September 6, 2010 | 10:30 am

Robert Schimmel z"l

Posted by Rob Eshman

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The comedian, writer, thinker and mensch Larry Miller has a beautiful tribute to Robert Schimmel on his blog today. Schimmel was a regular Howard Stern guest.  As funny as his stand up was, there was something in the interactions between him and Howard that unleashed an even funnier, even darker side. In some deep ways, those two understod one another.

Miller understood Schimmel too.  Here’s an an excerpt from the blog:

....Here’s something you won’t read in any of the papers, and it’s really the whole point of this clog.
Robert’s parent were both Holocaust survivors. His father was marched out of their concentration camp with thousands of others as the Americans were advancing in the winter of ‘45, in order to… Oh, who knows what those horrible folks were even thinking at that point. They marched the prisoners, in no coats, until they died or dropped. And when they dropped, trying to catch a breath, they walked over and shot them — as calm as a glass of tea. Robert’s father dropped, along with his best friend, and a guard walked over and killed him. Otto, the father, was next to him, and he was the one shot, weakly holding up a hand and whispering, “No. Please.”
Then the guard turned to Otto and… Shot him? No. He screamed, “If you want to live, get up and keep going.” And somehow Otto did.
And a few years later, Robert was making people laugh in Las Vegas.
Here’s the thing, though. One night, Otto told Robery after a show, “You were good. You know, I always wanted to be a comic, but, well…” Can you imagine? Is life weird enough?
And here’s the deepest part: Otto never forgot that moment in the snow on that march. And one day Robert said to him something I still find extraordinary. Did you catch it? It was what the guard said.
If you put it in different hands, at a different moment, with a different feeling, Robert said, it’s actually the greatest, deepest, simplest advice in history:
“If you want to live, get up and keep going.”
Robert Schimmel certainly learned that lesson. Get up and keep going. He never gave up. He was a terrific comic, but maybe that was his greatest gift: Get up and keep going.
Not a bad lesson for all of us to learn. With all the things in his life, I told him once, even Job turned to God and said, “Gee, now I don’t feel so bad anymore.”
Have a great Labor Day weekend. And then, get up and keep going.
(P.S. If you feel like it, that new show of mine is available for free by subscribing to iTunes: “This Week With Larry Miller.)
REMEMBER: IF YOU WALKED OUT OF BED TODAY, AND NO ONE YOU LOVE GOT SICK AND DIED, AND NO ONE SHOT YOU WHEN YOU GOT TIRED… FOLKS, TURN ON A GAME AND CRACK A BEER, BECAUSE YOU ARE WALKING IN TALL COTTON.

Rest in peace, Bob Schimmel.

By the way, our writer Naomi Pfefferman did a nice interview with Schimmel a few years back.  Here that is:

In June 2000, Robert Schimmel—whose ribald routines earned him a spot on Comedy Central’s list of 100 greatest comics—was pondering his mortality after undergoing a cancer biopsy: “Is there a God? What about Jesus . . . I didn’t believe in him on earth so is he gonna be pissed at me now?” the 58-year-old recounts in “Cancer on $5 a Day: How Humor Got Me Through the Toughest Journey of My Life.”

In the memoir—which he’ll discuss at the West Hollywood Book Fair on Sept. 28—Schimmel mixes harrowing stories about his chemotherapy with hilarious anecdotes about his illness and treatment. He riffs about the salesman who tried to sell him a pubic hair toupee (it’s called a “merkin”); lusting after various nurses; having to ask his mother, the Holocaust survivor, to buy rolling papers for his medical marijuana; and imagining his funeral (“I probably should’ve gotten close with some rabbi so I don’t get the generic eulogy,” he said. “I hate those. You know he never knew the dead guy.”)

Even before his diagnosis of Stage III non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Schimmel’s experiences had the makings of an inspirational book. He suffered a heart attack in his 40s and the death of one of his six children (also to cancer) in 1992, but he returned to the stage and, by 2000, had produced an HBO special, best-selling CDs, and a sitcom, “Schimmel,” slated to debut on the Fox network.
While in rehearsals for the pilot, however, the comedian experienced severe chills and night sweats; a biopsy revealed he had an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. His response to the doctor was immediate: “Just my luck. I get the one not named after the guy.”

“My instinct was to go for the laugh,” Schimmel said recently, looking fit eight years into his remission. He realized that even though he had just been told he had cancer, he hadn’t been told he was going to die. To prove it, he was going to do the one thing that showed he was very much alive, which was to make people laugh.

