Pardon the Interruption: Ep. 289

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Tablet Studios
Episode: Pardon the Interruption: Ep. 289
Date: September 30, 2021
Host: Marc Oppenheimer (A), joined by Liel Leibovitz (B)
Guests: Jacques Berlinerblau (C), Hannah Stein (D)

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Overview

This episode of Tablet Studios’ Unorthodox podcast offers a blend of holiday reflection, Jewish cultural news, humorous banter, and thoughtful interviews. Amid Sukkot and Hoshana Rabba, hosts Marc Oppenheimer and Liel Leibovitz discuss everything from TV technology woes and book tour frustrations to the deeper meaning of “interruptions” in conversation—prompted by a Deborah Tannen op-ed. Key highlights include Liel's candid interview with Jacques Berlinerblau about his new book on Philip Roth and changing attitudes toward complicated artists, and Marc’s lively discussion with actress Hannah Stein about Jewish stereotypes, family stories, Hollywood hustle, and Jewish identity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Opening Banter: Co-host Dynamics & Sukkot Vibes

• Marc jokes about Liel being his "only co-host" during Stephanie Butnik's absence, comparing their situation to Misery and No Exit ([00:17]).
• The hosts riff on the concept of a “true crime podcast about resurrecting victims of other podcasts” ([00:53]).
• Both reflect on Sukkot and Hoshana Rabba:
  • Liel describes Hoshana Rabba as “the real day,” explaining the tradition of poetic Hoshanot prayers and the long davening rituals ([03:29]).
  • “It’s like a scene out of Game of Thrones. Love this holiday.” — Liel ([05:03])

2. Personal Updates: TV Tech & Book Tour Woes

• The hosts bond over buying small, new televisions and lament the intensity of high-definition tech:
  • “You can see their pores. You can see where their makeup line ends on their neck. It’s ridiculous.” — Marc ([09:06])
• Marc humorously vents about struggling to organize a book event in San Francisco due to COVID caution, contrasting it with more permissive Seattle:
  • “Apparently no one has left their house in two years ... Even vaccinated people refuse to go outside.” ([10:25])
  • Liel quips: “That's, you know, anti-Semitism.” ([11:03])

3. News of the Jews

• Jewish holidays and workplace discrimination: A lawsuit against Unilever for firing a manager who requested Jewish holidays off ([12:27]).
  • “If we could fold the Ben and Jerry's mishigas into the lawsuit over whether the employee could take off Shmini Atzeret ... we could have one stop shopping for all of Unilever's problems with the Jews.” — Marc ([13:13])
• Fun with Jewish practices and stereotypes: Anecdotes about non-Jews and children misunderstanding Jewish holidays and challah ([14:12]).
• Jewish news around the world: The last Jew of Afghanistan, Zvulun Simontov, finally leaves for Queens, NY, after years of avoiding giving his wife a get (Jewish divorce) ([14:48]).
  • “Living under the Taliban actually wasn’t worth it.” — Marc ([15:14])
• Humor and low-brow culture: Introduction of the book "Ugly Belgian Houses" and recurring jokes about Belgium ([17:17]).

4. The “Interruptions” Debate: Deborah Tannen’s Thesis ([17:42]-[27:24])

• Inspired by Deborah Tannen's NYT op-ed, the hosts analyze “cooperative overlapping” (i.e., interrupting) as a sign of engagement in conversation, with cultural/ethnic nuances:
  • “There is something very antisemitic about this discourse. In practice, what it’s often saying is the Jew from New York ... has to be less of the Jew from New York so that the Scotch Irish Protestant ... has more space.” — Marc ([20:41])
• They discuss the misunderstood nature of extroverts/introverts in social situations, and how interpersonal engagement is necessary—even exhausting—for everyone:
  • “It's like a mask mandate. You want to be in society, you have to be an extrovert. If not, stay home.” — Liel ([24:20])
  • They note that being an engaged conversationalist is a “level of work” that’s often overlooked ([23:23]).

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Interview #1: Jacques Berlinerblau — “The Philip Roth We Don’t Know” ([29:48]-[53:54])

Summary

Georgetown professor Jacques Berlinerblau discusses his new book, “The Philip Roth We Don’t Know,” examining Roth’s legacy and shifting literary reputation through a post-MeToo and postmodern lens.

Major Topics

• Reverse Biography:
  • Berlinerblau studies Roth by reading his entire corpus, seeking patterns and asking new questions, avoiding “Rothean path dependency” ([31:22]).
• Changing Student Attitudes:
  • "How come my students are no longer vibing with Philip Milton Roth?" ([32:52])
  • The journey from laughter to discomfort to resistance (especially around issues of misogyny and autobiographical violence).
• Art, Morality & Cancel Culture:
  • “Once we learn incriminating information about an artist, our understanding of his or her art changes radically.” — Berlinerblau ([37:54])
  • Berlinerblau advocates for a nuanced, critical reading—arguing not for cancellation but for complexity.
  • Comparison to Michael Jackson and Roman Polanski ([38:50]).
• Empathy in Art:
  • Liel challenges the Rothian project as lacking empathy, arguing true art requires connection beyond narcissism ([45:46]).
  • Berlinerblau cites rare moments (“The Anatomy Lesson”) where Roth’s protagonist displays empathy, but agrees these are limited ([47:32]).
• Teaching Literature after Roth:
  • Berlinerblau is more attentive to systemic issues, avoids “winner-take-all” cultures, and diversifies syllabi ([49:49]).
  • Recommends Marlon James (“A Brief History of Seven Killings”) and others as alternatives ([51:45]).

Notable Quotes

• “For about half a millennia, professors have been calling their students dipshits ... I guess I didn't want to be that professor.” — Berlinerblau ([34:48])
• “His ability to empathize and care for other human beings is clearly lacking. This is clearly an autoerotic journey that this man has embarked on.” — Liel ([41:01])
• “Art is slimy. I take that word from Roth.” — Berlinerblau ([40:46])
• “There is a lack of empathy there on the level of the sentence.” — Berlinerblau ([47:43])

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Interview #2: Hannah Stein — Jewish Identity, Hollywood, and Family Stories ([54:25]-[67:56])

Summary

Actress Hannah Stein (Shira on Netflix’s Never Have I Ever) opens up about representation, stereotypes, building a writing/acting career, and forming her adult Jewish identity through storytelling.

Major Topics

• Portraying a Stereotype:
  • “My high school was full of Jewish American princesses ... I didn't really fit the mold, but it was the reality of the popular girls.” — Hannah ([55:30])
  • She wasn't offended to play a "JAP" because it reflected her personal experience and the show is unsparing across cultures.
• Journey to Hollywood:
  • From small-town Canada to interning at Sony, then writing, pitching, and creating diverse projects, including her grandfather's Holocaust survival story ([56:43]).
  • “I want to be a multi-hyphenate. I want to write, produce, and act.” — Hannah ([57:22])
• Hollywood Hustle and Wellness:
  • Describes balancing auditions, writing, multiple jobs, and self-care routines (Pilates, meditation, ayahuasca, etc.) ([60:22], [61:07]).
• Writing and Script Development:
  • Learning from reading thousands of scripts, admiration for Mindy Kaling and Aaron Sorkin ([63:19]).
  • Describes the grind and financial realities of pre-production and pilot development.
• Jewish Identity:
  • Teen trip to Israel transformed her from "atheist" to “proud to be Jewish.”
  • “After ... understanding where my family came from and the sacrifice they went through, I’m very proud to be Jewish.” ([66:21])
  • Ongoing learning about Israel/politics (via Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor) and acknowledging challenges of contemporary antisemitism.

