April 13, 2010

Two weeks ago, just hours before the first seder, Jon Stewart hosted Ben Stiller on The Daily Show to talk about his new movie, “Greenberg.” Instead, the two entertainers went the way of ancestral bonding, trading facetious quips about the Passover holiday.

Stewart began by protecting his Jewish comrade and assuring the audience that, despite the segment airing during the first seder, Stiller was not breaking Jewish law because the show is taped before sundown.

What ensued was a casual but revealing conversation in which Stiller and Stewart inquired about each other’s Passover practices: Stiller observes Pesach with his family, Stewart said he planned to eat a bacon sandwich (his usual wisecrack on significant Jewish holidays—he said as much last year on the day of Yom Kippur).

Despite the fact that by Orthodox standards, both men would likely be labeled secular, Stiller’s honesty and earnestness regarding his Jewish background (he grew up on the Upper West side of Manhattan where his school “provided” Matzah) was a marked contrast to Stewart’s condescending cluelessness. In fact, there was something naive and even sad about Stewart’s attitude toward the holiday—namely, that it didn’t matter much. And it showed when he explained that he did not grow up in a Jewish area, and that as a young boy, he was surrounded by “Italians and Polish and Irish—and they would wonder why I was eating crackers.”

From the outside, Stiller and Stewart might look like the same kind of Jew, but on a closer look, it becomes clear that Stewart was an outsider in a mixed ethnic community, whereas Stiller, who grew up in a close-knit Jewish community is the one celebrating seder and sending his daughter to Hebrew school.

Read my rough transcript of the (pretty hilarious) March 29 interview on “The Daily Show”:

Jon Stewart: Before we go on, we should clarify, this show is taped before sundown; this man is breaking no Passover law by appearing tonight.

Ben Stiller: That’s right, I am attending a seder after the show. (Turns to Stewart) Are you?

(Stewart looks like a dear caught in headlights. Stiller nods encouragingly)

JS: Uh, yes.

BS: There’s always room at our table…

JS: Do you do the big..

BS: My parents are doing it which is great.

JS: They do the big thing? How many people are gonna be there?

BS: It’s not gonna be big. There’ll be like 6 or 7 people. My daughter just got all excited about Passover. She learned the Ten Plagues, which was fun, so she’s going around and acting you know, blood, lice, cattle flies…

JS: That doesn’t make her nervous? Does she now fear the plagues?

BS: No, no she enjoys them. Especially death of the firstborn ‘cause her… her brother. It’s intense when she starts rattling off.. she’s into it.

JS: How old is she?

BS: She’s gonna be 8.

JS: Did you have to do the Passover… You grew up in New York or Los Angeles? When you were in like second grade, did you go with the matzah to school?

BS: I didn’t bring my own matzah to school. Our school provided matzah for us—it being on the upper west side of Manhattan. It was always exciting; we had to hide the afikomen (turns towards audience) and you had to find this afikomen… This is not the big Jewish audience I got from earlier. You see there’s a piece of matzah that’s hidden and you find it as the kid and then you get a little surprise.

JS: You get like a dollar. See, I did not grow up in necessarily a Jewish area so Passover was more of a…

BS: An idea?

JS: There were Italians and Polish and Irish and they would wonder why I was eating crackers.

BS: Right. And you told them it was..

JS: I had stomach cancer. (laughs) What am I gonna say? My people were slaves in the land of Egypt? And then boom. I do remember it being nice, everybody got together at the thing..

BS: Yeah it’s nice

JS: Would you get in trouble if you did not attend?

BS: Would I tonight? My mother would not be happy. And my mother is a convert. She was raised Irish catholic and then she converted so she knows more about Judaism than our entire family combined.

JS: The converts always care more.

BS: Yes. They’re much stricter.

JS: They studied it.. the rest of us…

BS: She made the choice.

JS: We did the Bar Mitzvah, got the money..

BS: Exactly. And we’d done our duty and moved on in life.

