Matthew Perry RIP

11/06/2023

A. The One With Chandler’s Work Laugh, the episode where Chandler’s on-again/off-again Jewish girlfriend Janice sleeps with Ross. When everyone learns of this dalliance, Ross says, “Okay, look, I-I know what you guys are going to say…” To which Phoebe replies, “You two will have very hairy children.” This is the only episode that Janice appears in where she does not nasally utter her classic line “Oh! My! God!”. But Chandler does utter that line (mimicking Janice’s nasal whine) when he learns that Ross slept with her. Janice replies to him, “Don't you worry, Chandler Bing. I can handle lots of Jewish boys but you’re still the only goy for me.”

B. The One With All the Rugby, where Chandler wants to break up with Janice, but he can’t tell her. So he says that he’s being forced to move to Israel for work, leading her to go with him to the airport to see him off. Chandler approaches the airline counter and says quietly “I need one fake ticket to Israel.” Not understanding, the clerk tries to sell him a real ticket, leading Chandler to reply, “What would you give to a kid if he wanted a ticket to play with?” Ultimately Chandler purchased a $2100 ticket and boarded the plane as Janice says she’ll write him at the address he gave her, “15 Israel Road, Israel.”

C. The One Where the Stripper Cries, featuring Danny DeVito as a stripper at Phoebe’s bachelorette party. In another scene Chandler and Ross go to a college reunion. Ross speaks with Missy Goldberg and he tells her that “He [Chandler] and I both really liked you a lot, but we didn’t want anything to jeopardize our friendship–so we kinda made a pact that neither of us could ask you out.” Missy looked surprised, saying that “Chandler and I used to make out. A lot!” She then says, “Well, Ross, I’m sorry to tell you that your friend lied to you, but for what it’s worth, I’m glad it was him and not you who asked me out.” Ross asks, “Because you respect me for upholding the pact with Chandler?” To which Missy replies, “Well, no. Not really. It’s because I had already dated lots of Jewish guys. Chandler was the first goy I ever kissed.”

D. The One With the Butt, where Chandler meets a beautiful Israeli soldier and considers asking her on a date, but feels she’ll never go out with him. Phoebe tells Chandler that “you always see these really beautiful women with these really nothing guys. You could be one of those guys.” They do end up dating, and Aurora shares a story about herself, concluding, “Luckily none of the bullets hit the engine block. So, we made it to the border, but just barely.” When she asks Chandler to tell more about himself, he says, “Once I got on the subway, right, and it was at night, and I rode it all the way to Brooklyn... just for the hell of it.”

E. The One With the Triplets, the episode where Phoebe gives birth to the triplets that she is carrying as a surrogate for her brother and his wife. One of the children is a boy, and the doctor asks if they want the child circumcised. This leads to a conversation among Ross, Chandler and Joey, where Joey says “Why would anyone do that? I mean, really? Cut it off?” Ross, who is Jewish, replies, “They don’t cut it off, it’s just a snip.” Joey then asks Chandler, “What about you? Are you still all man, or are you like Ross?”, to which Chandler replies, “I may not be snipped, but trust me, girls still don’t think I’m all man.”

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Shaft/Richard Roundtree RIP

10/30/2023

A. The 1968 news story was about three separate murders of New York diamond merchants in New York City within a 3-month period. The story inspired Tidyman to write Shaft Among the Jews about a group of seven Chassidic diamond merchants who reach out to Shaft to help solve some murders as well as a crime where crooked diamond merchants are making synthetic diamonds and passing them off as real.

B. Tidyman read an article in the New York Times about Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, whose aim was to protect Jews against antisemitism through faith and force (this was before Kahane’s move to Israel where he pursued a racist anti-Arab agenda). In the novel Shaft Among the Jews, John Shaft teams up with the so-called Jewish Safety League to protect Jewish merchants in Brooklyn. It is because of Kahane’s subsequent behavior in Israel that the novel was not turned into a movie.

C. Tidyman read a 1970 article in the New York Times about Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, who had fled to Israel to avoid arrest on tax evasion charges. The plot of Shaft Among the Jews features a Jewish mobster based on Meyer Lansky, and Shaft’s efforts to fight both the Italian Mafia and the Jewish Mafia in order to bring the Lansky-like figure to justice.

