I started baking rugelach because I was mad. There was
consternation at the theatre I was working at then: “Why are
we calling it a holiday party? We should call it a Christmas party.”
The Jews there were outnumbered and did not want to make a
big deal, to draw attention to themselves.
There was a contest, a bake-off, as part of
the party. I decided I was going to bake
the most Jewish pastry. I went on the
Internet, found a recipe for rugelach, and
I won that bake-off. It was in Ashland,
later, after I was called a kike walking
down Main Street, that I decided to teach
myself how to make babke. If there was a
bake-off, I feel pretty secure I would win.
There are so many things to talk about
when it comes to Indecent. I wish there
was room and time to tell you more
about Yiddish, Yiddishkeit, Sholem Asch
and his play The God of Vengeance with
the girls in the rain.
Or meeting Rebecca Taichman in
2001 and hearing her talk about the
indecency court case People vs. The God
of Vengeance. Or how 10 years later I was
part of American Revolutions when we
co-commissioned Taichman and Paula Vogel to revisit that court
case and the Asch play and it became this beautiful, expansive
story. In 2012, we had the first workshop. I left my parents’
apartment when news of the Newtown shooting was breaking,
and as the numbers of the dead started coming in we sat around
a table in Midtown translating Yiddish, and in my heart I knew, I
still know, we tell stories so we can remember.
It’s been surprising to me, considering the mythology of Jews
owning Broadway and Hollywood, that so many people involved
with Indecent over the years have told me that it marks the first
time they get to play in a Jewish world after years as working
artists. It makes me think about when a truck decked out with
Nazi flags and vile slogans parked down the hill from the OSF
campus and no one lit it on fire, about seeing swastikas on
buildings and sidewalks and all over the country and the world
and we paint over them. I think about sitting in a meeting at
this theatre and having an influential person tell me she never
thought antisemitism was a problem before Charlottesville
because Jews have money and
education. I think about the murders
in Pittsburgh and Poway. I think about
where the country is now and how long
it has been since OSF did a play about
any version of a Jewish experience other
than The Merchant of Venice—one of
Angus Bowmer’s earliest successes, a
play that built OSF, that runs underneath
OSF. And I think about being called a kike
walking down the street in Ashland and
rage-baking babke.
Like the rugelach, I got that recipe off the
Internet. I have made these my own, but
they are not from-the-old-country family
recipes. My great-grandmother from
Eastern Europe baked, but by all accounts
her cooking was not so good. (Sorry,
Sureh Yittl, of blessed memory.) I joke
that I come from a long line of Ashkenazi
women who lived near New York
bakeries. More true is that I come from a
long line of Jews who were able to assimilate, and rugelach and
babke and Yiddish fell by the wayside.
They were able to assimilate because they aspired to whiteness,
and they achieved it. Did it matter? Does it matter? We are still
Jews. There are still people who hate my son and me; some
want to kill us. I know my family and so many other white Jews
assimilated to hide in plain sight because they were scared. I
understand that fear more now that I am a mother and after the
Nazi truck and Pittsburgh.
Indecent is beautiful. The conversation about art at the center of
life. The many versions of love explored—the love Vogel’s character
Lemml has for The God of Vengeance, the love the company
has for each other, and especially of the girls Sholem Asch created who love each other and how Vogel has interpreted
them in her story. It also asks a timeless
question: What is it to be a Jew in this world?
I learned to be Jewish not so much in my
Hebrew school classroom, but sitting at the
kitchen table laughing and fighting—loudly,
over each other— about politics and culture
and justice. The Bundists from my father’s side
and the rabbis on my mother’s made me a
dramaturg, and also made me comfortable in
a place where there is no answer to the question.
Is the Jew the one who leads the ghetto
uprising or reads from the Torah? Or unionizes
garment workers or keeps the Sabbath? Or
lives in New York or moves to the suburbs or
Ashland or Israel? The one who has no family
or old country in Europe after the Holocaust or
the one who is Sephardic or Mizrahi or a Jew
by choice who knows not a word of Yiddish? Is
the Jew the one who bakes rugelach from the
Internet? Yes.
What is it to be a Jew in this world? We are
terrifying and awesome. We are the children
of revolutionaries. We are revolutionaries. We
survived the fire. We have resistance written
in with the trauma in our DNA or added to
our souls when we chose to be Jews. Despite
everything that has happened over the millennia,
we strive, and we strive for joyousness.
We weaponize our humor and find joy in
argument and dissent, and we were given a
book of laws, then more books that contain
argument upon argument about how one
could live an ethical life—to be a good person,
to save the world by saving one life, to heal
the world. To live with doubt, to do a play, to
laugh, to scream, to love who we love and
what we love, to stay or, yet again, to go. To
not hide.
Yiddish, like German, is a conceptual language,
and there is a concept I love—a pintele Yid.
The phrase represents the spark of Jewishness
that lights the blaze in our soul. Indecent is a
reclamation, but it won’t bring back a time
past and lost, or restore the salons of Europe
or a thriving Yiddish language. We are simply
here to tell you a story. To remember. And
maybe that story will light a blaze in your soul.
For tickets and information, visit Indecent.