Notable Quotes

• “I was that intern who walked into the CEO's office ... ‘I have an idea for a movie. You want to hear it?’” — Hannah ([57:16])
• “In this crazy, superficial field, I need something just for me.” — Hannah on self-care ([63:00])
• “I'm a reformed, more secular Jew. I look at it more as a community of people.” ([67:10])
• “Honestly, [the show] makes me feel like a better Jew.” — Hannah ([67:47])

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote / Description | |-----------|---------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:36 | Marc | “It’s no exit. What happens if you don’t get inscribed in the book of life? You have to podcast with Liel until Moshiach comes and raises the dead.” | | 05:03 | Liel | “If you go to shul, you get to stay there until Wednesday ... Like a scene out of Game of Thrones. Love this holiday.”| | 09:06 | Marc | “You can see their pores. You can see where their makeup line ends on their neck. It’s ridiculous.” | | 13:13 | Marc | “If we could fold the Ben and Jerry's mishigas into the lawsuit ... we could have one stop shopping for all of Unilever's problems with the Jews.” | | 20:41 | Marc | “There is something very antisemitic about this discourse ... the Jew from New York ... has to be less of the Jew from New York so that the ... Protestant ... has more space.” | | 24:20 | Liel | “It’s like a mask mandate — you want to be in society, you have to be an extrovert. If not, stay home.” | | 37:54 | Jacques | “Once we learn incriminating information about an artist, our understanding of his or her art changes radically.” | | 41:01 | Liel | “There was something deeply uncharitable, deeply unkind, deeply cutting ... about humanity ... which ... makes not only for terrible human beings, but also for terrible art.” | | 55:30 | Hannah | “My high school was full of Jewish American princesses. That was the reality of the popular girls ... I wasn't bothered by it ... because I was like, that was my high school experience.” | | 66:21 | Hannah | “After ... understanding where my family came from and the sacrifice they went through, I'm very proud to be Jewish.” |

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Opening / Sukkot / Hoshana Rabba: [00:02]–[06:19]
• TV technology woes / Book tour story: [06:19]–[12:02]
• News of the Jews: [12:06]–[17:42]
• Deborah Tannen & “Cooperative Overlapping”: [17:42]–[29:48]
• Interview: Jacques Berlinerblau on Philip Roth: [29:48]–[53:54]
• Interview: Hannah Stein (“Never Have I Ever”): [54:25]–[67:56]

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Conclusion

This episode embodies the eclectic charm of Unorthodox: warm co-host chemistry, hilariously relatable Jewish news, deep dives into contemporary issues of culture, identity, and morality, and honest, engaging interviews with thought leaders and creatives who reveal both the challenges and the richness of Jewish modern life. If you’re curious about why Jews interrupt, how Philip Roth’s legacy is shifting, or what it truly takes to build a creative life in Hollywood while staying proudly Jewish, this episode is packed with insight—and laughter.

Transcript

[A]

This is unorthodox. The universe's leading Jewish podcast. I am your host, Marc Oppenheimer, joined by the person who increasingly seems like my only co host. In the absence of Stephanie Butnik, Tablet editor at large, Leah Leibovitz. How are you, sir?

[B]

There was something about the way you said it that made it seem like I'm the Kathy Bates to your James Caan in misery. Like the person who increasingly seems like the only one who's locking me in this main rural cabin and will never let me out until I record the perfect Jewish podcast.

[A]

That's basically right.

[B]

Yes, Mark, I'm your only fan.

[A]

It's a Sartre. It's no exit. What happens if you don't get inscribed in the book of life? You have to podcast with Liel until the dead are raised, Until Moshiach comes and raises the dead.

[B]

This is like an M. Night Shyamalan movie. We died on Rosh Hashanah. And this is it. This is the rest of time.

[A]

It's called Mechayeim' the podcast. The podcast that'd be an amazing true.

[B]

Crime podcast, basically, about resurrecting all the victims of all the other successful true crime podcasts, like cereal.

[A]

We're just at idea a minute here. Chag Sameach Modim l'. Simcha. We're in the middle of Sukkot. You are dwelling in your man cave as we speak.

[B]

Not only am I dwelling in my man cave, but today is not just a moadim la Simcha. Today is the real day. Today is Hoshana, mother for bringing in Rabba man.

[A]

Hoshana Rabba. Before we talk about Hoshana Rabba, let's clear the decks first. Let's say the stuff we gotta say. First of all, we have a couple great Jews this week. You speak with Jacques Berlinerblau, the great literary critic from Georgetown University. I know him. You know him. He has a new book out that's about Philip Roth, in which he loves Philip Roth, and yet he feels that we're too kind to Philip Roth. Basically, it's a really cantankerous Jewy book. It's like he goes Philip Roth on Philip Roth, and you guys are gonna talk about that. And here I should say that even if you've never read Philip Roth, I think you'll find this conversation interesting because it's Liel and Jacques. Did you get the root of why for Brennan? His name is Jacques. What kind of name is that for a nice Jewish boy?

[B]

I think if you're the Berlinerblau family. You can't go, Jason. You're just wasting an opportunity, right? You have to be Jacques Berlinerblau.

[A]

Jacques Berliner Blau. And then I had a conversation with Hannah Stein, who portrays Ben Gross's girlfriend Vera on Never have I Ever. And this was set up by her dad, who's in our Facebook group. So it was the level of sort of three degrees of Jewiness. It was just awesome. But before we get to our discussion of Hoshana Raba, I just want to tell you one of my. Every time the Great Hoshanna. The Great Hosanna comes by on the calendar, I think of our friends, Hosanna.

[B]

Barr, as we know her.

[A]

Hosanna Barr. I think of our friends who are. We have friends who are evangelical Christians. Lovely people. They sent their kids to our kids preschool. And one of their daughters is named Hosanna. And one time I said to her, I was like, I think maybe just after the baby was born, I said, I'm gonna have to call her Hosanna Raba. And of course, she looked at me completely uncomprehendingly. And then I had to explain to her that Hosanna was actually a Jewish term that the Jews had at first. And we have something called the Great Hosanna. And it happens in the fall, in a trillion d years, she would never have thought that there was a Jewish Hosanna. She thought she'd found the most Jesus y name. She thought it was that there. And I mean, she was thrilled, right? Because these people, they loved the Jews. She was connecting her child to the Hebrew heritage. But I always think of little Hosanna as the Hosanna Rabb. But explain what the Fabren is. Hoshana Rabba for our listeners who are just gearing up for Shmini Atzeret.

[B]

And so because we're Jews and therefore sort of merciful by definition, and because our Lord is also very merciful, we play the long game of mercy and forgiveness, right? We start off by saying, okay, prepare an elul and, you know, come ready for the high holidays. There will be forgiveness. Then Rosh Hashanah be like, okay, Book of Life's opening. You have until Yom Kippur to atone for all the sins. Then Yom Kippur, the gates are locked. But this sounds way too final for Jews, right? It's like your mother saying, like, last, last, last, last chance. So you have until the end of the holiday of Sukkot to change all the bad stuff that might or might not have happened since Yom Kippur. I'm giving a very kind of broad thing here. So every day you read hoshanot, which is basically. I mean, the Hebrew word hoshanna is O Lord, please save us. You read. They're literally translated as supplications. You read beautiful poetic supplications to God. And here's the thing. You know, I was davening this morning because davening this morning was like seven and a half hours long. It's the longest, I think it's possibly outside of.

[A]

Did you go to shul for Hoshana Raba?

[B]

I could not. But I did the whole shebang at.

[A]

Home because I've gone to shul thinking, oh, because actually today is a yard site. I had a baby brother who died in infancy years ago. It's his yard site right now. I went to shul last night to say Kaddish. And I think I've been in the past and forgotten that. The morning service on Hoshana Raba is like 25 hours long.

[B]

It is. Because you circle the ark, you take out all the books, all the scrolls, all the Torahs, and you circle seven times holding your lulavs and etro. It's amazing. It's like.

[A]

And is there also halal? Do they also do halal in the service?

[B]

Oh, you know it. And then they do. And then they do these. If you've never heard them. If you've never heard Hoshana, our listeners like Hosanna, who may never have heard hosanna. Here's what they sound like. Like, for hip hop fans, you're in for a treat. They sound like, yeah, this is like Busta Rhymes, man. This is like. It's incredible stuff. So you read these, and they're so poetic and beautiful. And today, as you said, if you go to Saul, you get to stay there until Wednesday because you circle things with the lulav, which feels like a scene out of Game of Thrones. Love this holiday.

[A]

If you had gone to shul this morning, you'd still be there. So we wouldn't actually be taping this episode.

[B]

Correct. Which is why I did it at home. Starting at 6 in the morning, a.

[A]

Great Hoshana Rabba to all of you. And that means that Shminiyat seret is coming, which, along with Tisha B, was the favorite holiday in the Oppenheimer household for just silliness of. If you don't know what it means and nobody knows what it means, saying shminiyat serat just. It's fun. It trips off the tongue. So can I go from the sacred to the profane and just tell you what's up in my life right now.

[B]

No, an unorthodox. That'd be shocking.

[A]

And then we're gonna get to some bonkers news of the Jews. Two things. One, our old TV died, and so I had to go and buy a new TV. And now, of course, all TVs are smart TVs, which are you don't just flip channels. You click on apps. And one app is Netflix and one is Hulu. And if you subscribe to cable tv, you click on little boxes. It's like a phone. I've seen this at my parents house, but I hadn't really seen it before. Though apparently These are the TVs everyone's had for the past five or ten years. Sid had never seen one before. She kept saying, well, what channel are we on? And I said, well, we're not really on a channel. We're gonna watch something off Netflix now. Oh, so are you using Chromecast from your computer? No, it's actually in the tv.

[B]

She's like, where's Cronkite? I can't find Cronkite.

[A]

Wait a minute.

[B]

Because it's been dead for 30 years.

[A]

It'S actually in the TV. How can Netflix actually be in the TV? We don't have cable. And the thing is.

[B]

Oh, that's wonderful.

