How Fiddler On The Roof Can Help You Recover From My Depressing Post Last Night About Nano-Fog, Subverted MAHA, and Masonic MAGA: I Had To Put It Behind Us

Now We Lighten Up Again, And Maybe Have A Giant Brawl About Why I Love Jews

(*Fiddler On The Roof is not named after this painting. But I’m slowly learning to appreciate art, so included it.)

This writing has a few different subjects, tangentially related, and I hope I don’t frustrate you with its lack of a unifying “point.” I’ve been writing this post now for seven hours and I’m concerned it lacks focus, yet I can’t seem to curb it. The cats have passed out from hunger. It’s getting dark.

I’ll just let it be what it is.

1. Fiddler On The Roof: Masterpiece On Broadway, 1964, and On Film 1971

Philip Roth considered Fiddler On The Roof “middlebrow” and also called it “Shtetl Kitsch—” a whitewash of true history. Like so many snobs, on so many subjects, Roth missed it. He just missed it all.

For this reason, the demon whose secret name is “snobbery,” is the one I get out of bed to do battle with each day.

2. What Is Snobbery?

“Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair.”

—Joseph Brodsky

[Brodsky, born into a Jewish family in Russia, but viewed as a Christian poet.]

[I’m not sure why.]

The Alchemy of Words

We talked about “the alchemy of words” the other night—the course I want to develop—and this Brodsky line (I don’t even remember where it comes from,) is a perfect display of what can be done with words. Russians, of course, the masters.

Eight words from Brodsky—let’s look at them:

“Snobbery?” [The demon is named, held up, before the poet. You get the sense of a student posing a question.]

“But…” [Now we have movement. Pivot. Expectancy. Trust.]

Pausing here to show you two screenshots taken from the Internet about the word “but:”

And would you believe, the pods are hostile to this word?

Please do not listen to this woman.

Let’s get back to Brodsky:

”It’s only…” paired with “but,” these words form the central dramatic arc of this line. The poet is about to implode an entire matrix of falsity, and false idols, from our field of vision, and tell us (loved children) how to see.

“…a form of” creates the set up for the reveal.

“Snobbery.” Delivers the reader to the secret. The reader can now take this poet’s 8 word formula all through life, as an amulet against the plague of snobbery. It’s edifying. It relieves decades of pain! The poet is on our side.

It’s also built in to Russian syntaxes, to throw an idea out to the end, make no apology—not like Anglican syntax, which thinks it has to stack up as it goes. (Boring!)

The End.

Now, to the original object of this post: The dance scene “L’Chaim” from the 1971 movie version of Fiddler on the Roof.

It came up on my feed this morning and though I have no count of how many times I have watched it, I watched it again, and tears came into my eyes. One draft title for this post is: “When People Still Had Faces.” Another, more provocative, is: “Jewish Greatness.”

As “Zionism” is laid bare for all to see, as a pathology, it has become a little bit de rigueur* [* “…out of strictness,” or “…the quality of being unyielding] to dislike and distrust Jews, root and branch.

I have wondered: Which Jews? When? In which context?

Joseph Brodsky? Franz Kafka? Osip Mandelstam? Art Garfunkel? Otto Warburg? Groucho Marx? Jerome Robbins?

Hannah Arendt?

Vera Sharav?

I’m quite serious, though I probably will have hell to pay in the comments section.

What becomes of art, culture, “science,” music, literature, film—when Harvey Weinstein, Bibi Netanyahu or Yuval Harari are upheld as the representative sinister blooms of Judaism?

I say we slow all this down. Allow people to love what they love.

In 1978, TIME Magazine calculated that 80% of stand up comedians in the United States were Jewish.

Is that proof “…they run the world” or proof they provide America with some of its foundational comedy?

(Did any of them make you laugh? I wonder if gentiles laugh more at Jewish jokes than Jews do? Hm. I’m both, if that is possible. I see “Judaism” as cultural, not religious. I hope we all survive this post—good luck everybody.

My Jewishness, such as it is

I was asked once, in 2012, on the Baltic island of Runmarö, by a Swedish poet, around 2 am, as we reached the end of a long conversation: “What does it mean to you that you are a Jewess?”

“Vad betyder det för dig att du är Judinna?”

I was caught off guard. “Jewess?” Nobody ever called me that and it felt way too grand.

I drew a blank. I was raised by my Swedish mother and my father moved out (more like, fled) when I was 3.

