When we swing, we swing for the fences.

Perhaps more than any other sport, Jews have been drawn to baseball, both on and off the field, and in so doing, have established a kind of tradition, passing on stories from generation to generation. Hank Greenberg blasting two homers on Rosh Hashanah before sitting out on Yom Kippur, Sandy Koufax taking the bench for the first game of the 1965 World Series, even the latest jaw-dropping run by Team Israel in the World Baseball Classic—these Samsonian strongmen represent something bigger than themselves, and their success and failures have become a liturgy for the emerging Jewish baseball fan. Following suit on the page, authors—some members of the tribe, others playing for different ball clubs—have used blended Jewish ideas with baseball to create a new mythology.

The first stab at stitching Jews and baseball together on the literary field comes as early as the Roaring Twenties, although the scouting report is ill-favored for the home team. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has survived perhaps rightfully as a commentary on the tarnishing of the American Dream, but perhaps wrongly for how it veers from crediting the affairs of apathetic WASPs to blaming a caricature of the Jew as a loyalty-less grubber: Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim appears as one of Gatsby’s shadier connections—to really drive the point home, Fitzgerald dresses him in human-tooth cufflinks—but the true source of his corruption is revealed later by Gatsby:

“Meyer Wolfsheim? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

Wolfsheim, as it turns out, is a barely disguised Arnold Rothstein, often attributed with doing just what Gatsby accuses—fixing the World Series and getting away with it. It is clear from Gatsby’s distaste that he sees something perverse in a Jew bleeding the sacred cow that is baseball for a couple coin, and in doing so he establishes the first of many strains of myth-making in baseball literature. Baseball’s original sin stretches so long that W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (more popularly known in movie form as Field of Dreams) is still trying to atone.

Not the most auspicious start for a lasting relationship, though the irony is that Jewish authors and Jewish themes have long elevated the game in prose. Although not Jewish himself, Pete Hamill’s Snow in August transplants the golem from Prague to mid-century Brooklyn, where it is brought to life by a Holocaust survivor and his young Irish Catholic friend. The book uses baseball as a canvas for its themes of intolerance, and though not implicitly drawn, the true golem of the story is Jackie Robinson, beginning his history-making turn in the majors, who echoes the golem’s traditional purpose as a symbol for the oppressed. James Sturm takes the opposite approach in his graphic novel, The Golem’s Mighty Swing, which demystifies the image of the golem in a story of a barnstorming Jewish baseball team during the Great Depression and exposes the limits of how far baseball can truly take the American Dream when it seems rotten at its core.

With a more cosmic perspective, however, comes Michael Chabon’s YA novel, Summerland, a blender of Native American and Norse mythologies, all centered around a belief that baseball is a tool of champions. Chabon provides a typical hero’s journey, but with a twist: the battleground? A baseball diamond. The stakes? The end of the world. The hero? A kid who only needs to catch one good game.

In this sense, all roads lead back to the quintessential baseball novel and the man who married Americana and Arthurian legend to build a new motley mythos: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. It tells the story of a man named Roy Hobbs, returned to the game after being shot in his prime years before, and how he tries to rescue a slumping team with his Excalibur-like bat “Wonderboy” while battling his own tendencies to succumb to temptation. Nothing about the novel is essentially Jewish, except perhaps its ending. Whereas the movie adaptation provides a true Hollywood moment when cornfed Robert Redfield shatters the lights with his pennant-winning homer, the book ends, in true Arthurian taste, with Hobbs striking out, accused of throwing the game, and erased from its history. Maybe King Arthur learned pessimism from the Jews.

There can be miracles, however, if you believe. In Mindy Avra Portnoy’s timeless children’s classic Matzah Ball, a young fan feels ashamed schlepping to the ballpark with his Passover-approved lunch—and even more awkward when his friends eat his lunch instead of their own, leaving him in the lurch. In this dark hour, an old man appears and regales the kid with tales of boyhood games in Ebbets Field and gifts him a very special piece of matzah before disappearing. You know how it goes now—the kid catches a home run using his matzah as a glove, and we learn that while there may not be angels in the outfield, at least Elijah has a seat in the bleachers.

Photo of Sandy Koufax via Flickr

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If television had a prophet, he was called Rod Serling, a Space Age Jeremiah, come to edify the masses. So long has his reputation stretched over the medium, that any anthology series produced in its wake—from British import Black Mirror to the recently premiered Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams—is often tagged as “The Next Twilight Zone.” Chided gently these days for the same bluntness that ensures the show’s longevity, Serling’s weekly doses of mussar nevertheless characterized The Twilight Zone as a series informed by his experiences as a veteran and a Jew writing in the aftermath of World War II.

