If you can’t wait until Jewcy‘s Purim Pun-A-Palooza to get in to the holiday spirit, this weekend you can start getting your Purim freak on with the freakiest of celebrations— the JFREJ Purim Spiel.

A step back: JFREJ is Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and most of the year they organize political and community actions— think marches, training, protests. A Purim spiel is the Jewish tradition of a comic play that retells the holiday story, often with music, satire, irreverence. And when you combine the two? You get this year’s performance: JEWS WITH THORNS: A Purimshpil & Masqurade Ball.

The spiel is the baby of JFREJ’s partner: the Afselokhis Spectacle Committee— a collective of local artists, visual, musical, theatrical, you name it (all paid for their work), as well as several political action groups, Jewish and not. (Yiddish performance artist Jenny Romaine is generally at the helm, and her partner in crime was the late, great, Adrienne Cooper.)

The project began in 2002, and past productions have included Giant Puppet Purim Ball Against the Death Penalty, Rehearsal for the Downfall of Shoeshine: An Immigrant Justice Purim Spectacular!, Roti and Homentaschn: The Palace Workers Revolt! A Purim Carnival Spectacular, Your Homentaschen Are Killing Me! A Purim Ball for the body, its resilience, its fragility, and its bounce!… you get the general idea.

And what actually happens in these plays? They are definitely better experienced than described, but let’s just say that Purim is about turning society on its head, and JFREJ got the memo. Imagine running with that, with an unapologetically political bite. Last year, Vashti was a deposed queer leader of her people. The year before, Esther went by ze/hir pronouns and literally donned white-face to subsume hir racial identity and blend in with privileged palace life. All this while maybe a local band plays, or a spoken-word artist pauses the narrative to deliver a poem. The sets are made of all sorts of found-objects and simple supplies. Glitter is probably involved.

The story follows the general trajectory of Purim; or at least the stock characters are there. Haman represents institutionalized evil (though who knows what form he takes any given year), and some other characters (though maybe not the ones you would expect) resist. While the play changes greatly year to year, there will be some constants. There will be puppets. There will be music. There will be radical politics, and don’t expect to be comforted just because you’re the member of any particular oppressed group. In short, it will be Brechtian AF. Lather, rinse, go to the after-party.

The after-party is a spectacle in and of itself. It’s decidedly adult; you’re just as likely to see someone wearing leather as dressed as a superhero. You’re also just as likely to run into queer gentile acquaintances as traditional Jewish friends. It’s definitely a open free space for experimentation of expression. If you have a costume idea not quite tznius enough for the Megillah reading next weekend, try it out here. If you just want to rock jeans and a t-shirt, go anyway, with an open mind.

If you want the quieter, chiller evening, sans party, check out the spiel’s dress rehearsal tonight (doors 7:30, show at 8). You’ll still get the full joy of the performance, but for better or worse, without the energy of a bunch of leftists crammed into a space together. If you want to go all-out (and you should), attend the event this Saturday night, March 4th, doors at 7:45, show at 8:30. If you have kids, consider the Sunday family Purim carnival, from 12 to 4 p.m. The location for all of these is East Midwood Jewish Center, 1625 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.

Be there, or be part of what the spiel has called the “white Christian hetero-patriarchy.”

Photos of this year’s play in rehearsal by Erik R. McGregor.

The post The Radical Queer Purim Spiel You MUST Attend appeared first on Jewcy.

The purim ball was a fucking crazy time!

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) February 28, 2013

Lena Dunham gave the Purimspiel at last night’s Jewish Museum Purim Ball at the Park Avenue Armory. “Welcome to my bat mitzvah!” she said as she faced the well-heeled 800-person crowd in the massive party space filled with balloons streaming from the ceiling and sparkly decorations (in the name of journalism, I got a glitter tattoo).

The play was inspired by Eloise, the city child who lives in the Plaza, who Dunham called an “international, intergenerational symbol of just general precocity”—and naturally her favorite fictional character—and was written in the voice of a young Lena Dunham.

What started out as a potentially cloying narrative (“I am Lena, I am six. I am an artist’s child, and I live in New York City”) turned into a surprisingly revealing look at Dunham’s own understanding of her Jewishness—though Dunham interrupted herself early on as ‘grown-up Lena’ to insist parts about her parents had been somewhat fictionalized. She also added a very meta while-we-were-tweeting message: “If anything I say offends you, please don’t fucking tweet it because it’s going to really stress me out.”

Dunham was headlining the annual fundraising event as a favor to Museum Director Claudia Gould, a close friend of her mother, artist Laurie Simmons. Gould had asked Simmons if Dunham would participate in last year’s event, way back in a pre-Girls era, and Simmons wisely urged her to “give her a year.” But back to the Spiel:

“I suppose I’m Jewish, depending on which way you look at me. For instance, my mother is Jewish, and you are a Jew if your mother is a Jew—at least that’s what the Jews say,” Young Lena began. Her next line—”The Jews also say, ‘you’re too skinny, eat,'” got a hearty laugh from the crowd, who had just finished dining on short rib.

“The Jews don’t care who your dad is, unless he’s on the board of a major hospital,” Young Lena added, also to big laughs. (Tickets for the event, which this year honored artist James Rosenquist and AIG CEO Robert H. Benmosche, started at $1,250.)

Young Lena’s WASP father (a “White Angry Saxophone Protestant”) would go to synagogue but not wear a yarmulke—it looked like a bird pooped on his head, he said. Still, Young Lena learned early on about the hazards of Jewish hair and developed a very negative opinion of parents who sent their kids to camp (Camp Ramah got its second Dunham mention—the first was during Season 1 of Girls).

Then Young Lena assembled a group onstage to play the different roles in the Purim story—her mother played the principled Vashti, her doctor played King Ahashuerus, and boyfriend Jack Antonoff’s sister Rachel played Esther. The story was told quickly, a less dramatic version of a Rugrats holiday special, and ended with—spoiler alert—Esther convincing her husband Ahasuerus (even though we’re warned that Young Lena’s doctor is way too old to actually marry Rachel) to save all the Jews from Haman.

The whole thing was sweeter than what we’ve come to expect from Dunham, but just as sharp. She also did drop the F-bomb at a fundraiser for a Jewish institution, so there’s that.

Dunham spent the rest of the evening being politely accosted by girls in high heels and sparkly dresses. I was barred by a publicist before I could ask Grown-Up Lena the age-old question: was she an Esther or a Vashti?

There’s always Passover.

(Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Previously: Lena Dunham to Direct and Star in Her Own Purim Spiel
You Can Buy a Ring With Lena Dunham’s Face on it on Etsy

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The post Lena Dunham Wins Purim appeared first on Jewcy.