His audience consisted of fellow patients in the chemotherapy room at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix—“the toughest room I ever worked,” he said. “But remembering what Norman Cousins said about the healing power of humor ... [made] me want to be part of their recovery. I want to help them to feel good, even for a short time…. For in the moment that they laughed, in that one moment, they weren’t sick, and they weren’t afraid.”

Schimmel traces his own survivor’s spirit to his parents, Betty and Otto Schimmel, who survived Mauthausen and Auschwitz, respectively. During the most grueling part of chemo—when he briefly considered suicide—the comic was fortified by Otto Schimmel’s words about how he had traversed a Nazi death march. The prisoner had remembered a Nazi’s admonition: “If you want to live, keep moving.”

Doctors first warned Schimmel that he might be prone to cancer when he was 13, and they performed surgery on an undescended testicle. Nevertheless, Robert proved to be a class clown with a predilection for trouble. When he failed his German final exam in high school, he declared that the teacher was anti-Semitic: “My father went apes—- and threatened to sue the district,” the comic said. “He even got a Jewish German teacher to re-administer my final exam, but I got a worse grade from her than I did the original teacher.”

Schimmel went on to work as a stereo salesman in Phoenix, never envisioning a career as a comic, nor even attending a comedy club until he visited his sister in Los Angeles and she signed him up for an open mic night at The Improv—without telling him—20 years ago, when he was in his early 30s. The club’s owner chanced to pull Schimmel’s name out of a hat and heckled him until he ventured onstage. Schimmel riffed; the audience laughed; and the owner offered him future gigs.

“So I quit my job, put the Phoenix house up for sale and my [then-wife] and I loaded our belongings on a U-Haul to drive to Los Angeles,” he said. “I got off the Hollywood Freeway to show her where I was going to be working—and it turned out the club had burned down the night before.”

Schimmel stayed in Los Angeles, supporting himself as a salesman and working open mic shows until he could support his family as a comedian.

When his 3-year-old son, Derek, was diagnosed with cancer in the 1980s, Schimmel found solace in the Book of Job: “The story talks about whether one can have faith when s—- happens, and I always had faith,” he said. “I think the real you comes out when you hit bottom. That’s when you find out who you really are.”

Later, between Schimmel’s own chemotherapy treatments, he incorporated his illness into his nightclub act, complete with a slide show of his deterioration. (“That’s me when they told me what the co-pay was,” he quips about one skeletal-looking picture.) Club owners warned him that audiences wouldn’t appreciate the dark subject matter, but viewers roared with laughter, rewarding him with standing ovations and rushing to hug him after each show.

Later, the slide show incorporated photos of the now-healthy comic; his wife, Melissa; and his children (there is one of the late Derek as well). Schimmel just taped a Showtime special, and he performs numerous standup shows a year but still spends a good deal of time speaking to (and joking with) cancer patients.
“How can I say ‘no’ when people reach out to me? If there is a reason I survived, that’s it.”

August 26, 2010 | 5:04 pm

10 Ways Howard Stern’s Retirement Will Hurt the World

Posted by Rob Eshman

This blog is devoted to examining the effects of Howard Stern on the culture at large.  These days a lot of his on air discussion revolves around whether or not he’ll renew his contract with Sirius and stay on the radio as a morning broadcaster. 

I can’t imagine what it’s like going through such a major life decision so publicly.  Quite an industry has grown up around one man—doing anything other than simply renewing will upset the status quo for a lot of people.

But I don’t care about them.  At least, not for the purposes of this blog entry.  What I’ve been wondering is what happens to the culture, to society, without Howard?  I’ve come up with 10 effects.  They’re all bad.

1. There will be less innovation in broadcasting.

Howard has always been at the cutting edge of the industry.  He took radio to the edge of social acceptability, until society had to catch up to him.  He perfected some aspects that already existed, and invented others.  I give him credit with pushing the reality show format, with introducing real life—sex, pornography, frank talk—into a very plastic medium, with finding incredible talent, with pioneering forms of satire and social commentary (see the celebrity sabotage, the societal outcasts he turns into ongoing characters, The Howard 100 News). His move to Sirius didn’t create satellite radio, but enabled it to survive.  The fact that Howard has survived major show shake ups, even thrived after each one was predicted to ensure his doom, shows that he is still capable of growing and changing. There’s no one else who looks ready to push as many boundaries or develop as many new, untested ideas.

