Mel Brooks and Philip Roth on Jewishness, Work and Love

It was almost too much that Mel Brooks and Philip Roth were set to appear together in the same room. It was almost a relief that for their back-to-back press conferences promoting the PBS “American Masters” series, Roth was streamed via satellite into Pasadena’s ritzy Langham Hotel from his home in Newark, N.J., and Brooks was running “chronically late,” blaming L.A. traffic.

The legendary writer and the legendary entertainer couldn’t be more different. Roth is a shy, stern but sweet intellectual with bushy eyebrows and dark, penetrating eyes; Brooks is an effervescent crowd-pleaser, dapperly dressed and still, at 86, deprecating about his size: “I’m not such a comedy giant — I’m 5-foot-6,” he said.

They also couldn’t be more similar.

“I’m not crazy about seeing myself described as an American-Jewish writer,” Roth tells the camera in his “Masters” portrait, which will air on March 29, shortly after his 80th birthday. “I don’t write in Jewish. I write in American.”

“I think I missed the Jew boat by one generation,” Brooks said when asked if he considered himself a “Jewish entertainer.” “When I worked in the Borscht Belt, I spoke in English; a generation before me, they spoke in Yiddish.”

These two Jewish geniuses get asked about Jewishness a lot. Is it their Jewishness that makes them so special or their specialness that makes Jewishness matter?

“They keep asking me,” Brooks continued, “ ‘What is Jewish comedy? How does it differ from normal comedy?’ I say, ‘You got it wrong. It’s not really Jewish comedy — there are traces of it, but it is really New York comedy, urban comedy, street-corner comedy. It’s not Jewish comedy — that’s from Vilna, that’s Poland.”

I asked Roth why the Jewish label bothered him. “It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “People can call me anything they want.” Well, then, what role has it played?

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Parents, Mind Your Manners

It’s hard to teach kids etiquette when adults behave badly. So put down your smartphone and pay attention.

 By Marjorie Ingall

In my last column, I discussed how to teach etiquette to your children. But then it occurred to me that it’s hard to raise others with good manners when you yourself act as though you were raised in a barn. Therefore I will be expanding my new etiquette-training empire by offering virtual manners classes for grownups, those lumbering post-toddlers who are often even less civilized than their offspring.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Jewish parents, the very worst behavior is often on display where we might hope to showcase the best of ourselves: in synagogue. So let’s start there.

First lesson: Put down your freaking smartphone! I see you using it in shul—the same way you do at dinner, and during visits with your in-laws. Don’t pretend you’re looking up commentary on the weekly Torah portion; we know you’re “liking” things on Facebook and “sexting” and checking the latest score in “the game.” Siri secretly thinks you’re a yutz when you make her work during services, and so do I. Focus on the humans you are with, please. (And if you want to focus on the Divine, too, that’s just grand.) Also—and this is true everywhere, not just in synagogue— let’s think about the message we’re sending to our children when we’re using electronic devices while ostensibly spending time with them: “My little offspring! You are less important to me than invisible people!” If there is a call or text or email that absolutely cannot wait, apologize to all around you and excuse yourself to deal with it. But really, how many things cannot wait long enough for “Adon Olam” to be over?

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How Veggie Tales Prompted a Jewish Conversation About God

On a recent road trip, we stopped along the way to refuel–nurse the baby, potty break for the preschooler, and load up on snacks.

Right next to the snacks, of course, was a stand filled with DVDs for kids. Our 3-year-old wanted one, and since we were about to be in the car for another four hours (the trip from Brooklyn to Montreal is lo-ong), we acquiesced. We picked out what looked like the least scary and most preschooler-friendly on the shelf–something called Best of Veggie Tales–a top ten song countdown. What could be wrong with singing vegetables?

If you’re familiar with Veggie Tales (which I wasn’t at the time), you already know where this is going. Veggie Tales is a series of television shows and movies based on Christian morals and values. Luckily for us, everything on this DVD was in line with our Jewish morals and values, though they were expressed in different ways. On this DVD, for example, one of the songs is about God being bigger than the boogeyman–a super-comforting idea to a 3-year-old who’s often scared of things. (“God is bigger than the boogeyman, and He’s watching out for you and meeee!”)

But that introduced the conversation about God, which I’d kind of been avoiding. You might wonder why, especially if you’ve read my bio and know that I’m actually trained as a Jewish educator and have spent the past 13 years teaching other people’s kids about God. But now that it’s my kid, well… I’ve been dragging my feet. I don’t want her to believe in God as some man up in the clouds–that’s not the God I believe in. I want her to find her own understanding of God, not something that pop culture suggests. And the tough part about Veggie Tales is that their understanding of God is a very active and involved God, whose actions make a difference in the world. Though I think God does make a difference in the world, I don’t think about God in quite as embodied of a fashion as Veggie Tales does–somehow that feels a bit funny to my modernist sensibilities.

As I sat and thought about it, though, I realized that I found my own understanding of God through years of asking questions. I can’t expect that my 3-year-old will suddenly get Martin Buber‘s I-Thou theory in a personal yet simultaneously theoretical fashion. She’s 3.

So then, how do I explain God in a way that can work for her?

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The Zoo Rabbi

An Orthodox rabbi who writes about werewolves and unicorns and believes in evolution? Meet Rabbi Natan Slifkin – also known as "The Zoo Rabbi" – who teaches about what Jewish scripture says about natural history and beastly lore. And despite his opponents’ claims that his belief in evolution is heretical, he staunchly believes it's not.

In 2004-2005, three of Rabbi Slifkin's books were banned by a group of distinguished Haredi rabbis. Their heresy charges (listed here in full) included Slifkin’s claim that the universe is actually billions of years old, and that the Torah’s account of the six days of creation must not be interpreted literally. Slifkin and his mentors rejected the ban, evoking the tradition of non-literal interpretations of the creation story – perhaps most famously that of Maimonides, who says that it’s meant to be read metaphorically and not literally and chronologically.

Slifkin’s rational approach to biblical Jewish thought – not to mention his willingness to ask (and answer!) provocative questions – is vibrantly unorthodox in the contemporary landscape of Orthodox scholarship. His love for his work is evident, be it about giants or Darwin.