[A]

I'm not usually the technologically savvy one in our household. Sid's much better at this stuff and also just better at math. She was an econ major, Stem, you know, anything digital, anything binary code, anything. Right. But on this matter, like her TV knowledge, she basically wanted to go adjust the rabbit ears. But when we got things up and rolling and she was watching Great British Baking show, which just started its new season in beautiful 32 inch, you know, crisp color splendor. It was all good. Our children, however, had one comment, which is, dad, you got a new tv. Why is it so small? Because their impression of new TV. Everyone else who gets a new TV trades up to, you know, a 70 inch TV.

[B]

Okay, so I see your TV story and I raise you a TV story. We had a TV for 19 years. 26 years, 73 years.

[A]

And it was one you brought from Israel. So it actually only got two channels.

[B]

Only one channel. Channel one. So at some point the TV started going. And three or four weeks ago, I said, you know what? Okay, fine, let's go get a TV. And we walked into the local PC Richards and said, I would like a TV. And they're like, well, yeah, here's a 103 inch screen. I was like, no, no, no, it needs to be much smaller. They literally did not have any 30. Like the smallest that they had was 55. And they were so disgusted with me that I opted to buy this teeny tiny thing. I mean the man was literally questioning my man who's like, you sure? You sure it's all you want? Of course, they were also Israelis. Like, you sure all you want? All you have is 55 inch. Okay, this, I'm not judging, but here's a freaky thing. There was some. Some kind of crazy sale and I was like, oh, this looks nice. I'll take this. And it turned out to be this new OLED tv. Oled? Have you heard about this?

[A]

No, I have not heard about this.

[B]

So this is like the most insanely high def TV ever. And it's kind of freaking me out because like, I actually don't want to see. I hardly ever watch tv.

[A]

It's too high def. I've seen those where it's too high. You can see their pores. You can see where their makeup. You can see where their makeup line ends on their neck. It's ridiculous.

[B]

I love the Mets, but I don' want to see the Mets like this. I don't love them this much. It's kind of like, ah, try to have some blurriness and gauziness.

[A]

I was in a hotel room one time and I turned on the TV and I was seeing the actors nose hairs, I was seeing their ear hairs, I was seeing their pores. And I thought, this is way too high. It doesn't look. It actually makes it look less professional. It looks like they're actors blocking their scenes on a set. They look like random people reading lines. But they don't look like Hollywood people anymore because you can see them too clearly. It's very unnerving.

[B]

I'm telling you, someone needs to issue some kind of law about Graven Images.

[A]

Yeah, for sure.

[B]

We're well overdue for one.

[A]

We're well overdue for that. Here's the other. The other thing going on in my life is I'm trying to get this book tour locked down. I went on Facebook and talked about this. Two things. First of all, buy my book. It debuts October 5th. Second, if you want a signed copy, we'll work something out with Venmo and I'll mail it to you. Just write to [e-mail] but third, I have a gig in Seattle on October 10th and I have one in LA with Bari Weiss. October 12th at Sinai Temple. And that's gonna rock the day in between. I put San Francisco on my plane ticket, on my big, like, five stop plane ticket, thinking I'd pull something together. San Francisco. Apparently no one has left their house in two years. Even vaccinated people, all of whose friends are vaccinated, refuse to go outside. And so I've literally said to friends of mine, hey, would you have something in your backyard for me? And we'll. I'll sell books at cost and I'll read from it and I'll sign it, and we'll all be 10ft apart and we'll all wear three masks. And they're like, no, you couldn't do that, dude. No, that'd be bad. Like you. You'd lose all your friends. Your kid would get kicked out of vegan preschool. So I'm gonna be in the Bay Area with nothing to do for a day, with nobody wants to hear me talk about my book. From Palo Alto up to Marin County.

[B]

That's, you know, anti Semitism.

[A]

Is that what it is? If I were. If this were an Amish book, they'd come out for me.

[B]

I don't know. I dislike the Bay Area so passionately and strongly.

[A]

I know, I know. I'm starting. No, I. Look, some of my favorite places are the Bay Area. Some of my favorite people are in the Bay Area. I just wish one of them would be like, yeah, we'll pull together something in the Bay Area to talk. But it's really interesting because it's not like Seattle is some trumpy bastion where they're like, screw masks, right? But the JCC in Seattle is pulling together a lovely event at the JCC in person. It's going to be masked and appropriate protocols or whatever. And even mentioning this to people in the Bay Area gives them hives. Like they plan to lock down until the end of the Gavin Newsom presidency, which they're planning for.

[B]

In other words, just to put bookends on it in your lifetime. You've gone from attending a clothing optional summer camp to a mask mandatory event.

[A]

That's based.

[B]

This is the trajectory of your life.

[A]

My journey on the left.

[C]

Correct.

[A]

News of the Jews. N O T J. News of the Jews. Liel, is there news of the Jews? Outside of our own personal little narcissistic lives, what else is going on in the world of news of the Jews?

[B]

There are a few small things and then one big thing that I know we would want to discuss at length. First. First of all, while we had very good holidays, David Rosenbaum, alas, did not. He was working as a general manager at Unilever's Englewood Cliffs facility in New Jersey. This, I should say, was two years ago. Although the lawsuit is only happening this holiday season.

[A]

It's brand new.

[B]

And he claims he was fired for telling his superior, Frank Alano, that he would take off for the Jewish holidays. And then Frank Alfano said, what holidays? And. And David Rosenbaum said, and Frank Alfano's like, shit up. That's not a holiday. And he said, yes, it is a holiday. Then he said, explain what it is. He said, no one can. And it was a whole thing. Anyway, now it's a lawsuit. And as always, we wish for the truth to come out.

[A]

Now, Unilever, if I'm not mistaken, also owns Ben and Jerry's. So if we could fold. If we could fold the Ben and Jerry's mishigas into the lawsuit over whether or not the employee in New Jersey could take off shmini at Saret, we could have a sort of like one stop shopping for all of Unilever's problems with the juice.

[B]

Oh, I love this, man. This is the, this is the most genius negotiating, like labor union negotiating tactics like, okay, you get to ban, Ban and Jerry's, but. But we get some Gedalia off forever.

[A]

And we'll start making up holidays. Speaking of making up holidays, I just say, sorry, tangent digression, but you know the joke that the gentiles say, what Shminiyat? Sarah, that's not a thing. So I'm Gedalia. What? So one of my daughters may or may not take some sort of sporting lessons at a given sports institution where the coaches tend to be gentiles. And the coach may or may not have said to this child, so you're Jewish, so do you guys, do you eat the Jewish bread? At which point the daughter said, you mean challah? He said, yeah, yeah, the Jewish bread, challah.

[B]

I would have gone rye, but okay.

[A]

And she said, yeah, on Friday nights. And he said, oh, you mean for your seders. And she. So she came home, she said, in his world, there's a Jewish bread that they eat at the seders. And the seders happen every single week. Like that's. That could only have been cooked up by either a gentile who doesn't know Jews or by a four year old Jew who thinks seders are fun. Let's have one every single week.

[B]

It's either a gentile who doesn't know Jew or it's a breast lover who's like, every week should be a Seder.

[A]

Every week should a seder.

[B]

You know, who's about to have a Seder every week.

[A]

Who's that?

[B]

That would be Zvulun Simontov, the last Jew of Afghanistan who finally did the mental math and figured out that giving his wife a get was worth the trouble of getting the Fabrengan out of Kabul. He granted his wife divorce Bisha' Atova, finally. And now he's en route to New York City, Right?

[A]

So he actually was staying in Afghanistan so as to avoid giving his wife her halakhic divorce. Her Gad.

[B]

Charming man.

[A]

Charming man. Finally decided that living under the Taliban actually wasn't worth it. Why is he coming to. How did we luck out that he's moving to New York, Kabul, to Crown Heights.

[B]

That's your trajectory.

[A]

This is just brilliant. This is from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, quoting, I think, an article in New York Post. He left Afghanistan following the Taliban's takeover of the country. After at first rebuffing efforts to get him out, he now wants to start a new life in the New York City borough of Queens, where he has relatives. The New York Post reported on Saturday. I am a businessman. I'll do business there. Sibinto said in an interview with the Post. So he's, as we speak, he's touching down in Queens, right, where he's going to, you know, do a little business.

[B]

And two years from now, he will buy the Mets. Take us to Queens at once. Are you sure you guys want to go to Queens? I want Queens. Whatever you say, pal.

[A]

We really should check in with him. Like, he probably doesn't speak English. His skills have been honed entirely under the Taliban or US Occupation. Where is Zhulan Simmentov two years from now? In Forest Hills or Corona or wherever?

[B]

We will report and you will decide. Finally, before we move into the big item, I'm very excited, I have to tell you. I found, you know, I love buying books and sometimes reading them, but I found a new book that is just being published that is really the culmination of pretty much. If you wanted to see what my inner emotional life looked like, this is it in book form. It's a book. I'll tell you the title of the book and you will know exactly what the book is about. The book is called Ugly Belgian Houses, and the motto of the book is Better ugly than boring, which I think should be the official, you know, motto of the country of Belgium. It's by the artist Hannes Cudnes. From the great city of Bruges. It's just pictures of very ugly houses in Belgium. This is so wonderful. I can't even begin to tell you how much joy this brings me.

