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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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Did Qatar meddle in the Israeli Arab vote? Election officials reject Netanyahu’s claim of widespread fraud
(JTA) —
Allegations that Qatar secretly funded efforts to boost Arab voter turnout in Israel’s election have sparked a political firestorm, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring the vote “stolen” as his opponents accuse him of trying to undermine the results.
“The Ra’amgate affair is an earthquake,” Netanyahu’s Likud party said in a statement posted on the prime minister’s X account, referring to Ra’am, one of two Arab lists running in the election. “They stole the elections in Israel.”
Elections officials were at pains to say that the allegations did not indicate widespread fraud, and even if they were substantiated, would not invalidate the election.
“The elections to the Knesset were conducted lawfully,” acting Central Elections Committee director-general Dean Livne wrote Thursday, adding that “to the best of our knowledge there is no basis for claims of systematic harm to the integrity of the elections.”
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security apparatus, also cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “The Shin Bet has not yet completed its investigation, and any statements concerning the substance or nature of the suspicions under investigation do not reflect the agency’s position,” the statement said. “Such statements should have been avoided.”
Opposition leaders welcomed any investigation and accused Netanyahu of fearmongering – and noted that figures in his office have been under investigation for months for alleged ties to Qatar.
“I welcome the fact that Netanyahu is finally condemning Qatari involvement in the State of Israel,” said Gadi Eisenkot, whose Yashar Party is the largest in the opposition bloc. “It is serious when it happens in the Prime Minister’s Office and it is serious if it happens in the election system.”
Eisenkot accused Netanyahu of trying to change the rules after losing the game.
“What is already clear is that Likud and Netanyahu have embarked on an orchestrated and organized campaign to delegitimize the election results,” he said.
If the allegations are substantiated and found to have affected the results, a court could invalidate the election in whole or in part and order a new vote – though overturning an entire election is unprecedented in Israeli history.
The controversy erupted after Arab parties won a record 19 seats in Tuesday’s election, potentially giving them a decisive role in efforts to unseat Netanyahu.
With counting complete, Netanyahu’s bloc has 53 seats and the opposition bloc led by Eisenkot has 48, leaving neither with the 61 seats needed for a majority. One potential path for Eisenkot is to form a government with Arab parties or a minority government with their support from outside the coalition.
In a letter Wednesday to Shin Bet chief David Zini, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, chairman of the Central Elections Committee, called for an investigation into suspected foreign interference.
“Serious suspicions have been brought to my attention regarding improper influence on the elections through foreign funding by outside actors operating against Israeli interests,” Sohlberg wrote.
“I cannot attest to the nature of these suspicions,” he added, but said that because they involved foreign entities, “there is an obligation to investigate them thoroughly.”
Sohlberg instructed Zini to “uncover evidence to substantiate or refute the suspicions,” requesting findings within a week, ahead of the deadline for filing election appeals.
The letter did not identify Qatar or any Arab political party.
Likud alleged that foreign actors had sought to bring about an “Islamization of Israel” and overthrow the right-wing government. It urged other Zionist parties not to cooperate with Ra’am or the Joint List to replace the Knesset speaker or form a government reliant on Arab lawmakers.
Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas denied any connection between his party and the suspected financing.
“Ra’am has no connection whatsoever to the affair in question or to any other such affairs,” Abbas said in a statement, pledging full cooperation with law enforcement.
He mocked Netanyahu by invoking the allegations that Netanyahu’s office has been infiltrated by Qatari agents and also by linking him to his son Yair, a provocateur who has been caught up in separate controversies.
“To Abu Yair [father of Yair], who employs Qatari agents in his office, we have one message in response to the campaign of incitement and delegitimization he is waging against Arab citizens: There will be nothing, because there is nothing,” he said.
Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana called the allegations the most serious in Israeli democratic history, while National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir urged the arrest of Arab party leaders suspected of involvement.
In a statement Thursday, the Shin Bet said the intelligence originated from its own operations and “did not come from any political party or political entity on either side of the political spectrum.”
The agency stressed that the investigation was narrowly focused and “does not cast suspicion on, or accuse, an entire sector of society that went out to vote democratically and legally.”
Qatar rejected the allegations, calling them “ridiculous and dangerous.”
“We categorically deny allegations that Qatar has interfered in Israeli elections or funded any activities intended to influence their outcome,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al Ansari said in a statement.
Al Ansari accused Israeli politicians of attempting to use Qatar as a scapegoat for their electoral setbacks, pointing to what he described as contradictory accusations that Doha had bought Netanyahu’s loyalty, financed Israel’s left and now manipulated Arab voters.
Experts on Israel’s Arabs said the massive turnout was organic.
