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How Jewish comedy found religion, from Philip Roth to ‘Broad City’
(JTA) — In the 2020 comedy “Shiva Baby,” a 20-something young woman shows up at a house of Jewish mourners and gently offers her condolences. When she finds her mother in the kitchen, they chat about the funeral and the rugelach before the daughter asks, “Mom, who died?”
While “Shiva Baby” explores themes of sexuality and gender, the comedy almost never comes at the expense of Jewish tradition, which is treated seriously by its millennial writer and director Emma Seligman (born in 1995) even as the shiva-goers collide. It’s far cry from the acerbic way an author raised during the Depression like Philip Roth lampooned a Jewish wedding or a baby boomer like Jerry Seinfeld mocked a bris.
These generational differences are explored in Jenny Caplan’s new book, “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials.” A religion scholar, Caplan writes about the way North American Jewish comedy has evolved since World War II, with a focus on how humorists treat Judaism as a religion. Her subjects range from writers and filmmakers who came of age shortly after the war (who viewed Judaism as “a joke at best and an actual danger at worst”) to Generation X and millennials, whose Jewish comedy often recognizes “the power of community, the value of family tradition, and the way that religion can serve as a port in an emotional storm.”
“I see great value in zeroing in on the ways in which Jewish humorists have engaged Jewish practices and their own Jewishness,” Caplan writes. “It tells us something (or perhaps it tells us many somethings) about the relationship between Jews and humor that goes deeper than the mere coincidence that a certain humorist was born into a certain family.”
Caplan is the chair in Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She has a master’s of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and earned a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University.
In a conversation last week, we spoke about the Jewishness of Jerry Seinfeld, efforts by young women comics to reclaim the “Jewish American Princess” label, and why she no longer shows Woody Allen movies in her classrooms.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity
[Note: For the purpose of her book and our conversation, this is how Caplan isolates the generations: the Silent Generation (b. 1925-45), the baby boom (1946-65), Generation X (1966-79) and millennials (1980–95).]
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Let me ask how you got into this topic.
Jenny Caplan: I grew up in a family where I was just sort of surrounded by this kind of material. My dad is a comedic actor and director who went to [Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s] Clown College. My degrees were more broadly in American religion, not Jewish studies, but I was really interested in the combination of American religion and popular culture. When I got to Syracuse and it came time to start thinking about my larger project and what I wanted to do, I proposed a dissertation on Jewish humor.
The key to your book is how Jewish humor reflects the Jewish identity and compulsions of four sequential generations. Let’s start with the Silent Generation, which is sandwiched between the generation whose men were old enough to fight in World War II and the baby boomers who were born just after the war.
The hallmark of the Silent Generation is that they were old enough to be aware of the war, but they were mostly too young to serve. Every time I told people what I was writing about, they would say Woody Allen or Philip Roth, two people of roughly the same generation.
In “Funny, You Don’t Look Funny: Judaism and Humor from the Silent Generation to Millennials,” Jenny Caplan explores how comics treated religion from the end of World War II to the 21st century. (Courtesy)
The Roth story you focus on is “Eli, the Fanatic” from 1959, about an assimilated Jewish suburb that is embarrassed and sort of freaks out when an Orthodox yeshiva, led by a Holocaust survivor, sets up in town.
Roth spent the first 20 to 30 years of his career dodging the claim of being a self-loathing Jew and bad for the Jews. But the actual social critique of “Eli, the Fanatic” is so sharp. It is about how American Jewish comfort comes at the expense of displaced persons from World War II and at the expense of those for whom Judaism is a real thriving, living religious practice.
That’s an example you offer when you write that the Silent Generation “may have found organized religion to be a dangerous force, but they nevertheless wanted to protect and preserve the Jewish people.” I think that would surprise people in regards to Roth, and maybe to some degree Woody Allen.
Yeah, it surprised me. They really did, I think, share that postwar Jewish sense of insecurity about ongoing Jewish continuity, and that there’s still an existential threat to the ongoing existence of Jews.