[A]

For listeners who have joined us in the last six months or so since we last picked on Belgium, every time we're. We're looking for a story for news of the Jews, every time we have a week where, you know, nothing seems to have happened. It never fails. Some story of anti Semitism in some small town in Belgium.

[B]

Belgium, the child rape capital of the world. Low country, low morals. This will never, ever get old. Despicable nation with ugly homes for those.

[A]

Who don't want to shell out $49.95 to buy ugly Belgian houses. It is based on the Instagram account Ugly Belgian houses, which has 150,000 followers. And you could be. You could be follower 150,001.

[B]

But Mark, this morning in the most important news, you had sent me an article that appeared in the New York Times, which really kind of touched upon a lot of things that we usually talk about. What was this wonderful op ed?

[A]

This is an op ed in the New York Times by the brilliant sociolinguist Deborah Tannen, who teaches at Georgetown and is the author of books like, you Just Don't Understand Women and Men in Conversation. And that's not what I mean about misunderstandings in conversation. And I love her work and I've talked about her work on the show before, but today, for no apparent reason, she restated one of her great theses in an op ed in the New York Times. And it actually, I know why now, because it's pretty timely. May I summarize the argument, Leo?

[B]

Please do.

[A]

Deborah Tannen coined the term, and again, we talked about this probably three years ago on the show, Cooperative overlapping to describe what some people call interrupting. And her great point is that actually what we think of negatively as interrupting is often in conversations, a way of signaling that you're listening. So if you're talking and someone stares at you blankly with no affect, waiting for you to finish, it's actually quite unnerving, right? The only way we can have warm, friendly conversation that makes us both feel listened to is if the person somehow signals, I'm listening, I'm listening, I'm listening. So they might nod. They might say, uh huh, uh huh. They might say, I know what you mean. They might say, say totally. There's all these ways we signal it, and one of them is by waiting for you to almost finish and then leaping in with your comment. And this is what friends do with each other. But one of her great insights is that it's actually cultural that some regions and some ethnicities interrupt more than others. So New Yorkers tend to step on each other's sentences more than say, people from Minnesota or California. Unsurprisingly, this codes. Unsurprisingly, this often codes as ethnic. Right. So Italian New Yorkers or Jewish American New Yorkers tend to step on each other's sentences more. There's more interrupting than say, Swedish Lutherans. Right. Because there tends to often be correlation with ethnicity. This isn't just limited to America. I mean, in her book, one of the really funny things is, and I'm going to get the specifics wrong, but that Swedes are always talking about how the Danish never stop interrupting and the Danes are like God, the Finns. I can't get a wording edgewise. Right. And so whenever people from different backgrounds or even different households come together, one of them is a little more interruptive than another. But her point is that in contemporary culture, all interrupting has been deemed bad because it's all about a power move. It's all about who's. Who's gonna own the room.

[B]

Men interrupting, women.

[A]

Yeah. It's seen, it's seen as powerful people not letting less powerful people speak, when in fact it's often people showing. I've been listening to you closely and I'm so intrigued by what you're saying that now I'm gonna say I can't even wait to respond because what you're saying is so interesting.

[B]

My synapses are on fire. I wan.

[A]

Want to talk. I was very early on this, this yacht. I was sailing this yacht really early, to coin a metaphor. A few years ago I said there is something vaguely, by the way, to.

[B]

Coin the most Oppenheimer metaphor ever. I was on this yacht early with my corduroys and my G Martini.

[A]

First on this yacht several years ago. I said when. When there was the. The whole thing about listening better, giving space to other people. I said, look, obviously there's some virtues here. Everyone should get to talk. We should always be mindful of whether everyone's getting a chance to. To speak. But I said there is something very anti Semitic about this discourse. In practice, maybe it's not intended that way, but in practice, what it's often saying is the Jew from New York, male or female, has to be less of the Jew from New York so that the Scotch Irish Protestant from North Carolina has a little more space.

[B]

Persecuted minorities that they are.

[A]

Yeah. And the reality is we have to find ways for both of them to feel that they have space. Asking people who have grown up in a culture where some level of interrupting is showing that you're engaged and is validating the person you're interrupting, asking them to sit back and sit on their hand and just be proper and bite their tongue the whole time actually is saying, don't be who you are. What's interesting about Deborah Tannen's op ed is she never uses the word Jew.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But it's like all over the op ed.

[B]

But we know. But we know what she's talking about. I agree with you completely. And it's not just asking people to not be who they are. It's also asking the conversation to not be what it could be. Because, you know, if you want more interesting conversations, you should encourage, as Tannen, I think, kind of tangentially makes, makes the point, you should encourage precisely this type of dynamic because it forces people to think on their feet, to be faster, to be more engaged, to be less afraid, less reserved. Which. Which brings us to another one of our beloved controversial takes on this here show, for which we continue to get hate mail, I think, five years later, which is the whole point of people who identify as introverts. Mark, how do you feel about introverts?

[A]

Well, I, you know, I, of course, famously have written op EDS about this myself. I, look, I'm married to an introvert. I love introverts. But we have been in the middle of this introverts rights movement. You know, the Susan Cain book Quiet, I think was what helped kick it off. And Jonathan Rauch with his essay about tending to your introvert. And one of the things that I, the points I wanted to make is like, look, I mean, introverts are great, first of all. Introvert, extrovert. There's no neat binary. Everyone has hours of the day when they're more one than the other. Right. I mean, Leo, you more than anyone I know you like 25 hours alone to just sit and read. You know, Marcel Proust and Henry Green. I mean, you're not someone who needs to.

[B]

And Henry Green, yeah, that's true.

[A]

You're not someone who needs to be out there talking, talking, talking all the time. But there are realms of society that depend on their extroverts. Right? It's hard to run a good. Frankly, it's hard to run a good seminar and teach people. If everyone there is an introvert, you really need your extroverts for some of that. And I think over the past few years we've been kind of on the defensive and getting a bit of a bum rap, right?

[B]

And I don't think it's just layers of society. I think, look, human interaction is hard at any point, even if it's with your closest friends. There's an innate challenge to being with other people. It takes work, it takes a certain level of performance, it takes a certain level of emotional investment. And even for those like yourself, like myself, who've been blessed with absolutely no filters and could just go into an environment and talk to everyone still, you know, I bet you, you know that feeling, right? That you come home from a super nice dinner party where you genuinely had a good time and you feel completely spent. Cause you worked hard, you told interesting stories, you told jokes, you listened, you asked questions, you engage. That is a level of work. And I can't tell you how mad it makes me that today it's seemingly completely okay for people to come in and just sit in the corner very quietly and be, no, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna put in this work. Well, then don't be in society. It's like a mask mandate. You wanna be in society, you have to be an extrovert. If not, stay home, stay home. You don't have a talk vaccine.

[A]

Go away. I will say, first of all, I completely agree. Like, the idea that somehow we're not enervated and spent by having to engage other people is false. Nothing. And I've had this conversation with other journalists, right? Nothing is more exhausting than going and doing a few hours of interviews and having to listen actively and having to respond and having to nod and having to cooperatively overlap and, and say, I know what you mean. It is exhausting. And I do tell my kids, you know, you are responsible to be part of the conversation. I also tell them you have. And I don't always succeed, but I do tell them when you are in the room with someone new, you have to walk up to them and say, I'm so and so, what's your name? Like you have to do it. It is part of the work. And when you expressed your bit of pique at people who come to the dinner party and then sit in a corner and their spouse says, oh, sorry, you know, he's an introvert. I was literally at a dinner party, I'm going to say, about three weeks ago, where there was a couple where one of them did a lot of talking and the other one did not say a word the entire time. And not only that, but this other one. And I'll say they. The gender of each of these partners is not important. I don't know what your presuppositions are, but probably you'd be wrong. The other partner, they not only did not talk, they looked, but they did a kind of robotic, owl like, impassive look where you thought, are you judging? Instead of, you know, smiling with their eyes smizing, as Tyra Banks used to say on her show. Instead of nodding, instead of laughing when other people laughed, they just looked and stared at you, barely blinking. And you thought, do I have food stuck in my teeth? Am I saying something offensive? What is going on? And it was so socially inappropriate. It made my night so much worse that there was this. And by the way, this is someone who in their professional life has to talk all the time, has to relate to people. This is not someone who can't do that, because I know there are people who are not neurotypical in that way. There are people. For him, this is very hard. And you always want to be mindful of that. This is someone who actually is quite charming and quite chatty. Just didn't feel like it this night. This person was, was gathering this person's resources, was having a bit of recoulement that night, just, just in gathering their, their, their chi. And can I also say something? Two things. One, you can stay home, right?