Rami Zeedan, a professor of Israel studies and author of a book on Arab political participation in Israel, said he observed extensive grassroots mobilization during three months of fieldwork in Israel this summer. Many Arab voters viewed Netanyahu’s government as particularly hostile to their community and were determined to replace it, believing that almost any alternative would treat them more equitably as Israeli citizens, he said.
“The exceptional turnout was therefore not inexplicable,” Zeedan told JTA. “It reflected a genuine and highly visible effort to remove Netanyahu and his government.”
Zeedan said Likud and the Israeli right have long sought to delegitimize Arab political participation. He warned that the allegations could be used to cast doubt on the entire Arab vote or justify calls for a new election.
“The danger is that an investigation into specific financial or criminal allegations will be transformed into a sweeping claim that the Arab vote itself was fraudulent,” he said.
Joint List leader Yousef Jabareen accused Netanyahu of attempting to delegitimize Arab voters and prevent the new Knesset from being sworn in on schedule.
“Netanyahu was defeated at the ballot box. No incitement campaign will change the voters’ decision,” Jabareen wrote on X.
Knesset member Ahmad Tibi, also from the Joint List, fired back after the prime minister questioned why he had visited Qatar four days before the election.
“I told Al Jazeera in Doha that we very much want to bring you down,” Tibi wrote on X, quoting Netanyahu’s post.
“Meanwhile, according to Israeli police, the only ones who received Qatari money are those in your own office. Lots of money,” he added, referring to the investigation into allegations that Netanyahu’s aides received payments to promote the Gulf state’s interests.
Anwar Mhajne, a political scientist originally from Umm al-Fahm, said she was not surprised by the Arab voter turnout, saying she witnessed “sophisticated social media mobilization by journalists, influencers, activists,” who made a compelling case for voting.
Mhajne argued that Netanyahu was using the allegations to discourage opposition parties from partnering with Ra’am and the Joint List.
“The allegations risk achieving Netanyahu’s objective before the investigation concludes: making cooperation with Arab representatives appear illegitimate and closing off a possible route to replacing his government,” she said in an email to JTA.
President Isaac Herzog called for the allegations to be thoroughly investigated but warned against casting suspicion on Arab voters collectively.
“Even at a moment like this, we must not tarnish an entire community that sought to exercise its right to vote and take an active part in democracy,” Herzog said Thursday.
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Beyond the frame, thousands are being murdered in Auschwitz but here, there are blueberries
”It’s a detective story,” Moisés Kaufman said. “It focuses on an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum who is offered a mysterious album. The person offering the album claims that it is photographs of Auschwitz.”
Kaufman is talking about Here There Are Blueberries, the play about those photographs and that archivist. Kaufman conceived and directed the play, which he co-wrote with Amanda Gronich of the Tectonic Theater Project. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. The archivist — Rebecca Erbelding — “is very skeptical because there are very few photographs of Auschwitz in existence,” Kaufman, Tectonic’s founder and artistic director, told me over Zoom. “The Nazis did not want any photographs or records of what they were doing there.”
Once Erbelding gets the album, she discovers that the photos are authentic, but there are no photos of victims, only Nazis, including Josef Mengele. “The play,” Kaufman said. “is a detective story of her trying to figure out what these photos tell us.”
The album, which consisted of more than 100 photos taken between May and December 1944 and put together by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, a Nazi SS officer, was front page news in 2007 when Erbelding and the museum revealed it. “It’s something we didn’t know,” Kaufman said. “When you think Auschwitz, what do you think? Gas chambers, crematoria, you think barracks. And this is not that. We had never seen these photos before.”
Höcker “was a very high-up guy,” Kaufman continued. “That’s one of the reasons why the album is so important. Because he was very close to the center of operations. We’re looking at how the people who were running the camp behaved, and how they lived their daily lives.”
Kaufman decided he needed to turn those photos and that story into a play.
“I come from a Holocaust survivor family,” he said. “My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I knew that … I would at one point in my life have to write about this. But I kept postponing it because, as you probably know, the Holocaust is the one historical event that has been most written about. Many movies have been made about it. It’s like the historical event that has been most chronicled in art. So I thought, ‘What else is there to say?’ And yet, when I saw these photographs, I thought, this is something we didn’t know. I want to write a play about that.”
The play uses the photos, projected on the stage as the story is told.
“The Tectonic Theater Project is an experimental theater company,” Kaufman said. “And the kind of formal question for us was, ‘Can you write a play from an album of photographs? Can the photographs carry part of that narrative?’ Every play we do has a new form. We try to never repeat ourselves.”
Kaufman, 62, grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, and immigrated to New York City in 1987. He was nominated for a Tony Award for directing I Am My Own Wife and for writing 33 Variations. Blueberries previously played at the La Jolla Playhouse in California, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC and Off Broadway at New York Theater Workshop.