I hear that and I think of Woody Allen’s characters, atheists who are often on the lookout for antisemitism. But you don’t focus on Allen as the intellectual nebbish of the movies. You look at his satire of Jewish texts, like his very funny “Hassidic Tales, With a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar” from 1970, which appeared in The New Yorker. It’s a parody of Martin Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim” and sentimental depictions of the shtetl, perhaps like “Fiddler on the Roof.” A reader might think he’s just mocking the tradition, but you think there’s something else going on.
He’s not mocking the tradition as much as he’s mocking a sort of consumerist approach to the tradition. There was this sort of very superficial attachment to Buber’s “Tales of the Hasidim.” Allen’s satire is not a critique of the traditions of Judaism, it’s a critique of the way that people latch onto things like the Kabbalah and these new English translations of Hasidic stories without any real depth of thought or intellect. Intellectual hypocrisy seems to be a common theme in his movies and in his writing. It’s really a critique of organized religion, and it’s a critique of institutions, and it’s a critique of the power of institutions. But it’s not a critique of the concept of religion.
The idea of making fun of the wise men and their gullible followers reminds me of the folk tales of Chelm, which feature rabbis and other Jewish leaders who use Jewish logic to come to illogical conclusions.
Yes.
You write that the baby boomers are sort of a transition between the Silent Generation and a later generation: They were the teenagers of the counterculture, and warned about the dangers of empty religion, but also came to consider religion and tradition as valuable. But before you get there, you have a 1977 “Saturday Night Live” skit in which a bris is performed in the back seat of a luxury car, and the rabbi who performs it is portrayed as what you call an absolute sellout.
Exactly. You know: Institutional religion is empty and it’s hollow, it’s dangerous and it’s seductive.
Jerry Seinfeld, born in 1954, is seen as an icon of Jewish humor, but to me is an example of someone who never depicts religion as a positive thing. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
“Seinfeld” is more a show about New York than it is necessarily a show about anything Jewish. The New York of Seinfeld is very similar to the New York of Woody Allen, peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, attractive folks. It’s a sort of Upper West Side myopia.
But there’s the bris episode, aired in 1993, and written by Larry Charles. Unless you are really interested in the medium, you may not know much about Larry Charles, because he stays behind the camera. But he also goes on to do things like direct Bill Maher’s anti-religion documentary “Religulous,” and there’s a real strong case for him as having very negative feelings about organized religion which feels like a holdover from the Silent Generation. And so in that episode you have Kramer as the Larry Charles stand-in, just opining about the barbaric nature of the circumcision and trying to save this poor baby from being mutilated.
The few references to actual Judaism in “Seinfeld” are squirmy. I am thinking of the 1995 episode in which a buffoon of a rabbi blurts out Elaine’s secrets on a TV show. That was written by Larry David, another boomer, whose follow-up series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is similarly known for its irreverence toward Judaism. But you say David can also surprise you with a kind of empathy for religion.
For the most part, he’s classic, old school, anti-organized religion. There’s the Palestinian Chicken episode where the Jews are rabidly protesting the existence of a Palestinian-run chicken restaurant near a Jewish deli, and where his friend Funkhouser won’t play golf on Shabbos until Larry gets permission by bribing the rabbi with the Palestinian chicken. There, rabbis are ridiculous and can be bought and religion is hollow and this is all terrible.
But then there’s this bat mitzvah montage where for one moment in the entire run of this show, Larry seems happy and in a healthy relationship and fulfilled and enjoying life.
That’s where he falls in love with Loretta Black during a bat mitzvah and imagines a happy future with her.
It’s so startling: It is the most human we ever see Larry over the run of the show, and I believe that was the season finale for the 2007 season. It was much more in line with what we’ve been seeing from a lot of younger comedians at that point, which was religion as an anchor in a good way — not to pull you down but to keep you grounded.
So for Generation X, as you write, Judaism serves “real, emotional, or psychological purpose for the practitioners.”
I wouldn’t actually call it respect but religion is an idea that’s not just something to be mocked and relegated to the dustbin. I’m not saying that Generation X is necessarily more religious, but they see real power and value in tradition and in certain kinds of family experiences. So, a huge amount of the humor can still come at the expense of your Jewish mother or your Jewish grandmother, but the family can also be the thing that is keeping you grounded, and frequently through some sort of religious ritual.
Who exemplifies that?
