Rabbi Steven Stark Lowenstein, of the Am Shalom synagogue in Glencoe, looked out on the more than 300 people sitting in front of him and Brett Gelman on Tuesday night. “Raise your hand if you were at Brett’s bar mitzvah,” the rabbi said. About 20 people did.
“Ah,” said Gelman, wearing faux-leather pants and a long white sweater and a single earring. “Now that was the one thing that kept me from killing myself! That was my only good day in junior high, my bar mitzvah. I was deluded enough to believe I had friends.”
Gelman’s book tour was not going the way it was planned initially.
For one, publishers tend to prefer bookstores, not religious venues. He pulled a decent crowd at the Jewish Community Center in New York (which was planned from the start), but the Book Stall in Winnetka backed out in February, as did Book Soup in Los Angeles and Book Passage in San Francisco. The problem, two of the stores said, was safety; they could not provide the level of security such a controversial figure required. Book Passage went a step further and said Gelman had made “intemperate” remarks against “ethnic and social groups,” but declined to cite examples. Gelman said the cancellations were driven by protester intimidation and antisemitism, and then he changed plans.
On a normal book tour fronted by a well-known actor selling a book of short stories, you would expect a mix of readers. In Gelman’s case, fans of the show “Stranger Things.” And fans of “Fleabag.” And just fans of a character actor whose burly, bearded comic presence has become such a fixture of TV and movies, you know Gelman even if you don’t know him. His Am Shalom appearance attracted a bunch of fans, but also congregants and those who’ve known him a long time, family, friends. His mother sat in front, beside his fiancé.
On a normal book tour, such an author would also get asked questions about Hollywood, then read a little from their new book, which, in this case, is a funny, caustic, dark set of thinly autobiographical stories about anxiety, titled “The Terrifying Realm of the Possible.” It shows the clear influence of Woody Allen and Philip Roth, and as Gelman explained before the event, “it’s very much about showing Jewish pride in neurosis.”
On a normal book tour, having grown up in Highland Park, Gelman’s return to the North Shore would have looked somewhat different, and probably would’ve been a lot less interesting.
But then Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, taking hundreds of hostages and killing more than a thousand Israelis, and then Israel responded by attacking Hamas in Gaza, broadening a conflict that has now killed more than 30,000 Palestinians. Gelman took to social media and loudly supported Israel — though not its government or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said he was not anti-Palestinian or against Islam, but certainly anti-Hamas. He said advocating for Jews was not asking for a Palestinian genocide. He called out Gen Z and “all you other fake woke liberals” for not reading enough history.
He leaned prominently into pro-Israeli activism, making a speech at the March for Israel on the Washington Mall, visiting Israel several times in recent months (his fiancé is Israeli American) and appearing on an Israeli TV show satirizing Western protests.
He said many protests against Israel amounted to antisemitism.
And, in turn, backlash on social media accused him of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and soft pedaling the death of Palestinians, and turning a blind eye to both Palestinian evictions and a historical treatment of Palestinians that many consider apartheid.
And that’s how a tour for a little book of stories leads to private security teams placed at either side of the stage and an officer from the Cook County Sheriff’s office standing at the back while a rabbi asks you what you meant when you told an interviewer that you “woke up from being woke.”
“I don’t know anyone who actually uses that term who’s truly woke,” Gelman replied. “If you were truly woke, you wouldn’t be antisemitic and pervert analytic thinking to defend Islamic jihad — you wouldn’t equate Islam with radical Islam! That’s being very asleep.” He also said the same way that Jews have inherited centuries of trauma, “the rest of the world has inherited antisemitism — both genetically and psychologically. I believe that.”
The audience cheered some, and sat silent some.
Before the event, Gelman talked in Rabbi Lowenstein’s office, across from his mother, Candace Gelman, and singer-songwriter Ari Dayan, his fiancé. He was not surprised at the reaction to his comments. Across the country, institutions and bookstores have canceled appearances by Israeli and Palestinian authors. In January, protesters with Writers Against the War on Gaza broke up a PEN America event featuring comedian Moshe Kasher and actress Mayim Bialik, who has also been a vocal supporter of Israel.
“The other option would have been to retreat and not address this at all,” Gelman said. He said it’s entirely possible that his book gets overshadowed, and he can live with that.
He gets daily online threats.
“(Dayan) and I take our death threats with our morning coffee,” he said. “Aggressive attacks, saying I support genocide. That’s the best thing of what I hear. They attack personally, my appearance, my career. …. It’s a means of intimidation. This is their moment, but I don’t see them. I am doing something out in the world, and this is what they are doing?”
He said he’s definitely lost friends in the film and TV industry, but he’s not aware if his activism has cost him future work. Not yet, anyway. Still, he said, he calls his agent frequently to ask if he’s OK, if everything’s fine. He joked he’s exhausting to be around.
“The Terrifying Realm of the Possible,” which funnels stories of toxic masculinity and ambition and love through five personas, ranging from children to old women, suggests as much about Gelman, who is 47. He said he’s always wanted to be “like the multi-rounded Jewish artists who were my heroes, who acted, wrote, directed, authored.” With “Seinfeld” in the past and the end of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” looming and the cancellation of Woody Allen, he fears the decline of Jewish anxiety as a wellspring of comedy. “You hear that Jews need to move away from the Seinfeldian,” he said, “but we need to lean in. That’s Jewish excellence, artistic excellence. Why be so ashamed?”
He described his Highland Park childhood as a flood of anxieties:
Wanting to be popular. Being strange “but not proud of being strange.” Being needy, being desperate. “Not belonging. Not achieving my dreams. What happens after you die? Is there hell? Am I going to hell? Is my mother really my mother? Is my father really my father? Am I gay? Did I magically get AIDS at 9 years old? When I went to drama school years later, my fear of being gay was removed, because I was able to face that possibility without feeling afraid: Maybe I was? Who cares? Some days I hoped I was.”
“I hope he is most days,” Dayan said.
“You also had OCD,” Rabbi Lowenstein said.
Gelman nodded.
But he wasn’t nervous while watching comedy, he said. So he took classes at Second City and Steppenwolf Theatre; he joined Highland Park High School’s drama program. He wrote a Sundance film (“Lemon,” 2017) and for Adult Swim; he acted on “Mad Men,” “The Office,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and alongside Will Ferrell in “The Other Guys.”
Rabbi Lowenstein asked if he’s surprised how quiet Hollywood has been about Israel.
“Hollywood has always been a tremendous disappointment,” Gelman laughed. He said as inspiring as “Angels in America” was to his development as an actor, he’s “not very happy with (author Tony) Kushner,” who has told interviewers Israel’s actions “looks a lot like ethnic cleansing.” On the Oscar speech by “Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer — in which the filmmaker said “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people” — he said Glazer never mentioned Hamas or Israeli hostages and was an antisemite and ”self-hating Jew.”
At the event Gelman said Jews needed to embrace the animosity of their critics. He urged taking a page from the Black and LGBTQ+ community, which “says ‘I know you hate me and I don’t care. I defend my humanity’” — but he didn’t note that both of those marginalized groups were fighting for years to merely have a platform to speak from.
His appearance at Am Shalom was his biggest book event so far. Rabbi Lowenstein said it was ironic that if he had appeared at the Book Stall, he might have drawn fewer people.
“That’s what I say about the protestors,” Gelman replied: “Thanks for helping me sell books. (Without the backlash) a lot less people would have known about this book.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
