They brought a woman from the street And made her sit in the stalls By threats By bribes By flattery Obliging her to share a little of her life with actors
But I don't understand art
Sit still, they said
But I don't want to see sad things
Sit still, they said
And she listened to everything Understanding some things But not others Laughing rarely, and always without knowing why Sometimes suffering disgust Sometimes thoroughly amazed And in the light again, said
If that's art I think it is hard work It was beyond me So much beyond my actual life
But something troubled her Something gnawed her peace And she came a second time, armoured with friends
Sit still, she said
And again, she listened to everything This time understanding different things This time untroubled that some things Could not be understood Laughing rarely but now without shame Sometimes suffering disgust Sometimes thoroughly amazed And in the light again said
This is art, it is hard work And one friend said, too hard for me And the other said, if you will I will come again Because I found it hard I felt honoured
Captain Sonar! 🚨
Should we buy this board game? Does Alec have enough friends to play said board game?
Obsession meets intolerance far beneath the sea.
Hello, darling blog readers! Below is an interview I did with Emily Burack for the glorious Jewish website Hey Alma.
Enjoy a little peek inside my journey to becoming a Bat Mitzvah at 36, and all the illuminating points along the way.
The article below was published on Hey Alma, January 17, 2020.
*
Alexandra Silber is a Broadway star, writer, Jewish educator — and now a newly bat mitzvah’ed woman.
Let’s back up a second. Silber is Jewish; she was raised outside Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of a Jewish dad and a Catholic mom. Her dad passed away when she was 18 years old.
Silber has a long history with Fiddler on the Roof. In 2007 and 2008, she portrayed Hodel (the middle daughter) on London’s West End, and in 2015 and 2016, she was part of the Broadway revival of Fiddler as Tzeitel, the eldest sister. After the Broadway run of Fiddler ended, she went on to write After Anatevka, a novel that imagines what happened to Hodel after the story of Fiddler ends, and White Hot Grief Parade, a memoir about what happened when her father died of cancer.
“After two huge productions of Fiddler and the publication and book tours around each of my books, I met so many people in Jewish communities that sparked, fed, and fueled my interest in knowing more, and finding a peaceful, curious, voracious, and joyful certainty of God,” Silber explained over e-mail to Alma. Becoming a bat mitzvah “was the best decision I’ve made in my adult life.”
We talked with Silber about her bat mitzvah, why she wore her mom’s wedding dress and her deep relationship with Fiddler on the Roof.
Mazel tov on your bat mitzvah! What made you decide to become a bat mitzvah?
I come from a mixed family — my father’s family being Jewish and both sides of my mother’s family, Catholic. Life in my home was deeply spiritual, religiously informed, but entirely secular. I would say I am definitely a product of a few generations of highly motivated American assimilation — my mother’s cultural background is Irish and Latinx, and her maiden name is Noriega. When and where she grew up in California in the 1950s and ’60s, there was cultural incentives for assimilation that her parents and grandparents gave their lives for.
The same was true for the Silber family. My grandparents came into the prime of their adulthoods during the Holocaust, and though they were far from the European atrocities, their families and friends were not unaffected by the horrors. I will never fully understand their experience, but I can wrap my mind around the cultural pressures to assimilate.
I lost my father to cancer when I was just 18, and the experience charged me with many spiritual life-and-death questions at that tender age. As I’ve grown, those thoughts and concepts have swirled around me, informing so much of my life and work. And of course, professionally, Judaism has been a huge part of my life and immersing in the culture via the theatre (and subsequently through my books) has been a game-changer.
I saw on Instagram that you wore your mom’s wedding dress to your bat mitzvah — why did you decide to do this? What did it mean?
I’m so glad you asked this question. I wanted my mother to feel that she was literally embracing me, standing alongside me and offering a meaningful contribution to the ceremony that might otherwise feel slightly alienating to her culture and faith of origin. My mom Catherine could not be more supportive of all that I do, but I wanted her to feel significantly represented in the ceremony.
My parents were married in 1980 by a generous and beautifully spirited rabbi in Detroit, Rabbi Richard Hertz. The wedding photos of this outdoor Jewish ceremony are integral to my vision of my parents’ origins and peerless love story. It was a simple way for both of my parents to be “present” on the day, almost 40 years later.
What was the process like?
The month after the Broadway run of Fiddler on the Roof ended, Rabbi Larry Hoffman of Hebrew Union College invited me to teach at a retreat for his fourth year rabbinical and cantorial students. It was a three-day experience I will never forget. I used lessons commonly taught in theatrical environments and applied them to the scope of Judaism, and got some of the most memorable feedback and lessons were thrown back at me from the group of 16 or so students (that were largely my own age!).
