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In episode of CBS’ ‘The Equalizer,’ Adam Goldberg tackles antisemitic hate crimes in Brooklyn
(JTA) — Throughout his career, actor Adam Goldberg has been associated with iconic Jewish roles, from the hero in the kitschy 2003 action comedy “The Hebrew Hammer” to a Jewish soldier in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar winner “Saving Private Ryan.”
But for his latest role, on CBS crime procedural “The Equalizer,” Goldberg didn’t know his character had Jewish ancestry until recently, even though the show is in its third season.
On Sunday night, “The Equalizer” will air an episode called “Never Again,” in which a wave of hate crimes strikes Midwood, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. These incidents hit close to home for Harry Keshegian, Goldberg’s character, a computer expert and Brooklyn native who is part of the show’s team of vigilante justice-seekers. (The series, which is set in New York and stars Queen Latifah, is a reboot of the show from the 1980s, which also spawned a series of films starring Denzel Washington.)
The Harry character has long been established as being of Armenian-American heritage. But for this episode, co-showrunner Adam Glass decided to add to Harry’s backstory, giving the character a Jewish mother as well as a complicated relationship with that side of his faith.
This comes to the forefront when the hate crimes, including vandalism and antisemitic threats, start to pile up. “Growing up with a Jewish mom and Armenian dad, I can’t say I knew where I stood in the community,” Harry says during the episode. “But I definitely know where I stand on hate crimes.”
Harry later describes himself as “someone who’s got a history of genocide on both sides of my family.” And like a lot of Jewish Americans, he was of the belief, at least until recently, that antisemitism in everyday life was mostly a problem of the past.
In dealing with a rabbi (played in the episode by veteran Jewish actor Richard Masur), who tries to react to the horrific events with humor, Harry gets some surprising answers about his family’s past and reconnects, to some degree, with his mother’s faith.
The episode was co-written by Glass and Ora Yashar, who are two of several Jewish writers on the show’s staff.
In working on the show, “we’re really lucky and fortunate that we not only get to entertain, but we get sort of tackle… subject matters that are in the news, and, unfortunately, are part of our society,” Glass told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And obviously antisemitism is one of them.”
Goldberg, 52, whose extensive list of credits over the last 30 years also includes “Dazed and Confused” and a memorable guest arc on “Friends,” told JTA that, earlier in his career, he might not have been as comfortable with this sort of storyline, since it’s subject matter that he has explored before in other high-profile Jewish roles. In 2017, he attempted to put together a crowdfunding campaign to produce a “Hebrew Hammer” sequel inspired by the spike in online antisemitism at the time.
Adam Goldberg in character in a video promoting a crowdfunding effort for a planned sequel to “The Hebrew Hammer.” (Screenshot from YouTube)
“Given just the unbelievable horrific uptick in hate crimes at large, and antisemitism in particular, it just felt like certainly my duty to go there, and also just keep it as grounded as possible,” he said.
The episode was shot at a synagogue in Brooklyn — for security reasons, the team’s publicist would not identify which one — and the team consulted with a rabbi about getting the Jewish touches right.
“I think one of the things that we wanted to just be mindful of is when we’re actually in a synagogue that we were getting things correct,” Yashar said. At the same time, she added, they wanted to get right the way Harry would behave, as someone who hadn’t been inside a synagogue or the Jewish community for many years.
“I found myself being much more sort of moved [and] affected by it than maybe I thought I would,” Goldberg said. “Particularly having explored this terrain in the past.”
Goldberg, like his character, has one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent; he describes his mother as a “hardcore disavowed Catholic.” He went to Jewish day school in Los Angeles from first through sixth grades, and like his character Harry, he drifted away from Jewish education prior to having a bar mitzvah.
“I certainly thought of myself as a Jewish person,” Goldberg said. “I think this is the thing which I grappled with, and I think many Jewish people grappled with — which is how they see themselves, and where they fit in in a world where people have so many different ideas about what it is to be a Jewish person.”
“Grappling with all that as an actor has made that all the more confusing, how to balance all of that,” he added.
Goldberg said he has gotten mostly positive reactions over the years from people who recognize him from his Jewish roles. But he’s mindful of the idea of being typecast as a “neurotic Jew” or “nice Jewish boy,” both of which he sees as tropes. And the reactions he has gotten have not always been as positive.
“I think in many ways I’ve been sort of forced, and then sort of proudly have come to own my Jewish identity,” he said, “and in the last several years and I’ve been on the receiving end of just an incredible amount of hate on social media.” Goldberg added that he has a photo album on his phone titled “Nazis,” featuring “screenshots of just the most horrific shit you can imagine.”