My favorite example is the 2009 Jonathan Tropper novel, “This Is Where I Leave You.” I’m so disappointed that the film adaptation of that sucked a lot of the Jewish identity out of the story, so let’s stick with the novel. In that book, where a family gathers for their father’s shiva, the characters are horrible people in a dysfunctional family writ large. They lie to each other. They backstab each other. But in scene where the protagonist Judd describes standing up on the bimah [in synagogue] to say Kaddish [the Mourner’s Prayer] after the death of his father, and the way he talks about this emotional catharsis that comes from saying the words and hearing the congregation say the words — it’s a startling moment of clarity in a book where these characters are otherwise just truly reprehensible.
Adam Sandler was born in 1966, the first year of Generation X, and his “Chanukah Song” seems like such a touchstone for his generation and the ones that follow. It’s not about religious Judaism, but in listing Jewish celebrities, it’s a statement of ethnic pride that Roth or Woody Allen couldn’t imagine.
It’s the reclamation of Jewish identity as something great and cool and fun and hip and wonderful and absolutely not to be ashamed of.
From left, Ilana Glazer, Abbi Jacobson and Seth Green in an episode of “Broad City” parodying Birthright Israel. (Screenshot from Comedy Central)
Which brings us to “Broad City,” which aired between 2014 and 2019. It’s about two 20-something Jewish women in New York who, in the case of Ilana Glazer’s character, anyway, are almost giddy about being Jewish and embrace it just as they embrace their sexuality: as just liberating. Ilana even upends the Jewish mother cliche by loving her mother to death.
That’s the episode with Ilana at her grandmother’s shiva, which also has the B plot where Ilana and her mother are shopping for underground illegal handbags. They spend most of the episode snarking at each other and fighting with each other and her mother’s a nag and Ilana is a bumbling idiot. But at the moment that the cops show up, and try to nab them for having all of these illegal knockoff handbags, the two of them are a team. They are an absolute unit of destructive force against these hapless police officers.
I think all of your examples of younger comics are women, who have always had fraught relationships with Jewish humor, both as practitioners and as the target of jokes. You write about “The JAP Battle” rap from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which both leans into the stereotype of the Jewish-American Princess — spoiled, acquisitive, “hard as nails” — and tries to reclaim it without the misogyny.
Rachel Bloom’s character Rebecca in “Girlfriend” self-identifies as a JAP, but she doesn’t actually fit the category. It’s her mother, Naomi, who truly is the Philip Roth, “Marjorie Morningstar,” Herman Wouk model of a JAP. So Bloom is kind of using the term, but you can’t repurpose the term when the original is still there.
So as an alternative, I offer up a new term: the Modern Ashkenazi American Woman. It’s very New York, it’s very East Coast, it’s very particular to a type of upbringing and community that in the 1950s and ’60s would have been almost exclusively Conservative Jews, and then may have become a bit more Reform as we’ve gotten into the ’90s and 2000s. They went to the JCC. They probably went to Jewish summer camp.
But even that doesn’t even really speak to the American sense of what Jewish is anymore, because American Jews have become increasingly racially and culturally diverse.
There is also something that’s happening historically with Generation X, and that’s the distance from the two major Jewish events of the 20th century, which is the Holocaust and the creation of Israel.
The Silent Generation and baby boomers still had a lingering sense of existential dread — the sense that we’re not so far removed from an attempted total annihilation of Jews. Gen X and millennials are so far removed from the Holocaust that they don’t feel that same fear.
But the real battleground we’re seeing in contemporary American Judaism is about the relationship to Israel. For baby boomers and even for some older members of Gen X, there’s still a sense that you can criticize Israel, but at the end of the day, it’s your duty to ultimately support Israel’s right to exist. And I think millennials and Zoomers [Gen Z] are much more comfortable with the idea of Israel being illegitimate.
Have you seen that in comedy?
I certainly think you can see the leading edge of that in some millennial stuff. The “Jews on a Plane” episode of “Broad City” is an absolute excoriation of Birthright Israel, and does not seem particularly interested in softening its punches about the whole idea of Jews going to Israel. I think we can see a trend in that direction, where younger American Jewish comedians do not see that as punching down.