A few students in particular really stood out to me as people I’d love to remain friends with — two being (now Rabbi) Samantha Frank and (soon to be Rabbi) Rena Singer. They had gone about starting what can only be described as a Reform, feminist, totally inclusive, profoundly informative, and an all-around glorious Instagram account called @modern_ritual. I devoured the content. I identified with it. And before long, I realized that if I was going to engage with this bat mitzvah experience, I wanted to do it with them — with peers I looked up to immensely leading me, in just the way I had led them just a few years earlier.
Rabbi Frank and I made an initial date to meet and discuss the details — my prior knowledge, my goals, and what I truly wanted from the experience, and together we crafted a plan that was personal to me, where I am in my life now as an adult woman. We met once a week (sometimes in person and sometimes over the internet), and not only learned Hebrew and trope (from scratch!) but we discussed all things spiritual, Israel, Torah, history, and culture.
What was the hardest part?
Aside from learning Hebrew (medium-hard — I’m quite adept at languages in general) and trope (almost unbearably hard as a musician and music-reader), the hardest part was the bittersweet moment of saying goodbye to Rabbi Frank after the process was over. She became the only person in my life (other than my partner and my mother) whom I spoke with every day. I miss her!
Totally on a different note from your bat mitzvah, why did you write After Anatevka?
I played Hodel in the ’07-’08 West End production at the Savoy Theatre. Hodel took on a deeper significance for me than any other character I’d ever portrayed, mostly because when I began rehearsing here in London I was coming to terms with the death of my father five years earlier at the age of 18. Hodel’s final scene is not only an assertion of her adult autonomy, but it’s her chance to say goodbye to her father, a chance I was personally lacking in my real life. When Hodel said, “Papa, God alone knows when we shall see each other again,” it was more than a piece of dialogue for me. It felt mythological, primal even.
I suppose I only now see the direct connection between the an 18-year-old girl who boards a train to Siberia, and an 18-year-old girl who boarded a plane to Scotland. By exploring and assuring Hodel’s future, and her capacity to endure, I was in some deeper way doing the same for myself.
Did playing Hodel in Fiddler impact your Jewish identity?
Of course. On several levels. The first being that I was playing Hodel in London and the UK has a much less prominent experience of Jewish culture woven into the mainstream than we do here in the US. That said, in a large cast of 30, I was only one of three (even remotely) Jewish actors, and throughout that experience I learned many things alongside the Judaism novices, as well as feeling charged to be the best ambassador of Jewish culture I could be. I did endless research not only to benefit myself but to be a more dependable guide for my castmates. That naturally trickled into my off-stage life.
Second, and perhaps deepening that experience, studying Jewish culture, history, and the faith itself gave me an aperture into my personal genetic legacy — a connection to my father, grandparents, and beyond — all of whom I could no longer connect with on earth in the present tense. It was a way for me to feel the ancient links that connected me straight back to Hodel herself. A way to feel close to my father.
Melanie Moore, Alexandra Silber and Samantha Massell during the Broadway Opening Nigh,t Performance Curtain Call bows for ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ at the Broadway Theatre on December 20, 2015 in New York City.
By the time I arrived to live permanently in America in 2010, the process was well underway even if it wasn’t in the forefront of my consciousness. And by the time I was cast as Tzeitel in the 2016 Broadway revival, if the deal wasn’t sealed already, it was sealed doubly so by Rabbi Larry Hoffman of Hebrew Union College. He served as the Broadway production’s Jewish consultant, and we forged a very special connection that remains alive to this day.
What was the reaction like to your novel?
Largely positive. So many people shared my curiosity about what happens to this family! Of course, there will always be dissenters and people who wished I’d crafted the date of their beloved characters in a different way, but I had to remain true to history and to the woman I grew to know Hodel to become.
Jews have such a long history in the theater — why do you think that is?
All of the arts have powerful Jewish cultural parallels: ways of uniting a community, telling stories that make people think, feel, laugh, and change, and providing a way to bear the adversities of life.
What’s your favorite Jewish show?
Aside from Fiddler, I’m a huge fan of Paula Vogel’s gorgeous play Indecent — which chronicles the history of another pivotal Jewish/Yiddish play “The God of Vengeance” by Shalom Ashe.
Over the last few years, I've been immersed and welcomed into Jewish communities thanks to a combination of my ancestral, genetic and cultural history, the publication of both of my Jewish-themed books, and my repeated connection to the musical 'Fiddler on the Roof.' It's been an illuminating and profound experience to meet Jewish communities around the country and the world, to make real connections with Jewish people of all ranks and files, and to experience the feeling of contributing meaningfully to these communities.
However, as an individual with a heavily spiritual but religiously secular upbringing, I sometimes felt like a bit of an interloper, and as I have grown up I recognized that I wanted to dive deeper, to understand more thoroughly, and ultimately give myself the gift of an official Jewish identity by affirming faith and a community that has always felt like home.