2. There will be one less powerful voice to combat the phonies, hypocrites and demagogues on our airwaves.

Nobody as big as Howard speaks as frankly and as honestly about the Limbaughs, Schlesingers and Becks.  Howard is not afraid to take them on, and he is more than their equal on the air.  Though he is not overtly political, he can rise up and bash them down in a way that no one else—other than Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert—really can.

3. One of the great radio teams in history will come to an end

Howard, Robin and Fred are as classic a comedy team as American entertyainment has ever produced.  Their timing, their individual strengths, their teamwork— all of it honed over decades of working together—that will not be repeated any time soon.

4.   There is no one to replace Howard as a truly great, on-air interviewer.

Jon Stewart, Steve Colbert and Rachel Maddow are all excellent, but their format is so limiting.  The rich, famous and powerful who had the balls to sit with Howard face an interviewer in a forum that is as close to no-holds-barred as exists in broadcasting.  No language, topic or time limits—and an interviewer as smart and articulate as any guest.  Jon Stewart won’t go there.  Howard will.

5. There is no bullshit meter in mainstream media as accurate and as outspoken as Howard Stern.

Howard understood that outing hypocrisy is entertaining.  Whether its politicians, news stories or celebrities, Howard has a canny sense of when the public is being fed a line of crap, and he can relentlessly attack the crap-feeders.

6. There is no one who is both as childish and as mature.

Howard innovates, but he is also rooted in the Boomer generation.  He is not divorced from history, and it’s refreshing to hear someone who can talk about contemporary culture, but with a sense of what came before.  If his references to Ed Sullivan and the Beatles and the Ramones date him, they also deepen him.
 
7. The Jewish people will have lost a valuable voice.

Howard is sooooo Jewish.  He makes Larry David, with his golf clubs and Brentwood manor house, look Unitarian.  Whether he likes it or not, Stern is a very visible, voluble, valuable representative of his People.  The values he promulgates—tolerance, questioning, innovation, humor, irreverence—are the best of Jewish values.  Yeah, again, there’s Jon Stewart, but Stewart speaks mostly to the converted,  Howard preaches to a much more diverse audience. 

8. There are few better defenders of decent rights and values on the airwaves.

People get caught up in the lesbian strippers and fart contests.  Sure, there’s that.  But the whole circus Howard brings to town embodies certain bedrock values.  I’m going to reel off values I’ve heard Howard espouse, or demonstrate, time and again over the years.  He seems to have lived up to them in his personal life, or at least the part that’s been made public.  That’s quite an achievement for someone who has been in the public eye as long as he has. Social acceptance (Eric the Midget), gay rights (George Takei), hard work, civic involvement (Pataki, Whitman).  When The Simpsons came out people attacked it for undermining values.  Now churches use it to teach values.  Years from now they’ll use Stern the same way.

9. There will be no one else to save satellite radio.

Unless they find the Moshiach and give him a channel, shalom Sirius.  And I say that as someone who like a friggin’ genius bought stock at—I don’t want to say what I bought it at.  I hope Mel Karmazin will figure out a way to transform the company, but under the current model, it really needs a big personality.  No one has an audience as loyal as Howard’s. Done. Period.

10. There will be no more surprises.

A classic line in Private Parts has one NBC executive explaining why even people who hate Howard still tune in—to see what he’ll say next.  There are very few shows that have the ability to surprise us.  Some can shock us.  Reality shows are full of scripted shocks and edited emotions.  Howard Stern manages to supply daily, raw, entertaining surprises.  They can come in the complex interactions of the people on the show, or in the bits or guests, but they inevitably come. It is very rare to find mainstream entertainment that dependably surprises and sometimes even shocks you—and in so doing challenges and provokes and makes you laugh and think.  The Howard Stern Show is a circus, full of comedy and stunts and weirdos and logic-defying moments.  But it is an important, undervalued circus, whose tent is as big as all society. When it leaves town, we’ll all miss it.

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August 3, 2010 | 5:14 pm

Anthony Bourdain: The “Howard Stern” of Chefs

Posted by Rob Eshman

Anthony Bourdain, The Howard Stern of Food

Last night the only good food show on TV, “No Reservations,” featured a documentary on the host, Anthony Bourdain.  In the midst of it, Chef Beth Aretsky referred to Bourdain as, “The Howard Stern of chefs.”