You’re teaching a class on Jewish humor. What do your undergraduates find funny? Now that Woody Allen is better known for having married his adoptive daughter and for the molestation allegations brought by another adoptive daughter, do they look at his classic films and ask, “Why are you teaching us this guy?”
For the first time I’m not including Woody Allen. I had shown “Crimes and Misdemeanors” for years because I think it’s his most theological film. I think it’s a great film. And then a couple years ago, I backed off, because some students were responding that it was hard to look at him with all the baggage. He’s still coming up in conversation because you can’t really talk about the people who came after him without talking about him, but for the first time I’m not having them actually watch or read any of his stuff.
They have found things funny that I didn’t expect them to, and they have not found things funny that I would have thought they would. They laughed their way through “Yidl mitn fidl,” the 1936 Yiddish musical starring Molly Picon. I also thought they’d enjoy the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and they did not laugh once. Some of that is the fact that Groucho’s delivery is just so fast.
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Soccer helped my family survive the Nazis. Our community has lost sight of that story’s meaning
A new exhibit at the Holocaust Museum LA should be telling my great-grandfather’s story as part of its study of soccer, Jews and the Holocaust. But it won’t, because the museum failed to internalize the great moral lesson that my family learned from surviving the Holocaust: to never value the safety of one group over that of others.
The museum describes The Beautiful Game: The Untold Story, which opened this week, as an exploration of “the deep and often overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game.” It could have been curated specifically to tell my family’s story, because it was soccer that saved them from the Holocaust.
Pavel Mahrer, my great-grandfather, was a Jewish professional soccer player for Czechoslovakia. He played for teams in Teplitz and Prague, as well as at the 1924 Olympics. In the 1920s and 1930s he moved across the Atlantic to play for the Brooklyn Wanderers and for a Jewish team, New York Hakoah. His son Jerry was born during that time; eventually, the fact that Jerry held American citizenship would save much of the Mahrer family from the Holocaust.
During the Shoah, Pavel became the star player in the league at the Theresienstadt ghetto. He once wrote to his wife, as they were imprisoned separately, “tell our boys that I played soccer again and even played well and was successful.” Soccer brought him joy during those years of total despair. He avoided transport to Auschwitz — possibly because he was a famous athlete — and eventually reunited with his family in New York after the war.
The Holocaust Museum LA exhibit doesn’t tell that story, but it wanted to. My family pulled out of the exhibit because we didn’t want our story told by an institution that we think has faltered in holding true to the back half of its stated mission of inspiring “a more dignified and humane world.”
‘Never Again’ for whom?
We had already been in contact with the exhibit curators when the museum became entangled in a public relations crisis last fall over an Instagram carousel featuring a cover image of six interlocking arms of different colors with the text: “’Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.”
Further slides added: “Jews must not let the trauma of our past silence our conscience” and “To be Jewish is to remember and act.”
Finally, I thought, a Jewish institution that will stand against genocide and violence, full stop. Not just genocide and violence against Jews.
Over the past few years, I’d watched the Jewish institutions I grew up respecting make excuses for or ignore Israel’s assault on Gaza. At best, they remained silent as Israel killed innocent civilians in the name of the Jewish people. At worst, they supported Israel’s actions unreservedly.
But here was one Jewish institution that was sending the right, albeit subtle, message.
My family agreed that this was a museum that was teaching the history and lessons of the Holocaust in a way we wanted to support. We had told the museum of our interest in loaning them Pavel’s 1924 Paris Olympics jersey and photos of his soccer career for the exhibit, and grew more excited for the collaboration.
But not everyone had the same reaction to the post that we did. Comments flooded the museum’s page claiming that the phrase “Never Again” was only for Jews, and criticizing the museum for generalizing the Holocaust — as if Jews have a monopoly on being victims of genocide. I figured the museum must have been prepared for some backlash, but had decided it was worth upsetting some to show that they cared for all.
I was wrong.
The museum deleted the post, then issued an apology, calling the post “easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East.” To us, it read as if they were apologizing for giving the appearance of caring about Palestinian lives. The apology post drew outrage as well — although not in the comments section, which was disabled.
