SHTISEL WEEKLY - A SOAP OPERA DIGEST OF SORTS

Sheldon, my dad, never liked TV shows. Until he watched Shtisel. Finally, there was a show whose characters, dilemmas, and philosophical code he could relate to! During 2020 quarentine, at 8:00pm each evening I would announce, “It’s time for your Hasidic soap opera.” We would watch one episode per night, both enjoying Shtisel itself and also happy to find a respite from Chris Hayes’ on MSNBC until Rachel Maddow aired.

For Father’s Day in 2020, I created and gifted him a companion cherished by any loyal soap opera fan: A soap opera gossip magazine. Titled “Shtisel Weekly” and taglined, “For Yentas, By Yentas”, this debut edition is replete with Akiva Shtisel’s latest girl drama, Rabbi Shtisel’s קשיא (Advice), a “Tell Me Rabbi…” section featuring plot teasers and an ever-popular Who-Wore-It-Better competition…over Tefillin rather than Red Carpet looks in this case.

THE TIME MAGAZINE COVER PROJECT

My neighbor, Mr. Hawbaker, was also my high school art teacher. He had a goatee and bright brown eyes and was just cool. When teaching us how to draw an eye, he slipped in that you could tell someone was attracted to you because their pupils would dilate and the whites of their eyes would whiten. I still look for that tell. I was in the height of my Seinfeld obsession when he assigned us the project of painting a TIME Magazine cover. My dad had just taken me to see Jerry’s standup live in Pittsburgh and all of my AIM away messages were Kramer quotes — any other cover subject would have been a betrayal! Mr. Hawbaker had one special request, a P.S. to the project: That we mail our covers back to him in 2014 for a 10-year reunion display. I never mailed mine back and I never heard from any peers nor Mr. Hawbaker about the display. I still think about that, too.