[B]

Yep. You don't have to go to dinner parties.

[A]

You don't have to go to dinner parties.

[B]

There's no dinner party mandate.

[A]

I mean, Zev Yolan Simmentov left Afghanistan to escape the Taliban's dinner party mandate. He didn't want.

[B]

He was so hardcore there.

[A]

You don't have to go to dinner parties.

[B]

It's like you have to have cocktails at five every day. I was like, oh, no.

[A]

The other thing is that's a country you would actually move to.

[B]

Oh, my God, in a heartbeat.

[A]

The other thing is you can say to people, you know, I'm really sorry, I'm tired tonight, and forgive me that I'm not being very chatty. One sentence just shows I'm with you. I'm spiritually with you. I mean, I have someone I'm very, very close to, is not comfortable hugging and says to people who go in for a hug, puts up their hand and says, I'm sorry, I don't hug. May I offer you a handshake? Or in Covid times, you know, may I offer you a bow or a smile? And people are, this is a young person as a child and people are super charmed. People say that is so great that you vocalize your needs that way. And it is, it's a beautiful thing.

[B]

But see, but, but that's communication, that's talking, that's interacting and engaging. Well, listeners, join us next week when Mark and I tell you how difficult it is for both of us to be as handsome as we are.

[A]

Join us next week as we talk about the travails of having our level of wit and charisma.

[B]

It's very hard to be us.

[A]

Oh, boo hoo.

[B]

Let me play a sad song for you on the world's smallest violin.

[A]

Bessie.

[B]

Serious. I know. This really is the world's smallest violin.

[C]

See.

[A]

Hey, J. Crew, it's Mark here and Hanukkah season is upon us. We want you to give to us and we want to give to you. We are for the first time in quite a while because we took a break during COVID from this sort of schnorm, we are launching a fund drive. I am going to invite you to do this to go to Bit ly givetounorthodox. That's bit ly givetounorthodox and give some amount. We are much more interested in you giving something whether it's $10 or $18 or 1,800. And all I'm gonna say is you have our gratitude however much you give. If you give 180 or above, you can also choose a book to receive. It could be my book, Squirrel Hill. It could be Lielle's biography of Stan Lee, the comic book creator. It could be the newest Jewish encyclopedia or it could be tablet magazine's hundred most Jewish foods, which is a wonderfully baffo beautiful book for foodies. So look, just go to Bit ly givetounorthodox. Any amount gets you included in our total. And we want to get to 1000 donors which is what we had the last time we did this. That will really just mean a lot to us. Can we get to a thousand people willing to give something? And then again if it's 180 or more, you get to select the gift book of your choice from a little drop down window. Bit ly giveto unorthodox. Give 180 or more and you get to select your book from the dropdown window. Give anything and you have a place in the world to come and thank you. Jacques Berlinerblau. Unimprovably named Jacques Berlinerblau. His actual name is Phil Berlinerblau, but you don't get tenure as Phil.

[B]

His actual name is Jeff Hamburg, but Jacques Berliner Blau was much better.

[A]

His actual name is Ari Weinstein, but he thought Jacques Berlinerblau sounded a little bit more tenurable at Georgetown. He's the author of several books, including most recently, the Philip Roth We Don't Sex, Race, and Autobiography, which is a book filled with fighting words. It's a sassy, racy book in which he talks about Roth and race, Roth and MeToo. And recently he talked with Leah Leibowitz.

[B]

For a sassy, racy conversation. Professor Jacques Berlinerbaugh, welcome to the show, Liel.

[C]

Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

[B]

The pleasure is all mine. A brief kind of footnote. You and I met originally because of our shared complicated relationship, I should say, to Philip Rothschild. You had graciously invited me to partake in a panel celebrating, I believe is, what was it then, 80th birthday. And I then came out and said some very uncharitable things about the American Jewish community's favorite living author at the time. And here you are some years later with this really, really, really remarkable book that I would like to discuss at length. But before we do, help us understand it, you say at some point that this is a reverse biography. It's an attempt to make sense of the author's life by reading the work. What is it that you're trying to do in this book, and why choose this particular way to do it?

[C]

I wanted to go coast to coast on him. I felt there was an insight to be gleaned by starting in 1952 and going to 2009, 2010. So from the Box of Trudes, which is his Bucknell Juvenile, very unfortunate little short story, to the very final thing he wrote, I was being kind of a sociologist from literature. I was saying, okay, what are the patterns? What things keep happening in his fiction? That's what I wanted to get at. What I wanted to avoid is what I call Rothean path dependency. That means asking the same questions about Philip Roth that Philip Roth kept asking and answering in his own fiction, which will bring us back to reverse biography. He's asking himself these questions about himself. It's an orgy of narcissism, but it's actually quite good and quite interesting when it's good, given what he did for the genre of autofiction. So my remit was to ask very different questions. And in all honesty, it's very hard to do that because he is the most canvassed American writer in the post World War II period. So to ask an original question is very hard, but I tried and I think I got a few good shots in there. I think a couple of things came through that are pretty new and fresh about Philip Ross.

[B]

Do you have a set of ideas of notions of curiosities in your head? Are you saying to yourself, I am now going to try and pretend like I've never heard about this guy Phil, and I'm just going to give him a first shot and see what my scholarly mind takes me?

[C]

I think one question I was starting to ask is how come my students are no longer vibing with Philip Milton Ross? So it's kind of your question, right? They weren't feeling him, right? So in the 90s, it was like high fives everywhere. People were laughing. They loved the guy. In the aughts, there was Demurel. There were two or three grave voices. And over the last five to 10 years, and this is where I started. I started writing it in 2017. I started writing it 2013. I started thinking about it. The students were like in a state of revolt. I even wrote a little piece, which will be published soon, about a classroom insurrection I endured. So the question I wanted to ask is, all right, so what's his legacy? If this young generation is not feeling Philip Roth, what's going to become of his oeuvre, which is pretty massive? And then there were questions about professorial responsibility, like, what is my job in the classroom? Am I a cheerleader? You know, give me a P, give me an oh, like what is my job as an academician? And I kind of concluded glumly that I had to listen to these very smart students that I was teaching at Georgetown University, because what they were saying was real. And I started listening extremely carefully to the voices in particular of women and of African American students who were expressing admiration but also tremendous concern and difficulty with a lot of his prose.

[B]

Somewhere, I assume, a bearded, middle aged, cantankerous, right of center, hypothetical listener is listening and saying, oh, that's because today's students are just a bunch of woke babies who need trigger warnings and can't accept great literature and need everything to be hyper politicized. Address this. I mean, might some of the critique that students have been feeling have to do with this kind of political faddishness, especially on college campuses?

[C]

The previous book I wrote, Campus Confidential, which was about professors and the lives of professors. One thing I noticed is for about half a millennia, professors have been calling their students dipshits. All right? So this has been going on since the Reformation. And I guess I didn't want to be that professor. I don't want to be the professor that looks at a bunch of 18 to 22 year olds and says, God, they fail on so many levels compared to my generation, which was awesome. We were so. Because my professors were saying it about me. So the epistemological starting point is, listen very carefully to what these kids are saying, because it would be a cliche not to. I wouldn't call them a woke mob. I have real issues with these ideas of cancel culture and social justice warriors. They were struggling with it. They were struggling to understand why Roth. I'm going to go into my moralistic mode, right? Why did Roth play that rape? In the final scene of Portnoy's Complaint, for laughs, Alex Portnoy is impotent in Israel. He brings an expatriate American by the name of Naomi back to his hotel room for purposes of sexual predation. She wants absolutely none of it and starts lecturing him on the failures of diaspora American Jews such as himself, right? In a rage, Alex Portnoy physically throws her to the ground and tries to rape her. And I guess the kicker is that she beats him up, right? She stands above him and she kicks him on his chest. So when I read that scene in the 90s, a lot of students would laugh. All the students would laugh. They found it very funny. In the aughts, there were the demuros that I mentioned. And by the last couple of years, the first impulse of students, men and women, is, this is not funny, man. This is a rape. I don't want to read this. All right? In my life as a man, there's a scene where Peter Chartpole tries to murder his wife. It's very graphic, it goes on for pages. And he is absolutely a bullion as he's striking her. All right, so the questions that the students were raising is, well, wait a second, what is going on here, Professor, Is he like that Philip Roth? And this is where things get really complicated, because we now know, I feel. I feel that what the book is establishing is we now have a platform to say, yeah, unless proven otherwise, it probably is autobiographical. So what do we do with that scene where he nearly murders this woman who he later tells us was modeled on his first wife, Margaret Martinson Williams? This is where the really uncomfortable MeToo questions arise. What is the relationship between reality and what we see in the fiction? And what we see in the fiction is very troubling. Hey, but it's just Fiction, Right, Leo? But what if it's not? What if, again and again, he kept importing scenes from his real life into his writing?