D. Tidyman read an article about the 1964 murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner as they worked across the South to promote desegregation and an end to discriminatory practices against Black citizens. Tidyman was struck by the fact that Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish, and wrote Shaft Among the Jews, which features detective John Shaft working together with the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Anti-Defamation League to bring white supremacists in Mississippi to justice.

E. Tidyman read a review in the New York Times of the 1971 Fiddler on the Roof movie, starring Topol as Tevye. He then went to see the movie, and as a result wrote Shaft Among the Jews. In the novel, Golde learns from the priest that their daughter Chava has run off with a Russian Orthodox Christian named Fyedka. Tevye hires Shaft to find them and bring Chava back home, but when Shaft finds them he learns that they are in love, so he tells Tevye that he will not bring her home. Sadly, the film version of this novel never came to fruition, despite the theme song that Tidyman wrote, including the lines “They say this cat Shaft is a nudnik/(Shut your mouth)/He’s a complicated mensch/But no one understands him but his bubbie.”

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Seinfeld

10/16/2023

A. The Raincoats (Part II), where Jerry and his girlfriend Rachel make out in the movie theater balcony during a showing of Schindler’s List, with Jerry explaining that “I couldn't help it. We hadn’t been alone together in a long time and we just kinda started up a little during the coming attractions and the next thing we knew, the war was over.” Said Alexander, “I mean, yeah, anything can be funny. But not really anything. Not the Holocaust. I told Larry he’d be doing great harm to the show.” While David left in the plot line, he did cut out some of the most obnoxious jokes which he had written about Schindler.

B. The Serenity Now, where Elaine learns what “shiks-appeal” is when her boss’s son celebrates his bar mitzvah and tries to French kiss her, leading George to say  “Jewish men love being with a woman who is not like their mother.” Said Alexander, “I actually loved the concept of ‘shiks-appeal’ but the idea of Elaine and the bar mitzvah boy? It was just wrong.” David mostly left the scene intact, but he did remove one shot where Elaine smiled at the bar mitzvah boy who was coming on to her.

C. The Bris, where Jerry’s job is to hold the baby at the bris of a friend’s son, featuring a bumbling mohel who says “I could have been a kosher butcher like my brother. The money’s good. He’s got a union, with benefits. And cows don’t have families. You make a mistake with a cow, you move on with your life.” Alexander said, “The character of the mohel was disgusting...to make one who is a child-hating, self-loathing, foul-mouthed incompetent, to me was antisemitic in a hurtful way.” David ultimately cut out some of the most outrageous lines said by the mohel.

D. The Shower Head, where Jerry’s Uncle Leo interrupts Jerry to tell him that the cook at Monk’s Cafe made his hamburger medium instead of medium-rare “because he’s an anti-Semite.” Jerry responded, saying “The point I was making before Goebbels made your hamburger…” Alexander complained to David that “you just gotta be so careful with Nazi jokes,” leading David to change Jerry’s original response to Uncle Leo, which was “The point I was making before Hitler made your hamburger…”

E. The Yada Yada, where Jerry’s friend, the dentist Tim Whatley, converts to Judaism, as Jerry tells George and Elaine. “He looks at my tooth and he says, ‘oy vey, you got tsuris.’ I ask him why he’s talking Yiddish, and he tells me that he met a Jewish girl, and yada yada, he converted to Judaism.” Jason Alexander objected to the original script, where Jerry did a belly-wiggling Tevye dance while saying, “…and biddy biddy bum, he converted to Judaism.” Alexander disliked the Tevye imitation, saying “There’s no more beloved Jewish character than Tevye. I just don’t think we should make fun of that,” which led Larry David to change “biddy biddy bum” to “yada yada.”

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Dianne Feinstein, z"l

10/09/2023

A. She was the first female president of the Stanford University Law Review.

B. She was the first woman to preside over a United States presidential inauguration, that of Barack Obama.

C. She was the first female president of Mount Zion Synagogue in San Francisco.

D. She was the first woman to officially nominate a presidential candidate, nominating Al Gore at the Democratic Convention held in Los Angeles in 2000.

E. She was the first Jewish student to graduate from the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School.

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