The roots of science fiction may be Judaic in spirit (if you believe Asimov, after all, the golem was our first stab at robotics), but The Twilight Zone actually fits just as well, if not better, in a different cultural landscape: the World War II novel. In a strange turn of events, the history of the Second World War in America was largely carved out by returning Jewish American GIs, and it was largely a way of grappling with the anti-Semitism they had witnessed at home and abroad. Norman Mailer, Ira Wolfert, Merle Miller, Stefan Heym, Leon Uris, even J.D. Salinger—all were creating war epics that pondered a war both justified and perplexing. Perplexing in that it saw these men as scapegoats of their own cause, harassed beforehand, demeaned during, and blamed afterward. It’s no surprise novels like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 run towards the sardonically absurd, and the whole system collapses under the weight of its nonsense.

Neither did these stories veer away from incrimination. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny has just reached the highest point of drama when its Jewish military lawyer drunkenly contemplates how the book’s anti-hero had saved his mother (but not his other relatives) from becoming soap. Irwin Shaw’s angry young men are constantly bruised by the world they can’t escape and ponder whether to takes arms against it. Martha Gellhorn’s Point of No Return does have its Jewish protagonists take up arms, and so plots a course for all future revenge fantasies.

The Twilight Zone exorcises these specific Jewish anxieties of Serling in different ways. Several Twilight Zone episodes confront the randomness of death: in “Nothing in the Dark,” for instance, Death in the guise of a young Robert Redford coaxes an old woman into leaving her home for the great beyond; in “One for the Angels,” a pitchman manages to trick Death into trading his soul for a little girl’s. This preoccupation with death stemmed from an incident while Serling was stationed in the Philippines and a fellow Jewish soldier was killed in a freak accident, a crate of food dropped by a plane flying overhead.

Furthermore, though Serling’s placement resulted in most of The Twilight Zone’s WWII episodes being set in the Pacific theater—“A Quality of Mercy,” in which an American soldier swaps places with a Japanese soldier; “The Purple Testament,” in which a young GI discovers he can read death on his friends’ faces—his guilt over having missed the war in Europe led to some of the crueler twists in the show, such as in “Judgment Night,” when a Nazi U-boat captain is trapped in a purgatory of his own making.

Nevertheless, Serling did go on to tackle the Holocaust, both in metaphor and blunt force. It’s often believed that the Holocaust was not broached in popular fiction until decades later, but in fact those Jewish vets were confronting and questioning the Holocaust, sneaking up the best seller lists. On the parabolic side, Serling would often deliver his message with a splash of alien life and sans delicacy. Threats, real or perceived, lead to neighbor turning against neighbor in episodes such as “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” “The Shelter,” and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”. Authoritarian governments lurk in both the foreground (“The Obsolete Man”) and the background (“Eye of the Beholder”), and trumped-up strongmen are toppled on every extraterrestrial surface (“The Little People,” “On Thursday We Leave for Home”).

There were two episodes in The Twilight Zone’s run, however, the dealt with the Holocaust directly: one as judgement and one as warning. “Death’s-Head Revisited” is thirty minutes of cathartic rage: an old SS guard (“a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain”) returns to his stomping grounds at Dachau and is punished by the ghosts of the slain. (“This is not hatred,” says the spectral prisoner, Becker. “This is retribution. This is not revenge. This is justice. But this is only the beginning, Captain. Only the beginning. Your final judgment will come from God.”) Serling’s narration, too, is pointed and desperate as it can be:

“There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes – all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”

The second episode to address the Holocaust head-on was “He’s Alive,” whose twist (the evil man in the shadows tempting Dennis Hopper is actually Hitler!) may lend itself to mockery, but Serling’s fear, only a decade or so after the Holocaust, that Nazi beliefs would thrive once more is palpable. (And, one may argue, predictive.)

So yes, The Twilight Zone may have been obvious. It may have been ludicrous or campy. But what is lost in the reduction of The Twilight Zone to its shocking moments is that it is the journal of a man scarred by island-hopping and the bomb and death camps rediscovering hope and re-pledging himself for life. And what, after all, could be more Jewish than that?

Image via Wikimedia

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A superhero in Biblical rags. A comedienne rubbing shoulders with Lenny Bruce in 1950s New York. Ben Feldman’s hair on Superstore. You didn’t have to search very hard to find Jews making a splash in television this year. Even Stranger Things got in on the action, introducing a pinch of Yiddishkeit into white bread Hawkins, Indiana. (Okay, they didn’t explicitly spell out that the ambiguous but the ultimately good-intentioned Dr. Owens was a card-carrying Member of the Tribe— why else would you cast Paul Reiser?)

