Jewdas Film Club: Indecent

Jewdas Film Club presents a screening of a film of a play about a play

Indecent, written by Paula Vogel and directed on Broadway by Rebecca Taichman, follows the history of Sholem Asch’s 1907 Yiddish play God of Vengeance, which was controversial from the start. It told the story of a Jewish brothel owner who bribes a rabbi so that the rabbi’s son will marry his daughter. Except the daughter has already fallen in love – with one of the women working in the brothel.

Vogel’s play about a play depicts the author of the original, the actors who performed in it, the controversy surrounding it and the lost culture from which it came. Actor Richard Topol, who plays Lemml, says, “the play make us understand that we can lose culture, reminding us that Yiddish was this vibrant culture that is almost dead. And part of what happened in the 20th century and the Holocaust made it so that there were a lot of Yiddish speakers who are no longer with us.”