Theater

It seems out of character — to say the least — when Richard Montoya expresses concern about how his new play, “Palestine, New Mexico,” might be received at the Mark Taper Forum. Montoya, after all, is the irreverent front man for Culture Clash, the mostly left-leaning, often Chicano-themed political cabaret that has cheekily taken on multiculturalism for a quarter century in productions such as “Chavez Ravine” and “Water and Power.” No subject has been too sacred for its vaudevillian brand of humor — early sketches featured Latino “superheroes” such as “Busboy Man” and “Lawnblower Man” — and even Latino idols such as Che Guevara were fair game. “We didn’t realize until we read in a textbook out of New York University that we had heroically resurrected Che, but then killed him again,” Montoya said with a laugh.

A high school football player with a mohawk has a long, dark night of the soul. He dreams of an angelic visitation: a young woman in a nightgown, Star of David at her neck, wafts in through his window and gazes at him lovingly. As he awakes, he comes to the only reasonable conclusion: “Rachel was a hot Jew and the good Lord wanted me to get into her pants.” It must be said in all honesty, however, that this might not have been divine intervention; rather, like for Marley in “A Christmas Carol,” this visitation could have been the result of something the football player ate — the sweet-and-sour pork consumed during his family’s annual Simchat Torah’s viewing of “Schindler’s List.”

Did comedian Yisrael Campbell convert to Judaism for the jokes? If so, he might have tried to avoid the three circumcisions he had to endure to become a member of the tribe.

“I am intrigued with all things Jewish,” actor, author, director and filmmaker Henry Jaglom declared. “I must admit that I pick up a book in a library or in a bookstore, and I turn to the table of contents and look up ‘Jews.’”

When T.R. Knight chants the Shema blindfolded and with a noose tightening around his neck in the role of Leo Frank, his character’s terror is palpable. The scene takes place as the inevitable tragic dénouement of the historical musical “Parade,” now playing at the Mark Taper Forum, the story of the anti-Semitic trial and lynching in 1915 of a pencil-factory manager accused of brutally murdering a 13-year-old girl. In this production, Frank lives again via this boyish, 36-year-old actor best known for his part in the original cast of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

It’s hard to be a Jew and even harder to be the artistic director of a Jewish theater in Los Angeles.

Jo Levi DiSante, a Hollywood producer, was 28 when her sister’s breast cancer metastasized to her spine and bones and she was given three to five years to live. Two weeks later, DiSante’s mother also was diagnosed, for the second time, with breast cancer. “I was an executive in the film industry,” DiSante wrote in an online bio, “where every day I reminded myself and my peers that although we might experience blows from our egotistical studio head bosses as earth-shattering, we were not curing cancer.”

Cornelius Schnauber’s father joined the Nazi Party early on, when it was still a fringe movement, and the son has been wrestling with this legacy ever since, as an academician and playwright.

Way back in 1965, an actor named Chaim Topol, unknown in America, arrived in Los Angeles, staying at the cheapest possible hotel with fellow Israeli Ephraim Kishon, a popular satirical writer.