JS: I do have a tradition; a Passover tradition. I’m gonna share it with my audience tonight. I’m gonna share it with you. I get a bacon and egg croissanwich.

BS: It’s hard on the unleavened croissant. It gets messy and crumbly.

JS: Just 8 days man.. there’s so many holidays!

The sex lawsuit filed against actor Steven Seagal looks worse than the sex scandals of late involving Tiger Woods and Jesse James. That’s because the plaintiff, 23-year-old Kayden Nguyen, a former Seagal assistant, claims he assaulted her on multiple occasions. The motive for sex and power is the same old male egotism we saw with Woods and James, but the methods of obtaining sex can be radically different for different men, and it’s crucial to know the difference.

To avoid digressing into tabloid sensationalism, I’m just going to say that Seagal deserves the benefit of the doubt—until he doesn’t. But my true motive for posting this story is more out of female solidarity because after reading Nicholas Kristof’s enlightening and important book “Half the Sky” about sex crimes inflicted upon millions of women and girls worldwide, I consider it a dereliction of duty not to give voice to these matters when they are so often veiled and silenced around the world.

And if you’re going, “Steven Seagal, the guy from ‘Under Siege’ is Jewish?” Then read this excerpt from a column by JJ editor Rob Eshman:

…really, Steven Seagal is a Jew.

I mean, he’s a Jew from Lansing, Michigan, the son of Samuel Steven Seagal (1928-1991), a high school math teacher.  His father’s parents were Russian Jews,  Nathan Siegelman – later changed to Seagal – (1892-1973) and Dora Goldstein (1894-1989). Seagal’s mother is of Irish ancestry (Jewish? Catholic?) but according to Reform Jewish law, the man is a Jew.

Last night, during an interview and Q-and-A session with Israeli short story writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret, held by Birthright Israel at Bergamot Station, a Santa Monica art gallery, Keret gave me goosebumps (the good kind). Answering a question about his writing process, Keret said that he writes when he doesn’t want to go out and doesn’t want to stay at home.

I have since told two friends of mine. They both agreed that what Keret said was awesome.

One of them even wrote it down.

Surrounded by nonsensical artwork and photographs, the night of April 12, after a short reception with free wine and cheese, Keret—hair uncombed and wearing a button-down shirt untucked with loose-fitting jeans—sat for an interview with his old friend Luke Davies, an Australian author.

When Davies asked Keret how his son was doing, Keret said fat and fascist—but he also said that one of the only times he’s fully “present” is when he’s playing with his son (the other times are when he’s writing or getting a foot massage).

Birthright Next commissioned Keret to come to L.A. for the event.

Keret read a couple of new short stories from a book that will be available in Israel shortly (he didn’t say what the title is). He also showed clips from his films “Jellyfish,”—which he co-directed with his wife—along with “$9.99” and “What About Me?”

During a reading of his first short story, in which a guy holds a gun to Keret’s head and tells him to write a story (it’s fictional), I realized what makes many of Keret’s stories great: They have people acting calm in ridiculous situations, which creates humor.

Goran Dukic, the director of “Wristcutters,” sat in the audience. The film, which starred Shannyn Sossymon and Tom Waits and was about people who kill themselves only to end up in a place just like earth, only slightly worse, was an adaptation of Keret’s short story “Kneller’s Happy Campers.”

Originally, Keret explained, a French director was supposed to adapt “Happy Campers.” When Keret told a contact of the director’s that he was going to let Dukic do it, the French director had a stroke – but the stroke was unrelated, Keret said.

Still, Keret continued, as a second generation Jew, I felt very responsible.

We’re friends now, and he’s well, Keret said.

In Keret’s film, “$9.99,” a gun popped up again. A homeless guy holds a gun to his head and threatens to pull the trigger if another guy in a suit doesn’t give him a dollar. To which the guy in the suit tells the homeless guy that he’s being manipulative.

If this sounds cool to you, check out Keret’s “The Girl on the Fridge,” which has politically incorrect but touching and humorous short stories – some of them not even a page long.