How one man discovered his Jewish identity through sweating
Nick Cassenbaum’s play ‘Bubble Schmeisis’ explores the culture of London’s schvitz
Nick Cassenbaum gets a schmeiss. Photo by Gence Barbar
By Mira Fox March 20, 2025
Growing up, British playwright Nick Cassenbaum had a hard time connecting with his Judaism. He tried all the traditional things: He went to Jewish summer camp. (But he felt put off by the violence and aggression in the camp’s reenactment of the raid on Entebbe.) He cheered for the Tottenham Hotspurs, a soccer team with a very Jewish following. (But he found the game boring.) He tried leaving his Judaism behind and moving to a hip artsy neighborhood. (But he felt like the odd one out for being the only Jew.)
None of it was working for him — until he went to the schvitz with his grandfather. There, he found a Jewish ritual that finally spoke to him: the schmeiss, a tradition specific to British Jews that consists of a scrub-down done in the steam room using special raffia brushes.
“I was taken care of by these older men who brought me into it,” Cassenbaum told me over Zoom; he described the experience as a “nurturing” one. And, it felt like it spoke to his specific Jewish identity: “Because of how London it felt and how Ashkenazi it felt. And also how primal — like, it was my granddad washing me! I was naked, he was naked, washing me.”
Much like religious observance, there was a whole set of rituals to learn: The schmeiss is conducted in teams and each person has a role — cleaning the bench, doing the scrubbing, bringing oranges for snacks — lest they be called a “schmeiss ponce” for mooching.
“In a way, it’s like how people convert to Judaism. When I went to the schvitz, I had to ask to come — I could imagine my grandfather saying no four times,” the playwright said.
Cassenbaum turned the journey to Judaism via the ritual of the schmeiss into a play, Bubble Scheimisis, that’s coming to Brooklyn this week — complete with a klezmer band. In the show, he tells anecdotes from his Jewish journey, like realizing he was different in elementary school because his friends had foreskins, or that he wasn’t the right kind of Jew at camp when his friends came from fancier neighborhoods.
The show originally opened at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2016, where it received acclaim from critics. Cassenbaum has since toured it all over the U.K. But bringing it to Brooklyn is notable, given the deep Jewish roots that the schvitz has in New York — where it looks a little different.
The schmeiss, which is so central to Cassenbaum’s experience, didn’t make the trip over the pond. In the schvitzes in New York, there’s a platza, a Russian exfoliating treatment done in a dry sauna, not a steam room, that uses branches instead of a raffia broom. The schmeiss teams that Cassenbaum describes as central to the schvitz experience for him — they don’t exist. Neither do the brushes he’s used to.
“The thing is, schmeissing is like an oral storytelling tradition,” Cassenbaum said. “People will only learn it if they’re taught it.”
Perhaps Bubble Schmeisis will teach us American New Yorkers to schvitz more Jewishly. Or perhaps we’ll teach Cassenbaum our own own New York schvitz rituals — a cultural exchange between strains of Judaism. Perhaps we’ll all argue about what really makes a schvitz a schvitz. Really, what could be more Jewish than that?
Bubble Schmeisis is playing March 20-29 at The Brick in Brooklyn.
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