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Sat, March 8 2025 8 Adar 5785

Sunday, February 2, 2025 • 4 Shevat 5785

7:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Long before Tevye sings about the kind of ostentatious house he wishes his family could inhabit in Fiddler on the Roof, the complicated Jewish relationship with our homes has been key to understanding depictions of Jews in American pop culture. From Lower East Side tenements to uptown luxury apartment buildings to Catskills hotels to suburban McMansions, the locations of Jewish settlement and the dwellings that Jews have occupied have been a major theme in American humor. This talk will look at representations of Jewish residences in vaudeville, stand-up comedy, and sitcoms to trace how increasing affluence among Jews has been satirized in ways that reveal underappreciated aspects of the American Jewish domestic experience.

TED MERWIN, Ph.D. serves as Senior Writer for the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA). He came to JFNA in 2021 after serving as Director of the Synagogue Initiative for the Mid-Atlantic Region of AIPAC. Ted is the author of two books, In Their Own Image: New York Jews in Jazz Age Popular Culture and the National Jewish Book Award-winning Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli. Ted’s articles on Jewish culture have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, Haaretz, Hadassah, and other newspapers and magazines. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Andrea Lieber, and their three daughters.

Co-sponsored by Sisterhood, Men’s Club, and Sara & Samuel J. Lessans Adult Education Institute.

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