Stranger Things was far from the only genre show to tap a Jewish inspiration this year. Comic book shows across networks honored their creators with both Jewish characters (Gert Yorkes on Hulu’s Runaways) and Jewish metaphors (Supergirl’s ongoing debates of cultural displacement, lost history, and feeling trapped between two worlds). And though DCTV shed a few of its Jewish characters this past year, each got to go out with a bang. Martin Stein, played by the always charming Victor Garber, took his final bow in the Crisis on Earth X crossover, saving both the life of his partner and worlds entire with his actions. Still, the character popped up an episode later in a flashback, sporting a Chanukah sweater to die for and contesting for Furby-wannabe in a department store as a roided-up version of “Chanukah, Oh Chanukah” accompanies.

But the year’s standout moment belonged to Ragman, the gematria-identifying, schnapps-brewing, ancient rag-possessing superhero on Arrow. As his final act of heroism on the show, he wraps a detonating nuclear bomb in his rags and recites the Shema yes, this aired on the CW. When he survives, another character surveys the scene with an “Oh my god!,” to which Ragman groans in reply, “How come He always get the credit?”

Ragman wasn’t alone in exploring the spiritual aspects of Judaism on the small screen this year. To nearly everyone’s surprise, ABC’s new dramedy Kevin (Probably) Saves the World actually features as its underlying plot a mission to track down the Lamedvavniks who are lost this generation. Meanwhile, as Tom Hardy was reprising his role as real-life London gangster Alfie Solomons on Peaky Blinders across the pond, closer to home, Fargo embarked on its most divinely influenced season yet.

Fargo has always been a morality tale—there are shades of gray, sure, but ostensibly it is a story of good people striving to do good and bad people striving to do bad. The good people struggle but are ultimately vindicated; the bad people thrive but ultimately fail. The first season borrowed the movie’s essential conceit and expanded upon it—as Fargo the movie mused on the incomprehensibility of everyday evil by everyday people, Fargo the TV show enacts the debate on a Biblical scale.

The show has always been littered with Jewish allusion (parables of the Chofetz Chaim, a Chabad Rabbi and his Mrs. Robinson of a wife, repeated uses of 613, a plague of fish), but this season embraced a plot that barely papers over current events in order to craft a nesting doll of Russo-Jewish history in these American wastes. You have small-time crook Yuri, obsessed with identifying as a Cossack, shedding blood and spreading violence (and casual anti-Semitism), but go up the chain of command and you have his boss Varga, with his consumption and waste, and his false words, and his little portrait of Stalin (and more casual anti-Semitism). No wonder Michael Stuhlbarg’s Sy has such a rough go. But then we meet God in a bowling alley, and the world of Fargo is turned on its head— Rebbe Nachman and the slain people of Uman reemerge from their graves to enact eye-for-an-eye (or, an ear-for-an-ear, as it were) justice on Cossack Yuri. (This is the most Jewish scene on television this year, by the way.)

The influence of the past and the relationship between generations was a popular theme this year, whether it was Steven Spielberg’s joyous narration of director William Wyler in the Netflix war propaganda documentary, Five Came Back, or in the many different faces of Jewish family presented on screen. On Transparent, for instance, the Pfeffermans’ first bus ride to Jerusalem on their pilgrimage to Israel is immediately dragged into a familiar argument on Middle East relations. On The Goldbergs’ recent Chanukah special, Beverly Goldberg, “smother” extraordinaire, wearing another Chanukah sweater to die for, schemes to ensure her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend will choose her house for all future holidays. And on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, another mother-daughter relationship leads to a staggering moment of defeat and redemption when Rebecca reaches out for help through the screaming wash of her depression on an ill-fated plane ride.

And then of course, there’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a miraculous and mellifluous mile-a-minute gabber from Gilmore Girls genius, Amy Sherman-Palladino. From the first scene, where newlywed Midge Maisel finishes her toast by confessing that they served shrimp at the reception, the show is a veritable smorgasbord of Jewish comedy (my favorite: “You’re jealous of the rabbi? He was in Buchenwald, throw him a bone.”) and Jewish experience, whether it’s the sister-in-law who returns from Israel with larger and larger mezuzahs to prove her conversion, or the father-in-law who won’t stop telling stories about how he rescued Jews from Europe during the war. And in a year when Curb Your Enthusiasm returned, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel outdid Larry David by featuring Lenny Bruce as Midge’s disheveled sage. Yet no one shone brighter than Midge herself, who was vivacious and hilarious, introspective and yearning, vulgar and well-spoken, a baker of briskets and a breaker of convention. Season 2 can’t come soon enough.

