“When I walk into a theater, it is holy. It is a sanctuary. It is a synagogue. There is this kind of through line as a Jewish community, as a theater community. You gather around a table and share food and share stories and ask questions, and you gather in a theater and ask the same things.” “A huge number of Jewish theater artists are gathering to have our photos taken at the lovely Lyceum Theater.” “It’s this wonderful sound and sight of chaos.” “How’s it going?” [INTERPOSING VOICES] “Champagne so early in the day.” “This is like —” “History.” “This is history!” [INTERPOSING VOICES] “This is the most Jew-y thing I’m doing this week, and this is the week of Rosh Hashanah.” “It’s a little scary.” “Thank you. Oh my gosh.” “You made me weep so hard in ‘Parade.’ I just — you’re so brilliant.” “Oh my goodness.” “I’m feeling a little emotional, realizing that we’re mishpachah, that we’re family.” “Today, looking around, I felt, oh, I’m part of this lineage.” “Today’s the day.” “Saying I’m a writer or actor, it would always come with a little bit of shame, you know, because it seems like an indulgent kind of life path. But when I felt like I was part of this broader tradition, something that was connected to history, then I feel a little more comfortable.” “Along with persecution in Eastern Europe, there’s also been waves of Yiddish theater movements.” [SPEAKING YIDDISH] “Yiddish theater was sort of a developed thing. So a lot of people came from shtetls having seen traveling Yiddish theater troupes. A big Eastern European Jewish immigration wave came over with an enormous appetite to go by the thousands to the theaters.” “Theater was a really safe place for Jews to go when the rest of the world wasn’t, and not only safe, but, like, filled with music and their stories.” “In the face of a great deal of cultural hatred, Jewish theater allows people to tell the truth about their families, their neighborhoods, their ancestry.” “Our tradition is a dialogical, dialectical tradition. It’s a tradition of discussion and dispute and argumentation. You know, three Jews, six opinions.” “But on the seventh night, God created Yiddish theater.” “Just allowing the on the one hand, but then on the other hand.” “You can stay here with us tonight if you want.” “You have done too much already.” “O.K.” “A kind of humor, a kind of resilience.” “Who’s an American beauty rose? With an American beauty nose?” “Jews kind of enjoy jokes. It’s looked up to if you can make people laugh.” “You told me that they were coming here at 7:30. You were going to get here at 7:00.” “Smile and dance and sing.” “It’s juicy. It’s loud.” [INAUDIBLE] “There’s music. There’s fighting. There’s food.” “I’m sorry. Uh, Beth? This is Tom. Tom —” “Were they naked?” “Excuse me?” “I think Jewish theater became a concept to me when I saw ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’” “If I were a rich man, [VOCALIZING]” “’Fiddler,’ ‘Fiddler,’ ‘Fiddler,’ ‘Fiddler.’ ‘Fiddler,’ ‘Fiddler,’ ‘Fiddler.’” [VOCALIZING] “I recently directed it in Yiddish.” [SPEAKING YIDDISH] “The Great White Way, as it were, was begun by Jewish immigrants.” [SPEAKING YIDDISH] “I think you’re on the top step, please.” “Top step.” “Top step.” “As a teenager, the only things I was cast in were Neil Simon plays, and I was in ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ At the time, I was like, ‘I guess I’m really Jewish.’” “It was like —” “When I look back, like, when I fell in love with making theater, who I was was being formed around Jewish art.” “My first play was written by Harvey Fierstein, who’s here today.” “So that’s what you wear every day?” “Then Neil Simon, and I was playing him.” “How am I ever going to play for the Yankees with a name like Eugene Morris Jerome?” “When I was 15 years old, I was hired as a singer in many wedding bands, bar and bat mitzvahs. And that’s where I got my sort of musical education.” “Tony, let’s try you over here. And then Paula, we’ll —” “Right on his lap.” “— standing next to you.” “When I was a kid and I learned that musical theater was a job, but I was, like, trying to fit in and didn’t want to be unique in any way. I hated Barbra Streisand. Like, I hated the kind of uniqueness of her, like, bobbing vibrato and the weird way she, like, contorted her mouth on certain vowels.” “— hang my hat is home.” “And then, of course, as I’ve grown up, my world broke open.” [VOCALIZING] “(SINGING) I never knew anything.” “’Parade’ is about Leo Frank, a Jewish man in Marietta, Georgia. And he is wrongfully convicted for murdering a 13-year-old girl. The backdrop is this beautiful love story between Leo Frank and his wife, Lucille Frank. ‘Parade’ was the most fulfilling experience I could have ever asked for. It, like, connected me to a different part of my Judaism than I had anticipated or expected.” “As actors, we can become somewhat resentful of the pigeonholes that we’re forced into early on in our careers.” “Assimilation doesn’t mean to stop being a Jew. Your incidental effect would be the end of Judaism.” “I’m finding as I get older and I tell more of these stories, it’s bringing me closer to my Jewish identity and a community of storytellers that has given me a sense of purpose.” [CHATTER] “Mishpachah! Here we go! We’re going to be taking a picture now. If you’re a taller Jewish person, go to the back.” “Audiences are coming in and breathing the same air. When you’re having that very visceral experience, you can’t help but change in some way.” “Something about the choice that everybody is making to sit together and listen and observe —” “Good, good, good.” “They’re locked in that seat for an hour and a half, two and a half hours. So it’s like, ‘O.K., we are going to tell you our story, and it’s different than yours.’” “There’s a way to sort of delicately, or sometimes not so delicately, inspire people to think empathically, to understand someone else’s humanity.” “The threat of anti-Semitism is as high as it’s ever been. And so it’s not surprising to me that we are congregating in what at least I think of as a temple to connect and engage with the stories that got us here as a means of moving forward.” “The story of your background and being, you can’t escape it. As Jewish people, we’re always at an edge of being forgotten, killed, or misunderstood. So our stories are very important to ourselves, our children, to you.” “1, 2, 3. Mazel tov. Thank you.” [APPLAUSE] [CHATTER] “O.K., who’s going to take the lox home?”