The play’s title is taken from a picture in the album. “There’s a photograph in the album where they are eating blueberries,” Kaufman said — the title is a caption that the album’s owner had written. “I don’t want to give too much away,” Kaufman said, “but the location where this photograph is taken was something that few people knew about — that this location existed. And to me, it kind of encapsulates the spirit of the photos, which is a spirit of, a quotidian, a casual, the how do we live life in a moment like this?”
“What is happening outside the frame is that they’re killing 1.1 million people. Right outside the frame,” Kaufman continued. “And it poses questions about who we are as human beings.”
“We talk a lot about, what is the distance between culpability, complicity, and complacency?” said Kaufman. “And where do each one of us fall in that continuum?”
Why would someone knowing what’s happening in the camp take these photos and make an album of them?
“I think he thought the Reich was going to last a thousand years,” Kaufman said. “I thought that, in part, he wanted to chronicle his contribution to it.”
Kaufman said that although the play deals with what happened more than 80 years ago, it has a key relevance to today. “I think at a moment in time where so many governments around the world are turning towards authoritarianism, this play holds a mirror up to us. Who do we want to be?” he said.
What does he want audiences to get from this play after seeing it? What does he hope they are thinking as they leave the theater or afterwards?
“Number one, they’re going to see photographs that they’ve never seen before, and they’re going to see images that they’ve never seen before. Hopefully, the images will elicit new ideas, and hopefully, the conversation that they’re having when they exit the theater is different from the conversation they were having when they entered.”
The photo album, Kaufman said, “chronicles the life of everyone who runs the camp — people who worked in the kitchen, secretaries, high command, the people who drove the buses, the people who run the offices, the people who run the gas chamber. Everybody is portrayed. And I think that it invites the audience to think about not only how are humans capable of such a thing, but how are we all capable of such a thing? And what do we have to do in order to prevent ourselves from doing such a thing?”
‘Here There Are Blueberries’ begins performances Nov. 2 at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater and runs through Jan. 10.
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‘Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,’ as holiday grows beyond American expats in the Jewish state
Israeli cellphones have been pretty busy lately, given Tuesday’s monumental national election. There were the constant robocalls and daily text surveys leading up to Election Day. And with the scramble to form a coalition now underway, Israelis are glued to their phones, waiting for news alerts and debating every possible scenario in various group chats. But around Tel Aviv, hundreds of parents have an extra WhatsApp group to manage: the one dedicated to their neighborhood’s trick-or-treat event, set to take place this Saturday night.
“Can we change the date for Sabbath observers?” one mother asks.
“Halloween is always October 31st,” someone responds.
“I don’t think anyone here cares about the actual date,” another chimes in.
There are dozens of questions about where to buy candy in bulk, along with frantic costume emergencies. “Our order won’t make it! Does anyone have a witch costume for an 8-year-old?”
“We are so excited,” one parent writes. “This is our first time. Can someone explain how it works?”
Over the last decade, Halloween in Israel has grown from a small gathering of American immigrants into neighborhood-wide celebrations across Tel Aviv and other big cities. Bars and clubs now host annual spooky soirées, and costume shops that once depended almost entirely on Purim sales have added a second busy season in late October. And on Saturday night, thousands of children are expected to take to the streets for some classic trick-or-treating — with an Israeli twist.
The birthplace of Halloween b’Aretz remains its epicenter: Tel Aviv’s Old North neighborhood. The area has long been an enclave of both young families and English-speaking immigrants, a combination that helped transform the unfamiliar Halloween ritual into an annual local tradition.
The first trick-or-treat event was organized in 2015 by expat mothers Smadar Barak and Eliza Duenow, whose children were missing an American Halloween. It began with just 10 families spread out across the Old North. Within four years, that number had jumped to more than 100. And it was no longer just English speakers. Israeli friends and classmates had begun asking if they could join “American Purim.” Participation exploded as other neighborhoods began hosting their own Halloween-themed events.
But over time, many of the original families, including both organizers, returned to the States. The whole thing might have fizzled out completely had it not been for Noa Rudik, a young mother on extended maternity leave, who often ran Jewish holiday events for neighborhood families.
“A community candle-lighting for Chanukah. A kibbutz-style Shavuot celebration in the park. I saw that families, like mine, were hungry for opportunities to be together,” Rudik says.
Somehow, she ended up on an email list from Duenow, who was organizing a group pumpkin order and carving activity. Born and raised in Israel, Rudik had very little exposure to Halloween, but she was immediately enchanted. After taking her kids to the pumpkin carving, they eventually joined the trick-or-treaters. “In those early years, we didn’t have access to all of the Halloween supplies, so everything was very homemade — the costumes, the decorations, which I love. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to run around all night collecting candy?”
