David Benkof, the Broadway Maven, spoke on Jan. 11 as part of Kolot Mayim Reform Temple\u2019s 2025-26 Voices of Jewish Music series. <\/i>(photo from David Benkof)<\/i><\/p>\n
David Benkof, the Broadway Maven, visited Victoria recently, to give a talk titled Spotlight on Jewish Broadway, on Jan. 11. He began with a clip from the musical Spamalot<\/i>, which, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, asserts that a potential show may have the finest sets, the loveliest costumes and the best shoes, yet it \u201cwon\u2019t succeed on Broadway if you don\u2019t have any Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe joke is that Jews wrote Broadway, Jews perform Broadway, Jews produce Broadway \u2013 and that\u2019s true. It\u2019s historically true, it\u2019s statistically true, and it\u2019s been said so many times that it barely counts as an insight anymore,\u201d Benkof said.<\/p>\n
Although seemingly innumerable Jews \u2013 Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Barbra Streisand, to name a mere few \u2013 may be associated with Broadway, Benkof encouraged the audience to consider the meaning of \u201cJewish Broadway\u201d as something beyond the names of those who created and performed in well-known shows. Rather, he asked those attending in person and on Zoom to think in terms of Jewish-related themes: assimilation, reinvention, insecurity, exile, visibility and ambivalence.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to go a step further,\u201d he said, \u201cand argue that Broadway isn\u2019t primarily Jewish because of the people involved, but because of the very sensibility of the art form. Broadway is Jewish because its plots, themes and character arcs reflect the Jewish experience in North America.\u201d<\/p>\n
With clips from Hairspray<\/i>, Hello, Dolly<\/i>, A Chorus Line<\/i> and Chicago<\/i>, Benkof demonstrated that, while characters and plots were not overtly Jewish, or Jewish at all, there are invariably elements \u2013 such as restlessness, striving and defensiveness \u2013 that make them feel deeply Jewish.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt grows out of histories of conditional welcome, where excellence becomes a survival strategy and\u00a0<\/span>visibility is both opportunity and danger,\u201d said Benkof. \u201cBroadway characters don\u2019t assume that the room loves them. They hustle to make the room need them. That\u2019s why Broadway feels Jewish even when Jews are nowhere in sight.\u201d<\/p>\n Hairspray<\/i>, for example, makes no claim that the characters are Jewish. It is method, not identity, according to Benkof, that makes it Jewish. The lead character does not want to tear down the system; she seeks to join it, he pointed out.<\/p>\n \u201cThe belief that assimilation is both a strategy and an ethical good is deeply Jewish in a North American context,\u201d Benkof said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe combination of idealism, anxiety, and faith that the system can be nudged towards justice if you appeal to its conscience is not universal,\u201d he argued. \u201cIt\u2019s a Jewish sensibility operating inside a story that never needs to say the word Jewish out loud, which makes Hairspray <\/i>slightly subversive, like quite a bit of postwar Jewish art.\u201d<\/p>\n By the end of his Victoria lecture, audience members were able to find Jewish themes in musicals that, on the surface, seem far removed from the Jewish experience: The Lion King<\/i>, The Phantom of the Opera<\/i>, The Sound of Music<\/i>, even The Book of Mormon<\/i> (think reinvention).<\/p>\n In the example of The Sound of Music<\/i>, audience members found that its themes of escape, persecution and fear were elements that could be perceived as related to the Jewish experience.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Congratulating the audience, Benkof said, \u201cWe could have said, Richard Rodgers was Jewish and, therefore, The Sound of Music<\/i> is Jewish. That is true and boring. What we have been able to do here today is think about how you won\u2019t succeed on Broadway if you don\u2019t have any Jewishness, as opposed to just Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n Benkof also discussed a Canadian connection to Jewish Broadway, Come from Away<\/i>, a musical about the care of thousands of travelers, who, after Sept. 11, 2001, had their flights diverted to Gander, Nfld.<\/p>\n In 2024, Benkof made a trip to Gander to see a performance of the show, written by Canadians David Hein and Irene Sankoff.<\/p>\n \u201cI got to go and meet some of the people who had done it,\u201d he said. \u201cThey welcomed people into their home and their community, and that, I think, is a very Jewish theme.\u201d<\/p>\n Benkof\u2019s website, broadwaymaven.com<\/a>, offers five to 15 classes every month. In January, for example, the online educational community had classes on the musicals of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, on Pal Joey<\/i>, and a 50th anniversary roundtable on Pacific Overtures<\/i> by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman. Upcoming events include classes on Sweeney Todd<\/i>, Evita<\/i>, Kiss Me, Kate<\/i> and Cats<\/i>, among others. Benkof also posts weekly about Broadway on Substack: substack.com\/@thebroadwaymaven<\/a>.<\/p>\n Benkof\u2019s talk was the third lecture in Kolot Mayim Reform Temple\u2019s 2025-26 Voices of Jewish Music series, part of the Vancouver Island shul\u2019s annual Building Bridges program. The next in the series will be from Naomi Cohn Zentner, an ethno-musicologist at Israel\u2019s Bar-Ilan University, on Feb. 8. Her talk \u2013 Music and War: An Optimistic View \u2013 will examine how Israeli musicians have responded to recent historic events and explore music\u2019s role in processing grief, inspiring resilience and connecting community in times of crisis. Visit kolotmayimreformtemple.com<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sam Margolis <\/b>has written for the <\/i>Globe and Mail, the <\/i>National Post, UPI and MSNBC.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" David Benkof, the Broadway Maven, spoke on Jan. 11 as part of Kolot Mayim Reform Temple\u2019s 2025-26 Voices of Jewish Music series. (photo from David Benkof) David Benkof, the Broadway Maven, visited Victoria recently, to give a talk titled Spotlight on Jewish Broadway, on Jan. 11. He began with a clip from the musical Spamalot, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48271,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[785],"tags":[24583,20968,24584,3076,4242,9270,6296,8370],"class_list":["post-48270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-performing-arts","tag-broadway-maven","tag-building-bridges","tag-david-benkof","tag-education","tag-history","tag-kolot-mayim","tag-musical-theatre","tag-speakers"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}