Eliya Smith
By Eliya Smith
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Theater There’s something so Jewish about how very un-Jewish Stephen Sondheim was
A conversation with DT Max, the author of 'Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim'
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Culture 5 ways of looking at Sarah Silverman
A series of conversations among a quintet of critics after a field trip to ‘The Bedwetter’
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Culture ‘The Music Man’ was the last great goyish musical
Meredith Willson’s 1957 hit isn’t even a little bit Jewish. It marks the last time this was true of a popular musical on the American stage.
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Culture Finding pleasure in grief, an elderly Jewish widow discovers the best way to stay alive
It sounds like a pat narrative — a grieving elderly widow discovers a new, thrilling version of herself in the wake of her husband’s death, learning to indulge in the twilight of her life. The message implicit in such a tale usually goes something like this: society-bound elders, having spent most of their lives in…
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Culture I am begging you all to please shut up about the Harry Potter Jew-goblins
Jon Stewart has everyone talking about whether goblins in Harry Potter are a Jewish stereotype. Thinking they are antisemitic is... antisemitic
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Culture The original ‘West Side Story’ was Jewish — would it have been a better musical?
It starts in an alley. An angsty Italian gang creeps onstage in a “stylized prologue showing the restlessness of the youths.” It’s New York City in the 1950s, and, as the plot progresses, warring ethnic groups articulate their frustrations via song and dance. Children die preventable deaths; everyone sings; the audience thinks soberly about prejudice…
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Culture How a real FBI interrogation became the most surreal show on Broadway
Most of Tina Satter’s plays dance around plot, focusing less on events than small, weird, moving micro-moments. This isn’t true of her most recent work, “Is This A Room,” currently on Broadway. In 2017, Satter read the transcript of the FBI interrogation of a young intelligence specialist named Reality Winner, who leaked an intelligence report…
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Culture Marriage and exile at 15: Coming of age in a central Ohio JCC production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
Editor’s Note: Fifty years ago, on Nov. 3, 1971, the movie adaptation of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ premiered. In honor of that anniversary, this week we are publishing a series of article about the impact of ‘Fiddler’ and its legacy. You can read more of the stories here That I ended up cast in the…
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