A humane world for everyone
The apology felt like cowardice to me and my family. So we asked to meet with Beth Kean, the museum’s CEO. By the time we connected with her over Zoom in October, the apology post had been deleted as well. We wanted to understand what was behind their decision to post, remove, apologize and then act like none of it ever happened.
After the meeting, we understood that the museum hadn’t expected the response to the first post; some museum staff, horrifyingly, had received death threats. But we didn’t get a good answer as to how capitulating to hateful comments and violent threats aligned with the stated mission of the museum. We were promised an updated public statement that would specifically state the museum’s humanitarian goals; but if one was ever published, I didn’t see it.
We decided that we no longer felt comfortable lending the material that told Pavel’s story to the museum. I take pride in being the descendant of Holocaust survivors, and I’m especially proud that my family has always told our story in a way that emphasizes that the safety of all peoples is and has always been intertwined. I don’t think Pavel would be proud to see his story used to help suggest in any way that Jewish lives should be valued over others.
I didn’t expect the museum to change its mind because of a thirty minute Zoom call with my family, but its willingness to, in my eyes, bend on its principles left me disheartened. If we can’t take stories of Jewish suffering and strength — like that of my family — and apply their lessons to the suffering that is occurring to this day around the world, what is the point of telling them?
I’m a soccer player myself. Every time I score a goal or make a tackle I think of how I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for this beautiful game. I feel a kinship with other players, other soccer fans, because we share that love of the game. It brings us joy, it brings us hope.
I find my family’s story compelling not just because it is a story about Jews during the Holocaust, but because it is a story about survival — a story about luck, talent and both good and terrible timing. The drive to survive, and the need to ensure others’ survival, should be universal. If the message that our Jewish institutions send is that Jewish survival matters most, who is that message for? How can we expect the rest of the world to care about our safety if we don’t do anything to prove that we care about theirs?
Dani Mahrer is a former Jewish educator who now works in renewable energy in Los Angeles.
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Eliya Smith says plot is what happens when you’re busy doing nothing
Eliya Smith’s dad has seen her play Dad Don’t Read This. He’s kvelled at its every iteration.
“He’s always like, ‘Are people gonna know that I’m Dad?’” Smith, 28, said on the day of the Knicks Victory Parade. The streets of the West Village, where we met for coffee, were teeming with orange and blue; she was wearing a baseball cap with some sort of bird, a heron or maybe a penguin, swallowing a fish.
“I always think it’s funny that he’s like, ‘I’m here and I have no complicated feelings.’”
Smith’s father isn’t the title character of the piece, which is about four high school friends, the computer game The Sims and the existential angst of adolescence, but technically he is. Smith started writing the show about a decade ago, during Thanksgiving break from Harvard. She needed the pages printed and emailed them to her father with the injunction as a kind of title page. (The following page read, “If you’re reading this page, it means you started to read. Stop reading.”)
The play is a work of fiction, as are all its characters. But the real-life command became a guiding principle — and the first lines — of the show.
“There is like a sort of frame of, ‘This play isn’t for you,’” said Smith, a former Forward editorial fellow who, last year made her Off-Broadway debut with the play Grief Camp. “I think the audience should reckon with the experience of watching it. Not that I’m like, ‘Fuck you for coming to my play,’ I’ll always be grateful, but I think my favorite parts of the play are when it really feels like they’re like doing the play for each other.”
Dad Don’t Read This is what Smith calls her first real, full play. Unsatisfied with her earlier attempts, she took a crack at writing what she knew: boredom and Ohio (in her mind synonymous) and the endless hours she spent in her basement chatting with friends. That and The Sims, the life simulator where players construct the world and circumstances of flailing, gibberish-spewing suburbanites.
“When I was in high school, I feel like I would sometimes play The Sims and be like, ‘If only it were this easy,’” Smith said. She had a cheat code that could defy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: When a Sim had to pee, you could drag the need away. She found herself thinking, “’I wish I could do that for myself, that I could just like drag away the sadness.”
In the show, this sentiment is embodied by Mal (Amalia Yoo, hot off her turn as another high schooler in the midst of a best friend breakup in John Proctor is the Villain), who tries to manipulate her friends the way she does her pixilated people.