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Doesn't mean we have to cancel him. I think we have to think very carefully about what type of aesthetic literary operation is occurring and what we as readers are processing as we encounter this literature.

[B]

At the heart of the book is a question which has occupied, I think, anyone from grad students on balmy afternoons to serious thinkers and philosophers, which is really the connection between art and morality. I wanna read one sentence that comes pretty early in your book, I think, does a pretty good job of expressing the position that you take. It's not that immorality trumps aesthetics, but that immoral conduct and aesthetics must be intertwined by us, the conscientious audience. This means that once we learn incriminating information about an artist, our understanding of his or her art changes radically. Which I think is a feeling that many of us get when we listen, for example, to Michael Jackson these days or watch Roman Polanski movies. Say more about this reckoning. Has this always been your position? Has this been a question that troubled you? Is this something you're new to tell us how you've come to see your way around this question?

[C]

That was all these really interesting MeToo writers, they brought me around to this point, and I'm speaking about folks like Claire Dederer. I hope I'm pronouncing the name correctly. Rachel Cusk, Amanda Hess. And what I understood reading them is they're not trying to cancel anyone. That is not their impulse. Which is why I get worried about woke social justice mobs and cancel culture references. That's not what these theorists are trying to do. What they're arguing is when we consume a work of art, we can't be naive. We really have to think more carefully about the art. So in the case of Michael Jackson, you know, so mama se, mama samawakusa, right? Prior to seeing was it called Return to Neverland, the HBO documentary where it is alleged that Jackson committed all sorts of pedophilic atrocities Prior to seeing that documentary, I might have been like, mama sei, mama sama. I might have been like that, right? But now I'm like, mama sey, mama sama, makusa. I'm still there. I still feel the groove. I still like his music. But my pistons are firing in my mind, and that's good. That, to me, is a much more sophisticated aesthetic response than these idiotic, you know, art ennobles us. Art is a universal language. The title of my first chapter, Liel, is Art is Slimy. I take that word from Roth. So I feel I'm a better critic now if I know these sad details about their lives. And I think about the art much, much more carefully. I do feel that MeToo at its best is trying to demand from us a more intellectual, profound, disturbing encounter with the work of art. And that's great. That's what every literary critic, every music critic, every professor of art history. That's what we want to elicit from our students. And by reading this body of work on MeToo, it made me think that this is what I should be doing vis a vis Philip Roth.

[B]

Permit me now to commit the uncharitable act of trying to bind you with your own rope. And I'll do this, of course, like every good CIS man should, by talking about myself. The reason that I have always disliked Philip Roth, the reason I continue to dislike Philip Roth and the reason why your book delighted me, because it was as if someone actually took all my inchoate hunches and then actually went and did the work to confirm literally every single one of them, is because I felt from very first blush that there was something deeply uncharitable, deeply unkind, deeply cutting, deeply self centered, deeply nasty about humanity, which is a condition that I actually think makes not only for terrible human beings, but also for terrible art. Art being not just slimy, but in some cases an ultimate manifestation of ourselves. So my questions are several. First of all, then, why do we necessarily need the perspectives of, shall we say, identity politics, to use a very large catchphrase, to come to this conclusion? Why can't we simply say, well, we dislike this person not just because he's horrible to certain segments of the population, but basically because his ability to empathize and care for other human beings in a very real way is clearly lacking. This is clearly an autoerotic journey that this man has embarked on for 60 odd years and we don't care for that. Let's start there.

[C]

So I think we have a fundamental epistemological, ontological disagreement about what art should be doing. I think you're saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, Leo, that it should be kind of celebrating and uplifting and making us better people. Whereas I prefer one way of thinking of what great art does as it speaks the unspeakable. It tells us a truth that no other, be it politics, economics, social science, anthropology, they can't tell us the truth. That fiction and fiction alone, by the way, For Roth can tell us. So I don't even know if we're disagreeing. I think Roth never wanted to uplift. Roth never wanted to make us better people. He wanted to testify, using his considerable talent as a writer to what the world was like. And that's one great way of measuring a writer.

[B]

But ended up talking only about himself, right?

[C]

Yeah. Using himself as a universal. Which is really problematic in some of my later chapters. Right. He has all these theories about what is going on inside, inside a mind. And it's like he's using Philip Milton Roth as the universal subject by which all others can be mentioned. That's problematic. I'm not saying he succeeded in the project, but I think that's a good artistic project to say this is what life is like. And only through the medium of make believe, which is really important. Can I explain it to you, the reader, the checkoff line. We don't have to solve the problem, we have to correctly identify the problem. And I think Roth often does this. Right. He doesn't give us a solution to moral conundrum. He says, well, here's the moral conundrum. Do with it what you will, but my characters, this character did this and this character did that, and it's not my job. I'm not a priest, I'm not a rabbi. Right?

[B]

But look, by no means am I saying that art's work or job or goal is to lift or beautify or praise. I agree with you. I think your definition was very beautiful. Its job is to speak the unspeakable truths. I think that per. That the Berliner Blauwian principle, if you will. Roth fails miserably because all he does, and you show this better than I think anyone has because you do the scholarly work. Again, all he does is examine the increasingly darker, increasingly more intimate chambers of Philip Milton Roth, which he then arrogantly speaks, stupidly, venereally mistakes for humanity. It is almost impossible not to compare this with Bellow, which I think is a comparison that ran very parallel to Roth's entire career and not to his benefit. Bellow transcends. Bellow makes an attempt to tell us larger universal truths. Bellow makes an attempt to connect. He makes attempts to empathize. And this, to me, is where great art comes or goes. It doesn't have to be pretty or nice or easy to read or gratifying or. Or even particularly moving. But if it doesn't stem from a great source of empathy, as for example, Michael Jackson music surely absolutely does, then it's not good Art. And that's my point. I finished your book saying, like, right, that's actually why I think that Philip Roth wasn't just a probably terrible human being, but really shitty writer.

[C]

Wow. That wasn't the intention. I wanted people to be more along the lines of what those MeToo writers taught me is to bring in Roth's messy, choppy, personal relationships with women and think about how they informed the works of art that he produced. And then think more. Go to some meta mode where you're really thinking about all the interrelations between what Rolf said and what Rolf did and what Zuckerman, who's not quite Roth. And I like being in that space because it's a very contemplative space and it's a very like being up in a cloud somewhere. And I want art to induce that reaction in me. Is there great, timeless, unchanging work in Roth? I'd say there's a little. I want to point you to the ghostwriter, which I think is just a beautiful, beautiful story. I'd also point you to the Anatomy Lesson, which has real lessons for us on pain. By the way, it's often said that the Anatomy Lesson, it's the only time that a Rothian character actually shows empathy for somebody else's suffering. I mean, there might be a few other examples, but you're onto something. Where's the empathy? Where's the love? Where's the feeling at the very end of the Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman, who's like, strung out on vikes and cocaine and pot and he's just had his jaw smashed and he's walking through the ward of a hospital and he sees this big plastic bin where they put the soiled gowns. And he puts his hands in and he touches all the human fluids, right? And then he looks at a woman that has a quarter sized hole in her jaw. I don't know what affliction she had. And he thinks about the pain that she's suffering. And maybe we're. We're kind of on the same wave here wavelength, because I love that scene. It's like Zuckerman finally gets out of himself and he looks at somebody else's pain and he says, oh, my God, this is. This is terrible. And he wants to connect with the suffering of other people by putting his physical body in with their fluids and their viscera and so on and so forth. So I hear what you're saying. There is a lack of empathy there on the level of the sentence. Do you think he's a great Writer. This is what I would do with a cantankerous undergraduate such as yourself.

[B]

On the level, treat me precisely like one.

[C]

Do you find beautiful sentences?

[B]

Yes, and it upsets me more. This is precisely why I so deeply despise Billy Joel, for example, who I've called in print the Donald Trump of pop music. It's precisely because Billy Joel, on the level of songwriting, right, could construct such beautiful melodies that listening to his self centered, dismissive, mean spirited, caustic lyrics time and again and again and again offends me more. If Philip Roth was a mediocre writer, I would say, well, okay, this is just again the rantings of some second main. It is precisely because the divine gift, and being somewhat of a believer, I do believe that this gift of stringing together sentences comes from a higher authority. That all that is wasted on effluvia is deeply troubling to me. But I want to return you back to the classroom for a second.

[C]

We're at a great point here. Hold on, hold on. So I'm going to push back on you. What should one endowed with these God given gifts of aesthetic expression and articulation do with them? And I think what you're saying, it's very Jesuitical that I celebrate God, Tell the truth. Tell the truth and celebrate God might not be ide.

[B]

I think we're having a belief. Not to a believer, obviously.

[C]

Right, okay. So we've hit. We've gotten to the source of the problem. We have diagrammed the problem beautifully.

