How to Give a Speech Like Mandy Patinkin
Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Mandy Patinkin has done Shakespeare and Showtime, Sondheim and “Oyfn Pripetchik,” but one thing he does not do is a dull after-dinner speech.
The legendary veteran of Broadway and screens large and small let it all hang out when he accepted the Yitzhak Rabin Peace Award recently from the dovish Americans for Peace Now on whose board he serves.
Over the course of 25 minutes, the famously intense Patinkin:
-
Quoted Psalm 137 (“If I forget thee O Jerusalem”)
-
Paused mid-speech to sing, from start to finish, a medley of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Children Will Listen.”
-
Told a story of attending a Soviet Jewry rally in 1982 with his baby son and getting “bad vibes” from a man who turned out to be Benjamin Netanyahu.
-
Handed APN founder Mark Rosenblum blank white drawing tablets (representing “endless possibilities”) to hand to the governments of Israel, the Palestinians, and the United States, and to the writers’ room of “Homeland.”
-
Proposed that, if the peace process doesn’t advance, “Homeland” should do a season (or a spin-off) about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
-
Wrapped things up by leading the audience in a sing-along of the peace anthem “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu.”
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