It was an off-handed comment, just slipped into an hour-long documentary, but of course it leapt out for me—and not just because in that instant two of my passions—Howard Stern and great food—joined as one.  What Aretsky meant was that that Bourdain’s career as a chef and writer embodied the same qualities as Stern’s career in radio: a fearless, iconoclastic, anti-establishment, outrageous, original.

What stood out for me is that Aretsky, who has actually served as Bourdain’s executive assistant—she was the “Grill Bitch” in his book “Kitchen Confidential”—was using Stern’s name as a kind of adjective, but not, as is so often the case, pejoratively. (She might also have been struck by the personal similarities: both are tall, skinny, driven men whose wild public personas conceal a highly disciplined work ethic).

I know she’s on to something.  One day, hopefully while Stern is still alive, it will be a badge of honor for anyone to be referred to as “the Howard Stern” of his or her profession.  It means you blazed a trail, outraged, upset and ultimately entertained a wide audience, took huge risks in telling the truth, pursued your craft with excellence and originality, and in so doing shook up the larger culture.

All of this begs the question:  Who else is the Howard Stern of his or her world?  Who’s the Howard Stern of TV, of journalism, of fiction, of movies, of business?

And most importantly, how Howard Stern is each of us capable of being in our own work?

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July 9, 2010 | 4:28 pm

Is Howard Stern the Son Joan Rivers Never Had? [VIDEO]

Posted by Rob Eshman

Joan Rivers in Stern's Studio

The new film on Joan Rivers, “A Piece of Work,” is, as Howard said on his radio show, not just a fine documentary on Rivers, but one of the the finest documentaries on any topic you’ll see this year.  It drives along at a rock ‘n roll pace, delivering laughs, pathos, and shock.  I don’t know who writer/director Ricki Stern is—no relation, I’m sure—but I know I’d now watch a documentary on pencil holders if her name was on it.

One thing that shocked me was the doc’s initial depiction of Rivers as a washed up has-been to whom nobody pays attention.  If you live in the Howard Stern universe, you’d never know that.  She is a frequent, even revered guest, someone who comes in regularly and always kills.  One of my favorite exchanges on the Stern show is when Howard spoke to Joan about a date she had where the man had a heart attack at the dinner table.  The two of them get more laughs out of what had to have been some horror show tragedy—I love Joan’s crack about how terrified she was because the guy dropped dead before the check came.

The world may have passed Joan Rovers by—at least that’s the conceit of the first part of the doc—but Howard never has.  He must see in her what he has strived to be himself: a hard-working, tireless, driven and original entertainer, whose humor is based on telling the truth, on being more honest with the audience than anyone else could or even should be.  They have the children of immigrant upbringing, the compulsive work ethic, the self-loathing AND self-aggrandizing posture, and utter fearlessness. In that the two are very much alike, so its no wonder that in Stern’s world, Joan River never gets old.

Here’s a bit of them together:

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May 18, 2010 | 5:01 pm

Rima Fakih Miss USA 2010…and Howard

Posted by Rob Eshman

Howard Stern brought stripping out of the shadows and into the main stream, featuring strippers of all types, shapes and sizes on his radio show from the earliest days.  In the beginning mainstream media dismissed this as crass and inappropriate.  Now there are stripper aerobics in your neighborhood mall, and my daughter listens to Top Ten songs on AM radio about strippers.  Next I predict the Coca Cola Stripping Finals in Daytona Beach.  Howard’s great good sense was to pull our American appetites out of the shadows and shine the light of humor and satire on them. 

Howard was also poking fun at these beauty pageants and the essential hypocrisy of them long before they started self-destructing.  On his show he had lesbian beauty contests, retarded beauty contests, tranny beauty contests (that one was just last week—so weird I couldn’t even listen).  For years Miss Howard Stern has been a pill-addled booze-addicted unemployed blond who couldn’t string four words together.  And don’t forget the title of Howard’ second book, on whose cover he posed as a beauty queen: “MIss America.”  Howard long sensed that the beauty contests embodies so much that is hypocritical and ripe for satire in our culture: the myth of purity and chastity, the pressure of ideal beauty, the implicit cruelty of somebody sitting in judgment on someone else. 

Finally, Howard long understood the insatiable, secretive, repressed level of horniness lurking like a locked-up dog in the American closet.  He was getting “average” girls naked on his show long before reality TV made fortunes doing the same.  He knew that the hunger was so great, that a woman could get headlines just for peeling off her shirt. 

