel, this advice points toward jihadist enemies. Of special concern is a soon-to-be-nuclear capable Iran and Iranian terror-group surrogates (e.g., Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah), notably anxious to acquire “power over death.”
Israel’s most immediate concern will be the expanding war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a conflict in which the terrorist patron state (Iran) could display greater commitments to Reason than its associated fighting proxies. Nonetheless, even this relative reasonableness would devolve into brutish expressions of anti-Reason. What else ought Jerusalem to expect from adversaries who take palpable delight in the killing of “others?”
For Israel, there will be moral, legal and tactical imperatives. Though Reason will never govern the world, civilized states ought not plan to join the barbarians. In the best of all possible worlds, national and terror-group leaders could rid themselves of the notion that killing variously designated foes would confer immunity from mortality, but this is not yet the best of all possible worlds.
For the foreseeable future, the defiling dynamics of anti-Reason will continue to hold sway in Islamist politics. In Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank explains these determinative dynamics at a clarifying conceptual level: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.”
Israeli analysts will recognize here the elements of jihadist terror, of martyrdom-directed criminality that closely resembles traditional notions of religious sacrifice. In authoritative world law, moreover, jihadist perpetrators are always differentiable from counter-terrorist adversaries by their witting embrace of mens rea or “criminal intent.
Though Israel regards the harms it that unfortunately comes to noncombatant Palestinian Arab populations as the unavoidable costs of counter-terrorism, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah intentionally target Israeli civilians. Under international law, both customary and codified, the responsibility for Israel-inflicted harms lies with the jihadists because of their documented resort to “human shields. In law, such resort is unambiguously criminal. The pertinent crime is known formally as “perfidy.”
At a minimum, every virtuous state’s law-based national security policies should build upon intellectual and scientific forms of understanding. Ipso facto, a virtuous state’s “just wars,” counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs should be conducted as contests of mind over mind. These contests should never be regarded as narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.
Israel together with all other states coexist in an international state of nature, a perpetually unstable condition that 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes correctly called a “state of war.” Despite being patently unreasonable, barbarous states and their fighting proxies subscribe to the proposition that “sacrificing” specifically reviled “others” (Jews) offers powerful “medicine” against their own deaths. Among other things, this proposition reflects a grimly ominous “triumph” of anti-Reason over Reason.
Our planet’s survival task is primarily an intellectual one, but unprecedented human courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, Israel could have no good reason to expect the arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king among its retrograde enemies. For humane and Reason–based governance to develop, enlightened citizens of Islamic countries in the Middle East would first have to cast aside historically discredited ways of thinking about world politics and international law and do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and “mind” over blind faith and “mystery.”
Ironically, the legacy of Westphalia (the 1648 treaty creating modern international law) codifies Reason. We may discover murderous endorsements of anti-Reason in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and various others, but there have also been voices of a very different sort. For the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.” It is, he remarks in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous that the state was invented.” In a similar vein, we may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega y’Gasset in the Revolt of the Masses. The 20th century Spanish philosopher identifies the state as “the greatest danger, always mustering its immense resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it….”
Amid all that would madden and torment, the modern state and its proxies often “live” at the apex of anti-Reason. Before this self-destroying existence can change, humankind would first have to accept (1) the Reason-backed “sentence” of universal mortality or (2) the continuing supremacy of anti-Reason. If the second assumption is chosen, it could only make sense in a world wherein traditionally compelling promises of immortality were successfully “de-linked” from “religious sacrifices” of war, terrorism and genocide.
As the first choice is inconceivable for a species that has never generally accepted personal mortality, the second choice offers Israel its only realistic decisional context. To be sure, national and global survival amid anti-Reason can hardly be reassuring, but, at least for now, it represents the world’s only plausible prospect. As for convincing aspiring Islamist perpetrators that inflictions of war, terrorism or genocide on “others” could never confer “power over death” – this task becomes the single most important obligation of all civilized states and peoples.
Because the necessary starting point for all calculations is a world of anti-Reason, Israel will need to understand that political concessions (e.g., territorial surrenders and a Palestinian state) could never satisfy their lascivious foes.
Embracing a world of anti-Reason, these enemies are shaped by what Nietzsche calls “a world of desires and passions.” For them, such a world gives a green-light to the sordid pleasures of criminal barbarism so prominently displayed on October 7, 2023.
In essence, Iran, as mentor to the barbarians, represents the juridical incarnation of anti-Reason. A state of Palestine would add to the Iran-backed forces of anti-Reason. Iran-Palestine would present Israel with a unique existential hazard. Potentially, this hazard would be irremediable.
What next? To deal with conspicuously primal foes, enemies that seek “power over death,” Israel’s only prudential and law-based strategy should emphasize calibrated military remedies. In carrying out its soon-to-be-expanded operations against Hezbollah, Jerusalem ought never to forget that (1) its core adversary is Iran, not an Iranian terror-group proxy; (2) keeping Iran non-nuclear is an immutable national obligation; and (3) a Palestinian state could never satisfy Jerusalem’s adversaries and would inevitably become a “force-multiplying” peril of unprecedented magnitude.
Louis René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue. He is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war. A version of this article was originally published at JewishWebsight.
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