Image by Sarah Shatz/Amazon Video

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A jobbing actor toils in near-obscurity on the stage until two of the top filmmakers of the age choose him as the lead of their next semi-biographical, highly Biblical, ultra-Judaic dark comedy. It sounds like a Hollywood story itself (and, as with all Hollywood stories, is a little exaggerated—said actor had already been recognized for acclaimed turns in the likes of Long Day’s Journey into Night and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman), but Michael Stuhlbarg is a man who invites cliché: one scene wonder.

Keep an eye on this guy. There are no small parts, only small actors. Everywhere you turn lately, it seems there’s another screen showing Stuhlbarg’s face—expressive, kind, put-upon, dangerous—and with his end-of-year burst of Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, and The Post in quick succession, it seems his star is finally burning brightly.

It has not been an easy road from that initial moment of onstage discovery to the now-omnipresent whispers of Oscar glory, however. Stuhlbarg first reached public consciousness playing the protagonist in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (chances are you’ve seen the film already, considering its status as new rite of passage amongst Members of the Tribe, but if not, think the Book of Job meets your Reform aunt’s stories of confirmation).

Stuhlbarg’s harried performance as Larry Gopnik was epiphanic, one moment belligerent, the next wide-eyed with confusion, and always hilarious. (It is even more remarkable when one views archival footage of the actor, who is soft-spoken and considerate, and whose professorial airs make it seem as if he just wandered out of a lecture on Shakespearean verse.) The role garnered praise for Stuhlbarg (and a Golden Globe nomination), but more importantly established an onscreen persona for the actor that, though tweaked from part to part, sustains his body of work as one of the premiere character actors of our time.

Consider the anatomy of a character actor: a face you remember out of the corner of your eye but a name always on the tip of your guy, aka, That Guy; a sub-marquee credit; a whiff of ethnicity; an easy hand for dialogue. If you catalogue a character actor’s moments on screen, you’ll often assemble a Rolodex of quirks and foibles, blemishes and flaws. These are the characters that test our imagination of how far humanity can stretch, and Michael Stuhlbarg is privileged to rank high.

In his next major role, he used every tool in the character actor kit to bring a cool-blooded menace to his portrayal of Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein on the HBO drama Boardwalk Empire. A vampiric widow’s peak and a pair of endlessly versatile eyebrows—doleful, perturbed, intimidating, aggrieved, judgmental—that should have won their own Emmy? Check.  A habit of smiling toothlessly while dealing threats? Check. A pocketful of quips? Check and check. It was the character’s wit, and Stuhlbarg’s capacity for combining levity with danger, that elevated his portrait from a pale Godfather rip-off. He is a jester, perhaps, but he is no fool.

There is a moment that encapsulates this balance: Rothstein has just finished discussing digestive affairs with his wife at the breakfast table when he receives a call from fellow gangster, Nucky Thompson. Holding the phone to his chest, he pitches a practice “Mr. Thompson,” before settling in for another more authoritative “Mr. Thompson.” The switch from family man to mobster, evident, with just two lines of a dialogue and a comical change of voice.

Since then, Stuhlbarg has mostly made his bones breathing life into biopic bit parts: a U.S. Representative during the debate for Emancipation (Lincoln), a studio boss and mover-and-shaker (Hitchcock), a record producer (Miles Ahead), an agent interested in boosting American standing during the Cold War (Pawn Sacrifice), an Apple inventor (Steve Jobs), and Edward G. Robinson himself (Trumbo). A lesser actor might feel wasted in these roles, but Stuhlbarg invests himself in every scene. Indeed, his dedication to his work is apparent—a recent Chicago Tribune interview noted that the actor sketches profiles of each character he plays, filling notebook after notebook. Yes, even the methodology of his preparation seems gentle—where other actors mail their costars dead pigs or submerge into alternative careers, Stuhlbarg learns to play pool, or perhaps, to the admiration of his Boardwalk Empire cast mates, tie a bow tie, on camera.

The pool-playing came in handy for his supporting part in last year’s Miss Sloane, but it was the bow tie—and a mustache, again, worthy of its own Emmy—that once more valued his skills in FX’s Fargo. Stuhlbarg is Sy Feltz, a shady hand-shaker spiraling, Kafkaesque, through a gauntlet of bad apples until he no longer recognizes his very world. And again, he gives a comedic performance for the ages. It is the flexibility of a stage actor blown up to heights and unafraid to scale the peaks and valleys of human expression. His face—a character actor’s bread and butter—often stands in as punchline. Pathetic comedy is some of the hardest to pull off, and all season Sy was both the comedian and the butt of the joke.  When (spoilers) Sy eventually took his bow with a cup of poisoned tea, Stuhlbarg’s absence was certainly felt.