I don't need a big fancy wedding (let's face it I got "married" on the Tony Awards), this is my personal "wedding day" ceremony if you will.
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Thoughts on Pharaoh’s Dreams (my Torah portion)
We live in a moment when our future is not certain, nor is it easy to ascertain. When we meet Pharaoh at the top of our story he is in a state of confusion. He’s asked all of the best sages in Egypt to interpret his dream.
Dreams can be frightening— dreaming can represent nightmares and confusion, the experience of a vanishing sun made individual, personal. It represents both confusion and confusion’s opposite, intuition. Perhaps one of the lessons is that IF we sit with mystery, new ways of navigating emerge, ways that are more instinctual, intuitive and rooted in higher states of consciousness— a light shines into a new corner of the psyche, an ice dam thaws, change happens.
Maybe times of confusion are merely perfectly designed psychic situations (aka: DREAMS) that let us call on parts of ourselves that we wouldn’t otherwise use if we continued with the Old model that told us exactly what we were “supposed to” do.
Maybe confusion is an initiation?
If there is a fear that dreams represent, it is the fear of the unknown, in all its permutations. Dreams require us to be patient and to trust. Dreams dare us to make friends with what scare us, shake paws with the monster under the bed, gaze hard at ourselves at our most vulnerable, to make one with the Universe (for the Universe contains all), and love ourselves.
Finally,— the final words of my Torah portion are “cHAH-LOME EHcHAD HOO”
— “IT IS ALL ONE DREAM.”
Whoever we are, no matter how humble or mighty, I believe at our core we have the same dreams: for love and belonging, gratitude and. Peace. It is all one dream.
*
Thoughts on Faith and Mystery
To me, the concept of Faith has always been mixed up with the institution of Organized Religion (as I think it has for many of us). We often unfairly miscategorized these to be
1. SYNONYMOUS and
2. Primarily about fear and punishment, with some prayer, benediction, (and the odd Christmas carol and latke thrown in…)
This misinterpretation is a judgment. And judgment closes our minds and hearts. It leaves no room for the embracing of life’s inevitable mysteries, for the embracing of a myriad of spiritual practices, for a deeper knowledge of both the great strengths and the beautiful humilities of Humanity; and no room for a dialogue with the Unknown.
My perception of Judaism as a faith-based largely on the principle of discourse (after all, Tevye talks directly to and directly with, G-d!) And I have come to learn that in Judaism there is a constant learning, discourse, questioning, and rumbling with meaning, that reminds us this life is never a monologue and always a dialogue.
Any spiritual practice involves an essential recognition that life is not what it appears to be, but an interplay between the visible and invisible. Whatever form they take—be it a yoga practice, a walk in the woods or any Spirit-facing ritual. For me, that practice has long been present in theatrical superstition, prayers in a crisis to an Unknown Force, or in the calming wave of Love present with me at the “worst” moments of my life. I now feel confident enough to name that force (among many other things from Universe, Spirit, Nature, and Fate), the word G-d.
This ceremony and experience have not been a conversion, but rather an affirmation. That Judaism is not merely in a handful of early-life memories, my father’s bloodline, my ancestral DNA, my cultural history, and yes yes, all over my resume.
I have always suspected I was Jewish. Because I was. I am. And it is possible to be Jewish in my own way, and be “Jewish enough.”
Hooray for the Mikveh! I’ve always been Jewish but it’s official. [Seriously. There’s like...*paperwork...*]
I will find the time to properly find the words to express what this entire journey has meant, but for now?
Today: I dunked.
The immersion in the mikveh serves as many things, but in this instance, it acts as a symbol of #affirmation— a return to a source — and an act of renewal.
The Mikveh experience can be a way of softening traumas of the past, or to start anew after a difficult life experience.
But for me (and for many) it is a way to celebrate something precious and/or something new...
I have always had a questioning spirit, and used words like “Universe” or “Spirit” or “Fate” or “Nature.” Now I can add the word “God” without feeling squeamish. With no pressure to join me. With only hope for you to find your “way in” to a peaceful and meaningful life.
The word kav means “to be strong.” I believe a return to our source reinforces us. Mikveh becomes a reminder of the infinite within the finite, the eternal within the mortal.
Tomorrow (!) I will be called to the Torah to read in front of a small collection of my family and beloved peers, lead, coached, encouraged (and some days talked off a ledge) by my extremely awe-inspiring Rabbi Samantha Frank of the extremely beautiful Instagram account @modern_ritual.
