While an acclaimed actor, as a Jew he fails as a leading man
By Jonathan Feldstein
You don’t know this about me, but award-winning actor Mandy Patinkin, and I go way back even though we’ve never met. In 1988 following being named ABC News Person of the Week, I spent most of the rest of the year negotiating a TV movie contract about my life that led ABC News to select me with this distinction. There’s a lot more to the five-minute ABC News story, enough to have a LA producer call me the following Monday in my office.
The movie never materialized as a consequence of a changing mood in Hollywood. Movie producers clearly decided following Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev introducing glasnost and perestroika, and emerging as “the darling of the West”, such a movie would likely be perceived of as being anti-Soviet and hence financially too risky.
I reminded the producer that my story was about liberty, how one individual could help another achieve freedom. Even still, I was not ashamed with it being branded anti-Soviet because the Soviet Union literally represented nothing good globally, or specifically vis-à-vis the Jewish people about which my story was focused. I was fine leaving the contract.
What did all of this have to do with Chicago-native Mandy Patinkin?
At the time, the conversation about the movie had progressed that even though we never signed the contract, we were talking about who would be the lead actor playing me. Mandy Patinkin was the frontrunner for consideration and although he was 10 years older than me at the time – and still is – people believed he could be made to look younger. He had a beard, as I did at the time. He was Jewish and my story was a very Jewish story about freedom. So for the preference being for a Jewish actor to play me, his name was being seriously floated.
I was thinking about Patinkin recently following comments he made regarding Jewish support for the Senate candidacy of Abdul El-Sayed for Senate in Michigan. Despite his relative fame as an actor, his misguided comments expose ignorance.
Patinkin has posted videos urging Jewish voters to support Abdul El-Sayed citing concern for their “safety” in the US.
Patinkin asserts:
“Jewish safety depends on a real multiracial democracy, and Abdul is the one fighting to protect it.”
The contradiction of Jews electing an Islamist for their safety, is profoundly astounding.
In addition to my five minutes on ABC News, I have acted in one movie, and done some TV commercials and promos. I have done hundreds of live and recorded interviews. While I do know how to deliver a line, none of these make me an actor.
By the same token, that Patinkin has lived through and experienced modern Jewish history, neither makes him an historian, or an eligible qualified speaker on Jewish history. In fact, his uniquely diaspora perspective influenced by Buddhism is void of modern Jewish and Israeli history through which he has lived, much less not-so-ancient discrimination against Jews under Islam going back to Mohammed.
Saying that “Jewish safety depends on a real multiracial democracy,” views Jewish history through the prism of being outside Israel, with no awareness of Jewish life in Israel. It’s from the perspective of a tolerated second-class citizen protected by others. If that’s Patinkin’s view, no wonder he supports (and has been fooled by) the anti-Zionist antisemitic candidate in Michigan. Hooking his cart to El-Sayed’s Islamist horse, it doesn’t faze Patinkin that the candidate will not even call out antisemitic ads supporting his candidacy. Patinkin places himself solidly in the timeless role of Jews and Chrisitans under Islam as dhimmi – the second-class citizen who is either tolerated because of paying the Islamic jizya tax required of infidels, or being forcefully converted. It makes one wonder if Patinkin is trying out for the role of King of the Dhimmi.
Embracing El-Sayed, much less the narrow diaspora-based mentality that Jewish security can only be granted by others, Patinkin has written himself out of any role in the Jewish future. Forget a leading role, he’s not even an understudy.
Patinkin does however embrace the role of “useless idiot” to the point he should be nominated for an Oscar! Sadly, too many Jews throughout history in shifting to the radical Left paid a heavy price some of whom in the process became puppets to the Islamists. It reminds me of the parents of another Chicago-born Jewish friend, Abe Stolar.
Born in Chicago in 1912 to Russian emigree parents who fled Czarist pogroms, Abe’s parents were homesick for the motherland. They were also inspired by communism and imbibing the communist Kool-Aid, as a teen, Abe’s parents took him to Moscow to see firsthand the worker’s paradise. Five years later under Stalin’s purges, Abe’s father was arrested and never seen again.
In 1975, Abe, his wife Gita and their son applied to leave the USSR. That’s right, Communism offered no freedom just to leave the socialist utopia. They received permission to leave, selling all their belongings yet at the last moment – before boarding the plane – their permission was revoked. The Stolars were forced to return to their empty Moscow apartment, hopeless.
I met Abe a decade later. He was an American citizen detained in Moscow, frustrated and desperate to leave, but he was jovial, friendly, and welcoming. Two years later, I went back to Moscow and visited Abe again. He was more hopeful as he saw signs that things in the USSR were changing, but he was still an American citizen forcefully detained in Moscow. Eventually, in 1989, at 77 years old, Abe and his family were able to leave and settle in Israel. Abe understood that the Jewish future, even at 77, was in Israel, not based on the whims of others.
Mandy Patinkin’s ignorance of history is a shanda, an embarrassment. Unlike Abe Stolar’s parents, he has decades of seeing the horrible and dangerous consequence of the Red-Green (Communist-Islamist) alliance which he plays into now, Islamists using leftists to advance their ideology with the leftists gladly playing their role with glee.
Abe Stolar’s parents had not yet witnessed or experienced the Red-Green alliance, much less suffered under it. Perhaps they could be forgiven for their communist fervor given how badly Jews had been treated under the Czars. Patinkin should know better. There is not a single surviving and thriving Jewish community under Islam. To suggest that Jews in America – or anywhere for that matter – should outsource their future and safety to others, much less Islamists like El-Sayeed, is more than foolish. It is dangerous.
Closer to Abe Stolar’s age now than he was to my age in 1988, perhaps one day there will be a movie about Abe Stolar in which Mandy Patinkin can play the lead. Or maybe there will one day be movies about the Jewish communities purged under Islam with a role for Mandy Patinkin as one of the Jews dismembered by their Muslim neighbors. Until then, he has defined himself in such a fringe role among the Jewish people that he has essentially written himself out of the Jewish people. So, for him, of all people, to preach to the Jewish people, is inane at best.
I have other words, but then I might lose my PG-13 rating!
About the writer:
Jonathan Feldstein - President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Journal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.
While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).