Transformative and memorable, hard-working and unpretentious, the time is ripe for an actor like Michael Stuhlbarg. For too long has he wandered in the desert, watching from Nebo as his peers claim his prizes—and screen time. Perhaps this year, at last, he will cross into the Promised Land.

Image via Wikimedia

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The CW is up to four shows that simultaneously take place in the DC comic book universe— that’s The Flash, Supergirl, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow. Tonight will begin their annual crossover, “Crisis on Earth X” as all four shows briefly share the same plot-line, full of wedding veils, one-liners, cheap leather and… alternate universe supervillain Nazis?

To no one’s surprise, the idea of our beloved heroes masquerading under swastika hoods has raised pulses online, although, naturally, one can predict that our beloved heroes will no doubt triumph in the end, pausing along the way to throw a few right crosses into a few Nazi faces. There are several reasons for the skepticism: some are simply tired of Nazis as plot devices; others find it disrespectful to portray Jewish-created icons as their fascist nemeses. Really, it boils down to an ongoing question over how to represent the Holocaust in fiction: is it sacred or is it profane?

This has been an artistic debate since the limping aftermath of World War II, when Crossfire, a deep-in-the-shadows film noir, and Gentlemen’s Agreement, a Very Important Picture, both tackling the specter of anti-Semitism, battled for top prize at the 1947 Academy Awards. (Spoiler: Gentleman’s Agreement won out.) If you ask the Academy voters, year after year, it seems the only way to score points is with Oscar bait—Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, The Reader, etc., etc. It would be cruel to lump them all in the same boat (I will, after all, never doubt the sincerity of Spielberg), but, after a while, you begin to grow cold in the sight of new and shamelessly manipulative emotional Holocaust porn. The same images, gray, ground-up, replayed until rote. The same heartstrings plucked like an out-of-tune fiddle. The same. The same. “Good” German as hero, Jew as object, maybe pummeled, maybe tortured, but always saved, and if not, well, haven’t we learned a lesson about humanity? The same.

But there has always been an alternative—alternate histories. Time and time again, artists have cracked at the skeleton of history to see if they could reset it on a different path. Jews are an introspective lot, so it follows they’ve tried their hands at similar diagnoses: what if Charles Lindbergh and his America Firsters had defeated FDR (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America)? What if a Khazar army had existed in the corner of Hitler’s Europe (Emily Barton’s The Book of Esther)? What if Kafka had been saved by a golem hiding in Prague’s Old-New Synagogue (Curt Leviant’s Kafka’s Son)?

Some of these questions have happy answers, as in Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller-cum-spaghetti western Inglourious Basterds, which features (spoilers for many of these) Hitler and his cronies gun-blasted in the head. But Jews are a pessimistic lot, too, so often we’re left more uncertain than before (as when the Frozen Chosen of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union find themselves once more homeless and booted from their Alaskan refuge). This may be because these grimmer alternate histories are not really asking what if the Nazis won or lost—that’s a decided point. Instead, the familiarity with the subject allows them a canvas on which to explore wider thoughts.

The Plot Against America, for instance, has renewed life in a world that may not have remembered America First is a tried and true (and failed) phrase. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Simone Zelitch’s more recent Judenstaat both grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by transplanting it to different places and times—the first to an Alaskan territory full of black hatters and the second to a Cold War-inflected Germany, awarded to the survivors after the end of the war.

Both of these novels follow in Crossfire’s tonal footsteps of sculpting their alternative histories in a hardboiled Chandleresque mold (to suggest, perhaps, that you can create as many worlds as you want, but corruption is universal). This structure allows information to be doled out piecemeal and the façade of improvement exposed as just that—a façade. Perhaps the prime example of this sub-genre is Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming, which takes both the World War II alternate history and crime fiction ideas to their electric conclusion by making his protagonist a London-based private eye named Wolf hired by a Jewish femme fatale to find her sister, only to reveal that Wolf is in fact Adolf Hitler in hiding, the German communists having won the election in this version of history. The premise seems preposterous and almost offensive, until Tidhar throws another wrench in the gears and introduces a second perspective—that of a former Yiddish pulp writer, Shomer, who is imprisoned in Auschwitz and dreaming of this whole other reality as an escape. Indeed, in the end, it seems what Tidhar is really exploring is not what ifs, but hows: how do we talk about the Holocaust?