In “Saving Private Ryan,” Goldberg’s Jewish soldier character taunted Nazi prisoners by waving his Jewish star at them. Around that time, his name was featured on a white supremacist website, which in the late 1990s was a single page.
“I had no idea how bad shit was until the internet,” Goldberg said. “And how bad it’s gotten [in real life] since the internet.”
The two Jewish writers of the episode come from very different backgrounds. While Glass is an Ashkenazi Jew from New York, Yashar comes from an Iranian Jewish family.
“When I was growing up, I was told, ‘They’re white until they know you’re Jewish, don’t wear your Star of David,’” Glass said, echoing a comment by Harry on the show. “Those were things my bubbe [grandmother in Yiddish] said to me. And now I’m telling my kids the same things my bubbe said to me, unfortunately.”
A comic book store also features in the episode’s plot and is a nod to Glass’ other career: In addition to his work in television, Glass is a prolific author of comic books and graphic novels, having authored more than 150. He takes credit for putting Harley Quinn in the Suicide Squad DC comic series.
“I’m in two Jewish businesses,” Glass joked. “The comic book business, and the Hollywood business. Being creative is something that we as a people have always done.”
Yashar, who previously worked on the Netflix series “Atypical,” describes herself in her Twitter bio as “Iranian/Persian/OY Veyish.”
“One of the big things for this episode was that we can’t fight hate alone,” she said. “All marginalized communities, we all need to come together. Being a woman, being Iranian, and being Jewish, you know just my whole life experience has just been teaching me that all along.”
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On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee
Following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the state’s Jewish Democrats are reflecting on whether the divisions El-Sayed’s candidacy brought to the fore can be bridged before November.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race, with Jews both in fierce opposition and fiery support of El-Sayed in an election that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, who had endorsed El-Sayed, believes Democrats will get behind the nominee in the interest of defeating Republican Mike Rogers — a race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Pre-primary polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
“Shame on any Jewish Democrat if they’re going to go vote for Mike Rogers and put our democracy at risk because they can’t find their way to supporting Abdul El-Sayed, who is such a brilliant person, just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine,” Levin told the Forward. “That’s ridiculous.”
Levin lost his Senate seat to Rep. Haley Stevens after heavy spending against him by AIPAC, the campaign fundraising group advocating for unrestricted U.S. aid to Israel. An AIPAC-associated super PAC spent some $32 million in a failed attempt to get Stevens the Senate nomination.
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed for the general election Wednesday morning. But some Jews who voted for Stevens see no possibility for reconciliation. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the modern Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Etz Chayim in suburban Detroit had endorsed Stevens in the primary, alarmed by El-Sayed’s association with the controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and condemnation of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state.
In a TV interview Wednesday, El-Sayed used the term “bloodthirsty” to describe Israel.
“To have so many people vote for someone who is so hurtful to the Jewish community, the things that the Jewish community values — I think it’s depressing,” Lopatin told the Forward.
Lopatin has made up his mind that he will not vote for El-Sayed in the general election, but he also isn’t yet sold on Rogers, the Republican nominee.
“I have to study him more,” Lopatin said. “But I will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed, definitely, and I would tell people they should not.”
Lopatin said he wishes Stevens would condemn El-Sayed rather than endorse him.
Still, others see El-Sayed as the best candidate to face Rogers in the general — and don’t want him to pull back on the issues that won him the nomination. Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit who helped organize the group Jews for Abdul, said she has confidence El-Sayed will win the general — attributing the close primary race partly to the influence of outside money supporting Stevens.
“He was able to win this election in the face of close to $70 million of outside funding going to bolster his opponent,” Weinberg Barefield said. “This election is showing us, and elections around the country are showing us, that elections are not to be bought — they’re to be earned.”
Roslyn Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, was also among El-Sayed’s Jewish supporters, even as she disagreed with him on his lack of support for a two-state solution. She stressed the importance of beating Rogers in November irrespective of disagreements on Israel.
“My motto is and will be: vote blue, no matter who,” Schindler told the Forward. “I am hoping that all Democrats realize that to do otherwise will be self-destructive and just plain wrong.”
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens in the primary — isn’t issuing an endorsement in the general election yet.
She said the close margin El-Sayed won by, about 15,000 votes, gives her hope that El-Sayed will see the need to unify his party. A start, she said, would be focusing less on AIPAC during his general election campaign.
“There’s a lot of opportunity on Abdul’s side to be a better bridge maker versus kind of a bridge burner,” Alexander told the Forward. “The cards are his. It’s his responsibility to initiate.”
In his election night speech, El-Sayed didn’t mention AIPAC by name, instead speaking more generally about getting money out of politics.
On Wednesday, he addressed Jewish Michiganders directly: “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
The post On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee appeared first on The Forward.
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‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem)
One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.
And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.
As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.