It took me a couple of years into my adulthood to really understand why I always felt so exhausted at parties— personal or professional. Then one day, inspired by her incredible TED Talk I read Quiet by Susan Cain, and I realized: oh. Right, HELLO—Thank you Susan Cain—I’m an introvert. (An INFJ, to be precise, should you be in the Myers Briggs mindset).
I’m sure I am not the first to thank the pro-Introvert movement for helping me recognize and respect myself.
Dear readers, Hi there. My name is Alexandra Silber and I am an Introvert.
No, I am not aloof.
No, I am not shy,
or antisocial.
Or people-hating.
YES, despite having extraordinary extrovert skills, I am an Introvert.
And if you suspect you are one too, this brilliantly curated site ‘Introvert, Dear’ could not be more illuminating and celebratory of our true nature.
(Also? I know I am an actress with a lot of personality when I AM in public but… those are highly honed SKILLS, not nature. Please don’t tell me I am NOT an introvert. Please don’t assume you know me better than I know me. Don’t ever do this to anyone.)
In an extrovert-rewarding world that favors the outgoing and the gregarious, being an introvert can be difficult. We are assumed to be many a negative thing simply for being quiet (aloof, shy, anti-social, misanthropic and smug, being a handful of them). But the truth is that introverts are the world’s “watchers” and “listeners”— and have distinct advantages — as long as they know how to use them, and hopefully, the world comes to appreciate them.
Unlike extroverts, who draw their energy from social interactions, introverts gather their energy and recharge their batteries in (sweet, sweet) solitude, and gain hugely from quiet reflection.
I think winter is the season for introverts. It’s the time of year when Mother Nature begs us to rest, to slow down, to reflect. The world around us seems to take a collective breath, take time for quiet, deep reflection. It feels like the only time of year when humanity says it is socially acceptable to hole away at home—a state introverts enjoy immensely.
Thus, I have termed myself a “WINTROVERT.”
For when the days grow short and the temperatures plunge, the following virtues are at their peak:
Curling up for no particular reason
A long solo walk through the snow on a sunny winter’s day— the crisp, cold air filling my lungs!
Disappear under a blanket or three,
Make endless crockpots full of delicious soup.
Drink pots of hot beverages (sometimes in very cute teapots)
Get lost in a good book.
Binge-watch all twelve seasons of Murder, She Wrote.
Nobody expects you to leave the house. In fact, often, they insist you don’t (for once, cancelling plans due to it being “WINTER AF” outside is the right thing to do).
Staying put and hunkering down. A day to hibernate in your home and a reason to leave the rest of the world out in the blizzard. Nowhere to be. Time to watch the gentle flakes fall to the ground and marvel at the frozen beauty surrounding you.
There is something particularly satisfying about cooking and eating warm winter food from the comfort of your warm kitchen as a storm swirls outside.
Fireplace + book. No explanation required.
Netflix + couch. From late November to Mid-March, this is an actual destination.
Candles are cozier and even more atmospheric.
Winter is nature’s resting time—a very special hush comes over the world as the days grow short and the earth rests.
Winter makes one cocooned inside and splendidly alone. Trust me when I say that for introverts? THIS IS DAMN WONDERFUL.
Come on: SNOW IS AMAZING. We learned this from The King and I and we probably won’t have snow much longer because climate change.
It’s exciting when the outside world feels so dangerous and I am safely sitting on an armchair, slipping my finger between the dusty blinds, peeking at the slippery chaos.
Winter is the time for crafty projects, homemade food, daydreams and catching up with yourself (to cabin fever I am permanently immune!)
Zero FOMO, because everyone else is also trapped inside. I have an excuse for doing nothing at night and eating chips from the bag and writing writing writing.
As much as I enjoy the vibrant colors of spring, warmer days mean it is time to come back out and rejoin the world. The time of rest has come to an end. I shall savor every chilly moment until the final snowflake has melted into the budding crocuses.
Walter Matthau, 1985, he was at the bank and apparently took quite a shine to me as I wept in his face (“give her candy! Give her fifty dollars!”)
Daryl Hannah, bought $5 worth of cookies and lemonade from my lemonade stand in her vintage red convertible, 1989
Anna Maria Alberghetti, my neighbor in Los Angeles (and girlfriend of Dr. Pasternak, my mother’s OBGYN / the man who literally delivered me out of my mother’s body)
Steven Tyler, waking down the streets of Birmingham Michigan. Confused.
Katie Holmes, at the Detroit Metro airport, her security team mistook me for her at Christmas, circa 2004.
Buzz Aldrin, 2010, at Bar Centrale. Sitting with Nancy Opel and he walked past with his wife, and Nancy and I both realized that *HE HAS BEEN TO THE ACTUAL MOON.*
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2018, I sat NEXT TO HER at the Shakespeare Theatre Company Gala. She had a glass of sparkling wine. Divine.
London Still is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
I dunked!
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