‘I never saw a play in Yiddish and, to be honest, I never thought I would,’ says Dan Katzir, expressing a sentiment not uncommon among many young Jewish people. Yet unlike the situation of most Jews, that changed for the Israeli-American filmmaker after he met Zypora Spaisman, a vivacious octogenarian. His resulting film, ‘Yiddish Theater: A Love Story,’ is an English language documentary about one little old lady’s fight to keep her Yiddish theater open against all odds and, by extension, keep a moribund culture alive. ‘Yiddish Theater’ plays this weekend in Santa Monica. ‘I was vacationing in New York and I met Zypora by chance,’ Katzir tells the Palisadian Post. ‘She was the grand dame of Yiddish theater. She did everything to keep her show going”from acting to sweeping the floors.’ The 80-minute ‘Yiddish Theater’ follows Spaisman through a hectic week during which she must raise enough funds to keep her production of Peretz Hirschbein’s classic Yiddish-language play ‘Green Fields’ going, or see the theater that she started, the Yiddish Public Theater, come to a close’in tandem with her acting career. Filmed during Chanukah 2000, which that year culminated on New Year’s Day, the Jewish Festival of Lights adds meaning and structure to Katzir’s real-life drama. Ostensibly, the filmmaker uses the eight days of Chanukah as a device to provide suspense”each lit candle calibrating a day”as viewers sit at seat’s edge to see if Spaisman’s cast will prevail. They encounter extreme highs (The New York Times gives the production a glowing review) and lows (a severe snowfall slams New York). Obstacles materialize in between, from potential investors flaking, to the attendance-draining Christmas holidays. The movie culminates on New Year’s Eve 2001, nine months before the events of September 11, adding an unintended layer of poignancy to the viewing; ‘Yiddish Theater’ gives a glimpse of a more innocent, bygone Manhattan in more ways than one. ‘Everything what I do is Yiddish,’ Spaisman says in the film. ‘I live Yiddish, I eat Yiddish, I breathe Yiddish.’ In the 10th century, Yiddish became the official language of Central and Eastern European Jews (Ashkenazi Jews). A hybrid of medieval German and Hebrew, the Yiddish language, written in a Hebraic alphabet, also borrowed some English. Today, even non-Jews pepper their vocabulary with this expressive dialect; words such as schmooze, kibbitz, schlep, putz, and chutzpah have entered our lexicon, thanks largely to our country’s long tradition of Jewish entertainers. Yiddish culture also consists of a theatrical tradition that bridged the shtetls (Jewish villages) to early 1880s American life at a time when pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe caused Jews to immigrate to the United States. By 1924, two million Jews had arrived, bringing with them a rich culture. When the Folksbiene Theatre was founded in 1915 on New York’s Lower East Side, 14 other Yiddish theater companies existed. But as the U.S.-born children assimilated into the mainstream, this theater audience dwindled with Yiddish culture among the new generation. ‘There’s one thing that can be said about the Yiddish theater that can’t be said about any other foreign-language immigrant theater,’ says Palisades resident Marvin Zuckerman, a Yiddish culture authority. ‘It’s the longest-lasting.’ ‘The Yiddish theater is generally thought to be started in Romania by Avrom Goldfadn,’ explains Zuckerman, dean emeritus of Los Angeles Valley College. ‘Goldfadn [1840- 1948] is considered the guy who tied it all together. He wrote Yiddish operettas. The Broadway of Yiddish theater was Second Avenue”Yiddish art theater, vaudeville, musicals.’ Yiddish theater enjoyed a respectable reputation in its 1900-1950 heyday. Lincoln Steffens called it the best theater in New York. The genre, which peaked in the 1940s, coincided with Yiddish cinema (i.e., ‘Yidel Mitn Fiedl’ with Molly Picon) produced in New York and pre-war Poland. Hirschbein wrote ‘Green Fields’ in 1908 in Odessa, and a 1937 film version was shot in upstate New York. ‘He happens to be buried in Los Angeles behind Paramount [at Hollywood Forever cemetery],’ says Zuckerman of Hirschbein, who died in 1948. ‘He was a world traveler, he wrote for travel books, and he wound up in L.A.’ ‘A lot of famous American actors came out of the Yiddish theater,’ continues Zuckerman, husband of Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, the real-life ‘Gidget’ recently profiled in the Post. ‘Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, our very own Palisadian, Walter Matthau.’ Joel Grey’s father was renowned comedian Mickey Katz, who incorporated Yiddish into his act. The grandfather of conductor Michael Tilsen Thomas was the great Yiddish actor Boris Thomashefsky. One of Thomashefsky’s rivals was Jacob P. Adler, whose wife, Sara, was a prominent Yiddish theater actress. If his surname sounds familiar, it could be because his daughter was Stella Adler, whose acting disciples included Marlon Brando. The unspoken irony for the filmmakers is that Spaisman’s mission is a metaphor for their movie”itself a valentine to the culture and something of an underdog. ‘Yiddish Theater’ has squeaked by from screening to screening since its 2006 premiere in San Francisco. ‘It’s sad,’ Katzir notes, ‘that after 1,100 years, just as Hitler lost in his attempt to destroy this Yiddish culture, it’s fading away in the secular world. I’m Israeli. For Israelis, Yiddish is even more foreign than it is for Americans.’ In Israel, Yiddish culture has not been preserved among the overwhelmingly secular youth. As if to make that point, the lead in Spaisman’s play, a young Israeli, ironically shows off armfuls of tattoos (a corporeal desecration forbidden in the Jewish religion) after acting in Hassidic garb. But Eric Gordon, director of the local Yiddish culture society, The Workman’s Circle/Arbeter Ring of Southern California, quibbles with Katzir’s premise that Yiddish culture and theater is dying. ‘The movie has a kind of quality of lamentation about it that I take issue with,’ Gordon says, pointing out that the Folksbiene remains vital. mount major annual productions and stages plays in both English and Russian translations. Gordon’s own Workman’s Circle chapter celebrates its centennial this year, while California’s oldest Workman’s branch, in San Francisco, turns 101. What’s sure about ‘Yiddish Theater’ is the passion for Yiddish culture exuded by both Spaisman and the filmmakers. Another Palisadian, Los Angeles Times movie critic Kenneth Turan, called the film ‘charming and disarming.’ ‘Nothing can take away from the flavor of being caught up in the battles and dreams of a formidable group of people,’ Turan continues in a November 2007 review. ‘For a brief moment in time, we share their struggles, and that feels like a privilege.’ There’s something wonderful about seeing these dedicated actors, young and old, partaking in their uphill production. ‘Yiddish Theater’ is as much survival story as it is love story, and tenacious firebrand Spaisman’s spirit is entertaining, contagious and ultimately inspiring. ‘We live in a Seinfeld society where everything is fast, edgy, funny, but also smells a little cynical and jaded,’ Katzir says. ‘Yiddish has a lot of heart and emotions.’ ‘Yiddish Theater: A Love Story’ screens Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. at Laemmle’s Monica, 1332 Second St. Katzir and Markus will speak following each screening. For tickets, call (310) 394-9741 or visit laemmle.com/viewmovie.php?mid=3304. The movie’s Web site: yiddishtheater.net.

Dick Lahey, part nurseryman, part Indiana Jones, will speak to Palisades Garden Club members about his 21 years searching the world for exotic trees for Middle Eastern sheiks, on Monday, March 3, 7:30 p.m. at the Woman’s Club, 901 Haverford. Although Lahey worked for a company that provided specimen trees for customers throughout the world, including the majority of trees for Disneyland France, he was primarily contracted to find and deliver trees to various princes in the Middle East. ‘I facilitated in finding and delivering trees to 36 different palaces in places like Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar,’ Lahey says. Eighty percent of his product was palms, everything from cycads to date palms from Morocco and Mediterranean fan palms, which ironically often came from places other than the Middle East, such as Florida and Mexico. One of the longest and most complicated jobs involved providing the majority of the large and small specimen trees for the Islamic Conference Center in Kuwait. Lahey explains that many of the trees came from France and Lebanon because of the lower cost to transport them. ‘Every year, the Arab countries come to together for a conference,’ Lahey says. ‘ The project was huge, it would be like building a Santa Monica college in a year.’ Although Lahey was not responsible for landscaping, he purchased the trees with a guarantee for up to a year. ‘I documented the entire process, from the selection to landing. I noticed if they had been fertilized and irrigated sufficiently, and if there was any damage’like if a crane had dropped on one.’ In 1983, Lahey managed nurseries used for growing grounds in Sri Lanka and Thailand, which provided stock for the company. A year later, while preparing ficus tress cuttings from a forest in Anuradhapura, one of the ancient capitals of Sri Lanka, he was inadvertently caught up in the coup d’etat. The itinerant Lahey returned to the United States in 2004, and soon after purchased Merrihew’s Sunset Gardens on Ocean Park Boulevard. And even though retail is a change of pace for him, he continues to indulge his interest in different and unusual things. ‘I like to go out all over the county and look for unusual stuff; I buy from 81 different growers.’ The meeting is free and open to the public.