Director Laszlo Nemes, discussing why he felt compelled to shoot Son of Saul in such an immediate style, said, “the Holocaust is becoming a sort of myth… some kind of fantasy world.” Son of Saul of course takes place in our world, but wholly and unabashedly rejects the period piece ghettoization of Holocaust films and turns it into a thriller. A way, Nemes feels, to keep the memory alive. The same could be said of these excursions to actual fantasy worlds.

Before World War II, Jewish comics creators were the first line of defense against American complacency. Supermen in spangled tights ‘kapowed’ and ‘bammed’ their way through failed diplomacy. The sacred meeting the profane. Now, again, when this generation is cottoning on to the underbelly of neo-Nazi movements in this country and elsewhere, it seems these icons are leading the fight. After all, how could Supergirl and the Flash ignore a world succumbed to evil, even if they were ignorant until now, even if it is not their own?

You can’t let the Holocaust grow stale. You can’t let it become period piece and period piece alone. The past has to stay present or else we’ve already damned the future. It won’t rest easy on some stomachs, but when is genocide supposed to?

Photo: Melissa Benoist as Overgirl. By Jack Rowand/The CW

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During her acting heyday, Hedy Lamarr was described as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” The Austria native was well-known in Hollywood in the 1930s for her appearance in the German film Ecstasy, which featured her entirely nude in one memorable scene, and soon became a part of the American movie industry thanks to a contract with Louis B. Mayer. But there’s much more to the inimitable Lamarr than meets the eye, and a new documentary entitled Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story seeks to unmask the true story behind a woman who should be remembered for much more than just her beauty.

Lamarr’s story began in a Jewish home in Vienna. Her early marriage to a rich Austrian man closely connected with both Mussolini and Hitler started her career out in Europe, but she soon fled to Paris and then came to the United States with the promise of an exciting film career. She starred in some memorable movies, to be sure, but her legacy doesn’t compare to the likes of other actresses of the time, and her final film appearance came just twenty years after her Hollywood debut.

The way in which Lamarr was used by the moviemaking industry is particularly disturbing, with stories of how she would be given speed in the morning to wake her up and sleeping pills at night to put her to sleep so that she, like other actresses, could be ready to function at exactly the moments when she was needed to fulfill her contract. Her twenty-five-year relationship with Dr. Max Jacobson, better known as Dr. Feelgood, meant that she was constantly being medicated and rarely able to function as a person normally should, leading her to become a recluse, get arrested for shoplifting, and even sending a stand-in for herself at a divorce hearing (to predictably poor results).

Through all of this, Lamarr was still a pioneer in the area of technological innovation. She was responsible for developing a frequency hopping system designed to combat frequency jamming by the Nazis during World War II, a system that was put to much more use by the United States later on and is attributed as an early inspiration for modern-day tenets such as wi-fi. Much more than just a pretty face, Lamarr was decades ahead of others in the science and technology industry and eager to have her ideas come to fruition.

Lamarr’s Jewishness wasn’t something that she discussed often since it was seen as a black mark on her purity as an actress, and she had also been married to a man considered to be a Nazi sympathizer. This history led many to believe that she was a spy, deliberately sent to sabotage Allied war efforts, when it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Bombshell shows that amongst the many unfair aspects of her life, Lamarr was extremely under-appreciated as a scientist in her time. Even the patent she received for a “Secret Communication System” didn’t give her the rights it should have. Her little-known contribution, only acknowledged many years later, is reminiscent of Alan Turing’s story, brought to life on screen in The Imitation Game a few years ago.

In a fascinating anecdote, this film also shows that Lamarr’s two lives, as scientist and actress, converged in an unexpected way. As she aged, Lamarr had a good deal of plastic surgery and took an active role in telling the surgeons what to do, figuring out innovative ways of continuing to look young. Actresses, both at the time and after, would ask for whatever Lamarr had suggested, showing her influence and the respect people had for her. Lamarr died in 2000, more or less a recluse by the time of her passing at age 85.

This documentary does a superb job detailing Lamarr’s life and uncovering her true personality through interviews with her adult children and with others who interacted with her during her life, including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Peter Bogdanovich. German-born actress Diane Kruger is also featured, discussing Lamarr as a role model for those who come from Europe to make it in Hollywood. Much of Lamarr’s story features disappointing and unfair developments, and this documentary manages to convey it all in an engaging and, yes, entertaining manner.

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story opens Friday, November, 24, at the IFC Center in New York City, and is slated to screen at a number of Jewish film festivals after that.

Image via Zeitgeist Films

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There have always been cool Jews: Judah Maccabee, Bugsy Siegel, Lou Reed. But for one brief shining moment in the early Noughts, a curly-haired, comics-collecting, indie-listening ball of neuroses was the face postered on bedroom walls.