[B]

I believe we have. But I actually kind of wanted to turn that question 36 degrees north and ask you this question. So how does writing this book, or does writing this book change the way that you not only approach literature but also teach it? When you take other books now that you teach your students, undergrads and grads alike, like, do you begin with some kind of disclaimer saying, well, first of all, let us examine the premise of what it is that we want books in general to do.

[C]

Roth is unusual. He's as singular as the Sphinx. There's something really unusual about this guy in French, glande a wink. He's always winking at you. Oh, is it me? Is it not me? Ah, you thought it was me, but it's not. He's playing this three card Monty game with his identity. I don't know how translatable Philip Roth is to other American writers. Now, obviously, right. There's plot development, there's character development, and, you know, parataxis and all the things that literature professors do. But Roth is a singular writer. What has changed for me is a real dislike of winner take all artistic cultures. Right. I am realizing the degree to which Philip Roth occupied a perch in American letters for decades. And he's a great writer. I'm never going to tell you, but there were other great writers that could have been winning those National Book Awards, right, that could have been winning those Pulitzers. And I find that I want to read the writers that I look at much more carefully and with much more generosity and ask about, could this person have been fetid, like a Rolf? I have this almost sense of guilt that I devoted all my time, as did so many, to the works of this one excellent writer. But I failed in my critical responsibility of introducing other great writers to my undergraduates. So I'm much more cognizant of who I'm putting on the syllabus. And I'm trying to give more of a platform to different writers, writers that you might not have heard of previously.

[B]

I actually want to end on this exact note that you just mentioned as you helped us arrive at this important understanding of the nuanced interplay between morality and aesthetics. Give us one or two writers, free us, if you will, from Philip Milton Roth. Give us one or two writers that we could take with us and truly be moved and transformed by Marlon James.

[C]

In a Brief History of Seven Killings. And I believe it's called Book of the Night Women. Oh, my gosh, is that writing? And it would be very hard to see the narcissism there. I'm not a Marlon James scholar, but that the poetry, the mastery of dialects, the ability to zoom out and think about the human condition, not just the condition of enslaved African persons, but the human condition and human folly. He's a great writer, right? So Marlon James is somebody I'm very, very eager to bring to my students attention. There's a Chinese writer who visited my class because of a connection. She wrote a wonderful short story called Folding Beijing. And it's this work of science fiction about Beijing in the future, where poor people only get to be awake eight hours a day, something like that. They have to work six of those eight hours, and then Beijing flips over, right? And the wealthy get to enjoy the sunlight, and they have a kind of Tribeca sort of existence. So there are all these phenomenal writers, right? I was reading Rachel Cusk, and my first encounter with Rachel Cusk, the trilogy was not, whoa. But it was like, I got to do this again now, right? I've got to read it a second Time. Because there's something there which is really, really good and I don't understand it yet. So platforming other writers, writers who are not white Jewish American males, I know you don't like that type of logical configuration is something that I think I need to do morally. I can't read Roth anymore, as can you. I mean, I just can't read them. I've been doing this now for so long. I've learned a lot. I love the work, unlike you. I think there's a lot there for us to take with us. Leah.

[B]

Professor Jacques Berliner Blanc, I would like to thank you deeply and truly. You've alluded to something in the beginning of our conversation, and I want to conclude with this remark. It is not often at all that a scholar and an academic embarks on work that is not just, shall we say, myopic, but actually grapples with large and truly meaningful questions. This book is one of them. It was a pleasure to read and it was a pleasure having you on the show, Leo.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Hannah Stein portrays Ben Gross's popular girlfriend Shira Liedman on Netflix's Never have I Ever. She sat down to talk to our very own Mark Oppenheimer.

[A]

Hannah Stein, great to have you here. Thank you for being with us.

[D]

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Also, I gotta give a shout out to my dad real quickly because he was listening to the episode with Jaron and. And you guys were like, yeah, you're the only Jew on the show. And my dad's like, no, no. And she's my daughter.

[A]

Well, what's great is he totally. He. He lobbed it into Facebook. He was like, great episode, guys. But hello, my daughter's a Jew on the show. Like, well, hook us up. Let's. We'd love to interview your daughter.

[D]

My dad listens to you guys religiously. No pun intended.

[A]

I have so many questions I want to ask you because I'm fascinated. As somebody who's been pretty immersed in the New York writer world and has friends in the New York theater world, but very New York centric, I'm fairly obsessed with the LA culture and the way Hollywood drives everything. So I have a lot of questions about that. But I do just want to. I have one more question about this show in particular and this character. And we talked to Jaron a little bit about this, which is that obviously Jews don't always have to be portrayed as, you know, perfect human beings. Our podcast basically exists to prove that we aren't. But did you have any Misgivings about basically playing the jazz. To be perfectly crude about it.

[D]

No, but it's. It's the reality though, right? So my high school was full of Jewish American princesses. That was the reality of the popular girls. And it's funny because I feel like I didn't really fit the molds. Like, they would come to school in their brand new Jeeps and their Blackberries. My parents gave me my grandpa's old 1992 minivan. So it really goes into the bigger question of, like, is any stereotype fair? I wasn't bothered by it, to be honest, because I was like, that was my high school experience. And I think it's an honest portrayal of it. Being a young girl in high school nowadays in a wealthy Jewish community. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of great Jews in high school that aren't in the Jewish American princess world.

[A]

No, for sure. You were one. I was one. I get what you're saying. I mean, of course, one of the things about Never have I ever is it's unsparing with its portrayal of the Tamil community. I mean, Davy, it's not like they make, you know, greater Tamil American culture so gorgeous and flawless. They don't. They start right there and they're really kind of brutal about it. So you're from Detroit, right?

[D]

Yes.

[A]

Take me back to when you decided you wanted to be an actor. Take us on the journey.

[D]

I was actually 11 years old on Pelee Island. It's an island in Canada where my family has a cottage. And there was this tiny little community theater of all the locals, which is like 10 people on the island. And our neighbor was like, just come with me. Just come with me. It would be fun. I went, we did this little cute Snow White kind of remake. And I was like, I'm sold. I love this. I love becoming other people. I went to college and I was at CMU Central Michigan. But so I wasn't getting to where I wanted to go through that process. And I just called my parents up and I was like, I don't know how, but I'm going to LA this summer. I was 18. I got an internship at Sony Pictures Entertainment. And I just learned the process from the business side to pre production to audio editing. And I loved it. I was like, this is where I need to be. And I was that intern that walked into the CEO of television's office being like, hi, I'm Hannah the intern. I have an idea for a movie. You want to hear it? Like 99% chance, you could totally call security and fire me. But actually it was Steve Moscow at the time, and he's still a mentor of Min this day. And he kind of smiled and was like, write it and I'll read it. And this was actually my papa's immigration story. Immigrating from Poland to Canada, escaping the Holocaust. And to be honest, telling my papa's story drove me into writing. I want to be a multi hyphenate. I want to write. I want to produce an act. And then I kind of worked my way up through Sony. I became a development consultant at Crackle. So I dropped out of school also. So not promoting that. But, you know, everybody has their own path at Crackle. I was reading like 10 to 15 scripts a day. And Crackle at the time was Sony's digital platform, like their Hulu. And then I went to the Cannes Film festival. This is 2015 now. And I just was. It was such an amazing, innovative process. I was like, I can write my own things. I have stories to tell. So I left there and became a cocktail server and writer by day, cocktail server by night. You know, the whole Hollywood dream. And. Yeah. And that's when I started writing my papa's story. And I would love to share it with you.

[A]

Yeah. What's your. Give me the pitch. What's your papa's story?

[D]

So I'm just gonna. So the. The real story behind it is my great grandfather left Poland, lied, and said he was a single man to get into Canada. He turns around and is like, oh, wait, I want to get my family in. And they're like, no, we can deport you. So then he fought for five years to get them accepted, and he went to a mental institution when he just realized all hope was lost. That's the all hope is lost part of the movie. Then he sees a picture of a woman named Lillian Freeman, who was a prominent Jew at the time, and he wrote her letter. And she went to the prime minister who went to parliament. That got my papa's case overturned, and they got accepted.

[A]

I'm sold. And you've written the script?

[D]

I've written the script. And I've written an anthology series about it as well, with my now boyfriend, Aaron Golden. He's a very talented Canadian writer. Canadian Jewish writer.

[A]

We love the Canadian Jews.

[D]

So it's so funny because he met my papa. My papa's still alive. He's 93. And, you know, my papa was happy that he was a Jew. But then Aaron starts talking about growing up in Canada, and he's like, you're Canadian.

[A]

Canadians are like Princeton alumni and people who own little dogs, which is. They don't shut up about it. They are just like, they're all in. So, okay, so you're a multi hyphenate. You're still going on auditions, I'm guessing, because you book. Never have I ever.

[D]

Oh, dude, I'm doing everything. I'm doing voiceover. I'm doing regular auditions. I'm trying to get two TV shows off the ground. It is a daily hustle.