Now all these two trends collide: with pictures of Rima Fakih on the pole,  the stripper beauty pageant is now entirely mainstream—the world has caught up to Howard Stern.

And if Howard would draw a lesson from the Rima Fakih scandal, it’s likely this: it’s a better world for us all when half-naked Arab-Americans are on stripper poles in Michigan rather than in jail cells in Guantanamo.

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May 14, 2010 | 12:14 pm

Mario Almonte Gets Howard Stern So Right

Posted by Rob Eshman

First of all, welcome to LA Howard. 

This blog started a year ago to examine Howard Stern’s contribution to society.  At the time, everyone from my wife to my more intellectual friends to many readers thought the very idea was a joke.  Howard Stern?  The guy who does fart jokes and midget shtick?  Mr. Lesbian Stripper?  How could someone so lowbrow be so highbrow? 

Well, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.  Last week, on HuffingtonPost.com, a PR strategist named Mario Almonte wrote a brilliant essay that makes the argument I’ve been trying to make all along.  He does it succinctly, cogently, and all those other SAT words.  Here’s an excerpt:

For a man who almost single-handedly revolutionized the broadcasting industry and profoundly influenced modern American pop culture, radio personality Howard Stern continues to be spectacularly disrespected by his own colleagues and the media itself that he so radically transformed.

While personalities like Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen popularized radio as a medium for entertainment, Howard Stern transformed it into a weapon of mass destruction. He annihilated cultural taboos, relentlessly exposed the hypocrisies and double standards in society and the entertainment field. He confronted the charlatans in religion, politics, and the media—who often proved to be the worst offenders of the very things they railed against. He treated the physically and mentally disabled, the social misfits and other cast-offs from society like celebrities; while mercilessly ridiculing the rich and famous for their delusional sense of self-importance. His radio show was itself the first true, unflinchingly honest reality series long before the concept was even a glint in the eyes of television producers.

Through all the years and all the controversies—the obsessive efforts of the FCC to crush him with millions of dollars in fines for indecency; the relentless pursuit of fanatical fringe groups seeking to knock his show off the air because they thought him rude, crude and obnoxious—he not only persevered, he triumphed. He dominated the entertainment industry as one of the most popular radio personalities in North America—and in the history of broadcasting—for more than 20 years. He wrote two New York Times best sellers and starred in a number-one movie about his life. At the peak of his popularity, his radio show was syndicated in more than 60 markets in North America, with a listening audience estimated at 20 million.

When Stern moved his show from terrestrial to satellite radio in 2006, he caused a seismic shift in the dynamics of the two media. He instantly lifted the struggling satellite technology to prominence, while driving another nail in the coffin of terrestrial radio by creating a vacuum of talent that pushed it to bleed listeners faster than ever before. The company he landed on, Sirius Radio, struggling to lure memberships up to that point, saw its subscriber base skyrocket. More than 180,000 new receivers were activated on the day before he launched his show on January 8, and millions of more fans signed up in the coming months. The $500 million paycheck that Sirius gave Stern made him one of the richest persons in show business, rivaling Martha Stewart and Oprah. Time magazine voted him among its 100 “Leaders in the Limelight” and Forbes ranked him in the #7 spot on its annual celebrity power ranking.

If anyone ignored, dismissed or denied the existence or impact of Howard Stern before, they no longer could.

Stern read a portion of the essay on air last week.  And he thanked Almonte.  Which shows something else: Howard, along with everything else, has class.

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May 11, 2010 | 10:14 am

Howard and Hef

Posted by Rob Eshman

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, columnist Steve Lopez profiled Hugh Hefner.  And it made me think of Howard.

On the surface, the two couldn’t be more different.  Hefner is 30 years older than Stern.  He’s the child of deeply Christian Nebraska farmers.  He made his reputation cultivating an aura of suave sophistication, worldliness and sex appeal—just about 180 degrees off the image Howard presents as an uncool, uncomfortable, anti-social dork. And yet…

Lopez gets under the surface of Hef, and under the surface, the parallels between the two men become much more obvious.

Both men created a media empire by breaking cultural taboos.

Both men have an intense work ethic.  They are hard-working, obsessed perfectionists.  And they are both highly intelligent (Hef’s IQ is said to be 150.  Howard plays the dope but his is clearly way up there).

Both men have a sense of their historic role.  They are meticulous archivers of their lives and careers.  While they sell fun, they take their careers quite seriously.

