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How the Forward got a cameo in ‘Marty Supreme’
“The challenging thing about any film, for me, is you’re trying to build these worlds, so you’ve got to find the elements,” said Jack Fisk, production designer for Marty Supreme, and regular collaborator with big names including Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch and Brian De Palma.
“We’re trying to piece together bits of reality to tell our story, and that look right for the period,” Fisk said in a Zoom conversation, the day Marty Supreme got a Best Picture, Musical or Comedy, nomination from the Golden Globes. “So the challenge is to find them, that you can get to them reasonably and within the day, and that will fit in your budget.”
Often the on-the-ground reality of the filming location inspires the scene, but sometimes it gets in the way and forces the art department to get creative. Both were the case in a blink-and-you’ll miss it moment in Josh Safdie’s epic of a schvitzer table tennis champ.
While shooting a scene on location at Seward Park on the Lower East Side, the original Forward Building, with its historic preserved façade, loomed in the background. It fit the film’s early 1950s setting, and the biography of Marty Reisman, the real ping-pong pro whose 1974 book The Money Player inspired the film, and who grew up on East Broadway and learned the game at the Education Alliance in the neighborhood.
“Josh told me that, you know, ‘That’s this Jewish newspaper, it’s been here forever’” said Fisk.
It was more than a bit of trivia from a lifelong New Yorker. It was a fix to a problem: modern street signs opposite the park, which were decidedly out of place but which the city wouldn’t bother removing for a one-day shoot.
So Fisk and his team, drawing inspiration from the locale, built a Forward delivery truck to block out the signs. He even recalls printing up some papers. The graphic artists relied on reference photos to reproduce the font — painting the cargo bed immediately after a period-appropriate truck arrived. Fisk thinks it may have still been wet on shooting day.
Every time Fisk entered a neighborhood for this New York shoot — his first since 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise, directed by De Palma — he looked for traces of the past to take advantage of. (In the case of Phantom, Fisk opted to use the Brooklyn building of the Pressman Toy Corporation— a Jewish-owned outfit known for manufacturing Chinese Checkers and the family firm of Hollywood producer Edward R. Pressman — as a prison instead of filming in a real jail; Fisk said all the ones he scouted looked “too nice.”)
Recreating the lost world of Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, posed its own challenges.
Central to the film, if only briefly seen in the final cut, is Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club on 55th St. The building was demolished, but Fisk, together with producer Sara Rossein (who is also Safdie’s wife), was able to get hold of blueprints and black-and-white photos through tax records, government archives and a magazine feature. Rossein’s discovery of a 16mm piece of film clued Fisk in on the color palette.
Fisk got his start in film working for B-movie maven Roger Corman (“Every other page there was a bare breast or something,” he recalled of the scripts) so he is no stranger to improvising on a shoestring. In fact, he relishes it. On Marty Supreme, as maximalist a picture as Safdie has ever made, the budget — despite being reportedly the most-expensive A24 production yet at around $60-70 million — often creaked, calling for some creative problem solving.
There’s a scene where Marty volleys an apple into a bowl in a building across from his hotel room. There wasn’t money to retrofit the room in the window, so the period stove viewers see is an image printed from a plotter — a massive printer — pasted to the wall. Norkin’s Shoe Shop, where Marty works, was an actual location on Orchard Street, but the crew built modular units of the storefront so they could move the shots away from a modern-looking hotel recently built nearby.
While Marty Supreme is largely rooted in New York, with some detours to New Jersey, London and Tokyo, there’s a memorable sequence set at Auschwitz, as former world champion tennis pro Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig) recounts his life in the camp.
“It’s kind of horrible and challenging at the same time,” Fisk said of recreating a part of the death camp. “Everybody’s knowledge of Auschwitz and concentration camps really helped make the set.”
The dimly lit barracks were built inside a house that doubled as the set for a farm in New Jersey where Marty tries to retrieve a lost German shepherd.
Fisk said Röhrig, who starred in the Auschwitz-set film Son of Saul and converted to Orthodox Judaism after a visit to the camp, was excited for the scene. (Fisk noted that Röhrig is part of his longtime collaborator Terrence Malick’s upcoming film, The Way of the Wind, where the actor will play Jesus, possibly the first Orthodox Jew to embody that role on the big screen.)
Fisk’s work on Marty Supreme has been noted in nearly every review — even the rare pan in Time singled out his production as “the best thing about the movie” — but it’s technically not his only film this year.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere shows the Boss watching Malick’s Badlands on his home television; the crime drama was the inspiration for the singer’s album Nebraska, the making of which is the crux of the biopic. Fisk is grateful Badlands is still resonating, as it marked the beginning not only of his most prolific collaboration, but was the set where he met his wife, Sissy Spacek.
While Fisk is a sought-after talent for the ambitious auteurs looking to wind back the clock — his most recent credit is Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, for which he was nominated for his third Oscar — his most personal connection was with David Lynch, his friend since high school.
Lynch died in January, during the production of Marty Supreme. Fisk was in Japan working on one of the last scenes soon after his passing, and was gratified to see people hosting film festivals in diners in Lynch’s honor.
Marty Supreme is the first film Fisk has done with Safdie, and while it is a relatively early work (Safdie is just 41, though this film is his seventh feature, and his second without his brother, Benny), the veteran production designer was impressed by his enthusiasm and his attention to detail.
“I always tried to prepare myself so I have a little bit more detail than he asked, which is very hard to do,” Fisk said.
It’s that eye for minutiae — and the need to block out the blight of modernity — that paved the way for the Forward’s brief cameo. Fisk, for his part, likes the look of the Yiddish.
“It’s so graphic and beautiful and you can move it around,” Fisk said of the truck. “The camera’s gonna miss it, you can just back it up five feet to see it.”
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”