I asked the poet if I could think about it. Aaaargh. I could have milked it. In Sweden, I could have used it as protection, somehow. I could have whined about anti-Semitism.

I’ve never tried it.

But I did, in fact, have an answer, which came to me a few years later.

I wish I’d replied: “All it means to me, in my family, is that we look for what is funny. In that process, “political correctness” dies, because Jewish humor begins with the unsayable, and ends with the laugh.”

Imagine America with no Jews. Imagine America with no blacks. Imagine America with no Hispanics.

It’s called “Holland.”

I would love to imagine America without Masons and without Jesuits.

But Jews? (Many Masons are Jews, many are not.)

I think of Jews—normal Jews— as “…people of the voice.”

Things get expressed. The problem with it is that things get expressed.

WASPS understand the power of the exact opposite tactic: Decorum and silence. No reason whatsoever to say what you think.

When I say “voice,” I refer also to a genetic actual voice, for example, the Jewish woman—her vocal chords. Joan Rivers is a case in point—in her raspy voice I hear my father’s aunties in Baltimore and Florida. I don’t love Israel, but I love them.

Most Jewish women, I meant to say, don’t have the soft voices of princesses; They have voices for comedy and survival. Voices for cutting through. Dealing with (Jewish) husbands.

Here’s the most anti-semitic thing I will say today: Have you ever dealt with Jewish men? Feeding them? Tending to their medical needs?

A toast to Jewish women, then, and their tough, poignant, lapidary voices.

I looked up “Shiksa,” and even though it’s awful, I have to admit I laughed.

I had a position I wanted to express, and you will have to take my word I had this position before I looked up “Shiksa,” which was only moments ago:

I believe Jewish men should stop marrying non-Jewish women, which means I vote against my own existence.

It’s a mad trend that took hold after WW2 and it has to stop. Maybe Ivanka Trump will succeed but most of these unions are catastrophic, and children should proceed with caution to be born into this experiment. Maybe “fetish” is the word.

Jewish men should marry Jewish women or forsake their supposed big deal Judaism. Not have it both ways.

I’m not backing down.

But back to my point (sorry—)

My (southern) Jewish father and his brother, my uncle (a great comedian, and pianist, Jerry Farber—) we spoke, and speak, mainly about whether something is/was funny. My sister Bibi, too.

Do WASPS also, maybe? I don’t know.

Skip this if you’ve heard me tell the story before:

When I was 12, and caught attending communist youth rallies in Sweden, my mother called my father in New York, hysterical, he started laughing. How is it I remember what he said, through that red kitchen Cobra phone in Örebro, Sweden?

“It’s not funny Barry! She’s going to ruin her life! She won’t be allowed back into the United States!” (Little did we know, this would have been my very ticket.)

“Ulla!” he cried, interrupting her wailing. “You’re telling me Celia is a communist? You can’t say that’s not funny!”

And there you have it. If it was funny, it must be recognized as such, first.

By 14, I was over it. but I cherish this rare memory I have of my parents speaking to one another about me, and my “future.”

A Way To Say Happy New Year

This clip—the music, lyrics, choreography, set design, costumes—is to my mind simply amazing. Even if you’ve seen it many times already, and most of us have.

Here it is with subtitles:

It’s worth reading the Wikipedia pages of both the Broadway production, and the movie:

”Imperial Russia, in or around 1905” is exactly where my ancestry comes from on my father’s side. Maybe my “DNA” resonates. But I think most people alive love this masterpiece, and rightly so. I don’t care if I am “middlebrow.”

A remake? Are they crazy?

Some inspired YouTube comments:

Since Jerome Robbins’ original and iconic choreography for the 1960s Broadway musical, the choreography of FOTR is “required,” and non-negotiable. Thank God.

I have a funny true story to tell, that brings all these themes together: When, in 2017, I was at a Jewish cultural center called Paideia in Stockholm, with my then partner, they performed Fiddler on The Roof.

During the song “Tradition,” they actually stopped after they sang: “The pappaaaaa.” Stopped singing, stopped moving. Somebody stepped forward and informed the audience that they did not condone the patriarchy, implicit in the song. Then they resumed, and finished the number. I seemed to be the only one whose jaw dropped.

I have it somewhere—if you want to see proof.

You can’t say that’s not funny.

Wait I just thought of something. Is Fiddler On The Roof downright anti-globalist?

Well…humor…is anti-globalist, for starters.

Traditions. Family. Dance. Father. Mother.

Milk.

Cow.

I think we’re onto something.

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