“Hefner held a stack of notes detailing his millions in donations to film preservation and the study of cinema at UCLA and USC,” wrote Lopez, ” as well as a list of 22 documentaries he has helped finance, including movies on Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney and Rita Hayworth.”

Or consider this passage about Hef’s archives:

He smiled and led me up to the third floor, where a man named Steve Martinez has spent 20 years helping Hefner compile more than 2,000 bound scrapbooks filled with press clippings and personal mementos.

“I’m archiving his legacy,” said Martinez, as Hefner, a pack rat, grabbed a volume off a shelf and showed me his first cartoon strips as a sketch artist, photos of his family and letters he wrote to his mother.

“It was a way of inventing a world of my own, in which I was center stage,” he said of his collection, which will now include a second round of stories about the Hollywood sign.

Hefner reached for Volume 372 and was showing me photos of the 1978 fundraiser to restore the sign when his staff reminded him that he was more than half an hour late for his next interview. Hefner, lost in the story of his life, didn’t want to leave.

Reading this, I thought of Howard’s many references to his archives, and of those “History of Howard Stern” radio documentaries that air on his channel.  Hef would be impressed.

Of course. the easy parallel is that both men created careers for themselves that were, despite the trials and tribulations, really fun. That’s very very smart.

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May 5, 2010 | 4:37 pm

Howard Stern Goes to Shul

Posted by Rob Eshman

  Howard waited until late in the show today to announce that for the first time in his adult life, he was going to a synagogue to pray.  I missed the segment (I heard him talking about a staffer named Shuli, not shul), but I read about it at the excellent howardstern.com site.

Late in the show, Howard shocked Robin by announcing his return to prayer: “There’s something I’m upset about and I can’t get any—I can’t figure out any logical, scientific way to solve it so I’m going to prayer. Yeah. I asked [Beth] to go with me because I don’t want to sit there like an asshole by myself. So I’m now resorting to prayer. I’m going to pray to God. Yeah. It happened the other night. It always happens when I’m sick. That’s when I’m at my weakest.”

Howard declined to be specific but continued: “There’s something I’m so upset about—that is wrecking my life—that I’m going to pray to God for him to fix it.” While punctuated with one-liners (“I’m going to go to a Jewish temple and if that doesn’t work, I’m going to church.”), Howard said his appeals to God would be sincere: “I’m not praying for myself, by the way. [I’m] praying for someone else…I need help…it is something horrible.”

Howard said he’d fully committed to the idea: “I even decided—in this moment that I’m praying to God, I’m going to be wearing a Yarmulke. Yeah. Because I—I don’t want to be taken as a joke or as being disrespectful. A Yarmulke is a sign of respect—of humility in front of God.” Howard concluded his announcement: “So I’m not going to say that I don’t believe in God anymore because that would be hypocritical.”

As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, Howard has the same tortured relationship with organized Jewish religion that many of his peers have.  Think Woody Allen, Phillip Roth, Larry David, Neil Simon—Howard is their radio equivalent—and all of them have skewered the faith they had shoved down their throats as children. 

Howard has taken that to hysterical extremes—playing his squeaky-viced bar mitzvah tapes for comic effect, inviting the comedian Gilbert Gottfried in to do shtick as a rabbi, deriding—often with good reason— the emptiness of the bar mitzvahs he’s forced to attend. But…

But it is not surprising that as he’s matured, he has come to a deeper, spiritual understanding of what Judaism has to offer.  If you look at Roth’s writings, even Woody Allen’s later movies, you see the same evolution.  These men accumulate success, fame, money, but inevitably they look for more.  In their art, they are often asking big questions in funny ways.  In their lives, they are prone to asking the same big questions.  Their obsession with mocking Judaism belies an obsession with Judaism, a sense that there’s more there there, that the religion that disappointed them so as adolescents could perhaps sustain them as adults.

I don’t know what crisis Howard is undergoing— His children?  Beth’s need for a child?  His parent’s aging? Artie? His career choice? How dumb am I to even speculate?—but I do know that religion done right—Judaism done right— can be a powerful tool for guiding one through turmoil, indecision, darkness.

There are superb rabbis in New York and elsewhere who can offer the best of his faith back to him,  but ultimately, he was born into a faith that offers no easy answers, certainly no instant ones.

“Imperfection holds the sparks of holiness,” wrote Rabbi Irwin Kula in his book Yearnings, “we must understand the wisdom of our yearnings.”

Hang in there Howard….

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