The Spark of Jewishness

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Prologue
magazine for members
2019 Edition
Julie Felise Dubiner
View Full Image with Credit Julie Felise Dubiner, production dramaturg for Indecent.
Julie Felise Dubiner
Julie Felise Dubiner, production dramaturg for Indecent.
Production photo for Indecent
View Full Image with Credit Manke (Rebecca S’Manga Frank) and Rifkele (Shayna Blass) in The God of Vengeance, the controversial play at the center of Indecent. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Production photo for Indecent
Manke (Rebecca S’Manga Frank) and Rifkele (Shayna Blass) in The God of Vengeance, the controversial play at the center of Indecent. Photo by Jenny Graham.

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.