For fans of Marvel’s latest small screen offering, Runaways, it must have seemed like Chrismukkah came early when it was announced that showrunner Josh Schwartz would be one of the brains behind its leap from the comic pages. After all, who better to breathe life into smart, sarcastic, Jewish Gert (and her dinosaur sidekick, Old Lace) than the guy who created her spiritual ancestor Seth Cohen (and his toy horse sidekick, Captain Oats).

Seth Cohen was a different breed of teen idol, no less a romantic lead because he wasn’t muscled or athletic— or the fact that his childhood trauma stemmed from a friendless Bar Mitzvah party. But, of course, that was why The O.C. caught fire. Dipping into a genre that trends whitebread, Schwartz replaced the John Hughesian model of interchangeable suburbia and overspilling earnestness with his self-aware, highly located, unmistakably ethnic teen drama. The place, California’s wealthy and WASPy Newport Beach, would reign omnipresent and the people would be defined in relation to it. At the center of this world was a family who just didn’t quite fit in, the Cohens: exiled Bronx crusader Sandy and his blonde, blue-eyed wife Kirsten, their oddball son Seth (played, of course, by Adam Brody), and their adopted delinquent Ryan.

From the start, the Cohens’ difference to their neighbors was a source of comedic tension, and one of those many differences was that the Cohens were very, very Jewish. The show never tried to hide it and instead reveled in it as one of The O.C.’s trademarks. The first season introduced the concept of Chrismukkah, Seth’s attempt to wrangle nine nights of presents out of his blended family, to the show and to world at large, and each season would repeat the festival, escalating the drama exponentially— one Chrismukkah featured the invention of the “yamaclause”; another centered around Ryan learning a Torah portion for his Bar Mitzvah.

Unlike many Jewish characters, the Cohens didn’t simply become Jews on Christmas. Instead, their Jewishness saturated the show to the point of familiarity. One episode focuses on the visit of Sandy’s domineering matriarch, the Nana, as the Cohens scramble to put together a seder and Summer, Seth’s girlfriend, valiantly learns the Four Questions to impress his grandmother. A later storyline has Seth and Summer in a standoff over their engagement—Summer pursues conversion by grappling with a Torah scroll and learning to cook a brisket. And at a funeral, Seth, searching for the missing Summer, cracks “is she smoking the salmon herself?”

Of course, culturally, the Cohens were not the first gefilte fish out of water in the Golden State. Mark Harris, in his study of changing Hollywood in the 1960s, Pictures at a Revolution, highlights an epiphany reached by director Mike Nichols in the decades after he developed The Graduate. In Charles Webb’s book, Benjamin Braddock is another tall tanned sunburst of California WASP society.  The movie version?  Not quite.  Says Nichols:

“It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along — that I had been turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn’t get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?’ And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious: Who was the Jew among the goyim? And who was forever a visitor in a strange land?”

The casting, unconscious or not, strengthens the tone of discomfort of the movie, as Ben is paraded, handled, and manipulated like a curiosity by his family and friends. In revisiting the scenario forty years later, The O.C. flips the script—the Cohens still can’t quite assimilate in their coastal California town, but this time, their neighbors are the outsiders, and the Cohens, with the audience in tow, become insiders. For instance, in one episode, Summer starts dating another boy to make Seth jealous. The boy, Danny, is constantly cracking jokes that send everyone into exaggerated hysterics. Seth, and later Sandy, are the only characters left stone-faced. (Sandy: “Gentiles. I love your mother more than words, but – not funny.”) And because the Cohens aren’t laughing, neither are we. By attuning the Cohens’ brand of wit as the show’s usual humor, the audience sides with the Jews on this one.  

What the Cohens found cool, we found cool, and so The O.C. not only fashioned statements out of Seth’s love for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or Death Cab for Cutie, but also made the unglamorous—shuffleboard, bagels, showtunes, meatloaf—seem desirable. A Chrismukkah miracle, indeed.

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“Werewolves are kind of like good Jewish boys, only more so,” says a character in Wen Spencer’s young adult novel, The Black Wolves of Boston. And it’s true. When 30 Rock debuted the novelty song “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” (think “Monster Mash,” but with a nice cut of brisket), the joke seemed random, even unsustainable. But you might be surprised to learn that the idea of Jewish werewolves is a long-winded mesorah. They may not all have bar mitzvahs, but if you count off the usual tenets of a werewolf story—following a lunar calendar, dashing off when the sun goes down, making excuses for weird disappearances, accusations, hunts, being driven off by suspicious townspeople—it’s easy to guess why Jewish creators throughout the years have chosen the werewolf as a central horror figure. After all, who could know better how it feels to be both a part of a nation and a nation apart?