Beyond her own family’s enjoyment, Rudik understood the holiday’s potential for community building. “It doesn’t get any more communal than Halloween,” she points out. “Rosh Hashanah. Passover. You can celebrate those holidays just within your own family. Many people do. But for trick-or-treating, you literally cannot do it without your neighbors.”
Rudik and a few others eventually took over for Barak and Duenow and opened it up to the entire community. Today, the original WhatsApp group has close to 1,000 members, and nearly every Tel Aviv neighborhood hosts its own event. While the early trick-or-treaters sometimes had to endure strange looks as they traipsed from house to house in their costumes, these days you can feel the spirit of Halloween across the city, as the sidewalks fill with pint-sized ghosts and goblins.
Not everyone is on board with the Pagan-rooted holiday, though. Last year, Israeli pop star Miri Mesika sparked a public debate over Halloween and Jewish identity when she pointedly told an interviewer that her daughters would be waiting until Purim to dress in costume. Rudik has also sensed some reluctance on the part of the Tel Aviv municipality to support trick-or-treating, even though it typically helps fund her other events. Efforts to promote the activity through local schools were also met with objections from some parent representatives, leading to a compromise: each could decide whether to pass the invitation along to their class.
Occasionally, Rudik hears from more traditional families who are hesitant or have decided not to participate. “But otherwise, the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” she reports. “Most people do not even think about the religious aspect or the fact that it’s not ‘our holiday.’ They just see it as an opportunity to be creative, to spend time with friends, and to come together as a community.”
All of which involves some pretty complicated logistics. Even with the holiday’s growth in popularity, most residents don’t hand out treats, so America’s door-to-door model won’t work. In the early years, participants shared addresses, apartment numbers and even door codes with each other. But as the group grew, the prospect of giving hundreds of strangers access to their buildings became less appealing. Some families moved their candy stations downstairs; others divided up, with one parent taking the children around while the other stayed home to distribute candy, as they often do in the States. For years, families navigated with a Google map of participating homes. Last year, a tech-savvy neighborhood parent designed a custom trick-or-treating app that will now be available across the city.
“Start-up Nation does Halloween,” Rudik jokes.
The guiding principle is that anyone collecting candy should also help provide it. Some families put up elaborate decorations and stick around to distribute treats; others leave a simple help-yourself bowl by the door. Those who can’t host typically arrange to buy candy for someone else’s house, which gets coordinated through the Whatsapp group the week before.
“We go by the honor system,” Rudik says. “We trust people to figure out a way to contribute. And there is always plenty of candy for everyone.”
But just in case, Rudik spends much of the night manning a centrally located emergency candy station, dispatching reinforcements to households that are running low.
After more than a decade, the festivities usually run pretty smoothly, though the growing number of Israelis has brought with it a learning curve.
“I really love that this started with Americans,” Rudik says. “I think it lends a legitimacy that would not necessarily be there if a bunch of Israelis just decided to start trick-or-treating. But it has definitely changed shape over the years.”
“Halloween meets Israeli chutzpah,” she calls it. Like any cultural tradition, trick-or-treating comes with its own etiquette that isn’t necessarily obvious to newcomers.
“Usually parents would be responsible for making sure their kids follow the rules. But we realized parents themselves didn’t necessarily know the ins and outs. Most of us didn’t grow up on this,” she points out.
One year, after families complained that older children had emptied their unattended candy bowls, Rudik and her fellow organizers visited neighborhood schools to talk to the kids and sent parents reminders on WhatsApp.
“In the days before Halloween, we really urge everyone to review the rules with their children: just take one candy, leave enough for others. Be good neighbors.”
This year’s turnout is expected to be their biggest yet, Rudik says, with several hundred families registered in the Old North alone. It follows a string of quieter celebrations, beginning in 2020, when the pandemic kept everyone inside.
“I think we did something over Zoom,” Rudik says, rolling her eyes.
Then came the quietest year of all: 2023. Less than three weeks before Halloween, on Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel’s southern border, killing more than 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage.
“It wasn’t even a question,” Rudik recalls. “It was just obvious to everyone it would be cancelled. Nor was it specific to Halloween. No one was in the mood to celebrate anything. We were just engulfed in grief.”
The following year, the organizers went ahead with a toned-down version.
“The war wasn’t over, there were still hostages in Gaza,” she says, “but we also felt like we wanted to give the children some sense of normalcy. We asked people not to do anything too gory or scary — no blood or body parts or skeletons — and everyone really respected that. It was a pretty muted night.”
Last year, Israeli Halloween was back in full force, with one new addition: an adults only party, which Rudik also co-organized and will be bringing back this year as well. “Most of us didn’t get to celebrate Halloween as kids,” she says, with a smile. “So we are just making up for lost time.”
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