Santa Monica College political science professor Dr. Christine Schultz, who is known for her deep love of teaching and her success in growing and diversifying SMC’s honors transfer program, has been named one of four winners of the prestigious statewide 2008 Hayward Award for Excellence in Education. ‘I’m excited,’ said Schultz, who will also receive a $1,250 cash prize. “I never cared about this kind of thing but it is nice when you get recognized.” Schultz, 56, a Palisades resident, has taught at SMC for the past 24 years. In 2004, she took over as chairperson of the Philosophy and Social Science Department–which includes political science, economics, sociology, philosophy and women’s studies. A specialist in the effects of the mass media on presidential politics, Schultz also taught from 1979 to 1997 at UCLA, where she earned her doctorate. She has twice been named SMC Alpha Gamma Sigma Outstanding Professor of the Year and twice named UCLA Professor or the Year. Although colleagues praise Schultz for her intellectual heft and impeccable academic credentials (she is the author of three college textbooks on American government and politics), they single out her passion for teaching. “The happiest moments of each of my days are those spent in the classroom,’ Schultz says. “With my students I learn, laugh, embark on uncharted seas, and push the boundaries of knowledge. My love affair with the classroom is so consuming that I have never opted to take a sabbatical leave and I have accumulated 238 days of unused sick leave.” Demanding of her students, Schultz has produced results, chalking up one of the highest student retention rates at the college. More than 90 percent of her pupils have finished her courses, and more than 75 percent receiving A’s or B’s. “I am not an easy grader,” Schultz said. “Rather, I have developed a complex system of working individually with each of my students, tailoring my assignments to their particular interests and talents. “In a 16-week semester, I offer more than 42 assignments from which students pick and choose. It is not uncommon for me to be meeting individually with students the week of finals trying to provide them additional opportunities to express themselves and what they have learned. My students thrive in this environment of choice.” From 1986 to 2002, Schultz served as the faculty coordinator of SMC’s prestigious Scholars Program, an honors program whose students are essentially guaranteed admission into such schools as UCLA as long as they follow a prescribed curriculum and maintain the required grade point average. During her tenure, the program grew from approximately 30 students to more than 800. Reflecting on her decades long experience, Schultz has seen numerous cycles in student involvement in the politics. ‘I’ve taught so long, I’ve seen so many changes,’ she says. ‘At UCLA, students were so politically aware, then during the Ronald Reagan presidency, they were more interested in careers and making money. After Reagan, there was a lull for a lot of years. Now, this year, I’m beginning to see some interest again, not necessarily in the war, but they are really involved in the environment, there is real enthusiasm. They are see their world destroyed.’ With her specialty in mass media and presidential politics, Schultz admits that she is currently reveling in one of the most dramatic and exciting presidential races in contemporary American history. ‘The 2008 presidential campaign is exciting this young generation of first-time voters,’ Schultz said. “This moment in history presents an opportunity for this nation to invite them in and encourage and foster their voice in politics.’ Schultz and her husband, Greg, have two daughters, Katlain and Courtney, both of whom are involved in post-graduate work. Schultz jokes that, thanks to Greg, who is in real estate, she has always been able to do what she loves. When she is not in the classroom, Schultz enjoys her morning walks with her neighbor in the Riviera and the local mountains. ‘I love to hike and I love to be with my kids,’ she says. ‘Teaching has been a perfect job for a mother.’ The Hayward Award, named for former California Community Colleges Chancellor Gerald C. Hayward, is given each year to four instructors from four regions in the state.