The wolfish-Jewish association goes as far back as the Biblical Benjamin, who a Medieval commentator, Rabbi Efraim ben Shimshon, described as not just like a “ravenous wolf,” but capable of turning into a wolf itself. Notably, the rabbi’s fear was not that Benjamin would kill others, but that he would change among strangers and be killed by them.

This theme follows through most Yiddish lore. Germany fairy tales warned children not to go into the woods, lest they be snatched; Yiddish folk tales warned readers not to go into the wood lest they be accused of snatching children and baking them into matzo.

H. Leivick, a Yiddish folklorist of the last century, picks up this thread. Leivick, fugitive from Mother Russia, was no stranger to tackling creature features; his play, The Golem, turns a scary story about a clay man into a Miltonian epic with messianic ruminations and introspective soliloquies where every man, even the clay one, verges on tragedy.

Leivick’s poem “The Wolf,” from around 1920, stalks in the same vein, when a rabbi, last survivor of anti-Semitic violence, finds himself transformed into the titular beast. Taken to the woods, the rabbi-wolf haunts a new generation of Jews who have moved in to rebuild the town and eventually attacks them in the synagogue on Yom Kippur, where he is beaten to death by the congregation. It is interesting to gauge Leivick’s reaction to the pogroms of his homeland; the wolf, rather than turning his rage upon those who wronged him, instead terrorizes his kin. Leivick, it seems, is using the wolf to warn that blood for blood is pointless, for it makes the Jewish victim no different from his non-Jewish oppressors. It is not a revenge fantasy, but rather a revenge nightmare.

The Jewish werewolf once more emerges from the shadows in The Wolfman (1941) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), two films in conversation about the possibility of Jewish existence in Europe during and after the dehumanizing effect of the Holocaust. If Leivick’s desire was to remain the Other, these films express the terror of becoming the Other in a hostile world. You fit in, until you can’t. You’re one of us, until you’re not.

Consider screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who like many of his generation and, like the subject of his trend-setting The Wolfman, was forced to flee from home across the wastes of Europe, marked for pursuit, marked for Otherness, by a star.

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf,” the poem in the film goes—it can happen anywhere, through no fault of your own. Kafka saw himself as a cockroach; Siodmak saw himself as a wolf.

Along lurks An American Werewolf in London, intent on flipping The Wolfman on its head but, in the end, only fulfilling the pre-war prophecy, as two spry American Jews (implied but never explicitly outed) return to Europe and swiftly find themselves attacked and facing certain doom. The Holocaust clings like a sickly pall, polluting pop culture, because the Holocaust was the monster under the bed, and if you hid enough, you might silence it forever.

Movies like An American Werewolf in London invented a way around the societal gag order, and they did it by embracing the truth of the Holocaust as a horror show without a happy ending. When pig-faced Nazis storm werewolf-bitten David Kessler’s house in the film, it’s post-Holocaust shlock as shock therapy. When David is goaded by his old friend into suicide, it’s a punchline of Jewish guilt. When wolf-David is gunned down on a busy street in London, it’s a reversion to the open dehumanization of The Wolfman, inescapably Othered.

Flashforward and suddenly you have Jewish werewolves overrunning genre television—between Oz on Buffy (they may never have said it, but he’s played by Seth Green, okay?) and George of Being Human UK and Josh of its North American remake, werewolves are young and cool and holding down nine-to-five jobs, assimilated into the greater world. Or are they?

One of the biggest sources of unease in a werewolf story is the inability to pick one out of a crowd. They look like you, they sound like you, they could be any of you. Josh and George are nice Jewish boys growing up to be nice Jewish doctors and upstanding members of society before they are cursed, cast out of society and forced to live mouth-to-mouth, way station to way station, unable to settle down or find peace. Though they look just as normal as the next person, the vampires are able to sniff them out. An existence that had seemed integrated is once more Othered, and these characters are forced to wrestle with their identity as wolf or human.

“This is me, all the time,” Josh eventually confesses—not one or the other, but both: a werewolf. This is ironically confirmed by the show’s extension of vampire mythology to include Stars of David as religious symbols that harm the undead. Only his foes react to Josh’s necklace with fear; it is harmless to those he counts as friend.

From Bible verses to novelty songs, Jewish werewolves have always been lurking on the fringes, waiting to be brought into the light. Like the moon itself, I expect there will always be more to see.

Esther Saks thinks Bob Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize. Her writing is featured in Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology.

Image via Wikimedia

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