[A]

And this is my question, right? Cause I know what a freelance writer's life looks like. And largely, it's like you sit in coffee shops and hope that more famous, successful writers don't walk in and make you jealous. And you send a lot of emails and maybe you write something for an hour. My image of Hollywood, and again, this is purely unfair. Is like, you know, Pilates in the. That you all have to look good all the time, right? So I imagine that you book several hours of just physical self improvement a day. Male, female, you've all got to have six packs.

[D]

Everyone goes to Equinox. Are you kidding? You want famous people. I don't. It's expensive. I do Pilates. I'm basic.

[A]

And do you worry about. But I've had friends who've gone out there and said, like, yeah, my agent said I had to bulk up £20 or lose £20 or whatever. It's so brutal. How do you work that into your routine where you're also trying to write stuff?

[D]

Working out, like, having that hour to take care of myself. I know it's like such an LA answer, but truly is my release of anxiety, to be honest, especially even during the pandemic, I had no control over anything like everybody else in the world. And running outside for an hour, even though it was with the mask, it was like, okay, this is my release. And then I also meditate. I did ayahuasca when I. Oh, can I share that? Is that okay?

[A]

Absolutely. This just got even better. It's too bad Lielle's not here. Who's a serious druggie. Tell us about the ayahuasca journey. When? Where?

[D]

So this was July 2020 in Colorado. I had gone with some friends to Colorado, and we met, and their mutual friends were the owners of a CBD company. And then we're talking about, you know, they just do this retreat that was the next weekend, and there was a spot available. It was like, okay, I'll go to the woods and do ayahuasca with strangers. That sounds Safe, Totally. So then I went and it was a three day ceremony.

[A]

First of all, was it awesome?

[D]

It was. There's a misconception about ayahuasca. It does not fix you. You don't come out of it being like, I'm in enlightenment. It opens the door, but you have to do a lot of work. So it was a three day ceremony and it was led by a professional shaman from Peru. And it was really, really beautiful. But it was also very intense. Like everybody has their own journey with it. And for me, going into it, it opened a lot of wounds that then I need in the aftermath of it, I had to go and do a lot of self work. And it was interesting because I came out of Colorado and this is July of 2020, L.A. shut down again. So I come back and the world's like on fire is what it felt like. And I was like, whoa, I'm trying to heal. And then we're shut down and I can't see people. It was an interesting experience to say the least.

[A]

And so when you're doing your meditation, we got there because you were talking about Pilates and meditation.

[D]

For me, working out and meditation is something I need to do to stay connected just with myself because I am in such a crazy, superficial field that I need to do something that I feel is just for me.

[A]

So connect that to the intellectual piece of it. You're writing scripts. How do you learn to write a script? Do you go read a bunch of scripts? Well, you'd read thousands of scripts.

[D]

I've read thousands of scripts. I've read scripts that have a similar format to what I want to make. I just learn from watching writers. I love Aaron Sorkin.

[A]

I was going to say, who's the gold standard? Who are your heroes in this, in the work you want to. To do?

[D]

Well, Mindy Kaling, the way she breaks down a story though she is, she's brilliant. And Lane Fisher, both our creators of the show. Aaron Sorkin, Christopher Nolan, the writer of Crash, Paul Haggit. I'm a fan of Paul Haggit. But in terms of, like, getting back to what writing's like, honestly, what you just described, sitting at a fancy coffee shop, having an overpriced latte, sending emails that are probably going to spam and then probably writing for an hour, then going home. That is the life of a writer. And then you do your other five odd jobs that you do to make money. Like, for instance, we have a pilot about female empowerment. That's all I can say because it's still under wraps, in development with a great production company and we've been in pre development with them now for a year.

[A]

And does that mean they're giving you money? Like where are you getting money aside from. So you have residuals from Never have I Ever.

[D]

I have residuals from Never have I Ever. I do a lot of the O work, so video games. You just have to be frugal, to be honest, because my role, my reoccurring guest star role, you know, it doesn't make you livable money.

[C]

Right, right, right.

[D]

So yeah, you just have to be frugal. You have to have a lot of pots on the fire. And so we're in pre production, right. And we just were told we have to do a one page rewrite. So that means to completely rewrite the pilot and we're not getting paid for it yet. That's the reality though. And how me and my co writer look at it is, is just, it's a whim for us to be even working with such a prestigious company. There are so many writers out here that wish they could have a meeting with these people. And so you have to give yourself, especially in this industry, those little wins that, okay, it didn't sell, but I got to have this person read my work.

[A]

How do you think at this point in your life about being Jewish?

[D]

Such an interesting question. So through writing my papa story, which we're now writing as an anthology series. The first season, you know, focusing on the closed door politics of Canada and my great grandfather fighting that to get his family accepted. So I've spent years interviewing my papa, researching and I've been to Israel about three times. And when I was 15, my dad sent me on the team mission, which is a bunch of young youths going together in your community. And before the trip, I was like, dad, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in this. You know, I'm bat mitzvah, of course, and also my mom's Catholic. So we were raised Jewish, but we had as secondary holidays, we would do Christmas, we were those Jews. And I went to Israel for a month. I felt like I was thrown into Judaism and it was such an incredible experience. And I came back and I was like, dad, I'm so proud to be Jewish. And he was like, oh, it worked. But, but for me now, after doing all this research and spending so much time understanding where my family came from and the sacrifice they went through, I'm very proud to be Jewish and I can't wait to go to Israel again now that I have all this education. I mean, it's a continuous learning process for me. Right. Especially with what just happened over this past summer with the politics in Israel. It was really hard for me to see the silence across social media for Jews on a global scale. And they were blaming Jews worldwide for a government's decision in Israel. And it was really upsetting to me. And I actually read letters to my Palestinian neighbor by Yossi Klein Halevi because it's a constant learning process. And I wanted to understand, I wanted to understand why they were so much hate and why can't we find a common ground? And I'm not an expert. I'm still learning. But yeah, to answer your question, I'm very proud to be part of this community. I'm a reformed, more secular Jew. I look at it more as a community of people with, of course, our roots of where we come from. I'm very proud.

[A]

Hannah Stein, you play Shira in Never have I Ever. You are a fabulous human and Jew and multi hyphenate who taught me that new word today. And I'm so glad that you came on Unorthodox to be our Jew of the Week and represent the Midwest and Canadian niceness for the world.

[D]

Oh, thank you. I'm such a fan of the show. Honestly, it makes me feel like a better Jew. Listening.

[A]

Improving people's Jewish souls everywhere since 2015. Thanks so much. Mazel tov's gratitude. Farewell. Thank yous. Peace outs. Shalom Shaloms. Liel, whom do you want to speak to this week?

[B]

I would like to say farewell to two fine Jews from across the pond, as they say. The first is Mervyn Taylor, who passed away this week at the age of 89. He was the first Jewish person to serve as a cabinet minister in Ireland. He was a champion of women's rights and of other disadvantaged people and a much beloved politician, which is not something you hear often. And the same week we lost the great Sheila Bromberg, a Jewish harpist who was the first woman ever to play on a Beatles album. Bruch.

[A]

I have a farewell and a mazel tower. A farewell to the Schmaltz Brewing Company, which is an upstate New York company. It began in 1996. It called itself the Chosen Beer and apparently it is no more. The final version I read of its Jewish beer is called Bittersweet Lenny's Ripa.

[B]

Named I hope after Lenny Dykstra.

[A]

I should hope so.

[B]

Not a Jew, but a great friend of us all.

[A]

And this would be a great chance to talk about our super listener sonja Leicham's brewery. I of course wear her he brew shirt all the time and you know, the more Jewish brewing. I'm not a huge beer drinker, but I will drink Jew brews and a big mazel tov to my daughter Elisabeth's close friend from summer camp, Leora Wilkins, who became a Bat Mitzvah the other day. She had had her Bat Mitzvah postponed a couple times and finally came to the Torah and read from the Torah and read Haftorah and led services including part of Hallel and and just did a beautiful job last Shabbat. So mazel tov to the whole Wilkins family. Unorthodox Brought to you by tablet magazine on the web at tabletmag.com subscribe to our newsletter or send us your [e-mail] you can also call us and leave us a voicemail, preferably of 160 seconds. 914-570-4869. We often come to you live, so to book us or advertise with us, email producer Josh Cross. That's Cross with a K A Tablet message. To buy our swag, go to Bit Ly Unorthoshirt. You can join our Facebook group and follow us on Twitter or Instagram. Our show is produced by Josh Cross and Sarkara Van Eider, Associate produced by Robert Scaramuccia, arted up by Esther Wertiger, theme musiced by Golem Mailbox themed by Steve Barton and on Simcha Torah, we danced all night with Mifanor Zapata, Rabbinic supervision this week by Rabbi Goldberg in Portchester, New York. He presided over the Welkin's Bat Mitzvah. We come to you from the scattered home offices of T Lit Studios. Shalom, friends.