But first, there was lunch.
Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.
The Yiddish Teacher
The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?
The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees
The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine
The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”
The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper
The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx
We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best
The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing
The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round
I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always
— Chana Pollack
The post ‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem) appeared first on The Forward.
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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ is a Talmud-quoting, Tisha B’Av epic
“Before there were Jews… there was ‘The Odyssey,’” a theater manager infamously posted on a marquee in Portland, Oregon.
While the mythic, Bronze Age events recounted in the blockbuster film likely never transpired, Homer’s epic poem is by any measure younger than the Jewish people. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, now a proxy for a pitched battle over the essence of Western civilization, could not exist as it is without the Jews. Indeed, whether it knows it or not, it is telling a foundational story of our history.
Much of the criticism surrounding the film, which managed to agitate classicists from its first set photos of Matt Damon in a crested Grecian helmet (not a period-accurate Mycenaean boar-tusk ensemble) and bigots of all stripes with its casting of a trans man and people of color, has shifted since its release just before Tisha B’Av, taking aim at the film’s ideas and how they may clash with those of antiquity’s.
“Did you Christianize The Odyssey?” podcaster Zhong Shu asked Nolan in a now-viral interview.
Nolan explained that he was drawn to the ancient ethic of “xenia,” called “Zeus’ Law” in the film. In the Greek conception, this means welcoming guests because you never know if they may be a God. In Nolan’s blockbuster it’s described as treating others how you would be treated. When the law is breached, society as we know it comes undone, leading to our hero’s atonement and qualms that seem at odds with his traditional characterization.
While Nolan’s understanding mirrors the Christian Golden Rule, which itself is antedated by statements in the Torah and by Hillel, his vision of civilizational ruin when it is trespassed is more central to Judaism. Odysseus laments that, by creating the Trojan horse, and exploiting the code of hospitality to launch a massacre, he has broken something.
“To burn the walls of Troy is to burn the world entire,” Damon’s Odysseus tells Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. This is more or less a paraphrase from Talmudic wisdom: “To destroy one life is to destroy the world entire,” and its more recognizable corollary, “to save one life is to save the world entire.”
The Hebrew Bible is rife with examples of hospitality in extremis. In Sodom, Lot offers his daughters to a mob of rapists rather than have them violate his heavenly guests. The result: a destroyed city and a wife reduced to a table condiment. (Just before, Abraham fed these visitors, plus another angel of God.)
But watching the film Tuesday, I was reminded of another story. Remember when I mentioned Tisha B’Av, the holiday marking the destruction of Judaism’s ancient capital?
Our tradition teaches that the second temple fell because a man holding a banquet in Jerusalem kicked out his enemy, a fellow by the name of Bar Kamtza. Humiliated by his host, Bar Kamtza plots his revenge. He goes to Caesar and tells him the Jews are conspiring against his rule. To prove it, Bar Kamtza, like the wily Odysseus, concocts a ruse, suggesting the Romans send a sacrifice to the rabbis and see if they offer it.
They don’t, as Bar Kamtza blemishes the animal, making it unfit for offering.
In The Odyssey, the famous gift horse is presented as a tribute to Athena. Its blemish is the fighting force it hides inside, ready to sack the city.
The upshot of the rejected temple sacrifice was the razing of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. The temple is desecrated, in much the way the temple of Athena is in the film.
Christian theology doesn’t argue quite so forcefully that the violation of the Golden Rule augurs a civilizational collapse. Quite the contrary today, where xenophobia and whispers of Great Replacement — akin to the trade-wind rumors of sea peoples in Nolan’s film — have taken root in the Evangelical right. (Ezra Klein, and really anyone attuned to commentary as subtle as IMAX subwoofers, picked up on this tension.)
Jewish history tells us we fare poorly in places where the stranger isn’t welcome.
In a departure from the text, Nolan ends Odysseus’ wandering with his voluntary exile. He sails west, predicting a benighted age to come, where his exploits will be sung as men lose the ability to write.
Our story ends on a similarly bleak, yet hopeful note.
When Jerusalem fell, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai devised his own deception, sneaking past the city walls in a casket (before he was let out, zealots wanted to stab the bier, recalling the Trojans’ stabbing of the horse).
But before Yohanan can make his escape he’s intercepted by the general Vespasian, who he mistakenly refers to as the emperor. Vespasian offers a correction, but almost instantly a messenger confirms this designation, telling him Caesar died and named him his successor. Regarding Yohanan’s mistake as prophecy, he offers him a request.
Jerusalem had fallen, self-determination was unrealistic, and so Yohannan asks for the city of Yavneh and its sages. From there our modern history began, literacy thrived and a dark age was subdued.
The Temple and Troy have yet to be rebuilt, but their legends live on.
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