Smith isn’t Mal, but the character’s Ohio ennui (Smith’s from Columbus) and some of her feelings are true to her high school self. OK, Smith’s like her in one way: She, like Mal, had a cousin who gave her a Sims cheat code for unlimited money.
The connection between the world of The Sims, and the control it signifies, has a natural extension in playwriting.
“You become a playwright because you have control issues,” Smith conceded. “When I’m writing it on the page, I can manipulate the characters how I want, and then we start rehearsing it, and I lose a little more control, and then it’s like the more the play becomes its own thing.
“I think it is actually the reason I became a playwright, because I love the moment where my desire to control everything is sort of overruled,” Smith said. Still, it’s often painful for her to be present as her words are performed.
About the hat — the one with the bird — she often feels the need to wear one when she sits in the audience, not to be incognito (she’s been told it makes her more conspicuous) but to block some of her field of vision so she doesn’t have to see some patron sigh or look at their phone.
Smith and I move from the coffee shop — whose vibe she compares, no shade, to the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville — over to the Greenwich House Theatre, where Dad Don’t Read This just transferred from St. Luke’s Theatre in midtown, earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
We plop into swivel chairs in the dressing room and catch up. Eliya left the Forward in 2021 to go to grad school at UT Austin. She’s only really been living in New York full time for about a year, calling Park Slope home. Life in Austin, she said, felt almost like an extension of high school in Ohio. She’d drive around bored with her friends. She misses the heat.
“I feel like there’s a sort of leveling thing that happens,” she said between sips of her iced coffee. “I feel like in New York you like get off the subway and you somehow are supposed to not be sweaty from being like packed in with hundreds of other people underground, and I feel like in Texas it’s so hot that it’s just totally fine, everyone is kind of disheveled and gross, and it’s just like what the vibe is, and I feel like it’s really equalizing, like ‘We’re all like looking not our best,’ and I liked that.”
She has yet to write her Texas play — or her New York one.
“I feel like everything I write is on a five-year delay,” said Smith, whose produced plays often circle the Buckeye State. (Last season’s Grief Camp took place in Virginia, but also followed young people; another play, about Holocaust memory, was called Deadclass, Ohio and, aptly, played at the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan.) “Until I was like 23 I was like I can only write about being 17.”
Her new projects, Two Girls, a metatheatrical work about a shock porn video, and Biography (her least autobiographical piece to date), are departures.
It’s hard to explain the exact vibe of Dad Don’t Read This. Some have likened Smith’s work to Annie Baker, who she knows from UT Austin. I propose, in moments, it approaches Chekhov at a sleepover. Smith says she would never compare herself to the Russian master, but is happy to sing his praises. Though I meant this as a compliment, it could be seen as critique: On the surface, there isn’t much of a plot.
“I often joke that I don’t like plot,” Smith said. “But that actually isn’t true. I rigorously plot all my plays, it’s just the plot is like: This character is deeply wounded because of the perceived subtext from a line about a soda, and to me, that is plot.”
She also believes Top Gun: Maverick is the best movie ever in part because of how much happens. You can tell she is sincere, while knowing this is somewhat absurd to discuss in the same breath as The Cherry Orchard.
“You can have great art like Top Gun: Maverick, that is very sort of like there’s a story and these are all the beats, and you can also have Chekhov where the plot is like a wound that you couldn’t even name.”
Ineffable feelings are the engine of Dad Don’t Read This. Mal and her friends try and fail to articulate just what is going on in their little lives, where the inconsequential is the only thing that matters.
While firmly of a generation — it’s set in 2014, the actors are a few years younger than Smith — the play has found older admirers. Helen Shaw of The New York Times ranked it one of her top shows of the season. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik will participate in a “Dad Affinity Night” on June 28.
The key to its connection may well be what’s absent from the stage — smart phones and social media are nowhere to be seen. It’s intentional.
“We like don’t have boredom anymore, because we have phones, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how do I put characters in a situation where they can be extremely bored and where that can be dramatically intriguing,” Smith said. “And also, like, how do I make boredom resonate with an audience that doesn’t experience boredom because we look at our phones, and I do feel like being bored in Ohio is like something that I knew so intimately.”
Onstage at the Greenwich House Theatre, boredom lives. And it’s riveting.
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Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
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