Seymour Cassel will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year

‘Seymour is a Hollywood legend; he supported indie film before it became an institution. His philosophy was that he’d play a role he connected with for the price of a ticket.’ So comes homage to acclaimed actor Seymour Cassel from an unlikely source”Slash of Guns ‘n’ Roses. As the iconic rock guitarist explains in his 2007 memoir, Cassel’s son, Matt, was one of his closest friends during Slash’s Fairfax High days. In fact, it was Seymour Cassel who christened the erstwhile Saul Hudson with the nickname that became his professional nom de rock. Summing up Cassel’s colorful career evokes several words: ‘charmed’ and ‘eclectic’ among them. Cassel’s talent has landed him roles in more than 180 movies. Which is why Cassel, alongside fellow actor Robert Guillaume, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Fifth Annual Pacific Palisades Film Festival on March 6 through 8. ‘These are two well respected people in the industry today who, as far as I know, have not been honored locally,’ says Palisadian Bob Sharka, director and founder of the PPFF. The future Slash was just one of many rock legends Cassel befriended over the decades. The Rolling Stones showed up to many a Cassel house party in the 1970s, and ‘when Dylan saw ‘Faces,’ he invited me up to Woodstock,’ Cassel, 73, tells the Palisadian-Post. In retrospect, the 1970s have been viewed as Hollywood’s last hurrah: a golden time of formula-bending narratives and stylistic experimentation inspired by Kurosawa, the French and Italian New Wave, and other non-traditional approaches to cinema that had ripened in the preceding decade. Hopper, Fonda, Nicholson, Beatty”you name ’em, Cassel worked or partied with ’em…Hal Ashby, Kris Kristofferson… ‘I knew Kris when he was a musician,’ says Cassel, who was supposed to play the title character in Kristofferson’s big break, ‘Cisco Pike’ (1972). ‘I was offered the part of Cisco. They were giving the writer [B. W. L. Norton] a hard time about directing the movie.’ So Cassel dropped out. But he did get to work with Kristofferson on the Norton-scripted 18-wheeler comedy ‘Convoy,’ directed by renegade filmmaker Sam Peckinpah. ‘Sam was a demon in the sense that he liked to do things that stirred people up,’ Cassel says. ‘And he was fun to work with, fun to drink with. ‘What they didn’t take into consideration when you’re doing the movie is that you’re shooting trucks. Every time you shoot, they have to turn the trucks around and drive them back. That takes a lot of time. We fell behind. Kris had to tour in August. They had to change the actors’ contracts and we had to wait another six weeks before they could start up again.’ Cassel filed a grievance with the Screen Actors Guild after the studio tried to call back the actors and crew gratis. ‘You can’t call me back without paying me,’ says Cassel, still indignant over the breach of contract. Ultimately, he prevailed. By the time he was shooting ‘Convoy’ Peckinpah had started down his tragic booze-and-coke-laden freefall. ‘It was the beginning of the end for a lot of us,’ Cassel half-jokes. ‘When you were close to Sam, he was a great friend. He really wanted me to play in ‘Osterrman Weekend’ [Peckinpah’s final film]. They shot one day with another guy. Sam kept telling the producers, ‘Give me Seymour!’ and they kept telling him, ‘No, you can’t have Seymour.” Cassel also knew and loved a key Peckinpah player”’Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ star Warren Oates. ‘Warren was such a great guy,’ says Cassel, who worked with Oates on a 1967 episode of ‘Cimarron Strip.’ ‘I remember one day he had a Nikon on the set and he’s sleeping on the set so I had some guy hold the horses tail and I shot closeups of the horse’s ass.’ Cassel later quizzed Oates: ‘Listen, did you ever develop that film?’ ‘You son of a bitch, that was you!’ Oates shot back. Cassel says that he influenced Monte Hellman to cast Oates opposite musician James Taylor in the director’s most famous film, ‘Two Lane Blacktop,’ originally with black and white leads. As a third cameraman, Cassel spent 11 days on the New Orleans set of the seminal ‘Easy Rider.’ He insists that the cult favorite, for which script credit continues to be a bone of contention, as the son of legendary scribe Terry Southern (‘Dr. Strangelove’) claims that director Dennis Hopper and star Peter Fonda did not earn the screenplay credit they received with Southern. According to Cassel, the writing was incidental on the gratuitously improvised ‘Rider.’ ‘Terry didn’t write a word,’ Cassel insists. ‘Terry was doing everybody’s drugs.’ Cassel’s candor and his yen for acting was ‘implanted’ in him during his peripatetic upbringing. ‘My mother was in burlesque,’ the actor says. ‘She was with Minsky, a burlesque house in New York. They would show a movie and have some dancing. We went to Baltimore, St. Louis, Buffalo, Boston.’ When Cassel talks about ‘John,’ you sense there’s only one John he could be referring to: Cassavetes. Cassel remembers how he first spotted the groundbreaking actor-cum-filmmaker who became the defining professional and personal relationship of his life when he dropped by the John Cassavetes Workshop in Manhattan to wrangle a free acting scholarship. ‘John said, ‘They’re gone,’ but he called me into his office and he talked to me for an hour.’ Cassel tagged along on a shoot ‘that turned out to be footage for ‘Shadows’ [Cassavetes’ revolutionary 1959 directorial debut]. I just kept coming back. John was that way”if you wanted to be involved, you were. He became the older brother I never had and the best friend I had never known.’ Cassel co-starred in such Cassavetes classics as ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ and ‘Minnie and Moskowitz.’ They also acted together in Don Siegel’s ‘The Killers.’ ‘John probably knew people better than anyone that I had ever known and I thought I knew people very well,’ Cassel says. Contrary to the popular belief that Cassavetes’ films are totally improvised, Cassel insists that ‘they were the best parts ever written. They were totally scripted, but he gave you freedom. The music in ‘Faces,’ all the songs I sing, are mine. I always make up these goofy little songs.’ Cassavetes and Cassel were close friends by the time they made Don Siegel’s ‘The Killers’ in 1964, the same year that Cassel married Betty Lou Deering. The Cassels had three children”Matthew, Lisa, and Dilyn”before divorcing in 1983. ‘Every time we did a movie, it always was a good time. John drove me to the hospital when Matt was going to be born.’ Today, Matt Cassel works as a film editor, but as a tyke, he not only shunned acting, he did it with panache. ‘Matt turned down Woody Allen when he was five,’ Cassel laughs. ‘He had glasses, the muscles in his eyes needed correcting’.I took him with me to [a movie premiere]. Woody said, ‘Hi, do you want to be in a movie?’ And Matt said, ‘No.’ He asked Matt, ‘Can you do a British accent?’ and Matt said, ‘Why?” So while young Matt missed out on playing young Woody in Allen’s directorial debut, ‘Take the Money and Run,’ he did act in Cassavetes’ ‘Women Under the Influence’. ‘The reason Matt did the movie was because he knew John.’ Cassel had a blast shooting 1992’s ‘Honeymoon in Vegas’ with his buddy, James Caan, and Nicolas Cage. ‘I know he does a lot of diverse crazy things,’ says Cassel, ‘but Nic truly loves to act.’ Cassel has also connected with a new generation of filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, for whom he played roles in ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and ‘The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.’ In Anderson’s second outing, ‘Rushmore,’ Cassel played the barber father of the character played by Cage’s cousin, Jason Schwartzman. Before casting Schwartzman as Max Fischer, Bill Murray’s precocious teen rival, Anderson ‘went through a couple of thousand kids,’ Cassel says. ‘Wes takes me to dinner one night, he says, ‘Listen, I don’t know what to do. Bill wants me to fire this kid.’ I said, ‘What, are you kidding?’ ‘He told me the kid’s not funny.’ You see, Bill has to get the laugh. In order for this film to work, you’ve got to love this kid. Wes talked to Bill, and Bill was smart enough to understand that.’ As a prank gift, Schwartzman bought Murray a prosthetic leg. ‘He asked me, ‘Do you think he’ll like it?’ Cassel remembers. ‘I said, ‘I think you’ll find it in the trash can.’ Which he did.’ Cassel still shakes his head as he recalls the antics of an underage Schwartzman on the set of the 1998 comedy. One night, Schwartzman convinced Cassel to get the young actor into a nightspot. ‘I thought, What the hell!’ Cassel says. ‘So I take the kid out to a club and I get him a drink” Afterwards, Schwartzman insisted on stopping at a pharmacy to pick up some Robitussin. ‘I thought he had a cold,’ Cassel says. ‘I didn’t know that all these Beverly Hills kids liked to get high on cough syrup!’ The next day on the set, Schwartzman doesn’t show up”but his mother, ‘Rocky’ actress Talia Shire, does’and she’s furious. Turns out Schwartzman was in the hospital, getting his stomach pumped. Shire accosts Cassel, under the assumption that Schwartzman was hospitalized after Cassel had taken him drinking. ‘She’s screaming, ‘A hell of a father figure you are!’ says Cassel. ‘I said, Wait a minute, Talia, I’m just playing his father. I’m not his father.’ Even after working with the greatest talent in entertainment, Cassel still supports an underdog. He just worked on ‘Staten Island,’ co-starring Ethan Hawke, for a first-time director. And in one of his most challenging roles, Cassel portrays a mute in ‘Reach for Me,’ directed by LeVar Burton. Cassel appreciates the Palisades Film Festival ‘because people don’t want to see a lot of the crap that’s out. The kids will go see anything ‘ ‘Hannah Montana.’ A lot of films don’t get seen and it’s a way to be seen. ‘There’s a lot of studio films by the Coen Brothers, Wes, Paul Thomas Anderson. They made their name and then they take that confidence from the studio and they fight to make what they want to make. But they’re more the exception.’ Seems fitting that Cassel should receive the Festival’s accolade on the evening of March 6. After all, the actor’s goal and the PPFF’s mission are identical”supporting the vision of independent filmmakers. So support both. If you want to see a good film, hit the PPFF. And if you’ve got a good part for Cassel, hey, will you at least cover his airfare?